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

• Theme: Origins, identity, mortality, the metaphysical question

• Visual: A large, frieze-like tableau of Tahitian figures across an Edenic jungle; women, children, and an old woman appear in symbolic postures; a mysterious blue idol sits at right; the mood is both golden and grave; the title’s three questions guide the viewing from right to left

Thinking Through Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)’s Philosophy on Art Essence

This painting is not a sermon. It is a shrine to the unanswered. Nietzsche, who declared God is dead, would see in Gauguin’s work a man attempting to paint new myth from within the silence that followed.

There are no Christian signs here. No cross. No heaven. Instead: a blue pagan idol, bare feet, brown skin, ripe fruit, and a jungle of dream-color. Gauguin leaves Europe—physically and symbolically—not to find truth, but to rebuild symbolic life with new aesthetic clay.

And yet—he does not lie. The paradise he paints is not without shadow. An old woman crouches in grief. A child lies on the ground. Figures look away, inward. This is not utopia. This is Becoming in all its phases, from birth to death, from innocence to consciousness to loss.

Nietzsche would say: This is tragic art after metaphysics. The world is no longer explained. But still—look at the colors!

The gold, the turquoise, the earth-tones: Gauguin does not mourn passively. He paints defiance. This is not retreat into nihilism. 

It is a stylistic confrontation with the void. The painting asks, not from the pulpit, but from the jungle, from the feminine, from the intuitive and sensual body.

Where do we come from? We come from matter, birth, desire.

What are we? We are forms in transition, bodies in flux, symbols that try to mean something before we vanish.

Where are we going? Toward death, yes—but also toward art.

The painting is not linear, though it invites linear reading. Nietzsche would admire that it refuses total closure. It gives the illusion of sequence, but leaves openings, gaps, the fundamental ungraspability of life.

The idol, blue and serene, is not an answer. It is an echo—the kind of god humanity now must invent not to command, but to symbolize its own asking. Nietzsche would call this the new mythopoetic instinct—the drive to create aesthetic meaning in the absence of theological truth.

Gauguin paints not to teach, but to sing without certainty. That, for Nietzsche, is the highest art: to affirm without knowing, to color the void, to style existence as a gesture of grace, even when you know it ends in silence.

“This painting does not offer salvation,” Nietzsche would say.
“But it offers style in the face of fate. And that is more.”

The figures do not look at us. They inhabit their space. Their stillness is not passive—it is ritual. A ritual of being human, naked, mortal, and still woven into a dream of light and body.

Nietzsche would see Gauguin not as a prophet, but as a tragic artist who paints the world as if meaning might still return—through color, through rhythm, through myth re-invented.

Where Do We Come From? does not answer its own title. But it dares to ask in gold and blue. And that is its greatness.