Paul Gauguin: Where Do we Come From? What Are We? Where Are we Going?

$9.95 at Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

The life of Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) is one of the richest and most mythic in the history of Western art. Abandoning a career in banking, a family and his homeland, in the last decade of the nineteenth century he sailed from France to the South Seas to seek a life “in ecstasy, in peace and for art.” During his years in Tahiti, Gauguin brought forth a wealth of astonishing paintings, culminating in this monumental meditation on what he called the “ever-present riddle” of human existence posed in the work’s…