Two Tahitian Women

Two Tahitian Women

“Among Paul Gauguin’s main interests throughout his career was the people and also the society of Tahiti, where he lived for 2 separate stretches of time.

Initial starting in 1890, and then once again, after a brief return to France for financial reasons, beginning in 1895, which would certainly last until his last days. Among the major reasons for his retreat to such a remote place was his sensation that art in France had actually become instead standard, simply a handful of techniques as well as artifice that could be taught to as well as found out by basically any person.

Because of this, Paul Gauguin took a trip to Tahiti to discover, someplace in the tropics, the purity and also all-natural pressure he hungered for, away from the European moral and also intellectual shortcomings, as he saw them. In a manner, he was reverberating the total feeling, shared by the fin de siécle Europeans, of this mix in between disillusionment with Western values and the hope of locating the solution in the exotic as well as enchanting Various other, be it Gérôme’s Muslim globe, the Hudson River College’s escape to nature, or Gauguin’s travels to live amongst the Maori people in the South Pacific.

That being so, this oil on canvas, painted in 1899, and also thus during Gauguin’s second and last voyage to the South Pacific, exemplifies that longing for something much purer and also visceral. It depicts two Maori females, their busts exposed with naturality, one lugging mango blossoms on a plate, while the various other holds some flowers in a placement that Gauguin saw in a Javanese temple as well as in some cases replicated in his job. The female to the left, with the mango blooms, would have been none other than Pahura, the artist’s mistress, or “island wife,” who coped with him on the island.

The elegance of both females, which Gauguin also represented in various other paintings, like Faa Iheihe and also Rupe Rupe, is matched by their nonchalant perspective towards their viewer as well as to their nudity. They lug a very subtle poise and raw appeal, which is specifically what the artist was searching for when he left Europe.

Currently in possession of the Metropolitan Art Museum, in New York, the paint was attacked by a mentally deranged Christian fundamentalist when on loan to the National Gallery of Art in Washington D. C. in 2011 yet was not harmed due to a plexiglass cover.”