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

Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? Paul Gauguin. 1897–1898

C.E. Oil on canvas.

• A huge, brilliantly colored but enigmatic work. 
• It contains numerous human, animal, and symbolic figures arranged across an island landscape; the sea and Tahiti’s volcanic mountains are visible in the background. 
• Represents the artist’s painted manifesto created while he was living on the island of Tahiti. 
• The French artist  transitioned from being a “Sunday painter” (someone who paints for his or her own enjoyment) to becoming a professional after his career as a stockbroker failed. 
• Completed quickly, within a month; claimed to go to the mountains to commit suicide. 
• Gauguin was master of self-promotion and highly conscious of his image as a vanguard artist. Painting’s themes of life, death, poetry, and symbolic meaning.
• Gauguin suggests that the figures have mysterious symbolic meanings and that they might answer the questions posed by the work’s title. 
• The painting is to be read from right to left: from the sleeping infant—where we come from—to the standing figure in the middle—what we are—and ending at the left with the crouching old woman—where we are going. 
• These stylistic features, along with Gauguin’s enigmatic subject contribute to the painting’s “philosophical” quality. The painting is a deliberate mixture of universal meaning—the questions asked in the title are fundamental ones that address the very root of human existence.