Parau Api. What's New?

The title is a scrap of everyday speech. In Tahiti in 1892 you greeted someone with a version of ‘what's new?’, and Gauguin, who had arrived the year before, gave the phrase to two women sitting on the ground. He had come looking for a place untouched by Europe and found instead a French colony, with its officials, its missions and its boredom. You can read some of that here. One woman wears a red wrap of the older island kind, the other a pale dress of the sort the missionaries had brought. They look so alike because he posed the same model twice. There are no shadows. He builds the heat out of flat colours set side by side, red against green, yellow against blue, and rings every shape with a dark line.