Der Ruf

Gauguin painted The Call in 1902 on Hiva Oa, a small island in the Marquesas, at the very edge of the French empire and about as far from Paris as he could get. He had a year left to live. He was sick, in debt, and locked in running quarrels with the local officials and missionaries, yet he kept working through it, on a run of pictures brooding on life and death. Two barefoot women stand as if on holy ground while a third figure gestures to someone outside the frame. That pointing arm he lifted from the Parthenon frieze, the ancient marble in Athens he had known only from casts and prints, now set down among the palms of the South Pacific.