Fragrance (Noa Noa), from Fragrance (Noa Noa), title block

Paul Gauguin

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

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, Julien Leclerq and Charles Morice, 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. This woodblock for the title print of the suite serves as an extraordinary source of information about Gauguin's working methods as it reveals the hand of the artist in every gauged mark, incised line, and jagged hollow. The block consists of nine sections of fruit wood (probably pear) joined together and sprung along horizontal joinings.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.

Metropolitan Museum of Art