Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?
Artist: Paul Gauguin
Year: 1897
Eugene Henri Paul Gauguin was a French painter with a post-Impressionist style influenced by Picasso, Matisse, and more. His work often contained symbolism like primitive art. He was born in 1848 and was ahead of his time. His fame didn't come until after his death, which occurred in 1903.
1954 Commentary by John Rewald:
IN DECEMBER, 1897, GAUGUIN COULD NO longer stand the life of intermittent sickness and increasing debts he was leading in Tahiti. He resolved to kill himself, but before doing so he decided to draw upon all his remaining strength to paint a last important composition. He himself has told in great detail the story of this work:
"Before I died I wished to paint a large canvas that I had in mind, and I worked day and night that whole month in an incredible fever. Of course it is not done like a Puvis de Chavannes: - studies after nature, then preparatory sketches, etc. It is all done from imagination, straight from the brush on a coarse sackcloth full of knots, and the appearance is terribly rough.
"They will say it is careless, unfinished. It is true that it is hard to judge one’s own work, but, in spite of that, I believe that this canvas not only surpasses all my preceding work, but that I shall never do anything better or even like it. Before death I put in all my energy, a passion so dolorous amid circumstances so terrible, and a vision so clear, without corrections, that the haste of the execution disappears and life surges up.
"It is a canvas roughly five by twelve feet. The two upper corners are chrome yellow, with an inscription on the left and my name on the right, like a fresco on a golden wall whose corners are spoiled with age... . I am looking at it all the time and (I’ll admit) I admire it. The more I look at it the more I realize its enormous mathematical faults, but I would not retouch them for anything. The painting must remain as it is—merely a sketch, if one wishes. But when it comes to this question I am perplexed: where does the execution of a painting begin, and where does it end? At the very moment when the most intense emotions are in fusion in the depths of one’s being, when they burst forth and when thought comes up like lava from a volcano, is there not something like the blossoming of the work suddenly created, even brutally if you wish, yet great and of superhuman appearance? The cold calculations of reason have not presided at this birth, for who knows when, in the depths of the artist’s soul, the work was begun, unconsciously perhaps?"
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