6 September - 25 January 2026
Over 160 works and 23 woodcuts from international public and private collections retrace the French painter’s physical and spiritual journeys through the South Seas, primitivist symbols, and formal revolutions that made him one of the great innovators of modern painting.
Museo Storico della Fanteria, Piazza di S. Croce in Gerusalemme, 9
Through a path articulated among paintings, drawings, engravings, letters, and literary testimonies that recount the spiritual and adventurous dimension of one of the leading figures of post-Impressionist art, the exhibition “Paul Gauguin: The Diary of Noa Noa and Other Adventures” offers the public an opportunity to rediscover, in depth, the stylistic and intellectual evolution of the French artist’s artistic and human journey — from Brittany to Polynesia.
Curated with scholarly precision from professor Vincenzo Sanfo, the exhibition unfolds as an immersive journey into the symbolist and visionary dimension of the artist, following his traces across distant territories and through his exploration of spirituality, identity, and myth. It represents a rare opportunity to investigate the poetics of voluntary exile and primitivism — aspects that make Gauguin’s figure still essential today in understanding the tensions that shaped modern art.
In the heart of the second half of the nineteenth century, the European artistic panorama was marked by a profound crisis of language and identity. It was in this context that the figure of Paul Gauguin (1848, Paris, France – 1903, Atuona, Marquesas Islands) emerged with disruptive force, embodying what might be defined as the restlessness of modernity. His biographical trajectory — bourgeois by birth, a financial clerk, a self-taught painter, and later an academic heretic — mirrors the tensions of an era questioning the capacity of art to serve as a means for understanding reality.
For Gauguin, modernity was both a condition to escape and a problematic knot to traverse — an era of fragmentation in which the perspectival and luminous certainties of Impressionism appeared insufficient to grasp the deeper truths of existence.
From this stems an aesthetics of interiority, a growing desire to penetrate the visible in order to unveil its underlying meaning. His paintings do not describe; they evoke, suggest, interrogate. Art thus becomes a site of personal and spiritual revelation, opposing the dominant naturalism and opening itself to more archaic and universal visions. In this sense, Gauguin anticipates the sensibility of the twentieth century, replacing fidelity to nature with fidelity to myth, to the unconscious, and to collective memory.
Gauguin stands as one of the most emblematic figures of that generation of artists who, between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, chose to break away from bourgeois society and prevailing aesthetic conventions. Born in Paris in 1848, after a brief career in the merchant navy and in finance, he decided to devote himself entirely to painting. Following his early years in contact with Impressionism, Gauguin gradually sought a more autonomous and visionary language, rooted in archaic symbols, synthetic forms, and vivid colors.
His famous departure for Tahiti in 1891 was far more than an exotic voyage: it was a true existential choice, aimed at recovering — far from industrialized Europe — a more authentic connection with spirituality, nature, and art. “I want to live in harmony with my dream,” he wrote. And that dream took form in his celebrated Tahitian paintings, where female figures, tropical landscapes, and local myths merge into a powerful and unsettling aesthetic vision.
Gauguin’s contribution to European Primitivism was decisive. His work anticipates many of the aspirations that would later be embraced by movements such as Expressionism and Fauvism. His style, profoundly anti-naturalistic, is based on flat surfaces, arbitrary colors, sharp contours, and non-perspectival compositions. In this sense, Gauguin stands in deliberate opposition to academic painting — and even to Impressionism, of which he had once been a participant.
His fascination with so-called “other” cultures, however, was never merely decorative or folkloric. In Gauguin, exoticism becomes a critical category: a means of opposing the alienation of Western modernity with an alternative dimension, both imaginary and symbolic. His “return to origins” thus emerges as one of the earliest profound reflections on cultural otherness in modern art.
It was in Brittany, between 1886 and 1889, that Gauguin defined the traits of a new pictorial language founded on the autonomy of color and the subjective interpretation of landscape. Here he came into contact with Émile Bernard and the so-called “cloisonnisme” technique, characterized by flat color fields and bold outlines. The Breton experience culminated in masterpieces such as The Vision After the Sermon (1888), where the tension between reality and vision — the hallmark of his later production — is already evident.
Particular attention is given to Gauguin’s brief but intense stay in Arles in 1888, where he lived and worked with Vincent van Gogh. Twelve color lithographs are presented, including Gauguin’s famous Chair, a symbol of the complex and fascinating relationship between the two artists. This testimony to an intense and fruitful dialogue with Gauguin and other leading figures in the French art scene of the time is evident.
