Monday, November 15, 2010

Wk 11: The Seed of the Areoi

The Seed of Areoi 1892 by Paul Gauguin 36 1/4 x 28 3/8" MOMA

This painting is of a naked woman with a blue bird sitting in her hand.  She appears to be holding something in her hand that the bird would be eating out of because it's head isn't clear.  She is an African American woman sitting on a cloth with several different symbols embroidered along the edges.  In her hair, she has beads that probably can be linked to a tribal tradition.  Her feet and arms are abnormally painted on the canvas and she is sitting straight up and looks very proper.  Her legs are turned but her torso is facing the front although her head is slightly turned and looking off in another direction.  In the backgound, you can see mountains, clouds, blue skies, and green grass.  Gauguin painted the palm trees a sunflower yellow to make the trees more pronounced so that they didn't blend in and to add a little contrast.  In front of her you see a table with different exoctic fruits, which would tell you that she is somewhere exoctic.  Her eyes seem to have a calm and relaxed look to them as if she is more comfortable when she is around nature.

Gauguin was considered a Post-Impressionist.  He would express a spiritual meaning in many pieces of his artwork.  He would paint his pictures about "the disease of civilization" mainly of the islands in the South Pacific.  The Seed of Areoi was painted after Gauguin had been in Tahiti for about a year.  He wasn't painting what he saw in Tahiti, he was painting of what he dreamed it would be and what he wanted to find.  He thought that it had been ruined by missionaries and colonists.  I think that Paul Gauguin was trying to show us that without all the buildings and technology, nature is quite calming and more spiritual.  We forget the beauty of nature when we don't really look at it.

He is the European, who fleeting from it's overdeveloped culture and the complicity and artificiality of its life, sought simplicity by a desperate attempt to identify himself with the life of the Polynesian natives of Tahitit and the Marquesas Islands.

Title:  Paul Gauguin
Author:  Carl O. Schniewind
Source:  Bulletin of the Art Institute of Chicago (1907-1951) Vol. 43, No. 3 (Sep. 15, 1949), pp. 43-51

1 comment:

  1. Your comments really are quite stupid. She is Polynesian, not African American. She has a flowering mango in her hand and flowers in her hair. Was it only the exotic fruit which made you think she was somewhere exotic, nothing else in the painting? Go away and look at the painting again.

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