About this work
The image confronts the viewer with the raw, hallucinatory energy of Tahitian myth. The composition depicts a Tahitian ritual *upa upa* dance held in secret, in defiance of colonial authority. Figures emerge from and dissolve back into a field of deep blacks and mottled darks — the horizontal format spreading the scene wide, as if a frieze carved from ancient memory. Some impressions were printed in orange, green, and black , while later editions render the image entirely in stark black and gray, both versions carrying the same charged, nocturnal weight. The woodcut allowed Gauguin to create a dark image that would evoke the mysterious night world he associated with Tahiti, and by extension, with his own subconscious. The title's reference to a bad spirit — *varua ino* in Tahitian — hangs over everything: these are not figures in daylight, but presences at the threshold of the seen and unseen.
In 1893, Gauguin returned to Paris from time spent in Tahiti and began to conceive of a book that would describe his life outside Europe and provide context for the avant-garde works he created while away. This print is one of a series of ten intended to illustrate that book, which he titled *Noa Noa*.
When he returned from his first Tahitian voyage, the body of work he brought with him was considered odd enough to seriously damage his reputation as a leader of the Parisian avant-garde. To reestablish his position and make his new Symbolist paintings more accessible to a reluctant public, he set about writing *Noa Noa* — and in the process produced a series of dark and brooding woodcuts that continue to astound scholars more than a century later.
The woodcuts were composed of blocks of boxwood joined together and created using carpentry tools rather than traditional engraver's tools, a deliberate roughness that gave each print an almost archaeological texture. The Noa Noa woodcuts were seen for the first time by a coterie of Gauguin's friends at his Paris studio exhibition in December 1894. Two art critics in attendance praised the crudely-carved woodcuts as a revolution in printmaking and recognized them as a bridge between the seemingly disparate qualities of Gauguin's paintings and sculpture.
As wall art, *Mahna No Varua Ino* rewards low, directed light — the kind that throws shadows and lets the grain of the original woodblock read through the print's surface. It belongs in a room that can hold quiet and darkness without feeling empty: a study lined with books, a bedroom with deep-colored walls, a space where the occupant is drawn to art that resists easy resolution. Unlike painting, the woodcut did not demand complete, narrative compositions
