Two Tahitian Women

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Two Tahitian Women: Paul Gauguin

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Art Type: Oil Painting
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Paul Gauguin Oil Painting - Two Tahitian Women

Keywords: Tahitian, Women

Work Overview: Two Tahitian Women
Artist Paul Gauguin
Year 1899
Medium oil on canvas
Dimensions 94 cm × 72 cm (37 in × 28.5 in)
Location Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

Two Tahitian Women is an 1899 painting by Paul Gauguin. It depicts two topless women, one holding mango blossoms, on the Pacific Island of Tahiti. The painting is part of the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and was donated to the museum by William Church Osborn in 1949.[1]

Although Tahiti is depicted as an innocent paradise, the two women in the painting confront the viewer in a way similar to that in Manet's Le déjeuner sur l'herbe (1863) or Olympia (1863),[2] and follow an artistic tradition of comparing woman's breasts to flowers or fruit.[3] The women in the painting also appear in two other works by Gauguin, Faa Iheihe (Tahitian Pastoral) (1898) and Rupe, Rupe (1899).[1]

The painting was attacked April 1, 2011, while on loan to the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. A woman named Susan Burns banged on the painting's plastic cover. Due to the protection of the plexiglass, the painting was not harmed. The woman was “immediately restrained and detained” by the museum’s security guards who charged her with destruction of property and attempted theft.

As Gauguin brought his work in Tahiti to a close, he focused increasingly on the beauty and serene virtues of the native women. In this painting, he depended on sculpturally modeled forms, gesture, and facial expression to vivify the sentiments he had used to describe the "Tahitian Eve": "very subtle, very knowing in her naïveté" and at the same time "still capable of walking around naked without shame." These two figures first appear in the artist's monumental frieze Faa Iheihe (Tahitian Pastoral) of 1898 (Tate, London) and again in the even larger Rupe Rupe (The Fruit Harvest) of 1899 (Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow), which he composed for the upcoming Exposition Universelle of 1900.

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Paul Gauguin

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