Paul Gauguin abandoned a successful career as a stockbroker at 35 to pursue art full-time, eventually rejecting European civilization altogether and spending the last decade of his life in Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands. His bold, flat planes of color, decorative patterning, and exotic subject matter were a deliberate rejection of Impressionism's concern with light and atmosphere in favor of symbolic and emotional truth. He shared a famously turbulent two-month stay with Van Gogh in Arles in 1888 that ended with Van Gogh cutting off his own ear. In the South Pacific, isolated and ill, he produced his most ambitious work: the monumental Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?
