About this work
*Noa Noa (Fragrant, Fragrant)* is a woodcut printed in yellow, yellow-brown, red, and black — a vertical composition of lean, concentrated intensity. The title print of Gauguin's celebrated ten-woodcut suite, it anchors the series both literally and atmospherically: figures rendered in flat, sinuous silhouette emerge from a field of raw, gouged texture, the surrounding wood grain left visible and alive. In his woodcuts, Gauguin incised thin parallels rather than blocky outlines, like points of light or a shower of rain. The palette is warm and earthy — ochres and burnt tones pressing through deep blacks — evoking both tropical heat and the dreamlike opacity Gauguin associated with the Polynesian night. The ten *Noa Noa* prints are full of mysterious spiritualism, often set in dark tones which give the impression of fear-inducing nightmares. What strikes first is the rawness: this is a print that refuses refinement, its every mark insisting on the hand that made it.
After Gauguin returned to Europe in 1893, he began working on *Noa Noa* — Tahitian for "fragrance" — a book project based on his Tahitian experience and illustrated with woodcuts; although never realized in their intended form, both the text and the ten woodcuts survive among Gauguin's seventy-eight printed compositions.
Gauguin aspired to publish the manuscript to familiarize a Western audience with the culture, flora, and fauna of the island, and in an effort to promote his paintings from Tahiti, which were little understood and sold poorly on his return to Paris.
The *Noa Noa* woodcuts were seen for the first time by a coterie of Gauguin's friends and admirers at the artist's Paris studio exhibition in December 1894; two art critics who attended praised the crudely carved woodcuts as a revolution in the art of printmaking and recognized them as a bridge between the seemingly disparate qualities of Gauguin's paintings and sculpture.
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.
This print belongs on a wall that can hold its weight — not a busy room, but a calm one: a reading library, a study, or a bedroom in muted tones where the warmth of the ochres can settle and breathe. The woodcut allowed for the creation of a dark image that evokes the mysterious night world Gauguin associated with Tahiti, and, by extension, with his own subconscious. It speaks to the viewer who is drawn to art as an act of searching — someone who finds beauty not in finish but
