The artist who painted the work above is a French artist named Paul Gauguin. He was born in Paris in 1848 and died in 1903. He is known for his work in impressionism which is capturing detail in a work through the use of bold colors. And this is what Gauguin is known for, his experimentation with bold colors in his art. He gained more popularity for his work after his death making impressions on may other french and german artists.
The work above is a use of flat, bright and unrealistic colors. It is a painting of a Polynesian goddess who is sitting naked with nature behind her as a background. The painting itself is oil on burlap and was painted in 1892. He painted the piece due to his visit to Tahiti which was a French colony at the time. He visited the place in hopes of finding Tahiti culture but the French had already colonized enough. In the painting he shows Tahiti as a premodern land of leisure instead of the poverty that was stricken at the time. His interest in the piece was to recover a “pure” subject and closer to nature.
The piece promotes modernistic aesthetic through the different types of cultural styles used. For example the pose of the lady is an ancient Egyptian pose, Japanese art from the absence of shadow and modeling, and in the areas of flat color, and also Javanese in the position of arms. He also adds a Western style to it from the colors he uses. He used colors that are not realistic to what the island was like with its colors. The piece itself is not of its true colors because of the poverty that was in the area at the time. So Gauguin using colors to represent nature, and making it look pure is to avoid the viewer from seeing the true nature, adding a western touch to the already colonized island.
I encountered the work at MoMa surrounded by other works of Gauguin and other impressionists in art. The piece reflects the time of French colonization of other islands and countries.
The colors drew me to the piece the most. The woman sets a great contrast to the background and the cloth she is sitting on making the painting have many different areas to look and focus at for its detail and rich coloring.
Farhan,
You have provided a lot of interesting commentary here about the gap between Gaugin’s representation of Tahiti, as exemplified in this painting, and the reality of the Tahiti that actually existed at the time. You need to provide a citation for the source you used for this material. You are right – on the one hand, Gaugin’s painting underscores the beauty of his subject, but on the other hand, he is both pretending that Tahiti is something that it’s not (thanks to the ravages of colonialism) and is even himself a participant in a kind of colonialist art by asking the Tahitian women to pose for him, objectifying them, and making them available to the western viewer. It’s very complicated!