This week’s Friday exhibition is “Gauguin & Polynesia: An Elusive Paradise,” at the Seattle Art Museum. On view through April 29, the exhibition was organized by Art Centre Basel. SAM describes the show:

Past exhibitions have addressed Gauguin’s involvement with other cultures in a fairly superficial way. Through a balanced contextual analysis of Polynesian art alongside Gauguin’s works, this exhibition brings Polynesian arts and culture into the center of Gauguin studies. The show will display about 50 works by Gauguin (paintings, sculpture, works on paper) that fully reveal the extent of the influence of Polynesian art and culture on his work. It will also highlight about 60 works from the Pacific that exemplify the dynamic exchanges of Pacific Island peoples with Europeans throughout the nineteenth century. In contrast to earlier exhibitions, which included Pacific objects primarily as a kind of visual background to Gauguin’s development as a modern European artist, this exhibition and its innovative approach promise new insights into the relationship between Gauguin’s art and Polynesian art.

The Stranger’s Jen Graves has interesting things to say about the exhibition here.

Paul Gauguin, Nude with Sunflowers, 1889.

Standing male figure (Moai kavakava), late 18th century-mid 19th century, wood, bone, red ochre, Easter Island. Collection of the British Museum, London.

Paul Gauguin, Reclining Tahitian Women (The Amusement of the Evil Spirit), 1894. Collection of the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen.

Wooden figure, tiki akau, first half of nineteenth century or earlier. Marquesas Islands, Nuku Hiva, Pakiu Valley, Musée de la Castre, Cannes.

Paul Gauguin, Pere Paillard, 1902. Collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington.