The Invocation

The Invocation (1903) at the National Gallery of Art belongs to Gauguin's final Marquesan period, when his formal language had achieved its most austere and monumental quality. By 1903 he was living on Hiva Oa in the Marquesas, physically declining but painting with undiminished ambition, and the three frontal, praying figures in this canvas represent his most explicit attempt to create a formal language for spiritual experience that drew on the full range of non-Western devotional imagery he had been collecting and studying for years. He had photographs of Buddhist sculpture from Borobudur, Romanesque portal figures, Egyptian reliefs, and Marquesan carving pinned to his studio walls, and the figures in The Invocation bear the marks of all these sources. The formal language here — frontal symmetry, simplified volumes, the suppression of individual expression in favor of collective spiritual attitude — is entirely removed from the European academic figure painting tradition, representing the fullest realization of his primitivist project. The NGA's collection of this late canvas reflects the museum's comprehensive commitment to documenting Gauguin's full career.

The three figures are arranged symmetrically in the frontal, archaic manner Gauguin developed in his late work under the influence of non-Western sculptural sources. The palette is rich and deeply saturated — rust, gold, deep green — with minimal tonal modelling. The flat decorative background integrates the figures into a unified colour field.