Their cohabitation, which lasted just a few weeks, ended traumatically, but profoundly affected both artists. The exhibition explores the results of this exchange, including through letters, sketches, and paintings that reveal the divergent approaches between the two artists: Van Gogh was more lyrical and impulsive, Gauguin more structured and theoretical.
The voyage to Polynesia, begun in 1891, was not for Gauguin a mere geographical displacement, but a foundational act — a radical rupture with his culture of origin and a quest for authenticity imbued with a sacred tension. He left for Tahiti animated by an almost prophetic vision, by the desire to rediscover a primordial humanity, free from the moral and cultural superstructures of the West.
Yet his “elsewhere” is not a defined geographic place: it is a poetic projection, an idea, an imaginative construct. In this sense, Gauguin’s Polynesia is at once lived and dreamed, experienced and narrated, a play of reflections that reaches its literary summit in his diary.
Written during his first Tahitian stay and published posthumously, Noa Noa is not an objective document but a mythopoetic narrative. The title itself, meaning “fragrant” in the Māori language ,evokes a sensory and spiritual immersion. In this text, the artist fuses chronicle, myth, confession, and lyricism. Language becomes a visionary instrument, capable of recreating not only the external world but above all the inner state of mind.
Gauguin recounts his transformation into a shaman and demiurge — one who, through art, reinterprets reality and restores meaning to it. The diary thus stands as the counterpoint to painting, its narrative double: while his canvases convey the icon, his writing articulates time, memory, and emotional vibration.
The exhibition offers the rare opportunity to view original excerpts from “Noa Noa”, revealing the central role that writing played in shaping Gauguin’s identity. These displayed pages are not merely textual testimonies but true aesthetic objects, where text and image intertwine in a synesthetic weave that foreshadows the twentieth-century artist’s book.
Divided into multiple sections, the exhibition guides visitors through the principal turns in Gauguin’s life and work, following a path that is at once chronological and thematic. An initial core explores his Impressionist phase and his stay in Brittany. This is followed by sections devoted to his sojourns in Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands, featuring emblematic paintings such as Arearea, Parau Api, and Te tamari no atua.
Among the masterpieces on view stands the oil painting Tahitiana (c. 1891), together with the precious watercolor Polynesian Landscape with Hut, from the prestigious collection of the critic Giovanni Testori and of Alain Toubas. Alongside these is a rare monotype drawing, Study of Arms, Hands, and Feet.
The exhibition also presents two sculptures born of collaboration with other artists: Vase aux dieux tahitiens, in terracotta, and Idole à la coquille, in bronze and mother-of-pearl shell — the latter previously shown in the major Gauguin retrospective at MoMA in New York. Completing the itinerary is a patinated bronze mask depicting the Tahitian woman “Tehura”, on loan from the Musée Despiau-Wlérick in France.
The path continues with the lithographs produced for Avant et Après, Gauguin’s final text — a kind of spiritual testament in which the artist reflects on life, on art, and on creative freedom. A section of the exhibition is dedicated to the artistic and human dialogue that Gauguin wove with his contemporaries. On display are forty works by artists who inspired him or collaborated directly with him, including leading figures of the Nabis of Pont-Aven in Brittany — Maurice Denis, Émile Bernard, and Paul Sérusier — bearing witness to a vibrant network of exchanges, influences, and creative affinities.
In particular, Gauguin’s relationship with Van Gogh and with the avant-garde Primitivism is illustrated through iconographic comparisons and archival documents. The itinerary concludes with the photographic exhibition “The Islands of Tahiti: The Primordial Soul”, produced by Tahiti Tourism, which accompanies visitors in the discovery of exotic lands and the unspoiled allure of Polynesia. Rounding out the display are photographs, books, documents, and facsimiles of the delicate watercolors for the volume Ancien Culte Mahorie, featuring the original cover designed by Gauguin and printed by Ferdinand Mourlot.
The largest section of the exhibition is dedicated to the artistic production created during Gauguin’s stays in Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands. A cornerstone of the display is the in-depth examination of primitivism, which in Gauguin takes on ambivalent connotations. His work anticipates many of the impulses later taken up by Expressionism and Fauvism. His style, markedly anti-naturalistic, rests on flat surfaces, arbitrary colors, well-defined contours, and non-perspectival compositions. In this sense, Gauguin positions himself in sharp contrast to academic painting and even to Impressionism, of which he had nonetheless been a participant in his early years.
