ABSTRACT
Gauguin regularly describes the Tahitian body as "golden"—"Et l'or de leur corps" (And the gold of their bodies), he lyrically entitled one of his paintings. To understand the importance of this Tahitian body for Gauguin, this chapter reviews his earlier artistic versions of the woman's body, especially in his nudes, of which there are relatively few before his Tahitian stay, and which tend to be rather grim. His construction of "the natural", in Te Nave Nave Fenua, for instance, is a matter of the utmost artifice, aimed at disarming the traditional view of the nude and of the primitive, revising the space of the observation and the context of the looking. As in the letter to Strindberg, Gauguin's relation to the female body is presented within a problematics of looking, where the male attempt to penetrate an impassive exterior reaches an impasse that can be resolved only in physical penetration.
