French artist Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) sought personal and artistic freedom. He began his career as a stockbroker, but gave it up at the age of 35 to devote himself entirely to painting. Repelled by Western civilisation, Gauguin was always in search of the archaic and the primitive. In 1891, he travelled to Tahiti in the South Seas for the first time, settling there permanently four years later and becoming fascinated by the local culture.
Painted on the South Sea island of Hiva Oa a year before Gauguin's death, the Wuppertal still life shows a table covered with a white cloth against a pale background of various shades of pink, blue and green. Surrounded by scattered flowers, exotic birds lie on their backs. The ensemble is completed by Gauguin's female cult figure "Idol with Pearl", a small image of the gods in the style of the South Sea island, now in Paris. Deeply embedded in the dark background, the idol appears as a reassuring symbol of eternity in contrast to the dazzling and ephemeral things in the foreground.
Rather than the subject, it is the modern composition that is the novelty of the painting. Due to the unusual perspective of the table, the few lines break away from the exact representation of depth and strive for an exciting surface structure.
- Material & Technik
- Leinwand
- Museum
- Von der Heydt Museum
- Datierung
- 1902
- Inventarnummer
- G 0883