Journal of Art Historiography Number 12 June 2015 Paul Gauguin and the complexity of the primitivist gaze Ruud Welten The Three Tahitians, painted by the French painter Paul Gauguin in 1899, depicts two young women positioned on either side of a young man whose back is turned. Even if I did not know the title of the painting, I would have been able to tell that these half-naked people are natives from a non-Western country, sometime in the past. The entourage is paradisiac. The young woman on the left is holding a piece of fruit in her hand. Has the apple of sin been replaced by a mango? The man whose back I see is looking away from the woman on the right, while she seems to gaze into nothingness. There is something mysteriously tranquil about the painting. A promise of a simple, carefree life. The three people are doing nothing in particular and find themselves in a natural environment of some sort, perhaps the woods or the beach. The weather appears to be fair. In this painting Gauguin reveals the truth and beauty of primitive, Polynesian life. At least, this is a common interpretation of GauguinȂs work, often read or heard. In what follows, however, I will argue that such an interpretation of GauguinȂs painting is far too simplistic, and, consequently, false. We might even wonder whether ȁprimitivismȂ to Gauguin was not so much a colonialist style of making art, but rather a way of deconstructing it. I will elaborate on this question by drawing the problem of primitivism on a broader canvas of colonialist and anti-colonialist mentalities. Figure 1 Paul Gauguin, Three Tahitians, 1899.