In 1891, Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) traveled to Tahiti in an effort to
live simply and to draw inspiration from what he saw as the island's
exotic native culture. Although the artist was disappointed by the
rapidly westernizing community he encountered, his works from this
period nonetheless celebrate the myth of an untainted Tahitian idyll, a
myth he continued to perpetuate upon his return to Paris. He created a
travel journal entitled Noa Noa (fragrant scent), a largely
fictionalized account that recalled his immersion into the spiritual
world of the South Seas. To illustrate his text, Gauguin turned for the
first time to the woodcut medium, creating a series of ten dark and
brooding prints that he intended to publish alongside his journal--a
publication that was never realized. The woodcuts crystallized important
themes from his work and are the focus of this major new study.
Gauguin's Paradise Remembered addresses both the artist's
representation of Tahiti in the woodcut medium and the impact these
works had on his artistic practice. Through its combined sense of
immediacy (in the apparent directness of the printing process) and
distance (through the mechanical repetition of motifs), the woodcut
offered Gauguin the ideal medium to depict a paradise whose real
attraction lay in its remaining always unattainable. With two insightful
essays, this book posits that Gauguin's Noa Noa prints allowed him to
convey his deeply Symbolist conception of his Tahitian experience while
continuing his experiments with reproductive processes and other
technical innovations that engaged him at the time.
