Gauguin's Poèmes barbares and the Tahitian Chant of Creation

Abstract

Despite the abundance of art-historical studies on Paul Gauguin, one area remains largely uncharted: the impact of the Tahitian religion on the symbolic language of his South Seas works.¹ It so happens that the significance of one of Gauguin's major paintings, Poèmes barbares of 1896 (Fig. 1), has never been correctly elucidated. Gauguin, in fact, drew upon the Tahitian Chant of Creation to symbolize the universal principle of creation.

In his personal notebook Ancien culte mahorie [sic] of 1892, Gauguin copied J. A. Moerenhout's translation of the Chant from that author's Voyages aux îles du grand océan of 1837,² as René Huyghe has pointed out.³ (Gauguin also copied some of Moerenhout's observations where they occurred.)

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Mary Lynn Zink

Mary Lynn Zink is a doctoral candidate in art history at the University of California, Santa Barbara and Assistant Professor at Central Washington University, Ellensburg.