Noa Noa: Women at the River (Auti Te Pape)

Noa Noa: Women at the River (Auti Te Pape) by Paul Gauguin is a seminal woodcut created between 1893 and 1894. This piece belongs to the wider Noa Noa series, a portfolio of prints and text intended to document Gauguin’s first major journey to Tahiti and interpret the culture he found there. The choice of the woodcut medium was deliberate, allowing Gauguin to achieve a raw, highly stylized, and often intentionally crude aesthetic. The heavy, sculpted lines and dramatic contrast between the inked surface and the stark white of the paper reflect the artist’s rejection of European naturalism in favor of Symbolist abstraction and non-Western forms.

The subject matter, Tahitian women gathered by the water, transforms a simple scene of daily life into an enigmatic meditation on tropical existence. Gauguin’s work attempts to fuse the observed reality of the South Pacific with mythological and spiritual undertones. While deeply rooted in the artistic traditions of France, the prints of this era define Gauguin's mature Symbolist style, which relied on flattened perspective and expressive color (though minimized in the black-and-white woodcut) to convey emotional truth rather than visual accuracy.

These Noa Noa prints stand as key examples of Post-Impressionist graphic art, illustrating Gauguin's quest for primitivism and establishing him as a crucial figure in the revival of the woodcut medium in modern art. This important work, demonstrating the artist’s mastery in translating tropical light and form into expressive texture, is currently preserved within the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art.