The seed of the Areoi

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The Seed of the Areoi (Te aa no areois) (Paul Gauguin)
The Seed of the Areoi (Te aa no areois)
Paul Gauguin , 1892
Oil on burlap
92.1 x 72.1 cm
Museum of Modern Art , New York

The Seed of the Areoi is a post-impressionist painting by Paul Gauguin from 1892. It shows a Polynesian woman from Tahiti , who is sitting on a dark blue cloth and holding a young flowering plant in her left hand. Gauguin gave his picture the Tahitian title Te aa no areois . Today the picture belongs to the collection of the New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).

description

The painting has the dimensions 92.1 × 72.1 cm and is executed using the technique of oil on sackcloth. The picture was initially in the A. Fontaine collection and was then owned by Dr. Abel Desjardins. The art dealer Jacques Seligmann sold the picture in 1936 to the New York media entrepreneur William S. Paley . After Paley's death in 1990, his art collection, including the painting The Seed of the Areoi, was donated to MoMA.

The woman sitting on the dark blue cloth, which is partly decorated with white, partly figurative and geometric symbolic forms, holds a young flowering plant in her left hand. Her feet rest on a red background. In the lower left corner on a lying yellow palm leaf is Gauguin's original title of the picture in the Tahitian national language Te aa no AREOİS . In the front right there is a small table with fruits. Gauguin's red signature P. Gauguin 92 can be seen on the plate . Behind the woman are pink to purple flowers, behind which there is a green meadow with palm trees with yellow leaves. The meadow is bordered by scrub towards the background, and a deep V-shaped gorge with a white cloudy sky, flanked by steep blue rock walls, forms the perspective conclusion of the picture. Gauguin's color choices shocked contemporary audiences. In the foreground of the picture he chooses the tones red, yellow and brown, while in the background he chooses yellow and complementary violet. In order to soften this effect on the viewer, he claimed that he had found this color palette in the Tahitian landscape, but the true colors of the South Sea islands are completely different. But it is precisely the new coloring that makes his painterly mastery clear. The posture of the woman in this picture is inspired from outside Europe. The hieratic or “priestly” pose is ancient Egyptian, the position of the arms is modeled on depictions in the Javanese Borobudur temple. The areas of the picture with flat paint, for example the floor under the woman's feet, have no shadow, which suggests influences of Japanese painting. Art history also sees elements of Western culture in the picture, such as the symbolism of the painter Pierre Puvis de Chavannes , who painted similar poses before Gauguin.

Background and interpretation

Gauguin had traveled to Tahiti in 1891 and arrived in Papeete in June . His romantic image of an unspoiled paradise was partly shaped by Pierre Loti's story Le Mariage de Loti . However, he found that French colonization had destroyed this glorified image. He therefore tried to express the aspects of this culture, or what he believed to be, in his works. Therefore, he chose Tahitian titles such as Fatata te miti , Te Faaturuma or Manao tupapau to show idyllic landscapes in supposedly spiritual surroundings, choosing simple shapes. In July 1893 he returned to France in the hope that he would finally achieve success with his new works. In 1894 he wanted to publish the book Noa Noa , in which several woodcuts were printed that reflected his impressions from Tahiti. Neither the book nor a solo exhibition in Paul Durand-Ruel's gallery met with the public's approval, so that he finally left France for good in July 1895. Gauguin's painting in Tahiti was the beginning of an art movement that dealt with exotic subjects at the end of the 19th century. European artists, skeptical of the cultural development of Europe, found in the aesthetics of the so-called “primitive cultures”, now a racist term, a favor and inspiration for a new art that romanticized them but was also intended to advance them. Gauguin, and above all this picture, pioneered the later primitivism art movement , which enabled artists to overcome the vanishing point perspective since the Renaissance , for example .

