When Paul Gauguin carved the relief \”Te Fare Amu\” in Tahiti sometime in the 1890s, he painted the genitals of a crouching nude woman in vivid red. When American collector Henry Pearlman smuggled it into the United States in 1954, he painted over that red in green. In 2026, the Brooklyn Museum is preparing to undo a century of artistic censorship.
The Hidden Red: How Obscenity Laws Buried Gauguin’s Original Vision
Every artwork tells two stories. The first is what the artist intended. The second is what we do to it after. In the case of Gauguin’s \”Te Fare Amu\” (\”the house of eating\”), the second story is a masterclass in suppression—and the Brooklyn Museum is now determined to rewrite it.
Gauguin carved this shallow relief panel on sequoia wood, then polychromed it with bold color. The female figure was rendered in green with red genitals—a deliberate artistic choice, one of the artist’s signature moves: sexuality rendered explicit, unashamed, visible. The work originally hung above the entrance to Gauguin’s hut in Tahiti, a private statement about desire and the body.
When Henry Pearlman purchased the work in Paris in 1954, he faced a problem that sounds absurd now: American customs would not allow it to enter the country because of its \”indecency.\” Rather than fight, Pearlman painted over the red genitals in green, concealing the artist’s original color palette beneath a layer of revisionist overpaint. He wrote that he believed the sculpture was \”quite sensual\” and would need to pass through customs, \”which could have refused admission on account of its indecency.\”
In other words: the U.S. government didn’t ban it. Fear of the U.S. government did.
Censorship as Collecting, Collecting as Censorship
The Te Fare Amu story is NALA’s story. It’s about who gets to be nude in museums, and who gets to decide. It’s about how cultural gatekeepers—customs officials, collectors, institutions—have historically silenced the artist’s voice by erasing the nude body itself.
Notably, the painting was shown in Paris in 1949 at the prestigious Gauguin centenary exhibition at the Orangerie without controversy. In Paris, among French collectors and curators, a nude Gauguin with red genitals was uncontroversial art. In America, it was contraband.
This isn’t unique. For decades, museums have made decisions about what nudity is \”acceptable\” to display, often sanitizing artworks in the name of decorum. They’ve cropped paintings, hidden sculptures in back rooms, refused to show work at all. The excuse is always the same: protecting the public, respecting tradition, managing shock.
What they’re really doing is deciding whose bodies matter, whose sexuality is art, and whose is scandal.
The Brooklyn Museum’s Reclamation Project
The Brooklyn Museum has promised to examine Te Fare Amu \”with conservation work\” to \”remove the overpaint and restore Gauguin’s original vision.\” This is a big deal—not because of Gauguin, who was a deeply problematic figure with a troubling attitude toward Polynesian women and culture. But because of what it says institutionally: that we can undo erasure, that we can choose to see what was hidden, that an artist’s intention matters more than the discomfort of gatekeepers.
The work will go on display at the Brooklyn Museum starting October 2026 as part of the Pearlman collection exhibition. Conservators are expected to examine the removal question \”in the light of the latest techniques\”—because in 2017, when the Art Institute of Chicago had the sculpture, their conservators found that previous removal attempts might have damaged the original red paint layer beneath.
This is what institutional commitment looks like: not just agreeing that censorship was wrong, but investing in the careful, risky work of undoing it.
What \”Te Fare Amu\” Means for Us
This isn’t ancient history. We live in an era where Instagram still suppresses nude art, where museums still negotiate what bodies are \”appropriate,\” where collectors and institutions quietly decide what gets seen and what gets hidden.
The Gauguin relief—carved by someone who lived in the 1890s, confiscated by 1950s customs, buried by 1954, and finally being excavated in 2026—is a timeline of shame. But it’s also a timeline of reckoning.
Every time a museum chooses to show nude work, every time a conservator carefully removes overpaint to restore an artist’s intention, every time a gallery hangs work that challenges sexual comfort—that’s a choice. That’s Nude Art Los Angeles’s choice, made six times a year in a small storefront or outdoor venue.
The difference is scale. NALA is operating in solidarity with centuries of artists who refused to erase the human body. The Brooklyn Museum is now, in 2026, finally doing the same.
For more about why this work matters—and to participate in continuing the conversation about nudity, art, and freedom—get involved with NALA.