Original Paul Gauguin Poster Grand Palais, 1978

This is an original exhibition poster created in 1978 for the Gauguin retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris — presented as part of the Salon d'Automne in November 1978, one of the great recurring events of the French cultural calendar and the exhibition that had launched the careers of the Fauves and the Cubists at the turn of the century. To mount a Gauguin retrospective within the Salon d'Automne was a deliberate act of historical continuity — a reminder that the same institution that had first scandalised Paris with Matisse and Picasso was now consecrating the artist whose colour and line had made both of them possible.

Paul Gauguin (1848–1903), born in Paris and raised partly in Lima, Peru, began his artistic career as a stockbroker before abandoning his family and his profession in the early 1880s to paint full-time — one of the great ruptures in the history of modern art. Shaped by his friendships with Pissarro and Van Gogh, and by a profound disenchantment with European civilisation, he undertook a series of voyages to Brittany, Martinique and finally Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands, where he died. It was in Polynesia that he found his definitive language: bold flat areas of pure colour, simplified outlines, an imagery drawn from indigenous mythology and daily life, a palette unlike anything the Western tradition had produced. His influence on the generation that followed — Matisse, the Fauves, the Expressionists, the Nabis — was foundational and irreversible.

The Grand Palais, that great iron-and-glass cathedral built for the 1900 Universal Exposition, was the natural home for this retrospective: the largest and most prestigious exhibition space in France, the venue where the story of modern art had been written and rewritten across the 20th century. A Gauguin poster from this show is a document of that history — and of the moment France formally recognised the full scope of what this most restless and uncompromising of painters had bequeathed to the world.

This example is in excellent condition — grade A — and is presented unframed, ready for the wall it deserves.

A landmark document — Gauguin at the Grand Palais, the Salon d'Automne, and the moment Paris looked back at the artist who had set colour free.