Unlike Gauguin who was a long term settler in Tahiti and the Marquesas, Matisse spent a fleeting eleven weeks there in 1930. Intriguingly, his drawings from that visit include few portraits of women and no nudes. His major later works inspired by that sojourn, Oceania, the Sky and Oceania, the Sea and sequences in Jazz have been represented, not least by Matisse himself and his biographer Spurling, as the evocations of sensuous embodied memories and the creations of an individuated master. Following Wright’s suggestion about Matisse’s aesthetic métissage in North Africa this paper will explore such processes in Oceania.

Biography: Margaret Jolly is Professor in Anthropology, Gender and Cultural Studies and Pacific Studies in the School of Culture, History and Language in the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University and is an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow. She is an historical anthropologist who has written extensively on gender in the Pacific, on exploratory voyages and travel writing, missions and contemporary Christianity, maternity and sexuality, cinema, art and museums including on the Musée du Quai Branly, Paris.

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