L' Aventure de Pont-Aven et Gauguin

Published to coincide with the celebrations for the centenary of the death of Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), the volume that accompanies the major traveling exhibition – which will be moving to Quimper and Naples after it closes in Paris – presents over a hundred and thirty paintings, watercolors, drawings and prints executed by Gauguin between 1886 and 1894 (the years covering the master’s five stays in Brittany) and by the artists of the Pont-Aven school, the group of young painters of Symbolist inclinations who, gathering around the figure of Paul Gauguin in the small Breton town, gave rise to one of the most vital currents in Postimpressionism, destined to have an influence on all the main movements in painting that followed (from the Nabis to abstraction).
United by the need to bring out a more intimate aspect of reality in a new form – something that Gauguin sought in unspoiled and primitive places like Brittany – these artists rejected painting from life and Impressionism as the pure representation of appearances in favor of a focus on memory and the imagination, on color and the simplification of form.
The volume brings together almost thirty works by Gauguin along with paintings by the artists belonging to the Pont-Aven school that were executed in the celebrated Breton town between the second half of the 1880s and the first decade of the twentieth century: among the most significant names, those of Émile Bernard, Paul Sérusier, Henry Moret, Henri Delavallée, Maxime Maufra, Maurice Denis, Meyer de Haan, Roderic O’Conor, Charles Laval, Georges Lacombe, Claude-Émile Schuffenecker, Wladyslaw Slewinski, Cuno Amiet and Armand Séguin.