Landscape in Tahiti (Mahana Maʼa)

Paul Gauguin

Oil on canvas

Art Institute of Chicago

Painted during Paul Gauguin’s first sojourn in Tahiti (1891–1893), Mahana Maʼa is a Post-Impressionist landscape rendered in oil on canvas that depicts the tropical terrain of the island with Gauguin’s characteristically bold, non-naturalistic color and flattened pictorial space. The Tahitian title, variously translated as “The Day of the Food,” “The Moment of Truth,” or “True Day,” reflects the artist’s deliberate use of indigenous language to frame his vision of Polynesian life and nature. Gauguin—a French Post-Impressionist born in Paris in 1848 who abandoned a career as a stockbroker to pursue painting—traveled to Tahiti seeking escape from European civilization and a more direct engagement with what he understood as a preindustrial world. The work belongs to a celebrated body of Tahitian landscapes and figure paintings from this period that would prove foundational to the development of Fauvism and Expressionism in the twentieth century.