Manaò tupapaú

Manao tupapau (The Spirit of the Dead Watching, 1892) at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum is the most psychologically intense and explicitly symbolic of Gauguin's first-period Tahitian paintings. He described its genesis in Noa Noa: returning home late one night, he found his young companion Tehamana lying face down on the bed, rigid with fear of the dark. The image of the tupapau — the spirit of the dead that Polynesian tradition believed haunted darkness — combined directly observed terror with the mythological framework of Polynesian animism that Gauguin was constructing from his reading of ethnographic texts. The composition — a reclining nude figure watched by a seated spirit — had obvious structural parallels with the Western nude tradition from Titian through Manet, but Gauguin deliberately inverted the erotic potential by making the reclining figure frightened rather than inviting and by replacing the Western viewer's gaze with the spirit's supernatural surveillance. The Buffalo AKG's possession of two major Gauguins from his breakthrough Breton-Tahitian transition (this and The Yellow Christ) makes it one of the most important single-institution holders of his canonical works in America.

The composition divides between the horizontal nude figure in the lower portion and the ghost-like spirit crouching above the bedhead. Gauguin uses a deep, vibrant purple-blue for the background creating nocturnal otherworldliness.