Where Do We Come From...?

Paul Gauguin,  
Where Do We Come From, What Are We, Where Are We Going?‏, 
 oil on canvas, 1897

I'm adding this post because of some of the questions  I raised in the review last week. Too abruptly, perhaps. It was certainly not my intention to put you on the spot--or to make anyone feel badly. If I did so, please accept my apologies. Rather, questions of difference--and a sense of where we all come from--are an crucial part of Songs & Places. Hence what follows.

The French artist Paul Gauguin made this painting in Tahiti in 1897, giving it the title, D'où Venons Nous / Que Sommes Nous / Où Allons Nous. Lots of things have been said about Gauguin, about why he left France for the Pacific, about how he saw/envisioned life there--his reasons for painting his characters--Tahitians all--in the way he did. Gauguin left elaborate journals that speak to some of this--and there is a huge amount of Paul Gauguin "lore." Likewise, with today's often critical perspective, much has been made of Gauguin's "romanticism," his idealization of an imagined bucolic life in Tahiti (which he saw it as a kind of Eden) and the ways by which he took advantage of his position as a European (Tahiti was then a French colony). Also, ironically, how much of contemporary Tahitian life he simply ignored. All of these issues are certainly worth our attention--but there remains at the same time the painting itself--what it tells us, and what we make of it. D'où Venons Nous / Que Sommes Nous / Où Allons Nous came at a time of personal crisis for Gauguin. (One reads that he was close to suicide.) His "reaching across" cultures here carries that personal weight.

And given that so many of us at Berkeley come from such a wide range of cultures and backgrounds (all worthwhile, all interesting) it's doubly valuable to realize how works like Gauguin's--ones that that address these differences with such grace (meant in all senses)--can speak to us in an intensely palpable way. So, let me offer it as the beginning  of a conversation (and a continuation of what we touched on in our review last Thursday evening...)

Remember how I told you at the outset that in the run of Songs & Places, there would be more questions than answers...