Why Are You Angry? (No te aha oe riri)

Paul Gauguin

Oil on canvas

Art Institute of Chicago

No te aha oe riri (Why Are You Angry?) is a large-scale oil painting completed in 1896 during Gauguin's second extended stay in Tahiti, depicting women of varying ages going about daily life within a colorful, stylized outdoor environment. The composition centers on a brooding standing figure whose posture and expression resist simple interpretation, while other female figures converse or rest nearby, lending the scene a subtle but unresolved dramatic tension. Painted in Gauguin's signature Post-Impressionist manner — marked by bold, flat areas of color, rhythmic contour, and a deliberately dreamlike atmosphere — the work combines observed Tahitian subject matter with artistic invention rather than documentary realism. The provocative bilingual title, given in both French and Tahitian, extends this ambiguity to the viewer, leaving unanswered who is angry and why, a strategy characteristic of Gauguin's most significant Tahitian canvases.