タヒチの女たち

Two Tahitian women sit side by side, close yet worlds apart, wrapped in a silence that Paul Gauguin found stranger than anything else on the island.

The story behind the painting

Paul Gauguin painted Tahitian Women on the Beach during his first stay in Tahiti, which ran from 1891 to 1893. He had travelled to the French colony in search of what he called "ecstasy, calm, and art," far from European materialism. In letters to Van Gogh he spoke of a savageness that was also in himself. French colonial influence had already washed away some of what he hoped to find, yet he worked productively, and this canvas belongs to a larger series. Note a conflict in the sources: Wikidata dates the painting to 1890, while Wikipedia places it towards the end of the 1891 to 1893 trip.

What to look for

Two women sit still in a mood of aloof indolence, crowded into the canvas yet entirely independent of each other. The woman on the left wears a traditional pareu. The one on the right wears a missionary dress, a sign of French colonial and Christian influence. Their amber skin and powerful, sculptural bodies and mask-like faces push the picture from portrait toward genre. Look at the colours: orange, yellow, pink, ochre, deep reds, turquoises and browns, set in ornamental patterns. Is it really a beach? Historians debate it. The diagonal ochre and yellow zones and the white lines between green and blue may be architecture rather than sand and waves.

Meaning and intent

Gauguin was struck above all by the island's silence. He said he understood why people could sit motionless for hours, gazing at the sky. The women carry that silence, a melancholy that unsettles European ideas of paradise. He used synthetism, a term he coined that grew from cloisonism, in which dark lines enclose flat colour so the inner, symbolic poetry outweighs observed reality. Art historian Charles Stuckey suggests the ambiguous setting deepens the mystery. Interpretations differ. The work was long read as a rejection of oppressive European civilisation, but more recent historians criticise it as reflecting colonial imperialism and the exploitation of a native "savageness."

Legacy

At the suggestion of Edgar Degas, his friend and greatest supporter, Gauguin sent the painting to Paris to be shown by Durand-Ruel. Historians have compared its independent figures to Manet's On the Beach. Gauguin painted a variant in 1892, Parau api, or What News?. There the missionary dress becomes a striped pareu, the ochre turns deep yellow, and a wooden post hints at a veranda. He was reportedly enraged when it was sold. Parau api is in Dresden, while Tahitian Women on the Beach now hangs in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.

豆知識

Oil painting, 69 × 91.5 cm (Wikidata).
Wikidata gives 1890; Wikipedia places it during the first Tahiti stay, 1891-1893.
Variant: Parau api (1892), Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden.
Musée d'Orsay, Paris.

Wikipedia · Wikidata