Haere Mai

Haere Mai (1891) at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum belongs to the earliest months of Gauguin's first Tahitian stay, when his formal language for the Pacific was still forming. The Tahitian title — 'come here,' 'welcome' — captures the quality of invitation and openness that he associated with his idealized vision of Polynesian culture in contrast to the closed, competitive world of European modernity. He had arrived in Tahiti in June 1891 with elaborate expectations about finding a world untouched by Western civilization; he discovered instead a largely Christianized, colonially administered society where many of the pre-contact traditions he sought had been suppressed or destroyed. The early works like this one preserve both his genuine response to the specific beauty of the Tahitian landscape and the projection of his primitivist fantasies onto that landscape — both layers are present in the warm golden light, the lush vegetation, and the hieratic figure that occupies the foreground. The Guggenheim's two early Tahitian canvases from 1891 are among the most important documents of the beginning of his Polynesian career.

The composition balances a figure in the foreground with an expansive Tahitian landscape receding behind. The handling is still somewhat transitional — the flat, bold colour zones of mature Synthetism not yet fully applied to the tropical subject. Warm yellows and ochres in the landscape contrast with the darker vegetation. The figure is placed as an invitation, their gesture reflected in the painting's title.