Not to work

Not to Work, at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, was painted in 1896 during Gauguin's second Tahitian period and belongs to a series of images in which reclining or seated figures embody an alternative to the industrious Protestant ethic of European modernity. The title is deliberately provocative: idleness was morally condemned in the bourgeois world Gauguin had fled, and painting leisure — especially the leisure of Polynesian women — as dignified and complete was a pointed statement about the cultural values he had chosen to reject.

The reclining figure is rendered in Gauguin's mature synthetist manner, the body defined by firm contours filled with warm, unmodulated flesh tones. Behind and around the figure, the tropical environment is treated as a decorative field of pattern — foliage, fabric, and ground merging into a single chromatic surface that refuses conventional spatial depth.