Interpretive Resource

Paul Gauguin (1848-1903)
Of all of the Post-Impressionists, Paul Gauguin ultimately traveled the furthest away from Paris, the city that originally spawned so much Impressionist art. Restless and nomadic, the stockbroker-turned-painter had long yearned for the exotic, the primitive, for what he believed were more spiritually pure cultures than that of his native France. After exhibiting in the last five Impressionist exhibitions, he abandoned his family and bourgeois life in 1886 for the simpler settings of the French regions of Brittany and Provence, the site of his brief and tumultuous visit with van Gogh. He also traveled to the tropical West Indian island of Martinique, between North and South America.

In 1891, he finally ended up on the opposite side of the world from Paris, replacing its fast, ongoing moment with the infinite, almost indolent, ease of the French colony of Tahiti. His stated goal upon his departure was to make "a simple, very simple art... to immerse myself in virgin nature, see no one but savages, live their life, with no other thought in mind but to render, the way a child would, the concepts formed in my brain, and to do this with nothing but the primitive means of art, the only means that are good and true." He remained in Tahiti until 1893, when he returned to France, his health and spirits broken, his finances in disarray. Tahiti was not the paradise he had expected. Nonetheless, his output of over sixty paintings, remarkably innovative sculptures, and copious drawings, watercolors, and prints belies his disillusionment — as does his return to Tahiti in 1895. He lived in the South Sea islands for the remainder of his life.

Ancestors of Tehamana, 1893, was done during Gauguin’s first stay in Tahiti, shortly before his two-year trip back to France. It represents a formal portrait of his young Tahitian mistress Tehamana and was perhaps painted as a farewell. Tehamana was Gauguin's favorite model, an uninhibited Tahitian Eve who, for the artist, was the ideal antidote to the western depiction of women as seen in, for example, Seurat’s corseted and bustled figures. While Tehamana faces us, Seurat’s profiled figures, for the most part, look away. In the Art Institute painting, she is elaborately dressed in a European-style missionary dress, with flowers adorning her hair. As Gauguin’s main source for information on Polynesian mythology, she is shown seated in front of a mysterious painted background similar to a frieze on the wall of an ancient palace or temple. The symbols on the upper band of the frieze resemble the only surviving text, as yet undeciphered, from ancient Polynesian culture. Two ripe mangoes — perhaps an offering, or tokens of fertility — rest beside Tehamana’s hip. She points a fan, an emblem of beauty, toward the similarly frontal figure of a goddess in the frieze, who also wears a red flower in her hair. The goddess represents the ancient deity Hina from whom all Tahitians believed they were descended. The dress, fan, flowers, fruit, and even the way Tehamana glances to her right suggest not only the strong, enigmatic bond between the woman and the goddess, but also the connections between East and West, present and past, the corporeal and the spiritual, the living and the dead.

To arrive at his "simple, very simple art," Gauguin streamlines, almost abstracts, line and form and creates innovative and unusual color harmonies. He uses earth tones to model Tehamana, then cloaks her in the bold blue and white stripes of Western garb. His line is rhythmic and unadorned. Large, disk-like shapes, one incomplete, depict the fruit. Space is also compressed: the bronzed planes of Tehamana’s face are flattened, as is her figure. She seems almost sandwiched against the two-dimensional wall decoration, filled with emblems of her impenetrable past. Alluding to the complexity of this past, the title refers to the Tahitian custom of multiple godparents and, by implication, the complicated origins of the culture as a whole.

Like Monet in his later years, Gauguin painted slowly and deliberately, often working and reworking his composition until he felt he had achieved a pictorial and symbolic harmony. Just as this work incorporates Gauguin’s interpretation of the forms, myths, and symbols of Tahitian culture, so does his larger oeuvre contain his adaptations of the art forms of myriad western and non-western artistic civilizations. In this way, he explored in works such as Ancestors of Tehamana —with its elusive meaning, evocative color, and simplification of line and shape — the mysteries, superstitions, and emotions that the artist believed lay beneath all appearances. In introducing the arts of traditional societies into western modes of representation, Gauguin played a seminal role in early twentieth-century art.