Paul Gauguin : Vers La Modernité

Excluded, like most members of the avant-garde, from the galleries of the Paris World's Fair in 1889, Paul Gauguin and his followers exhibited their work in a café on the site of the event. As his agent Theo Van Gogh had suggested. Gauguin presented an extraordinary portfolio of eleven zincographs on yellow paper, which already contained the main motifs of his work and established him as the leader of a radical new style, disregarding illustrative representation and directly addressing subjective experience.

This book explores the context of the official event by reconstructing the circumstances in which Gauguin and his friends set up shop at Mr Volpini's Café des Arts. Contributions review the development of lithography in late nineteenth-century Paris, and focus on the iconography of Gauguin and his colleagues by subjecting the prints to rigorous technical analysis.