I must be straight here and say that I teach art history among other things. I'm a studio artist and photographer but am also qualified to teach art history - that's not to say that people (students included) don't TOO often tell me things that somehow slipped through the cracks - sadly enough. I seem to have an extremely selective memory where anything to do with art is concerned.
Anyway, "Whence Do We Come? What Are We? Where Are We Going?" is my favorite Gauguin. There is a letter to Daniel de Monfried, Tahiti, February, 1898 in which he describes the circumstances under which it was conceived and executed. He was destitute and suffering numerous ills. He felt humiliated and shamed - having lived his life an incredible egomaniac and being reduced to this, among other things. He'd gone into the mountains and took arsenic - hoping to die and be devoured by ants, never to be found. Fortunately for me he vomited enough to recover and in this state he worked "day and night in an incredible fever" to accomplish, before dying, this philosophical work about which he wrote, "It is true that one is not a good judge of one's own work; however, I believe that this canvas not only surpasses all the preceding ones, but also that I will never do anything better or even similar to it. Before dying I put into it all of my energy, such a painful passion under terrible circumstances, and a vision so clear without corrections that the haste disappears and the life surges up". His judgement of this work, at least, was right on. It resides in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Market Data 
Markets 
AI
