Paul Gauguin - Nafea Faa Ipoipo? When Will You Marry? 1892
Nafea Faa Ipoipo? When Will You Marry? 1892
101x77cm oil on canvas
Sold for: USD 300 million
Auction house: Private sale
Sale date: February 2015
Seller: Rudolf Staechelin family
Buyer: State of Qatar
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
When Will You Marry? (Tahitian: Nafea faa ipoipo) is an oil painting from 1892 by the French Post-Impressionist artist Paul Gauguin. On loan to the Kunstmuseum in Basel, Switzerland for nearly a half-century, it was sold privately by the family of Rudolf Staechelin to Sheikha Al-Mayassa bint Hamad Al-Thani, in February 2015 for close to US $300 million (£197 million), the highest price ever paid for a work of art. The painting was on exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler, Riehen, until 28 June 2015.
Gauguin travelled to Tahiti for the first time in 1891. His hope was to find "an edenic paradise where he could create pure, 'primitive' art", rather than the primitivist faux works being turned out by painters in France. Upon arrival, he found that Tahiti was not as he imagined it: it had been colonised in the 18th century, and at least two-thirds of the indigenous people of the island had been killed by diseases brought by Europeans. "Primitive" culture had been wiped out. Despite this, he painted many pictures of native women: nude, dressed in traditional Tahitian clothes, and dressed in Western-style dresses, as is the rear figure in When Will You Marry?.