Paul Gauguin (French, 1848–1903)
Under the Pandanus (I Raro te Oviri), 1891
Oil on canvas
26 1/2 x 35 3/4 in. (67.31 x 90.81 cm)
Foundation for the Arts Collection, gift of the Adele R. Levy Fund, Inc., 1963.58.FA

In Tahiti Gauguin sought an exotic world far from Western civilization, a distant place of brilliant colors, luscious vegetation, and foreign custom. There he found both the real and psychological distance to pursue his radical aesthetic goal of an art that does not copy nature. In Under the Pandanus, Gauguin suppressed spatial illusionism and instead constructed the landscape with horizontal bands of colors which reinforce the two-dimensionality of the canvas. The figures are dressed in pareos, skirts of flowered cotton wrapped around the waist. The red fabric forms a bold contrast to the brilliant green field to the left, a daring manipulation of complementary colors that is repeated in the fruits balanced on the shoulders of the figure at the right. The reddish brown earth bears a calligraphic pattern of undulating yellow—fallen palm leaves—that gives the impression of hot, molten material.

The stiff, wooden stances of the women recall the importance of the Buddhist bas-reliefs at Borobudur in Java (which Gauguin knew from photographs) as a specific source for the artist’s primitivizing rendering of figures. Even the black dog at the center of the composition seems to transcend mere genre, suggesting the animalistic or barbaric qualities that Gauguin imagined he had discovered in the South Pacific. The seductive aura of the exotic undoubtedly served as a powerful catalyst for Gauguin’s bold redefinition of painting. Gauguin clearly prized this painting. He adopted its imagery in a woodcut and for a monotype, which he used as the frontispiece to his semi-autobiographical account of his first Tahitian journey, Noa Noa.