Paul Gauguin

Biography

Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) left a finance career to pursue avant‑garde painting, seeking alternatives to European modernity first in Brittany and then in Polynesia. His Tahitian works synthesize bold color, flat contour, and symbolic imagery, shaping the course of Post‑Impressionism and modernist primitivism [3][1].

Themes in Their Work

The divine & the sacredColonialism & empireMimesis vs. abstraction (truth vs. artifice)Mortality & transience (memento mori)Landscape & placeGender & sexuality

Featured Artworks

Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? by Paul Gauguin

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

Paul Gauguin (1897–1898)

A panoramic frieze staged in a Tahitian grove, Paul Gauguin’s Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? unfolds right-to-left as a cycle of life, from an infant at the far right to an aged woman at the far left. Amid saturated blues and ochres, a central figure reaches for fruit and a pale-blue idol stands motionless, creating a theatre of <strong>origin, desire, and destiny</strong> that never resolves into a single answer.