Gauguin Woodcuts

Paul Gauguin's woodcuts occupy a singular position in the history of printmaking. His original woodcuts, which he carved and most often printed himself, constitute a veritable revolution in the history of printmaking, foreshadowing the Fauvist predilection for this means of expression, with no real prior equivalents.  Where his paintings are saturated with colour and myth, the woodcuts strip things back to gesture, grain and force — the hand of the artist legible in every gouged line. In the first series of ten woodcuts — known as the Noa Noa Suite — Gauguin compressed much of his mythological construction of the Tahitian past, images drawn from his first voyage to Oceania in 1891–93. At the same time he found a medium which could unite the optical and abstract qualities of his paintings while straddling the aesthetics of painting and sculpture. Penn Museum Rather than incising his blocks with the intent of making a detailed illustration, Gauguin initially chiselled his blocks in a manner similar to wood sculpture, then used finer tools to create detail and tonality within his bold contours.  that carries the marks of its own making — rough, immediate, and strangely alive. When Degas and a coterie of critics first encountered the Noa Noa woodcuts at Gauguin's Paris studio in December 1894, they recognised them as a bridge between the seemingly disparate qualities of his paintings and sculpture.The themes that run through this body of work — creation and death, the sacred and the erotic, day and night — place the woodcuts at the heart of Gauguin's symbolic project, rather than at its margins. Gauguin Woodcuts presents these works as the radical objects they are: not preparatory studies or reproductions, but primary acts of image-making in their own right.