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Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?

Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?
Artist	Paul Gauguin
Year	1897–1898
Medium	Oil on canvas
Movement	Post Impressionism
Dimensions	139 cm × 375 cm (55 in × 148 in)
Location	Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? is a painting by French artist Paul Gauguin. The painting was created in Tahiti, and is in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts, US. Viewed a masterpiece by Gauguin, the painting is considered "a philosophical work comparable to the themes of the Gospels".

The notable qualities of the painting include peculiar subjects, dull colors, and an overall perplex atmosphere. To an extent, these qualities reflect the personal conflicts Gauguin has endured while creating this artwork.

Background

Gauguin had been a student at the Petit Séminaire de La Chapelle-Saint-Mesmin, just outside Orléans, from the age of eleven to the age of sixteen. His subjects there included a class in Catholic liturgy; the teacher for this class was the Bishop of Orléans, Félix-Antoine-Philibert Dupanloup. Dupanloup had devised his own catechism to be lodged in the minds of the young schoolboys, and to lead them towards proper spiritual reflections on the nature of life. The three fundamental questions in this catechism were "where does humanity come from?" "where is it going to?", and "how does humanity proceed?". Although in later life Gauguin was vociferously anticlerical, these questions from Dupanloup's catechism had lodged in his mind, and "where?" became the key question that Gauguin asked in his art.

Looking for a society more simple and elemental than that of his native France, Gauguin left for Tahiti in 1891. In addition to several other paintings that express his highly individualistic mythology, he completed this painting in 1897. During the process of creating this painting, Gauguin encountered several unfortunate events that would place him in great desperation. He suffered physical challenges by being diagnosed of Eczema and Syphilis along with having conjunctivitis. He faced financial challenges by going into debt. He was also informed about the death of his daughter from Copenhagen. From one of many letters to his friend, Daniel de Monfreid, Gauguin disclosed his plan to suicide in December of 1897. Before he did, however, he wanted to paint a large canvas that would be known as the grand culmination of his thoughts.

Following the completion of Where do We Come From? Where Are We? Where Are We Goin?, Gauguin subsequently made an unsuccessful attempt to suicide with an overdose of arsenic.

Setting

Gauguin believes that the scene he created consists of a paradisal environment. The miscellaneous combination of “blues and greens” builds an absolute distinction between natural features: “the ocean behind a light screen of trees and, in the distance, a neighboring island against a deep blue sky”. This framework is set to be a flawless world that can be achieved if an individual abandons reality for the the state of pleasure.

Details and Analysis

Eve-like figure picking a fruit

Two sorrowful women walking

The three major groups in the painting reflects the overall themes presented in the title.

The three crouched women with a sleeping child on the right represent the beginning of life; the middle group symbolizes the daily existence of young adulthood; the final group, according to the artist, "an old woman approaching death appears reconciled and resigned to her thoughts"; at her feet, "a strange white bird...represents the futility of words" or "the uselessness of vain words". All together, the painting from right to left suggests the cycle of "birth-sin-death". Outside of this cycle of life, there is a blue figure. The blue idol in the background represents what Gauguin described as "the Beyond."

Gauguin particularly addresses the life cycle depicted in the painting through a feminine perspective. The girl surrounded by kittens demonstrates the purity of "girlhood". The figure in the center is placed in a "Garden of Eden motif"; she is picking fruits from a tree. Gauguin intended to represent this woman as sin, like the allegory of Eve. Maternity is seen through the figures that surround the baby. Along with the motherhood of a woman's life, Gauguin also displays the idea of "domestic submission" through the bracelet and collar worn by the mature woman on the left and the white goat, respectively. Finally, the state of seniority can be seen through the old woman on the left.

Near the blissful people are two sorrowful women near a tree who seems opposed to their surroundings. In front of these women is a crouched figure who lifts her arm towards them in a critical gesture. The three women represent a significant conundrum of humanity. The problem presented from this group is the dispute of enlightenment and the “superstitious, irrational, even barbaric traditions”.

One notable aspect of Where Do We Come From? Where Are We? Where Are We Going? is the odd inscriptions. Gauguin inscribed the original French title in the upper left corner: D'où Venons Nous / Que Sommes Nous / Où Allons Nous. The inscription the artist wrote on his canvas has no question mark, no dash, and all words are capitalized. In the upper right corner he signed and dated the painting: P. Gauguin / 1897.

