Art: Gauguin Prints

Print collectors prize the strange tropical prints of Paul Gauguin so highly that the general public gets only fugitive glimpses of them. Last week the recently renovated Brooklyn Museum contributed something new to understanding of the artist when it opened the first complete exhibition of Gauguin’s graphic art, in a handsome show that gave added proof that the great Frenchman was one of the most fertile innovators of his pathbreaking time.

In his graphic art as in his best painting, Gauguin accomplished most after he had broken with his family, settled in. the South Seas. Using only the most primitive materials—”any wood I can get hold of,” he wrote, “and no press”—he turned out woodcuts that sometimes seem more primitive than the work of natives, studies based on Maori religious psychology, in which the design is clenched around a terrified figure as tightly as a closed fist. He varied work of this character, sultry and mysterious, with woodcuts in which gentler island gods, and relaxed natives are integral to the repose in his designs.

Biggest contribution of the Brooklyn show, however, was its evidence of Gauguin’s ceaseless experimenting, tireless ingenuity. Visitors could see how the artist became dissatisfied with his woodcuts after making a few impressions, altered details that displeased him, strengthened effects that he liked. Curator of prints, Carl O. Schneiwind, who assembled the show and is revising the Guérin catalogue of Gauguin’s prints, believes that as Gauguin’s rich paintings resemble tapestry, his woodcuts resemble murals. To prove it he made a photographic enlargement of Gauguin’s biggest woodcut, dramatized his thesis that Gauguin was a natural muralist who could not find, either in stuffy Parisian houses or South Sea huts, walls to work upon.