Polynesian female nudes, scenes of everyday life, and divine figures that inhabit his canvases are at once anthropological documents and mythical projections. Works such as Te aa no areois and Manao tupapau testify to his interest in local legends and in the metaphysics of the everyday, in a pictorial language that assumes an almost liturgical register.
At the heart of the exhibition lies the “Noa Noa” diary, not only as a literary testimony but as art as confession. Gauguin’s idea of accompanying his canvases with a written text arose from a profound need: to create an integrated narrative in which painting, word, and myth might coexist within a coherent aesthetic universe. The artist thus conceives a form of expression that anticipates the multimedia poetics of the twentieth century: the diary is not a mere explanatory supplement, but an integral part of his oeuvre — indeed, its symbolic and spiritual extension.
In the text, the narrating “I” is no longer solely the European artist observing an “exotic” world, but a subject who becomes a participant in the indigenous culture, while remaining conscious of his own role as an image-maker. It is this tension between authenticity and artifice that renders the diary an aesthetic and philosophical document at once. The language adopts lyrical, at times ecstatic tones, alternating with descriptions of rituals, legends, and daily gestures. The visionary element permeates the prose, aligning it with the literary Symbolism of Mallarmé or with the poetic mysticism of Blake.
The exhibition presents several versions of the diary, including illustrated editions with the artist’s woodcuts and annotated manuscripts, which allow visitors to follow the creative process and its revisions. Some sheets are adorned with drawings and ornamental motifs, bearing witness to the author’s syncretic intent. From a philological perspective, these materials make it possible to investigate the intersection between image and word, between pictorial work and the poetics of living.
In light of all this, Noa Noa reveals itself as a kind of existential and stylistic manifesto, in which art becomes a total language and the artist the demiurge of a new inner reality. The diary does not merely recount a journey; it transfigures it into a rite of passage, an initiatory experience that leaves a profound trace not only on Gauguin’s work but on the history of modern art tout court.
Paul Gauguin is a pivotal figure for understanding the transformations that overtook European art at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The exhibition makes it possible to retrace ,through works and documents of great significance, the path of an artist who anticipated the languages of the avant-gardes while remaining rooted in a personal and poetic imaginary. His oeuvre stands at the crossroads of aesthetics, anthropology, and spirituality, making him one of the most influential and problematic authors of modernity.
Many of the works on display come from private collections and are rarely presented to the public. The exhibition therefore offers a precious opportunity to engage directly with works that seldom leave international collecting circuits. The presence of documents, letters, and archival materials also allows for a deeper understanding not only of the artist but of the man — in all his contradictions and aspirations.
The exhibition is conceived for a broad yet discerning audience: from art scholars to students of the history of religions, from those seeking cultural depth to those who simply wish to be inspired. Gauguin’s journey, as the title suggests, is also an inner voyage, an adventure of the soul that continues to question contemporary viewers about the meaning of art, of difference, and of personal quest.
The itinerary is enriched by explanatory panels, multimedia devices, interactive maps, and thematic guides that lead visitors through the diverse realms of Gauguin’s oeuvre. A didactic section dedicated to students and families further enables a better understanding of the historical and cultural transformations of the period in which Gauguin worked, contextualizing his travels within colonial dynamics and the European Symbolist currents.
Although starting from Impressionism, Gauguin rapidly moved away from it, turning toward a painting that privileges mental and symbolic construction over immediate perception. His language would profoundly influence Van Gogh, Munch, and later Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. The exhibition in Rome also restores the central role the artist played in the genesis of modern art, showing how his formal experiments anticipated many aspects of Expressionism and the Primitivism of the historical avant-gardes.
In recent decades, Gauguin’s figure has been the object of extensive critical reassessment. Alongside the recognition of his artistic contribution, reflection has emerged on the ethical and cultural implications of his work within colonized contexts. The exhibition addresses these issues without rhetoric, offering insights into the relationship between art and power, between individual creativity and historical responsibility. In this sense, the display invites a mature dialogue with the legacy of an artist who — though controversial — remains indispensable for understanding the metamorphoses of contemporary art.
The exhibition is produced by Navigare srl on an initiative of the Ministry of Defense – Difesa Servizi S.p.A., and sponsored by the Lazio Region and the City of Rome – Department of Culture. The scientific committee is composed of Gilles Chazal, honorary president of the Musée du Petit Palais in Paris, and Giovanni Iovane, art historian and former director of the Brera Academy.
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