Gauguin, Paul - Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897)

The Last Testament of a Tropical Fever

Paul Gauguin didn't paint this massive mural to decorate a parlor. He painted it to say goodbye. It was 1897 in Tahiti and his romanticized colonial dream had turned into a nightmare of syphilis, unbearable humidity, and crushing poverty which were all too real. While Paris was obsessing over the rise of the motorcar and the concept of the New Woman, Gauguin was hiding in the islands, watching the French Empire strip the local land of its soul. He was beyond tired, he was weary. The air smelled of damp earth and rotting fruit. This wasn't a picturesque postcard from a savage paradise. It was a outcry from a man who had reached the edge of his own map who trembled at the edge of it all.

The work is a sacred scroll of human existence, meant to be read from right to left. It starts with a sleeping infant and ends with an old woman staring down the inevitable. Gauguin used rough sackcloth instead of fine canvas because he was broke and desperate. The colors are flat and unnatural, shifting away from the reality of light into the reality of the spirit. He finished the piece and immediately tried to end his life by swallowing arsenic. He failed at the suicide but succeeded in creating a monument to existential dread and spiritual fatigue. It is a snapshot of the tipping point before the old 19th century myths died and the 20th century exploded into being.

References

Gauguin, Paul. Noa Noa: The Tahitian Journal. Dover Publications, 1985.

Shackelford, George T. M. Gauguin: Tahiti. Museum of Fine Arts Boston, 2004.

Thomson, Belinda. Gauguin. Thames & Hudson, 1987.

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