Auti te pape (Women at the river)

Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) was a French post-Impressionist artist. Unappreciated until after his death, Gauguin is famed and admired for his experimental use of color and Synthetist style that were distinctly different from Impressionism. Towards the end of his life he spent ten years in French Polynesia, and most of his paintings from this time depict people or landscapes from that region.

His work was influential on the French avant-garde and many modern artists, such as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse/  Gauguin's art became popular after his death, partially from the efforts of art dealer Ambroise Vollard who organised exhibitions of his work late in his career and assisted in organizing two important posthumous exhibitions in Paris. Gauguin was an important figure in the Symbolist movement as a painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramist, and writer. His expression of the inherent meaning of the subjects in his paintings, under the influence of the cloisonnist style,. paved the way to Primitivism. He was also an influential proponent of wood engraving and woodcuts as art forms, particularly relevant in relation to Auti ti pape.

Ever seized by wanderlust, Paul Gauguin sought to abandon the European life he viewed as conventional and artificial in favor of one in tune with nature and free of the constraints of Western social mores. In search of a more vital and authentic way of life, he first visited Tahiti in 1891. Although the island was not the untouched Eden he had hoped for, he was still greatly inspired by the people, culture, and lifestyle there, and these new influences were reflected in his paintings, sculptures, and drawings. After he returned to Europe in 1893, he began working on Noa Noa (Tahitian for 'fragrant scent'), a book project based on his experience and illustrated with woodcuts that were meant to make his new art more understandable to his contemporaries. Although never realised in their intended form, both the text and the ten woodcuts for Noa Noa survive among Gauguin's 78 printed compositions in woodcut, etching and lithography.

The project was originally conceived as a narrative of Gauguin's personal and artistic perceptions of Tahiti but ultimately became something much more complex and mysterious, full of references to Tahitian creation myths and ancient Maori culture. The imagery and themes of the prints - love and fear, creation and death, day and night - are in keeping with much of Gauguin's Tahitian oeuvre.

This print shows a female nude seated on a riverbank; a second woman with raised arms prepares to plunge into the river in the background. Images of beautiful young women bathing or lounging beside bodies of water reappear throughout Gauguin's Tahitian oeuvre. While this image was not meant as a literal illustration of the text of Noa Noa, it resonates with a section of the first chapter which describes women bathing their legs in the Fatana River.

The Noa Noa woodcuts illustrate everything that drew Gauguin to printmaking. Although the woodcut had seen a modest revival in the nineteenth century, no example matched the audacity of Gauguin's approach to the medium, which allowed him to work on a natural, 'primitive' matrix, creating works that combined the sculptural gouging of his carved wood low reliefs with the evocative color of his paintings. It also provided seemingly endless opportunity for experimentation. Gauguin printed Noa Noa blocks with various inkings and color combinations, on different papers. In addition to the Noa Noa woodcuts printed by the artist, impressions were also pulled by the professional printer Louis Roy during the artist's lifetime; this print was produced posthumously in Copenhagen without using colour blocks, but on attractive creame wove oriental paper, by Gauguin's son, Pola, in an edition of 100 in 1921.

Sources:

The Met, 'Auti Te Pape',  https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/337833

Sarah Suzuki, in Deborah Wye, Artists and Prints: Masterworks from The Museum of Modern Art, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2004, p. 42)

Dr Mark Stocker   Curator, Historical International Art  August 2018