Style

The painting is an accentuation of Gauguin's trailblazing post-impressionistic style; his art stressed the vivid use of colors and thick brushstrokes, tenets of the impressionists (though the Impressionists focused on quick brushstrokes), while it aimed to convey an emotional or expressionistic strength. It emerged in conjunction with other avant-garde movements of the twentieth century, including cubism and fauvism.

Reception and provenance

In 1898, Gauguin sent the painting to Georges-Daniel de Monfreid in Paris. Monfreid passed it to Ambroise Vollard along with eight other thematically related pictures shipped earlier. They went on view at the Galerie Vollard from November 17th to December 10th of 1898. The exhibition was a success, although D'où Venons Nous? received mixed reviews.

Two years later, Charles Morice tried to raise a public subscription to purchase the painting for the nation. To assist this scheme, Gauguin wrote a detailed description of the work concluding with the messianic remark that he spoke in parables: "Seeing they see not, hearing they hear not". The subscription nevertheless failed. Vollard eventually sold the painting for 2,500 francs (about $12,375 in year 2015 US dollars) in 1901 to Gabriel Frizeau, of which Vollard's commission was perhaps as much as 500 francs.

Subsequently, Frizeau sold the painting around 1913 to Galerie Barbazanges, which sold it before 1920 to the Norwegian ship owner and art collector Jørgen Breder Stang. He sold the painting via Alfred Gold in 1935, and it was bought by the Marie Harriman Gallery in New York City in 1936. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, acquired it from the Marie Harriman Gallery on 16 April 1936.

Critics and Gauguin

Critics of the time thought of Paul Gauguin as one of the major artists of the time. When it came to Where Do We Come From? Where Are We? Where Are We Going?, however, Gauguin's peers seemed hesitant about the artist's intentions.

Thadée Natanson of La Revue Blanche expressed how Gauguin's work took the viewers to an extreme extent in examining the bewildering nature of fate. Due to the complexity of the painting, Natanson explained how the interpretation of its meanings were a challenge to recognize at first glance; he believed that it is the artwork's role to display its meanings. Due to complicated compositions of the painting, Natanson recognized it as "obscure". Similarly, the critic Gustave Geffroy of Le Journal believed that Gauguin's painting consists of cunning devices.

The critic Andre Fontainas of the Mercure de France acknowledged a grudging respect for the work but thought the allegory impenetrable were it not for the inscription, and compared the painting to Inter artes et naturam (Between Art and Nature) of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes.

Although Gauguin appreciated the works of Puvis, he wanted to differentiate his works from “the great master of decorative painting”. He addressed to Fontainas that the objectives of Puvis’ works were predetermined and could be conveyed in words; he believed his works consist of a great "pictorial language of feelings". Gauguin believed that his paintings had abstract, inexplicable qualities that can’t be taken into a literary lens.

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes's Inter artes et naturam

References and sources

References

Sources

• Andersen, Wayne V. “Gauguin and a Peruvian Mummy.” Burlington Magazine 109, no. 769 (1967): 238–43.
• Boime, Albert. (2008) Revelation of Modernism: Responses to the Cultural Crisis in Fin-de-Siécle. University of Missouri Press, ISBN 9780826266255
• Boyle-Turner, Caroline. Current Issues in 19th-Century Art. Zwolle : Amsterdam: Waanders ; Van Gogh Museum, 2007.
• Dorra, Henri. The Symbolism of Paul Gauguin : Erotica, Exotica, and the Great Dilemmas of Humanity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.
• Gayford, Martin. (2006) The Yellow House: Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Nine Turbulent Weeks in Arles, London: Penguin Books, ISBN 0-670-91497-5.
• Mathews, Nancy Mowll (2001). Paul Gauguin, an Erotic Life. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, ISBN 0-300-09109-5
• Rousseau, Theodore. Gauguin: Paintings, Drawings, Prints, Sculpture. Art Institute of Chicago, 1959.
• Shackelford, George T. M., Frèches-Thory, Claire, Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Gauguin Tahiti. Boston, MA: MFA Pulications, 2004.
• Stuckey, Charles. "Gauguin Inside Art" in Eric M. Zafran. Ed., Gauguin's Nirvana: Painters at Le Pouldu 1889-90. New Haven: Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford in association with Yale University Press, 2001, ISBN 0300089546.
• Thomson, Belinda (1987). Gauguin. London: Thames and Hudson. ISBN 0-500-20220-6.

Further reading

• Rewald, John (1956; revised 1978). History of Post-Impressionism: From Van Gogh to Gauguin, London: Secker & Warburg.
• Rewald, John. (1946) History of Impressionism.

External links

Media related to Paul Gauguin at Wikimedia Commons

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