In the Waves (Dans les Vagues)

In the Waves (Dans les Vagues, 1889) at the Cleveland Museum of Art was painted at Pont-Aven during Gauguin's most intense period of formal experimentation. He and Émile Bernard had been developing Cloisonnism together — the simplified, flat-colored style with firm outlining that both claimed to have invented — and this canvas pushes that approach to an almost abstract extreme. The nude female figure almost merges with the churning wave forms, the boundary between body and water deliberately ambiguous, creating an image that is simultaneously a painted sensation and a symbolic declaration about the submergence of individual identity in natural force. Odilon Redon and the Symbolist poets were exploring similar ideas about the dissolution of the self in their literary and visual work, and Gauguin's canvas belongs to the broader Symbolist moment even as it departs from Symbolism's typically indoor, cerebral register. The Cleveland Museum's strong collection of Post-Impressionist work places this among the most important Gauguins in American institutional collections.

The figure is almost dissolved into the wave forms, the boundary between skin and water deliberately obscured with bold curving strokes in blue-green and white. Gauguin abandons conventional spatial recession: the waves fill the picture plane as a flat pattern of curved forms. The nude's flesh tones — warm pinks and ochres — provide the only conventional naturalism against the abstract wave design.