1950s After Paul Gauguin "The Moon and the Earth", Boho Chic First Edition Print

Description

A Boho Chic Style vintage First Edition full-color print of Post-Impressionist painting "The Moon and The Earth" (Hina Te Fatou, … more A Boho Chic Style vintage First Edition full-color print of Post-Impressionist painting "The Moon and The Earth" (Hina Te Fatou, 1893) by Paul Gauguin. Comes from a First Limited Edition art folio published in the 1950s. Printed on one side. Hand tipped-in on a board of heavy paper. Information regarding the original artwork is printed under the plate. Detailed. Rich deep colors. Excellent condition - never framed.

Overall 10.90"W x 14.75"H
Image 5.45"W x 10.20"H

Toward the end of his life Gauguin endeavored, in a letter to a Parisian art critic, to explain the origin of paintings such as this one - painting based not so much on scenes observed as on a peculiar mixture of things seen and imagined.

"Are not", Gauguin asked, "there repetitions of tones, these monotonous color harmonies (in the musical sense) analogous to oriental chants sung in a shrill voice to the accompaniment of pulsating notes which intensify them by contrast? Beethoven uses them frequently (as I understand it) in the Sonata Pathetique, for example... Color, which is vibration just as music is, is able to attain what is most universal, yet at the same time most elusive in nature: its inner force."

"Here near my cabin, in complete silence, amid the intoxicating perfumes of nature, I dream of violent harmonies. A delight enhanced by I know not what sacred horror I divine in the infinite. An aroma of long-vanished joy that I breathe in the present. Animal figures rigid as statues, with something indescribably solemn and religious in the rhythm of their pose, in their strange immobility. In eyes that dream, the troubled surface of an unfathomable enigma."

"Night is here. All is at rest/ My eyes close in order to see without actually understanding the dream that flees before me in infinite space; and I experience the languorous sensation produced by the mournful procession of my hopes."

And Gauguin went on to quote what Mallarme had once uttered while standing before one of his Tahitian paintings: "It's amazing that one can put so much mystery in so much brilliance." less