The Devil Speaks

The Devil Speaks is a powerful woodcut created by Paul Gauguin between 1893 and 1894. This period marks Gauguin’s deep engagement with printmaking, where he used the unforgiving nature of the woodcut medium to convey his distinctive Symbolist vision. The work was printed on delicate china paper, enhancing the visual contrast between the rough, carved lines of the block and the smooth surface, a testament to his technical experimentation during his second sojourn in the South Pacific.

The composition features stylized human figures rendered in Gauguin’s characteristic flattened forms and intense linearity. The imagery, often drawn from the artist’s synthesis of Tahitian culture, European spiritual anxieties, and esoteric themes, presents a dark narrative. Gauguin expertly utilized dense black ink and the visible grain of the woodblock to create dramatic textures, ensuring the prints maintain a raw, immediate quality suitable for his exploration of existential themes.

This important impression, along with other significant prints from the artist's output, resides in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Gauguin’s radical approach to the woodcut technique, moving away from traditional European approaches toward a more expressive, primitive aesthetic, profoundly influenced subsequent generations of artists, notably the German Expressionists. Although commercially produced, these original prints are now highly sought-after. Works produced during this era, while originally protected by copyright, are increasingly entering the public domain, making high-resolution images of Gauguin's revolutionary work accessible to scholars and admirers worldwide.