Drawing upon a refined selection of over eighty masterpieces, the catalogue and the exhibition it accompanies explore the entire career of the restless French artist Gauguin, analysing the primitive tendency as ideology, as an artistic practice, and lastly as a heritage of vast importance for the development of painting through the entire 20th century.

Although Paul Gauguin is known mainly for his Polynesian adventures during the years of his maturity, his search for the primitive was actually a lifelong search intended to attain a sole objective: the renewal of figuration and of all its canons. Breton folklore, Provençal mysticism, Danish Bronze Age rites: Gauguin pursued the idea of the primitive in whatever form encountered, bringing together in his works the inspiration taken from real journeys and memories mixed with exotic literature, art, exhibitions and reproductions of non-European works.