In the Waves (Dans les Vagues)

Painted in 1889 at Pont-Aven in Brittany, this dynamic image of a woman in ocean waves belongs to a pivotal moment in Gauguin's development. He was moving decisively toward Synthetism — the simplified, flat, boldly outlined style he developed with Émile Bernard — and this image pushes Symbolist and Synthetist ideas to an expressive extreme. The nude figure submerged in churning blue-green waves carries ambiguous meaning: ecstasy, drowning, submersion in nature. Now at the Cleveland Museum of Art, it is one of the most viscerally powerful works of the Pont-Aven period.

The figure is almost dissolved into the wave forms, the boundary between skin and water deliberately obscured with bold curving strokes in blue-green and white. Gauguin abandons conventional spatial recession: the waves fill the picture plane as a flat pattern of curved forms. The nude's flesh tones — warm pinks and ochres — provide the only conventional naturalism against the abstract wave design.