Day of the God (Mahana No Atua)

Day of the God (Mahana No Atua): Paul Gauguin

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Art Type: Oil Painting
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Paul Gauguin Oil Painting - Day of the God (Mahana No Atua)

Keywords: Day, God, Mahana, Atua

Work Overview: Day of the God (Mahana No Atua)
Paul Gauguin
French, 1848–1903
Day of the God (Mahana No Atua)
1894
Oil on canvas
26 7/8 x 36 in. (68.3 x 91.5 cm)
Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection, 1926.198

Paul Gauguin began to paint in his late 20s. A restless man, he traveled and worked in the French regions of Brittany and Provence as well as South and Central Americas. In 1891, he moved to the French colony of Tahiti in search of "ecstasy, calm, and art." He spent all but two of the remaining years of his life in the South Seas. When he returned to France in 1893, he spent most of his time in Paris promoting his work and writing and illustrating Noa Noa, a fictionalized account of his Tahitian experience. Day of the God (Mahana No Atua), one of the very few paintings Gauguin completed during this period, is closely related to his literary project.

Set in a Tahitian landscape by the sea, the composition is divided into three horizontal bands. At the top, islanders perform a ritual near a towering sculpture. Like many figures in Gauguin’s Tahitian images, the monumental sculpture was derived not from local religion but from photographs of carved reliefs adorning the Buddhist temple complex at Borobudur (Java). In the middle band, three symmetrically arranged figures are placed against a field of pink earth in poses that may signify birth, life, and death. The woman in the center, formally linked to the sculpture at the top, is similar in appearance to other depictions of Tahitian females who Gauguin used to suggest the Christian figure of Eve in paradise. The lower portion of the composition evokes brilliant, contrasting hues reflected in the water. Gauguin’s Post-Impressionist style, defined by a decreasing tendency to depict real objects and the expressive use of flat, curving shapes of vibrant color, influenced many abstract painters of the early 20th century.

Day of the God is one of a small number of paintings of Tahitian subjects that Paul Gauguin made in France between his stays in the South Pacific. An imaginary rather than realistic depiction of the South Seas, it is dominated by an idol of the goddess Hina. To the right of her, women dance the upaupa, a suggestive ancient Tahitian dance that missionaries and colonial authorities tried to suppress. In a middle ground of pink sand sits a female bather flanked by ambiguously gendered figures lying on their sides. Although the arrangement of this trio seems symbolic—perhaps of birth, life, and death—Gauguin made its exact meaning an enigma.

In the two years that Gauguin spent in Paris between his trips to Tahiti he was occupied with a number of different projects, including the exhibition of his recent work at Durand-Ruel's and the writing of Noa Noa. All this left him little time to seek out new motifs, and he fell back on favourite themes in an attempt to consolidate his exotic reputation. Mahana no atua was probably painted immediately after his exhibition and represents a fictionalised version of life in Tahiti, akin to that which he was creating for Noa Noa which drew largely on Jacques-Antoine Moerenhout's Voyages aux Iles de Grand Ocean (first published in 1837) and which furnished Gauguin with ideas for his writings, paintings and carvings.

The figure of the god in the centre of the composition, around which the work revolves, is a composite of Moerenhout's description of figures from Easter Island and those from Borobudur, of which he had photographs. The ritualistic aspect of the scene is enhanced by the use of a frieze-like arrangement of figures and by the work's esoteric nature.

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