Be Be (The Nativity)

Be Be (The Nativity, 1896) at the Hermitage Museum is Gauguin's second major transposition of the Christian Nativity into a Polynesian setting, companion to the 1896 Te tamari no atua at the Neue Pinakothek. The title 'Be Be' is Polynesian for 'baby' or 'infant,' and the subject — a woman and child in a tropical interior — places the Nativity's essential elements within an entirely Polynesian context. His sustained engagement with the Nativity across multiple canvases in 1895-96 reflected his belief that the Christian story's universal spiritual content could be expressed through any culture's formal language — and that the Polynesian version might be more authentically spiritual than the European academic tradition's approach to the same subject. The Hermitage's multiple Gauguins from this period allow Moscow visitors to trace the full range of his second-stay production, from domestic observation through mythological construction to explicit religious transposition.

Gauguin gives the composition the formal gravitas of religious painting — the mother and child are centrally placed, the surrounding space organised with ceremonial care — while every visual detail declares its Polynesian identity. The warm flesh tones, tropical flora, and flattened spatial depth refuse the European pictorial conventions that academic nativity painting took for granted.