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home > exhibitions > gauguin tahiti
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| Gauguin Tahiti
Sunday, February 29, 2004 - Sunday, June 20, 2004
| Printable View  |
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A little more than one hundred years ago, Paul Gauguin began Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? The artist called it his "testament," for he planned to take his own life when the painting was finished. He worked feverishly, painting "on sackcloth full of knots and wrinkles," but found the finished work more than acceptable, writing, "I believe that this canvas not only surpasses all my preceding ones, but that I shall never do any-thing better, or even like it." Gauguin survived the completion of this work for five more years and his "testament" became one of the most important paintings of the nineteenth century.
Gauguin’s great painting, in the MFA collection since 1936 and recently restored, lies at the heart of "Gauguin Tahiti," a major retrospective of the last half of the artist’s career. The works--created between 1891 when Gauguin left France to set up a "studio of the tropics" in far Tahiti, and his death in 1903 in the even more remote Marquesas Islands--are characterized by exotic beauty, mysterious symbolism, and the artist’s uniquely poetic fusion of color and design.
For the first time in more than a generation, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? appears with other paintings from Gauguin’s time in Tahiti, reuniting masterpieces from the MFA and the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, along with a group of eight related paintings that have not been seen together since 1898. The exhibition also features spectacular paintings, sculpture, ceramics, prints, and drawings by Gauguin from museums and private collections in Denmark, France, Germany, Great Britain,Japan, Russia, Switzerland, and the United States. Shown to great acclaim in Paris from October through January --Le Figaro called it, a voyage to the very heart of Gauguin’s genius--"Gauguin Tahiti" is on view in Boston from February 29 through June 20. |
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 | | Gauguin’s great painted "testament" of 1897-98, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? was inspired as much by the artist’s vision of Tahiti as by his intense personal suffering. Determined to end his life after its completion, Gauguin infused this self-proclaimed masterpiece with eternal themes of life and death, religion, and fate. | |
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| George Shackelford is Chair, Art of Europe. |
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| This exhibition was organized by the Réunion des Musées Nationaux, the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities |
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