Alastair Wright – MATTHEWS GALLERY BLOG

Paul Gauguin, The Day of God (Mahana No Atua), woodcut

There’s no record of what Paul Gauguin’s last lover Marie-Rose Vaeoho thought of him, but their courtship must have been rough. By the time Gauguin reached the Marquesan island of Hiva Oa in 1901, he had eczema, syphilis, malaria, tooth rot, a heart condition and a very bad liver. Local teen Marie-Rose gave birth to his daughter in September of 1902, and he died on May 8, 1903. Gauguin’s body was already rotting in the tropical heat during the burial.

This distasteful finale is an ill-fitting epilogue to Noa Noa, Gauguin’s fanciful (and mostly false) account of his early travels in Polynesia. The artist’s twilight years may have been ruled by destruction and decay, but he clung to themes of rebirth, transformation, divinity and utopia in his art and writing. The New York MoMA’s new exhibition Gauguin: Metamorphoses centers on woodblock prints and other works on paper that he produced between 1889 and the time of his death. At Matthews Gallery we have two Gauguin woodblock prints from the same period that he made to accompany his Noa Noa memoir.

From MoMA:

These remarkable works on paper reflect Gauguin’s experiments with a range of mediums, [including] radically “primitive” woodcuts that extend from the sculptural gouging of his carved wood reliefs […]. Gauguin’s creative process often involved repeating and recombining key motifs from one image to another, allowing them to evolve and metamorphose over time and across mediums.

For Gauguin, the printmaking process was a natural extension of this mercurial philosophy. It allowed him to mirror and tweak imagery between prints and even in different runs of the same print.

In New York, you can see several versions of Gauguin’s Noa Noa woodblock prints. In Santa Fe, come track the evolution of the series through two of our works. Here’s a peek—

The Day of God (Mahana No Atua), our woodblock print and the painting

Our woodblock print and its oil counterpart were created around the same time and are close mirror images of each other. Both show three women on a shore with a Polynesian sculpture (based on carved Buddhist reliefs from Java) rising above them. In the painting, our eyes are drawn to the bright colors and wild abstract forms of the water. In the print, the women and the statue stand out as bold graphic elements, highlighting the symmetry of the composition.

Gauguin’s decision to reverse the composition from one work to the other brings up some interesting interpretive questions. The three women in the foreground may represent birth, life and death. If their positions can be so easily flipped, perhaps life’s course isn’t so linear either. Viewed together, the works form a loop that reflect Buddhist beliefs concerning rebirth.

Five versions of Paul Gauguin’s L’Univers Est Cree, including ours (center)

We’ve written about our version of L’Univers Est Cree on the blog before, but Gauguin, his son Pola and artist Louis Roy made several print runs from the block. Some are crisply defined and others are murky with only a few details clearly in view. Some incorporate bright reds and yellows, while others are starkly monochrome.

When Gauguin presented his Noa Noa prints in a private studio show in Paris in 1894, he hung several versions of each print. The decision seems like the artist’s acknowledgment of his futile struggle to embrace a paradaisical version of his island experiences. As scholar Alaistar Wright puts it, the repeated, ever-changing images “allowed him to reflect on the impossibility of having any authentic experience in his dreamed-of Polynesian idyll.”

Visit us at Matthews Gallery to see Paul Gauguin’s incredible woodblock prints. To learn more, read our blog post about “L’Univers Est Cree” and listen to Lawrence’s accompanying podcast. For daily gallery news, connect with us on Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr.

Paul Gauguin at the Matthews Gallery — Paul Gauguin, l’Univers est Cree

Paul Gauguin’s memoir chronicling his first trip to Tahiti is called Noa Noa, which means “fragrant scent”. It’s a reference not to the sweet smell of flowering tropical flora, but the “mingled perfume, half animal, half vegetable” of the Tahitian women.

Paul Gauguin- L'Univers est Cree (detail)- Matthews Gallery — Fish-man

Gauguin embarked on his famous voyage in 1891, fleeing from financial ruin and harsh criticism of his art. He put 30 of his works up for sale to pay for the trip and set off in search of an untouched beauty far away from “everything that is artificial and conventional.”

Upon his return to France in 1893 the artist finished writing Noa Noa and illustrated it with ten woodblock prints, including l’Univers est Cree (The Creation of the Universe). The journal tells largely fictional stories of an idyllic island life, but its title hints at the true nature of Gauguin’s odyssey. In Tahiti, the wandering artist found a culture shattered by colonialism, and couldn’t shake an all-consuming sexual desire that would eventually kill him. There’s more than a hint of this darkness in the print that hangs on our wall.

Gauguin and his son produced multiple versions of l’Univers, a primordial beach scene featuring a bizarre cast of creatures: a male torso, a distorted female figure, a fish-man and a levitating cluster of monstrous faces. The Noa Noa series was the artist’s first try at woodblock printmaking, and he was determined to approach the medium in as primitive a manner as possible. He used needles and sandpaper to etch the block and applied it to the paper by hand.

The facture of l’Univers is so rough that authors Alastair Wright and Calvin Brown said that Princeton’s version “hovers at the edge of illegibility”, but the Matthews Gallery’s print was pulled with a more delicate touch. From the tumbling waves to the lines that mark out fierce winds, each feature of the strange landscape stands starkly from the black ink.

Even with Gauguin’s creation story spread so clearly before us, it’s difficult to guess at the meaning behind it. “It’s a surrealist work before surrealism,” Lawrence likes to say. Perhaps this subconscious sandbox, built from dreams and nightmares, sits on the line between the artist’s high hopes for life in Tahiti (rebirth, beaches, beautiful woman) and the reality that he faced when he got there (tumult, deformation, death).

The artist never would have let this tension slip into his fanciful writing or his sunny paintings of Tahiti, but something more ominous emerged when faced with the challenge of hacking his utopian scenes into wood. Gauguin’s paradise was as ephemeral as a fragrant scent.

To learn more, check out our other print from the Noa Noa series and read about it in this blog post. For daily gallery news, connect with us on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.