Video: "Are you jealous?": The story of one painting by Paul Gauguin
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
French artist Paul Gauguin He traveled a lot, but the island of Tahiti was a special place for him - the land of "ecstasy, tranquility and art", which became a second home for the artist. It is here that he writes his most outstanding works, one of which - "Are you jealous?" - deserves special attention.
Paul Gauguin first arrived in Tahiti in 1891. He hoped to find here the embodiment of his dream of a golden age, of life in harmony with nature and people. The port of Papeete, which met him, disappointed the artist: the unremarkable town, the cold meeting of local colonists, the lack of orders for portraits forced him to look for a new refuge. Gauguin spent about two years in the native village of Mataiea, this was one of the most fruitful periods in his work: in 2 years he painted about 80 canvases. 1893-1895 he spends in France and then leaves for Oceania again, never to return.
Gauguin always spoke about Tahiti with special warmth: “I was captivated by this land and its people, simple, not spoiled by civilization. To create something new, one must turn to our origins, to the childhood of mankind. The Eve I choose is almost animal, so she remains chaste, even naked. All Venus exhibited in the Salon look indecent, disgustingly lustful … . Gauguin never tired of admiring Tahitian women, their seriousness and simplicity, majesty and spontaneity, unusual beauty and natural charm. He painted them on all of his canvases.
Painting "Are you jealous?" was written during the first stay of Gauguin in Tahiti, in 1892. It was during this period of creativity that an extraordinary harmony of color and form appears in his style. Starting from an ordinary plot, spied on in the everyday life of Tahitian women, the artist creates real masterpieces in which color becomes the main carrier of symbolic content. The critic Paul Delaroche wrote: "If Gauguin, representing jealousy, does it through pink and purple, then it seems that all nature takes part in this."
The artist explained his creative manner during this period as follows: "I take as a pretext any theme borrowed from life or nature, and, despite the placement of lines and colors, I get a symphony and harmony that does not represent anything completely real in the exact meaning of the word …". Gauguin denied the reality that the realists wrote - he created a different one.
The plot of the painting "Are you jealous?" also spied on in the everyday life of Tahitian women: after bathing, the natives sisters bask on the beach and talk about love. One of the memories suddenly arouses jealousy of one of the sisters, which made the second suddenly sit down on the sand and exclaim: "Oh, you're jealous!" The artist wrote these words in the lower left corner of the canvas, reproducing the Tahitian speech in Latin letters. From this accidental episode of someone else's life, a masterpiece of art was born.
Both girls in the picture are naked, but in their nudity, despite their sensual postures, there is nothing shameful, strange, erotic or vulgar. Their nakedness is as natural as the unusually vibrant exotic nature around. According to the European canons of beauty, they can hardly be called attractive, but they seem beautiful to Gauguin, and he fully manages to capture his emotional state on canvas.
Gauguin attached particular importance to this picture. In 1892 g.he told a friend in a letter: "I painted a great nude picture recently, two women on the beach, I think this is the best thing I've ever done." Tahitian women are mysterious and inexplicably beautiful, just like the others 10 female images in the paintings of Paul Gauguin
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