New Gauguin at Getty Museum
Arii Matamoe (The Royal End) by French Post-Impressionist Painter
Paul Gauguin's painting "Arii Matamoe (The Royal End)" joins three works by the famous French Post-Impressionist in the permanent collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum.
Los Angeles, California's J. Paul Getty Museum announced on March 12, 2008 its recent acquisition of Arii Matamoe (The Royal End) (1892) by Post-Impressionist Paul Gauguin (1848-1903). Purchased from a private collection in Geneva, Switzerland, the oil on coarse fabric painting, exhibited once since 1946, joins three other works by the prolific French artist: Portrait of a Tahitian Girl (ca. 1892); Head with Horns (1895-97), a wooden sculpture; and the experimental transfer drawing Eve (The Nightmare) (ca. 1899-1900).
Paul Gauguin and the Allure of Tahiti
The son of a French journalist and half-Peruvian mother, Paul Gauguin was a stockbroker and father of five children. An ardent gallery habitué, this collector of emerging artists' works painted with Camille Pissarro (1830-1903), Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) and Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890). Quickly disillusioned by the Impressionists and enthralled by African and Asian art's exoticism and symbolism, Gauguin sailed in 1891 to the Pacific Ocean in search of a pristine Polynesian paradise unspoiled by European civilization. Upon his arrival in Tahiti, the tropical island's contact with Western merchants and colonists had already ruined Gauguin's fantasy of an idyllic earthly culture. The artist's second retreat to Tahiti in 1895 resulted in his permanent residence in the South Seas.
Arii Matamoe
Gauguin's Arii Matamoe is a powerfully morbid interior scene. Its foreground is dominated by the unsettling image of a decapitated male head, replete with eyes rolled back and atop a white cushion. A crouching sorrowful nude female, framed by a motif of foreboding skulls geometrically arranged, expresses grief. Behind a screen lurks a shadowy figure in the midst of other mourners. The painting's translated title and overall composition make it probable that Gauguin's expressive work is a fanciful depiction of a noble Polynesian death ritual.
Possibly inspired by the passing of Tahiti's King Pomare V (1842-1891), Arii Matamoe has been viewed as Gauguin's metaphorical interpretation of Tahitian culture's demise as a result of French colonization. Although decapitation does not figure in any known Tahitian funerary rites, Gauguin could have borrowed the painting's severed head imagery from stories of mythology's Orpheus and the biblical John the Baptist as well as the public guillotining of a murderer he witnessed in 1888.
Last publicly displayed in the retrospective Paul Gauguin at Martigny, Switzerland's Fondation Pierre Gianadda (June 10-November 22, 1998), the recently cleaned Arii Matamoe takes up residence near the artist's carved Head with Horns at the J. Paul Getty Museum in April 2008.
Sources:
- Ives, Colta and Susan Alyson Stein, with Charlotte Hale and Marjorie Shelley. The Lure of the Exotic: Gauguin in New York Collections (exh. cat.). New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2002.
- Shackelford, George T.M. and Claire Frèches-Thory, et al. Gauguin Tahiti (exh. cat.). Boston: MFA Publications, 2003.
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