One of Gauguin’s most famous paintings from his first visit to Tahiti is Manao Tupapau or Spirit of the Dead Watching (1892). The painting depicts Gauguin’s young mistress Teha’amana lying nude, face down on a bed with a stark black figure in the background. Unlike many of his other strong and powerful portrayals of women, this one shows a woman who is clearly frightened and vulnerable. In Noa Noa Gauguin recounts finding Teha’amana lying in this position on a bed. His sentiments are exactly what he tried to capture in this painting. He explained, “[Teha’amana]’s terror was contagious… Never had I seen her so beautiful, so frighteningly beautiful� (Wallace 132). The combination of these two characteristics, fear and beauty, led Gauguin to create a striking message about European portraiture’s portrayal of the nude female. His portrayal was meant to show a reversal of the more common, objectifying conception of the female nude.
The composition of Manao Tupapau is a clear imitation of a painting with which Gauguin had a self-proclaimed obsession, Manet’s Olympia (1863). Gauguin copied Olympia many times and carried a photograph of it with him to Tahiti. This photograph must have been nearby as he painted Manao Tupapau because the body position of Teha’amana is almost exactly an inverted version of the position in which the infamous Olympia reclines on her bed. Here however, Teha’amana faces to the viewers’ right, is on her stomach (with approximately the same angle between her torso and legs), and the woman in the background is on the left side, all of which are exactly opposite of Manet’s version. Gauguin’s reference to Olympia makes it clear that he intended for his painting to evoke a similar sexually controversial response from his viewers. Manet was heavily criticized for creating such a sexually brazen painting that appeared to be glamorizing what was essentially high-class prostitution. Gauguin uses the strong sexual undertones of Olympia but applies them to a different situation, where the woman is not confidently presenting her naked body to the viewer but instead hiding it by lying face down and looking out with fearful eyes. Her presence does not imply the same kind of female power as does Olympia or many of Gauguin’s paintings of other Polynesian women. Here he shows fear through the lens of sexuality, a theme quite contrary to many of his a-sexual representations of powerful women.
While Manao Tupapau is unique in that it includes sexuality and fear in the representation of a Polynesian woman, it does share attributes with Gauguin’s androgynous depictions of women. Gauguin’s Skirt author Stephen Eisenman remarks that “the posture and anatomy of Teha’amana, which emphasizes her boyishness, is derived from various androgynous and hermaphroditic prototypes� (Eisenman 121). Teha’amana shares a rather muscular physique with many of the previously discussed androgynous women in Polynesia. Also, her positioning on the bed hides all of her feminine anatomy, a detail that further emphasizes her androgyny. With all this in mind the painting becomes less of statement about women and more of a commentary on the European conception of the nude, and why it is always female. Eisenman theorizes that Manao Tupapau was “intended as an assault upon the tradition of the European nude� (Eisenman 121). Gauguin depicts a nude that is neither clearly male nor female and in doing so destroys the European construct of objectification of nude women as sexual objects. Here he presents a nude figure, one that is clearly disturbed, and allows it to exist in an androgynous state. While Manet’s Olympia celebrates the nude female Gauguin’s Manao Tupapau criticizes it, and replaces it with what could be considered a genderless figure who’s fear censures the European viewer, asking them to rethink the role of the woman and her body.