Aha Oe Feii?

Painted by Paul Gauguin in 1892 during his first stay in Tahiti, this canvas takes its title from a Tahitian phrase that the artist inscribed in the lower left corner. The French rendering he used at the 1893 Paris exhibition, Te quoi! Tu se Jalouse?, rested on a dictionary error, and the phrase's literal meaning is closer to a question about holding a grudge. The scene draws on an episode Gauguin later recounted in his diary Noa Noa: two young women lie on the shore after bathing, relaxed and drowsy, talking about past and future lovers until one of them asks the other whether she is jealous.

What stands out is the gap between title and image. The tension implied by the word jealousy hardly appears on the canvas, where both figures feel calm and almost languid. The seated woman was based on a photograph Gauguin owned of a frieze from the theatre of Dionysus in Athens, which gives her a sculptural, relief-like solidity. He reused this figure in later works, including Nave nave moe (1894), The Great Buddha (1899) and The Gold of Their Bodies (1901), suggesting he regarded it as a successful discovery. The sandy beach is rendered in flat colour, and the sea curls in sinuous forms with arbitrary hues, moving the picture away from straightforward naturalism.

Interpretations have often centred on an image of a Pacific paradise where sexual relations are playful and harmless. The scholar Peter Toohey has argued that the jealousy here does not arise from a threat to an exclusive relationship but from one sister having enjoyed more sex than the other the night before. Gauguin thought highly of the work, judging it the best he had produced so far, and sent it to his wife in Copenhagen to sell, but the asking price proved too high. After it was shown in Paris, Edgar Degas bought it. Today it is held by the Pushkin Museum in Moscow.

Painter

Paul Gauguin

Date

1892

Medium

oil paint, canvas

Dimensions

66 × 89 cm

Museum

Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow

Genre

genre art, nude

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