Vintage 1958 Gauguin "Manao Tupapao" Art Print

Paul Gaugui's "Manao Tupapao," 1894. Color woodcut retouched with water color.

Manao Tupapao was done during the last, terrible years of Gauguin's life when, sick and bankrupt, he was achieving his finest work in self-imposed exile from the studios of Paris, in the South Seas. Gauguin wanted to combine the savage simplicity of primitive art with a set of highly civilized theories of esthetics, a paradoxical combination that gives his art its special quality and one that does not always come off. In this woodcut the "crude" technique and the "awkwardness" of the forms are calculated as part of a composition that observes fairly conventional ideas of linear relationships and does manage to bring about a successful fusion of Gauguin's two contradictory ideals.

Print from a 1958 Metropolitan Seminars in Art volume.

12.5" x 9.5" unframed