Paul Gauguin and the Pont-Aven school begin…
1889 CE
Gauguin no longer uses line and color to replicate an actual scene, as he had as an Impressionist, but rather explores the capacity of those pictorial means to induce a particular feeling in the viewer.
He expresses his distaste for the corruption he sees in contemporary Western civilization in the carved and painted wood relief Be in Love and You Will Be Happy (1889; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts), in which a figure in the upper left, crouching to hide her body, is meant to represent Paris as, in his words, a "rotten Babylon."
As such works suggest, Gauguin has begun to long for a more removed environment in which to work.
After the Café Volpini exhibition of 1889, Synthetism, as evolved by Gauguin, Bernard, Anquetin, and others, spreads rapidly.
The total effect suggests cloisonné enamel (a technique in which metal strips differentiate the color areas of the design, thereby creating an outline effect), hence the name Cloisonnisme used also to describe this style.
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West Europe
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