Aha Oe Feii?

Aha Oe Feii? (Are You Jealous?, 1892) at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts is one of the most serene and compositionally resolved of Gauguin's first Tahitian canvases. Two women recline on a beach, their poses of easy relaxation the opposite of the Western nude's calculated display or the academic figure's studied attitude — they are simply present, resting, comfortable in their bodies and their landscape. Gauguin described the painting's genesis in Noa Noa, noting that he had observed two sisters after bathing and that one asked the other 'are you jealous?' — a fragment of Tahitian social life that he elevated into a compositional title while the painting itself pursued formal rather than narrative concerns. The Pushkin Museum's extraordinary collection of Gauguins from the Shchukin and Morozov collections — assembled in Moscow before the Russian Revolution and nationalized in 1917 — includes this canvas alongside the Matamoe, Not to Work, and The King's Wife, making Moscow essential for understanding his mature Polynesian achievement.

Two reclining figures occupy the foreground in poses that echo without exactly mirroring each other. Gauguin uses this near-symmetry to create tension rather than balance. The background is a saturated decorative field of pink, orange, and blue reading as both environment and emotional atmosphere.