CLEVELAND -- The great Post-Impressionist artist Paul Gauguin was equally scandalous in his art and in his personal life.

Born in Paris in 1848, Gauguin led a privileged childhood in his mother's native Peru. After a stint in the merchant marines, he settled into a career as a successful Parisian stockbroker, but by 1883 had abandoned his position and, shortly after, his family.

In 1891, he traveled to Tahiti, where he created the exotic, sensually charged imagery for which he is most remembered, and also contracted syphilis. He died in 1903, impoverished and stranded on the South Pacific Marquesas Islands.

A visually sumptuous exhibition, "Paul Gauguin: Paris, 1889" at Cleveland Museum of Art, explores a significant moment in the artist's life through his own work and that of his contemporaries.

The year marked the return of the Exposition Universelle, an extravagant showcase of French political and technological power held in Paris every 11 years, and the concurrent debut of the Eiffel Tower. France flaunted its prowess by importing 300 indigents from its widespread colonies to parade before the Exposition's 28 million attendees. Painted panoramas offered visitors immersion within unfamiliar landscapes such as a trans-Atlantic sea voyage or oil fields in Pennsylvania.

Art was also important and the French showcased it best, to world acclaim, in surveys that celebrated the decade and also the centennial of the beginning of the French Revolution. Those exhibitions, however, reflected official taste and had little room for the avant-garde expression of Gauguin and his peers.

But an opportunity arose when gilt mirrors did not arrive for Monsieur Volpini's Cafe des Arts, located on the Exposition grounds. Gauguin and seven of his friends convinced the proprietor to allow them to fill the empty walls with their paintings, and the first Symbolist exhibition in Paris was born.

The Cleveland show features 15 paintings from the 1889 exhibition and reunites a set of prints that Gauguin created and hand-colored for it. Additional paintings, works on paper and a few ceramic and sculptural works by Gauguin flesh out the motifs that were evident early in the artist's production and that continued throughout his life.

The entry gallery sets the scene and includes 16 photographs of the construction of the Eiffel Tower, whose arch formed the entrance for visitors to the exposition.

The second room comprises an elegant if somber display of a half-dozen paintings that appeared in the official survey shows. The brushstrokes are invisible, the colors naturalistically accurate, each detail portrayed with verisimilitude.

Subjects are idealized, such as Jules Breton's bare-footed peasant or Henri Fantin-Latour's fleshy "Tannhauser" nymphs. Two full-length portraits include Manet's representation of a top-hatted Antonin Proust, former minister of Fine Arts and president of the survey organizing commission.

In the next gallery, the visitor tumbles into Gauguin's world as through Alice's rabbit hole.

Upon striped, pomegranate-colored walls that surround cafe tables, vividly colored paintings challenge period conventions of perspective, representation, subject and technique.

One goes from admiration of the adept, but staid, academic works to fascination with the emotive energy that coursed through Gauguin's mind and eventually fed his artworks.

Four large paintings from 1888, which fill a wall, illustrate the artist's rapidly developing aesthetic as well as his struggle to represent not what he saw but what he felt.

"Landscape From Pont-Aven, Brittany" is an impressionistic rendering of a rural scene that includes a young herder in the foreground adjusting his shoe, and the village in the background.

"Breton Girls Dancing, Pont-Aven" shifts the focus to three youthful figures in traditional dress whose skin coloration and proportions begin to show expressionistic liberties.

"Landscape From Arles," seething with unnatural color and the compositional dynamics derived from flattened planes, was painted during Gauguin's ill-fated but developmentally significant several-week stay with Vincent van Gogh.

Finally, imagination triumphs over observation in the masterful "Human Misery." A despondent woman with head resting upon her hands sits before a fiery red and gold landscape in which three women wearing the traditional dark clothing of the region are harvesting food or herbs. Her exposed red hair and light-colored clothing, which more resembles undergarments than the black cloaks of the other women, may indicate that she is being shunned for having loose morals.

The figure would recur in Gauguin's art, as in "Breton Eve," who leans remorsefully against a fruit tree upon which a snake twines in this handsome if spare watercolor and pastel.

One of the exhibition's revelations is a rare suite of 11 zincographs that Gauguin created at the suggestion of Theo van Gogh, Vincent's brother and gallerist who also supported Gauguin. The Cleveland and co-organizer Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, Netherlands -- to which the exhibition will next travel -- each own one of the few remaining pristine complete suites.

Printed on large-sized canary yellow paper, the sheets were offered for sale at the Cafe des Arts and became known as the Volpini Suite. Subject matter includes that inspired by residencies in Brittany, Martinique and Arles, and the portfolio served as an advertisement of Gauguin's interests and style.

The museum has thoughtfully created facsimiles of the prints, which visitors may handle for an intimate and tactile experience of the work.

Suite prints hand-colored by Gauguin are shown with his works that are similarly themed, such as "The Laundresses," from the suite, and a painting of the same title made a year earlier.

While a common Impressionist and Post-Impressionist subject, Gauguin's laundresses are imbued with symbolism. The bent figures working at the edge of the sea wear the headdress of Breton women in mourning, suggesting that Gauguin was inspired by a Celtic legend of mysterious women who come out at midnight to wash the clothes of the dying. As such, they may represent harbingers of death.

The only South Seas subjects represented are several woodcuts from Gauguin's "Noa Noa" series -- one of which is printed on the back of a Volpini Suite impression -- which serve to point to the work to come but don't overshadow his accomplishment heretofore. The overall result is an appreciation of Gauguin's perseverance, and torment, as he created a body of work that is pivotal to the development of contemporary expression.

Looking for more from the Post-Gazette? Join PG+, our members-only web site. You'll get exclusive sports content, opinion, financial information, discounts from retailers and restaurants, and more. Our introduction to PG+ gives you all the details.