The Seed of the Areoi

The Seed of the Areoi (1892) at the Museum of Modern Art is one of the most important works from Gauguin's first Tahitian period, a composition in which the ambitions of his Polynesian project are most fully realized. The Areoi were a traditional Polynesian secret society associated with fertility, performance, and the gods — a subject Gauguin encountered in J.-A. Moerenhout's ethnographic text Voyages aux Îles du Grand Océan, which he had copied extensively in his handwritten manuscript Noa Noa. The monumentality of the seated figure — her frontal pose, the generous weight of her body, the calm authority of her expression — combines the influence of archaic Greek sculpture, Egyptian tomb painting, and Javanese temple reliefs into something new and distinctly Gauguin's own. MoMA's acquisition of this canvas placed it at the center of the institution's narrative of modernism's origins, confirming the extent to which Gauguin's primitivist project had re-oriented the possibilities of figure painting away from the European academic tradition and toward the full range of world art.

The hessian support imparts a distinctive coarse texture to the painted surface, visible through the thinly applied colour areas. The figure is painted with warm, golden flesh tones that glow against the rich blue-green background. The bold contour defining the figure's silhouette is one of the clearest examples of Gauguin's cloisonné technique in his Tahitian work.