Watched by the Spirit of the Dead (Manao Tupapau)

A French artist influenced by ukiyo-e, Buddhist art, and Romanesque sculpture. By means of clear-cut contours and flatly divided colors, Gauguin blended richly implicative images with ornamentation and is known as a representative artist of Symbolism and Synthetism in France at the end of the nineteenth century. In his later years, he left Europe for Tahiti and created works acutely questioning the significance of the human existence.

Based on the oil paintings he had produced in Tahiti, between 1893 and 1894, Gauguin concentrated on woodcuts. This print is one of a series of woodcuts entitled Noa Noa (1894), which was pulled posthumously as A Suite of Ten Woodcuts by his fourth son, Pola, in 1921. The subject “Watched by the Spirit of the Dead” is one that Gauguin was very interested in and he did two oil paintings of the same subject. According to Gauguin, the Tahitians believed that the spirit of the dead would come out of the dark emitting phosphorescence to fetch living people and Tahitian women never slept in the dark. There, they consider that life and death are connected in a single line like day and night. As the woman here lies with her body curled up, she is also referred to as “the fetal spirit of the dead.”