Vairaumati Tei Oa 1892, Pushkin Museum, Moscow

The girl is thirteen-year-old Tehura, the painter's lover, whom he painted several times on his first trip to Tahiti. In this picture, Gauguin depicts her as Vaïraümati , the mythical earth mother of the Tahitian Areoi secret society (see also Arioi ). In the Pushkin Museum in Moscow there is a similar picture with the title Vairaumati Tei Oa (your name is Vairaumati) with a different background. In her hand it is said to be a sprout of a kind of mango . The Areoi formed a religious community which, however, ceased to exist long before Gauguin's arrival in Tahiti. French colonialism and the missionary activity associated with it had long since established Christianity and Western culture. But Gauguin wanted to escape precisely this western, as he wrote, “decadence” and conjures up in his picture an alleged ideal, nature-loving, paradisiacal original state of Tahiti. Gauguin claimed that he learned the old Maori legends from his girlfriend, but the artist did not meet the last living people to know the story. Rather, Gauguin drew his knowledge of the Tahitian religion and myths from the incorrect travel report by Jacques-Antoine Moerenhout entitled Voyage aux îles du Grand Océan from 1837. Despite the unpleasant reality, the artist always stuck to his idea of ​​a primeval paradise as an alternative to western culture. Here he wanted to find happiness. In the opinion of the art historian and curator at MoMA, William Rubin , the poetic parallel between the artist as creator and the deity, his beloved, is portrayed in his picture, as it was before Gauguin. There is a self-portrait from his Breton phase in the school of Pont-Aven from 1889 ( self-portrait with yellow Christ , Musée d'Orsay ), which shows him in front of a crucified Jesus and thus a parallel between him, this time as a sufferer, and Christ as God suggests.

Exhibitions (selection)

Gaugin in the exhibition in 1893 in front of the picture Te Faaturuma
  • November 1893: Solo exhibition in the gallery of Paul Durand-Ruel with the title Oeuvres récentes de Gauguin
  • 1897: Quatrième Exposition de La Libre Esthétique, Brussels
  • 1928: Paul Gauguin, Kunsthalle Basel
  • 1933: Exposition des la décor de la vie sous la Troisième Republique, Louvre
  • 1935: L'Impressionisme, Palais des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles
  • 1939/1940: Materpieces of Art, 1939 New York World's Fair
  • 1955: Paintings from Private Collections, The Museum of Modern Art, New York
  • 2004: The MoMA in Berlin. Masterpieces from the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Neue Nationalgalerie , Berlin

literature

Web links

Commons : Te aa no areois  - collection of images, videos and audio files
  • Te aa no areois deartibus.it (Italian, with other similar images of this phase)
  • MoMA website with a detailed description of the painting

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b William Rubin: The William S. Paley Collection. Museum of Modern Art 1992, ISBN 0-87070-193-2 , p. 159 (reading sample, books.google.de ).
  2. ↑ Paul Gauguin: The Notes of Noa Noa. The first Tahitan trip. Verlag Büchse der Pandora, Wetzlar 1982, ISBN 978-3-88178-102-2 , p. 22.
  3. ^ Paul Gauguin The Seed of the Areoi 1892. MoMA website with a detailed description of the pictures (English).
  4. ^ A b William S. Rubin in: Exhibition catalog Das MoMA in Berlin. Masterpieces from the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Hantje Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern-Ruit 2004, ISBN 3-7757-1389-1 , p. 264 f.
  5. ^ Pierre Loti: The marriage of Loti (Rarahu) . Laurie, London ( archive.org - French: Le Mariage de Loti . 1880. English edition).
  6. ^ Tara Lloyd: Seed of the Areoi, Paul Gaugin's most Controversial Work in in the art magazine Singulart .
  7. ↑ Vairaumati Tei Oa (Her Name Vairaumati). pushkinmuseum.art, accessed on December 16, 2019 .
  8. ↑ Jacques Antoine Moerenhout: Voyages aux îles du Grand Océan . A. Bertrand, Paris 1837 ( archive.org ).
  9. ↑ Paul Gauguin - Self-Portrait with a Yellow Christ. Musée d'Orsay, accessed December 16, 2019 .
  10. ^ William Rubin: The William S. Paley Collection. Museum of Modern Art 1992, ISBN 0-87070-193-2 , p. 50 ff. (Reading sample, books.google.de ).
  11. ^ Charles Morice: Exposition Paul Gauguin: Galeries Durand-Ruel… novembre 1893 (=  Modern Art in Paris, 1855–1900 . No. 45 ). Impr. De l'art, E. Moreau, Paris 1893, OCLC 192140247 .