Marking the end of an eight-year quest and the expenditure of untold millions of dollars, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles has acquired a signature Tahitian painting by French artist Paul Gauguin.
“Arii Matamoe (The Royal End),” a richly colored but curiously morbid image, depicts the severed head of a Polynesian man on a white pillow, set on a small purple table in an elaborately decorated room.
The artist painted the 18-by- 30-inch work in oil on roughly textured cloth in 1892, during his first sojourn in Tahiti. The Getty, which purchased the painting from a private Swiss collection, plans to put it on view in early April.
“This is a very satisfying acquisition for us,” said Michael Brand, director of the museum, scrutinizing the work on an easel in the museum’s paintings conservation lab Tuesday. “It’s an answer to the question people always ask about what you would like to add to your collection. We had a clear need for a great painting by Gauguin to accompany our post-impressionist masterpieces by Van Gogh and Cezanne.”
Describing the addition as “a key moment” in the history of the museum’s collection, Brand said the Gauguin also exemplifies the artist’s fascination with Polynesian civilization and his connection to the French symbolists.
Brand said that waiting for the right Gauguin instead of grabbing a lesser example points up the virtue of “long-term curatorial planning and patience.”
Although the Getty did not disclose the price it paid, Gauguin paintings have brought as much as $39.2 million at auction.
Scott Schaefer, the Getty’s curator of paintings, said that the image is a metaphor for the death of Tahitian culture in the face of European colonization and that it may represent the savagery Gauguin expected, but did not find, in Tahiti. The image also recalls severed heads of John the Baptist, Orpheus and other individuals depicted by the French symbolists.
