Tahitian girl

Tahitian Girl (1898) at the National Museum of Serbia in Belgrade belongs to Gauguin's second Tahitian stay, the year of his most ambitious philosophical canvas Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? and his attempted suicide. These smaller figure studies from 1898 represent the sustained working practice that continued alongside the monumental philosophical painting — the daily engagement with Tahitian subjects that kept his pictorial language alive even during his most crisis-ridden period. The National Museum of Serbia holds this canvas as part of a collection of European modernism assembled during Yugoslavia's period of artistic internationalism in the mid-twentieth century, when museums in Belgrade, Zagreb, and Ljubljana were building significant holdings of Western European art through purchases and exchanges.

The figure is rendered with the bold, flat color areas and synthetist outlines characteristic of Gauguin's mature style, the Tahitian girl's form simplified into large decorative zones of warm color. The background is treated with equal chromatic deliberateness, the greens and yellows of the tropical setting functioning as active color presences rather than neutral settings.