Before Matisse and Picasso, Paul Guaguin was the first artist to speak of indigenous art in terms of what we nowadays call tribal art.

The island of Hiva Oa in the Marquesas is the final destination of the great traveller, Paul Gauguin. After Paris, Peru, Denmark, Brittany, Panama, Matinique and Tahiti, it was on this wild and remote island on the other side of the world that the
painter set down his easel in 1901. What was he seeking on this Southern Pacific island ? What constant but never truly satisfied desire drove him throughout his life to seek out a paradise that would always remain beyond the horizon?

Paul Gauguin was one of a rare few who travelled so widely at the time, and one of very few painters to have fully integrated the different cultures he encountered into his work. One hundred years before everyone else, he elevated Maori culture and Marquesan traditions to the status of « Art Papou », and revealed much of its wealth in his work.