The Tatau or the original tattoo
The word tattoo comes from the Polynesian tatau, as it was here that the white man discovered it. The art of tattooing was highly developed in Tahiti and throughout Polynesia, where each victory saw the warrior's body darken a little more, both as an ornament and to impress the opponent. Men decorated their bodies almost entirely - a practice found to a lesser extent among women. Tattooing is linked to an initiation rite, which sees the newly tattooed pass into adulthood and lose their childhood tabu. Tabu, or tapu, are a set of rules that structure Polynesian societies. They are linked to the sacred and forbidden, and define a certain number of practices and punishments. The original tattooing technique was obviously very rudimentary: small holes were drilled in the dermis, and a comb was then used to inject lampblack, an ink obtained from the kernel of the bancoul nut(Aleurites moluccana or tuitui in Tahitian). Banned by missionaries, tattooing remained underground until the early 1980s, when it was rehabilitated as an art form in its own right. Today, the majority of Polynesians are tattooed, but not from head to toe. Contemporary tattoo artists borrow from traditional Polynesian motifs, made up of spirals, mosaics and stylized figures evoking tiki, turtle, fish... Marquesan motifs are very popular. A major international tatau convention is held every year at the Musée de Tahiti et des Îles, culminating in the Miss & Mister Tatau elections.
A people of sculptors
Skilled with their hands, the Polynesians are a people of artists thousands of years old. As the islands have neither ore nor industry, the Maohi obtain the tools and ornaments they need from the resources at hand: rare essences, coral, mother-of-pearl, coconuts, etc. Sculpture is the major art form in Polynesia. Sculpture is the major art form in Polynesia, particularly in the Marquesas, where it has reached a very high level of quality. In these remote islands, engraving takes pride of place. Every stone you come across has an engraved motif. The materials are worked with a chisel and hammer, or more commonly these days with a milling cutter whose tips are changed. The mastery of these tools, the polishing and buffing techniques and the choice of materials represent ancestral know-how. To ensure that this heritage lives on, Polynesian sculpture schools and mother-of-pearl workshops exist, including the Centre des Métiers d'art de la Polynésie française in Papeete. To admire the objects that make up Polynesian material culture, don't hesitate to visit the Musée de Tahiti et des Îles in the capital Papeete.
The tiki is Polynesia's most widespread work of art. This human representation of divinity wears an indefinable expression on its face. Short on legs, elbows on knees, its big head stares at you with round eyes. The largest tikis in French Polynesia are almost 2.50 m high and weigh several tons. But they're small compared with tikis from other regions, such as the moai of Rapa Nui, the Easter Island statues standing 10 m high and weighing almost 80 tons! Each tiki is endowed with a magical power, mana, a supernatural force provided by an arioi, the priest of Maohi rites. Tikis can be found everywhere, in the middle of the jungle or in the middle of an avenue, as pendants or door handles. The most impressive are those carved in stone, in keetu or basalt, which you come across on a forest walk, and which seem to protect the place. The ones you can buy, carved from coconut, tou (dark, veined wood) or miro (rosewood), sometimes measure 1 m and are made with exemplary precision and regularity. Smaller ones are carved in mother-of-pearl or sometimes in aito, a very hard wood.
A paint imported from France
French Polynesia, with its shimmering colors and scenes of daily life, has been a great source of inspiration for many renowned painters. The best-known is, of course, Paul Gauguin (1848-1903). Often alone and gnawed by poverty, he lived in Tahiti from 1891 to 1893, then from 1895 to 1901. It was during this period that he produced his finest works, which remained unnoticed until his death. Despised by his contemporaries and himself, Gauguin received only posthumous recognition. Gauguin was one of the first Europeans to capture and express the quintessence of Maohi civilization, its hedonism and generosity. Like Jacques Brel, he chose Hiva Oa in the Marquesas to end his days. However, his legacy remains a complex one for Polynesia, not least because of the sulphurous reputation he earned there and the problems his notorious paedophilia engendered: a social trauma that has never been fully recognized by the authorities in mainland France. Some of his finest works are Poèmes barbares (1896), Femmes de Tahiti (1891) and Manao Tupapau (1892).
Paul Gauguin undoubtedly had a strong influence on the paintings of Henri Matisse (1869-1954). Trained in the studio of Gustave Moreau (1826-1898), Matisse was initially influenced by Pointillism, before gradually moving away from realistic hues. Inspired by his many travels, during which he developed a passion for warm colors and opulent bodies, this great lover of light left for Tahiti in 1930 to say: "I'll go to the islands, to look under the tropics, at night and the light of dawn, which undoubtedly have a different density. The light of the Pacific is a deep golden goblet into which one looks. I remember that when I first arrived, it was disappointing, and then little by little, it was beautiful, it was beautiful, it was beautiful!" Matisse only spent two and a half months in Tahiti and the Tuamotus (Fakarava and Apataki), and painted just one canvas there, but this stay was to mark all his future works. Last but not least, Jacques Boullaire (1893-1976), who arrived in Polynesia in 1937, was a great lover of the raw light of the islands, where he produced numerous engravings and paintings: portraits of children and wahines, and tropical landscapes.
A contemporary art still little represented
Tahiti's contemporary art scene is struggling to emerge. First and foremost, it has to be said that the subjects and techniques of the island's many painters are inherited from the masters who have passed through here, and struggle to establish a true cultural identity in the face of well-developed traditional arts and crafts. The few galleries dedicated to contemporary art are few and far between, and are to be found mainly in Papeete and Raiatea.
