Gauguin and SÄmoa
Paul Gauguin was a French painter, printmaker, and sculptor who worked in Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands for over a decade between 1891 and 1903. He constructed a persona of himself as a ânoble savage' for the purpose of asserting his own claims to invention and novelty within the evolving modernism of the French art of his time. Although Gauguin never set foot in SÄmoa, Kihara uses uncovered archival evidence that demonstrates how he based several of his major paintings on photographs of people and places in SÄmoa. Kihara argues that Sacred Waters is âinspired byâ a photograph taken in SÄmoa in 1887. Similarly, some of Thomas Andrew's photographs taken in SÄmoa are in Gauguin's Journal Noa Noa. The silhouette of the back of the man in Gauguin's painting Three Tahitians was directly lifted from another Andrew photograph.