Artists

Paul Gauguin

Press release

The Circles of Post-Impressionists and Symbolists The Paul Gauguin exhibition is Hungary's first large-scale exhibition on the master and represents an outstanding international undertaking; we are indebted, first and foremost, to the nearly forty public and private collections around the world that have loaned their masterpieces to make this exhibition possible. The exhibition presents Gauguin's art not only chronologically, following the evolution of his style, but also through his intellectual and conceptual development. It retraces the search for creativity that led the art of late nineteenth-century France towards the foundations of modernity. Particular emphasis is placed on Gauguin's network of relationships: an analysis of his friendships and creative ties with artists (Camille Pissarro, Claude Monet, Paul Cezanne, Vincent van Gogh, Émile Bernard, Paul Sérusier, Jens Ferdinand Willumsen, József Rippl-Rónai), literary figures (Stéphane Mallarmé, August Strindberg), and art critics. Paul Gauguin: Tahitian Women (Femmes de Tahiti) 1891, Museé d'Orsay, Paris The exhibition guides visitors through the key locations of Gauguin's life and work: from Paris, the Île-de-France, Brittany and Arles in France, to Martinique in the Caribbean, and then to Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands. We follow the evolution of a pictorial language that broke away from both Naturalism and Impressionism; a style in which form, colour, musicality, myth, and symbol were fused into a unified whole. Gauguin's art sought to rediscover primeval harmony and the lost unity between humanity and nature; our exhibition brings this universal theme to life for the contemporary viewer. The exhibition is the organic continuation of the internationally acclaimed series of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist exhibitions, which began more than two decades ago and has included Monet et ses amis, Van Gogh in Budapest, Cézanne and the Past, Cezanne to Malevich, and Renoir – The Painter and His Models. These exhibitions consistently approached the art of the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from a twenty-first-century perspective, underpinned by rigorous scholarship yet designed to appeal to a broad audience. The Gauguin exhibition carries on this tradition. The exhibition is curated by Judit Geskó, academic adviser at the Museum of Fine Arts and vice-president of the French Société Paul Cezanne. Exhibition organised by the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest with gratitude for exceptional loans from the Musée d'Orsay.