Gauguin and PolynesiaThe Post Impressionist artist and writer Paul Gauguin led an extraordinary, troubled, and restlessly itinerant life. He came late to painting and spent most of his last decade in the Pacific islands of Tahiti and the Marquesas. There, he produced paintings loosely based on Polynesian tradition that heralded the emergence of primitivism and would exert a profound influence on modernist artists from Picasso and Matisse to Jackson Pollock. However, his