L'Univers est crée(The Creation of the Universe)

L'Univers est crée(The Creation of the Universe) is a profoundly spiritual and technically innovative woodcut conceived by the French Post-Impressionist master Paul Gauguin in 1894. This classification as a print highlights Gauguin’s crucial role in reviving and adapting graphic arts mediums to express modern spiritual anxieties and symbolic narratives.

While Gauguin is most celebrated for his paintings from the South Seas, his dedicated exploration of the woodcut technique, particularly upon his return from his first voyage to Tahiti, allowed him to achieve a direct, primitive aesthetic essential to his subject matter. The process of relief carving yielded stark, flattened forms and rich textures perfectly suited to depicting Polynesian mythologies and the creation story referenced in the title. Gauguin deliberately abandoned the detailed academic styles favored by many of his peers, preferring the coarse materiality inherent in the wood grain itself, which enhances the work’s thematic focus on primal origins and universal myths.

The raw, powerful lines and abstracted figures evident in this work reflect the artist’s mature visual language from the 1890s, a crucial period for the Symbolist movement. Gauguin sought to imbue the woodcut with an expressive force that contrasted sharply with contemporary European academic traditions, often utilizing dense black inks and deep contrasts to convey cosmic themes.

Although the design was executed in 1894, this edition of L'Univers est crée was printed 1921, extending the reach of Gauguin’s complex imagery to a wider audience decades later. The delay between conception and printing ensures precise documentation for the graphic output. This print, an important example of the intersection of French modernism and non-Western iconography, resides in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, attesting to its enduring significance as both a technical triumph and a cornerstone of Symbolist graphic arts.