Barbarian Poems

Barbarian Poems (1896) at the Fogg Museum at Harvard takes its title from Leconte de Lisle's collection of symbolist-inflected verse, published in the 1870s and 1880s, in which the poet used archaic, non-European civilizations — Vedic India, ancient Greece, the Scandinavian north — as vehicles for a critique of modern European rationalism. Gauguin's appropriation of this Symbolist title for a Tahitian figure painting in 1896 was characteristically assertive: it positioned his Polynesian work within the serious intellectual tradition of French cultural critique rather than the mere exotic curiosity that many Paris critics and collectors saw in it. By 1896 he was in his second Tahitian stay, producing the most ambitious compositions of his Pacific career, and the literary reference to Leconte de Lisle's 'barbarism' as a term of praise aligned his project with the broader anti-rationalist current of 1890s French culture. The Fogg Museum's strong collection of Post-Impressionist work, assembled through Harvard's art history department's early engagement with French modernism, holds this canvas alongside other major works from his mature Polynesian period.

Gauguin composes the image in characteristic synthetist manner — large areas of unmodulated colour bounded by strong contours, figures placed without cast shadows. The palette deploys the warm ochres, deep reds, and blue-greens that became his Polynesian signature, while the decorative patterning of textiles and foliage flattens any residual illusionistic depth.