The Social Conquest of Earth - By Wilson, Edward O Page 0,1

soul, an adventurer, ever anxious to find what lay beyond the place he lived. In art, he was accordingly an experimentalist. In his wanderings he was drawn to the exoticism of non-Western cultures, and wanted to immerse himself in them in search of new modes of visual expression. He spent time in Panama and then Martinique. Returning home, he applied for a position in the French-ruled province of Tonkin, now northern Vietnam. When that failed, he turned at last to French Polynesia, the ultimate paradise.

On June 9, 1891, Gauguin arrived at Papeete and immersed himself in the indigenous culture. In time he became an advocate of native rights, and therefore a troublemaker in the eyes of the colonial authorities. Of vastly greater importance, he pioneered the new style called primitivism: flat, pastoral, often violently colorful, simple and direct, and authentic.

We cannot escape the conclusion, however, that Gauguin sought more than just this new style. He was also deeply interested in the human condition, in what it truly is and how to portray it. The venues of metropolitan France, especially Paris, were a domain of a thousand voices shouting for attention, where intellectual and artistic life was ruled by recognized authorities, each rooted in his own small acreage of expertise. No one, he felt, could make a new unity out of that cacophony.

Such might be done, however, in the vastly simpler yet still wholly functional world of Tahiti. There one might possibly cut down to the bedrock of the human condition. In this respect Gauguin was one with Henry David Thoreau, who earlier had retreated to his tiny cabin on the edge of Walden Pond “to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach . . . to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.”

That perception is best expressed by Gauguin on his twelve-foot-wide masterwork. Look closely at its details. It contains a row of figures arrayed in front of a faint mélange of Tahitian landscapes, mountain and sea. Most of the figures are female (this being the Tahitian Gauguin). Variously realistic and surreal, they represent the human life cycle. The artist intends for us to scan from right to left. A baby at the far right represents birth. An adult of ambiguous sex has been placed in the center, arms raised, a symbol of individual self-recognition. Nearby to the left a young couple picking and eating apples are the Adam-and-Eve archetype, in quest of knowledge. On the far left, representing death, an old woman is hunched in anguish and despair (thought to have been inspired by Albrecht Dürer’s 1514 engraving Melancholia).

A blue-tinted idol stares at us from the left background, arms lifted ritualistically, perhaps benign, or perhaps malignant. Gauguin himself described its meaning with telling poetic ambiguity.

The Idol is there not as a literary explanation, but as a statue, less statue perhaps than the animal figures; less animal too, becoming one in my dream, in front of my hut, with the whole of nature, dominating our primitive soul, the imaginary consolation of our sufferings and what they contain of the value and the uncomprehending before the mystery of our origins and our future. (Gaugin’s emphasis)

On the upper left corner of the canvas he wrote the famous title,

D’où Venons Nous / Que Sommes Nous / Où Allons Nous.

The painting is not an answer. It is a question.

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The Human Condition

“WHERE DO WE COME FROM?” “What are we?” “Where are we going?” Conceived in ultimate simplicity by Paul Gauguin on the canvas of his Tahitian masterpiece, these are in fact the central problems of religion and philosophy. Will we ever be able to solve them? Sometimes it seems not. Yet perhaps we can.

Humanity today is like a waking dreamer, caught between the fantasies of sleep and the chaos of the real world. The mind seeks but cannot find the precise place and hour. We have created a Star Wars civilization, with Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. We thrash about. We are terribly confused by the mere fact of our existence, and a danger to ourselves and to the rest of life.

Religion will never solve this great riddle. Since Paleolithic times each tribe—of which there have been countless thousands—invented its own creation myth. During this long dreamtime of our ancestors, supernatural beings spoke to shamans and prophets. They identified themselves to the mortals variously as