Still Life with Grapefruit

Still Life with Grapefruit (1901) at the Basil and Elise Goulandris Foundation Museum in Athens belongs to Gauguin's final Marquesas period, when the tropical produce of his new environment — more dramatically colored than Tahitian fruits, the climate hotter and drier — provided new still-life subjects. He had moved to Hiva Oa in the Marquesas in 1901 specifically because he found Tahiti too colonized and too expensive, and the Marquesan environment offered him a more genuinely remote setting. The grapefruits of this canvas — large, golden, tropical — are treated with the monumental seriousness he gave to the Polynesian figures in his major compositions, reflecting his conviction that the still life was as serious a form as the figure painting that his critics considered his primary achievement. The Goulandris Foundation in Athens, which also holds major canvases by Van Gogh, Cézanne, and Picasso, acquired this late Gauguin as part of a collecting strategy that focused on the Post-Impressionist generation as the source of twentieth-century art's most important formal developments.

The grapefruits are rendered as bold, golden spheres with the simplified volumetric approach of Gauguin's late still-life style. Thick, confident paint application builds their form without recourse to conventional tonal modelling. The background is handled broadly in deep, saturated tones. The composition is spare and direct — the fruits given monumental presence through scale, placement, and the richness of the surrounding colour.