Tahitian Women On the Beach

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Tahitian Women On the Beach: Paul Gauguin

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Art Type: Oil Painting
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Paul Gauguin Oil Painting - Tahitian Women On the Beach

Keywords: Tahitian, Women, Beach

Work Overview: Tahitian Women (on the Beach)
Paul Gauguin 056.jpg
Artist Paul Gauguin
Year 1891
Medium oil on canvas
Dimensions 69 cm × 91 cm (27.2 in × 35.8 in)
Location Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Tahitian Women on the Beach (French: Femmes de Tahiti) is an 1891 painting by Paul Gauguin. The painting depicts two women on the Pacific island of Tahiti on the beach.

The painting is currently in the collection of the Musée d'Orsay, located in Paris, France.

In 1892 Gauguin painted a similar painting Parau api, (Two Women of Tahiti) which is in the collection of the Galerie Neue Meister in Dresden. In Tahitian, "parau" means word and "api" means new. Thus "parau api" means news. A common greeting is "Eaha te parau api", or what's new?

In 1891, Gauguin went to Tahiti, an island he imagined to be a primitive paradise. The artist wanted "to live there in ecstasy, calm and art". His financial difficulties, his aesthetic concerns and this very Baudelairian "invitation au voyage" drove him to that distant land to escape "the European struggle for money" - to be "free at last".

This composition is typical of his paintings during the early part of his first stay in the Pacific, paintings often depicting Tahitian women busy with simple daily tasks. Here, the heavy, hieratic figures have their own space, creating a series of arabesques in a perfectly orchestrated harmony. The faces are rendered as a mask or a profile, rather indeterminate, but full of melancholy. Gauguin's wonderfully confident handling of the line makes it both elegant and decorative. By choosing somewhat rigid poses, he introduces a rhythm into the painting through a mysterious, harmonious geometry, thus producing what looks more like a genre scene than a genuine double portrait. The painting is lightly animated both by the discreet, almost monochrome, still life in the foreground, and by the rollers breaking on the lagoon in the background, suggested by a few white highlights.
The painter regarded this painting as significant enough to produce a variant of it in 1892, Parau Api (Dresden, Staatliche Kunstammlungen), in which the floral sarong replaces the sensible mission clothes of the woman on the right. The synthetic lines and simplified shapes of Manet, whom Gauguin admired greatly, influenced these contrasting outlines of the women. But above all, these characters herald the coloured effects of Matisse with their powerful graphic style and vivid colours.

Gauguin arrived in Tahiti in June 1891. The motives for his flight from Europe seem to have been mixed—artistic, domestic, political, aesthetic, and financial—and well rehearsed. Always a traveller—from the days of his childhood in Peru, his years in the merchant marines, and a disastrous journey to Martinique in the West Indies with Laval in 1887—Gauguin was searching for something that neither decadent Paris nor ‘primitive’ Brittany could provide. As he wrote to Redon in September 1890, from Le Pouldu:

Even Madagascar is too near the civilized world; I shall go to Tahiti and I hope to end my days there. I judge that my art, which you like, is only a seedling thus far, and out there I hope to cultivate it for my own pleasure in its primitive and savage state.1
While Polynesia was not what he expected, neither was Gauguin naïve: he understood there was to be no Utopia of unspoiled ‘nature’. As he wrote to his wife Mette in late June 1891: ‘Our missionaries had already introduced a good deal of protestant hypocrisy, and wiped out some of the poetry, not to mention the pox which has attacked the whole race.’2 The two Tahitian women that he painted in his first months on the island display an ambiguity of mood which seems to catch both artist and subjects. The women do not engage us directly. The woman on the left, dressed in a flowered pareu and white blouse, is formed from arabesques of lowered head, foreshortened body and leg, with a strong vertical arm. The woman on the right is clothed in a coverall pink missionary dress, a sequence of circles and ellipses from head to torso and arm, and crossed legs under her skirt. She is plaiting a basket, but looks out of the picture beyond the artist, towards our right. Her occupation may be traditional, but her clothing, like her friend’s, is made of cheap cotton imported from India or Europe.

The two figures are depicted close up, dominating the space. Behind them lie horizontals of the black sea with white wave-tips, the green lagoon and cream-coloured sand. Rich and simplified colours fill in the planes, with minimal distraction from impasto or painterly expression. Instead, the introspective, even melancholy women sit quietly on their beach. It was this introspective, symbolic quality that Gauguin introduced so powerfully into art after Impressionism. He rejected the artificial, mythical narratives of Moreau or Puvis for deeper truths of the human condition. These seemed pessimistic in the by-passed worlds of Brittany or the South Seas, as touched by modernity as the city of Paris.

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