Tahitian Mountains

Lush Tahitian mountains rise in rolling waves of green, blue, and rose, the tropical foliage and slopes simplified into flat, boldly colored shapes. Gauguin painted the island's landscape during his time in the South Seas, less interested in topographical truth than in decorative harmony and the sense of an unspoiled, primal paradise. Now in Minneapolis, Tahitian Mountains shows his late style at its most purely scenic - color freed toward the expressive and ornamental, the real island remade into the dreamlike, saturated Eden that his art forever sought and never quite found.