Nevertheless, French Polynesia has seen the emergence of important figures in contemporary art from Oceania. Bobby Holcomb (1947-1991) stood out for the transdisciplinarity of his practice: he excelled in dance, music, painting and singing. In the course of his eventful life, he rubbed shoulders with the likes of Frank Zappa and Salvador Dali. Arriving in Tahiti in 1976, he settled in the village of Maeva on Huahine. Holcomb became an ardent defender of Polynesian culture, notably as part of the Pupu Arioi troupe, inspired by the social protest movements of the late 1960s and distinguished by its environmentally committed songs as well as its naive paintings. Bobby Holcomb refused French nationality for the rest of his life, protesting against the French nuclear tests in the archipelagos. Gotz (1964) is one of the local figures not to be missed. A painter, he is also a sculptor, a creator of props for theater and music, a comic-book illustrator and a fervent enthusiast of tattoos, about which he has written several books. He moved to Moorea in 1991 and set up his studio there. His work is imbued with a certain spirituality, and he himself says that "behind the scenery, he reveals impermanence".
From the new metropolitan Eden to the emergence of a Polynesian photographic scene
Photography in Tahiti, as in all the Polynesian archipelagos, developed as a means of constructing an image of a new paradise. In this way, the environmental qualities and indigenous Maohi populations were used for ideological purposes: the French colonial empire possessed little jewels, new Edens preserved from its development and which it could now appropriate. Paul-Émile Miot (1827-1900), a French naval officer from the West Indies, was one of the photographers whose work contributed to the collective colonial imagination. He arrived in Papeete in 1869, then in the Marquesas Islands in 1870, following a major expedition that took him across the entire Pacific Ocean, including Chile and Easter Island. In Polynesia, he produced a series of photographs, Océanie, which was used to illustrate Le Tour du monde, nouveau journal des voyages, a French illustrated weekly published from 1860 onwards. The series comprises some 57 shots, including portraits of upper-class Tahitians and natives, views of the islands, their lagoons and endemic vegetation. He thus nurtured a certain colonial practice of ethnography and played an active part in giving Tahiti the image of an antipodean paradise. We also find in him the figure of the fortuitous ethnographer, like the Spanish sailors who took the first photographs among the Amerindian tribes in the 19th century. At the time, photography was an amateur activity, a traveler's hobby that nevertheless served to construct a certain colonial identity, giving empires and their conquered peoples their image. In 1989, the Musée d'Orsay devoted an exhibition to him entitled Paul-Émile Miot, photographe de Tahiti et des îles Marquises.
Charles Burton Hoare (19th century) and his wife Sophia (19th century), both from Manchester, played a key role in Tahiti's photographic scene at the end of the 19th century. When they settled on the island in the late 1860s, they founded a photography studio. The Hoares were the official photographers of the protectorate, taking portraits of people of power, including the royal family. Charles soon died, and Sophia took over the family business, which she continued to run for almost thirty years. She gradually gained a reputation that she still enjoys today, and was awarded a bronze medal at the 1889 Universal Exhibition. She produced many high-quality portraits of Tahitian youth on albumen paper.
Little is known today about photography in Polynesia during the 20th century, and the medium has only taken a truly artistic turn in recent decades. This is why the Hoho'a Nui festival, created by the F16 association in 2010, offers a fresh look at photography in Polynesia. It enables local artists, both professional and amateur, to exhibit their work at the Maison de la culture de la Polynésie française in Papeete, and allows the public to discover local talent, such as the young Tahiri Sommer (1994), who stands out for his dreamlike, digital universe, or Jalil Sekkaki (1968), a surf photographer who also illustrates himself with dynamic, colorful scenes of local folklore.
The recent importation of street art
The development of street art is very recent in Tahiti. In fact, it was the creation of the Ono'u (join the colors) festival in 2014 by a young local company that enabled frescoes to appear in Papeete and the other Polynesian islands (Bora-Bora, Moorea and Raiatea, for example). Over the past six years, graffiti has experienced a veritable local explosion. One of the most popular works produced for the 2015 edition of the festival is La Tahitienne Rouge, the result of a collaboration between Seth, a globe painter originally from Paris, and HTJ, a Tahitian graphic artist and street-artist himself, who has produced well-known works from Papeete to Raiatea. A sleeping young woman, wrapped in a red sarong with white motifs, lies on a background of the same colors. The artists are referring to traditional pareos featuring white hibiscus on a red background. Behind the apparent serenity of the fresco, the motif hides a political message: a mushroom cloud and the symbol of radioactivity, lost among the traditional forms, refer to the nuclear tests conducted by France off the archipelago. HTJ himself illustrated the building of the Polynesian Political Party with a large fresco depicting a tiki, entitled La Mana Te Nunaa, or "power to the people".
Another remarkable painting was created by Irish artist FinDac for the fourth edition of the festival in 2017. This is a portrait of a modern vahiné, Herehia, which adorns a blind wall on Rue du Docteur Cassiau, Papeete. She wears a mother-of-pearl crown and carries a Tahitian bird in each hand. Her body is entirely painted white, while around her eyes, make-up in the shape of a blue superhero mask runs down her cheeks, as if she were crying. Herehia is part of a series of portraits made by the artist around the world, in which he depicts women as anonymous superheroines.
Last but not least, a magnificent fresco by Australian artist Fintan Magee has more recently seen the light of day in Papeete. For the 2019 edition of the festival, he took over the wall of the Paofai clinic in Papeete to create a touchingly melancholy embrace scene of a Polynesian couple: Force de la mémoire. The man is prostrate, sporting a warrior's tatau on his left arm, while a woman takes him in her arms and rests her head on his back. It's all done in an unsettling photo-realistic style, but the scene seems fleeting, like a memory captured just before it fades away. Some of the bodies fade into the background, as if they were disappearing. The tahitiheritage.pf website references many of the works, with associated maps showing their location, a useful tool for any enthusiast wishing to venture into the streets of Papeete or Raiatea.
