Et l'or de leur corps

By 1901 Gauguin had given up even on Tahiti. He sold what he had and sailed further out, to the Marquesas Islands, about the most remote place he could reach, sick and in debt and with two years left to live. He painted this there. Two young Polynesian women lie stretched across the front of the canvas, their skin a deep gold against cool greens and reds. He set the warm bodies against those cooler surroundings and let broad flat areas of paint do the work, the way he had long argued European art should. He was not painting the islands as they actually were by 1901, changed by decades of European contact, but the untouched paradise he had gone there to find. The title comes from a line of his own writing, and it points straight at the gold of the skin against the green.