Encountering Pacific Art

Abstract

In 2003-4, the Musee d'Orsay, Paris, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, mounted an exhibition, Gauguin Tahiti, examining the French artist's career in Tahiti and the Marquesas between 1891 and his death in 1903. The organizers, George Shackelford and Claire Freches-Thory, assembled paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures, and ceramics by Paul Gauguin around his celebrated monumental painting, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? of 1897-8 (from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston).1 A striking feature of the exhibition was the inclusion of a number of Tahitian, Marquesan, and other Polynesian objects. These were meant to lend context to Gauguin's works, and to exemplify the indigenous artefacts to which he was in part responding. Yet these Polynesian objects turned out to have the disturbing capacity to command attention in their own right, even when pressed into the service of a purely Western art history concerned with Gauguin's artistic progress from Impressionism through PostImpressionism to the beginnings of Modernism. They overshadowed Gauguin's own efforts at anything other than painting, drawing, and printmaking. A Maori canoe-stern (from the Musee national de la Marine, Paris) clearly had a far more compelling aesthetic presence than anything that Gauguin himself fashioned in the medium of wood. At the time, I tried to imagine what the exhibition might look like were all the Gauguins to be removed, leaving only the Polynesian pieces presented as artworks. In the event, I had to wait just two years to see something of this kind, though on a far grander scale; that is, Steven Hooper's Pacific Encounters exhibition that is the subject of this Special Issue. Pacific Encounters comprised works acquired by Westerners between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries from throughout the vast swathe of the Polynesian Pacific, from Aotearoa / New Zealand in the south-west, to the Hawaiian Islands in the north, to Rapa Nui / Easter Island in the south-east. Hooper and his colleagues presented these objects not as anthropological specimens, as is so often

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