In this book, Gaugin's exoticism, the inexhaustible subject of mythical constructions, is re-examined within the framework of the complex contemporary interferences between Symbolist culture and the pressure of colonial policies. Various perspectives are adopted, from the analysis of the theme of the mask in the self-portraits, to the literary suggestions or those evoked by the Universal Exhibition of 1889. There is also a re-reading of the sojourns in Brittany and Oceania, designed to clarify the links between exoticism and nostalgia: a definition of the evasion in space as the substitute for a regression in time, in search of a dimension of the origins from which modern man is by now debarred.
