This catalog offers a retrospective of Gauguin's entire artistic career, beginning with his early impressionist works through to his final masterpieces painted on the Marquesas Islands, where Gauguin was inspired to create artworks that are among the most vivid in the history of painting. "Gauguin had clearly decided to violate social norms, destroy consecrated artistic standards and create a scandal wherever he went, and he was successful. He wanted to be a dissenter, a rebel, an outsider and a renegade, but through art he also wanted to rebuild the fantastic images of a Golden Age that had dominated his mind from his first travels around the world." (From the introductory essay by Eisenman.) This book features a magnificent sampling of the artist's paintings and an absorbing introduction by Stephen F. Eisenman, a noted scholar on artistic movements of the twentieth century.