Are You Jealous? (Aha oe feii?)
Paul Gauguin (1848 to 1903) · 1892
Two Tahitian women rest on a beach after bathing. One sits with her back to us on the pink sand, the other lies stretched out with her head on her arm, and the water behind them is a flat yellow green. The title, written in Tahitian at the bottom left, means Are you jealous? Gauguin explained that he had overheard two sisters talking about lovers and one asking the other that question. The pink of the sand is invented; it is there because pink against green was what the picture needed.
Gauguin had arrived in Tahiti in 1891 looking for a paradise untouched by Europe, and found a French colony where the old religion had almost vanished. What he painted was partly what he saw and partly what he wished to see. Look at the bodies, drawn with a heavy dark outline and modelled in warm flat colour like the figures in a stained glass window, and at the way the whole scene is compressed into bands of pink, green and yellow with almost no depth. The pose of the seated woman is borrowed from a Buddhist relief that Gauguin carried a photograph of.
He thought this one of his best paintings, and wrote from Tahiti asking that it be priced accordingly. It reached Moscow through Sergei Shchukin, who bought sixteen Gauguins and hung them together in his dining room as a single wall of colour that he called his iconostasis. After the revolution it passed to the state and in 1948 to the Pushkin Museum. Whatever one thinks now of Gauguin's colonial fantasy, the painting is a lesson in how a few flat colours can be made to sing.
Did You Know? Shchukin hung his Gauguins edge to edge on one wall of his dining room, so tightly that visitors compared it to an icon screen.
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