Gauguin's Paradise Remembered

WARNING

You are viewing an older version of the Yalebooks website. Please visit out new website with more updated information and a better user experience: https://www.yalebooks.com

The Noa Noa Prints

Alastair Wright and Calvin Brown

View Inside Format: PB-Paper with Deluxe Flaps
Price: $35.00
YUP
Our shopping cart only supports Mozilla Firefox. Please ensure you're using that browser before attempting to purchase.

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.



Distributed for the Princeton University Art Museum


Exhibition Schedule:

Princeton University Art Museum(09/25/10-01/02/11)

Alastair Wright is University Lecturer in History of Art and a Tutorial Fellow at St. John’s College, University of Oxford.  Calvin Brown is Associate Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Princeton University Art Museum.

EXHIBITION SCHEDULE

Princeton University Art Museum(09/25/10-01/02/11)

ISBN: 9780300149296
Publication Date: October 26, 2010
Publishing Partner: Distributed for the Princeton University Art Museum
136 pages, 9 1/2 x 9 1/2
6 b/w + 87 color illus.
Outside In

Chinese x American x Contemporary Art

Jerome Silbergeld; With Cary Y. Liu and Dora C. Y.

...
View details
Pop Art

Contemporary Perspectives

Preface by John Wilmerding; Introduction by Hal Foster; Ess

...
View details
Rethinking Recarving

Ideals, Practices, and Problems of the "Wu Family Shrines" and Han China

Cary Y.

...
View details
More than One

Photographs in Sequence

Edited by Joel Smith; With essays by Peter Barberie, Kelly

...
View details
Italian Master Drawings from the Princeton University Art Museum

Laura M. Giles, Lia Markey, and Claire Van Cleave

View details