CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk Provided by TopSCHOLAR Western Kentucky University TopSCHOLAR® Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Honors College at WKU Projects Spring 2007 Synthesizing Gauguin: A Comparative Look at Cultural Contexts And Gauguin’s Tahitian Paintings Joanna Miller Western Kentucky University Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.wku.edu/stu_hon_theses Part of the Art Practice Commons, Other International and Area Studies Commons, and the Social and Cultural Anthropology Commons Recommended Citation Miller, Joanna, "Synthesizing Gauguin: A Comparative Look at Cultural Contexts And Gauguin’s Tahitian Paintings" (2007). Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects. Paper 126. http://digitalcommons.wku.edu/stu_hon_theses/126 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by TopSCHOLAR®. It has been accepted for inclusion in Honors College Capstone Experience/ Thesis Projects by an authorized administrator of TopSCHOLAR®. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Synthesizing Gauguin: A Comparative Look at Cultural Contexts And Gauguin’s Tahitian Paintings Joanna Miller Senior Thesis Submitted to the Honors Program of Western Kentucky University Spring 2007 Approved by Abstract When a plethora of primary sources exist from an artist, a tendency persists for the art historian to focus on an artist’s personality when analyzing or interpreting that artist’s work. In the case of Paul Gauguin and his Tahitian works, his personality faults, extreme character, and uncouth notions and motivations become the concentration of much scholarship and can lead to a misjudgment of the artist’s depiction of the Tahitian natives and culture. This paper examines how Gauguin represented a foreign peoples and met the goals he pursued under Primitivism, Symbolism, and Synthetism by analyzing the cultural contexts of Fin-de-siecle France and Tahiti and the synthesis of these contexts into his paintings.