Paul Gauguin

Here a young Polynesian woman sits on a blue-and-white cloth. Gauguin’s style fuses various non-European sources: ancient Egyptian (in the hieratic pose), Japanese (in the relative absence of shadow and modeling and in the areas of flat color), and Javanese (in the position of the arms, influenced by a relief in Indonesia’s Borobudur temple). But there are also signs of the West, specifically through aspects of the pose derived from a work by the French Symbolist painter Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. The color, too, is eclectic: although Gauguin claimed to have found his palette in the Tahitian landscape, the exquisite chromatic chords in The Seed of the Areoi owe more to his aesthetic invention than to the island’s visual realities.

In the origin myth of the Areoi, a Polynesian secret society, a male sun god mates with the most beautiful of all women, Vairaumati, to found a new race. By painting his Tahitian lover Tehura as Vairaumati, Gauguin implied a continuity between the island’s mythology and its present reality during his stay there. In fact, the island had been profoundly altered by colonialism, and the Areoi society itself had disappeared. Gauguin’s anachronistic vision was particularly powerful for him, however, in the contrast it provided with the West, which, he believed, had fallen into “a state of decay.”