La mémoire et l'imagination. Noa Noa. Epreuve unique du bois dessiné et gravé d'après Paul Gauguin par George-Daniel de Monfreid

La Mémoire et l'Imagination. Noa Noa. Unique proof of the woodcut drawn and engraved after Paul Gauguin by George-Daniel de Monfreid
Original proof, likely unique, of this intermediate state of a woodcut drawn and engraved by George-Daniel de Monfreid after a watercolor by Paul Gauguin. Print on fine cream laid paper, annotation by the artist in the left-hand margin.

Woodcut drawn and engraved after a watercolor from the Noa Noa manuscript, pasted on a page of text of the famous album.
The final woodcut will serve as the head of the first illustrated edition of Noa Noa, published by Crès in 1924, the first illustrated work after Paul Gauguin and a majestic tribute to one of the precursors of modern art.

Superb and significant engraving after a very specific watercolor from Paul Gauguin's manuscript, a real breakthrough in text, engraved by his closest friend and executor, the artist George-Daniel de Monfreid, heir to the album he would offer to the French State in 1927.

The initial watercolor was cut out in waves around the female figure and pasted on the last chapter to prevent it from being read and thus get the story back on track. Gauguin had also added winding lines starting from the watercolor on the text page, thus giving the impression of a cave breaking through the page, by the psychic power of the sitting woman whose head diffuses the undulating rays. Monfreid decided to place it at the head of the work accompanied by two birds taken from other works, to illustrate the power of the artist and his imagination.
A likely unique proof, part of 17 known test woodcuts from the early project to publish Noa Noa, all made on various fine papers and annotated by the artist.

Unique proof of a woodcut engraved after the mystical watercolor erasing the first ending of the story to allow the reader to graphically enter the painted album, repeated in the printed version as the initiatory opening of the engraved story.



It is from the original illustrated manuscript of Noa Noa, brought back from Tahiti by Segalen on the artist's death in 1903, that Monfreid began producing this fundamental work from as early as 1904. This is the second version of this “to read and look at” notebook. The first manuscript, written on the return of his first voyage and entrusted by Gauguin to Charles Morice in 1893, responded to a different project. Gauguin had composed only the text, interspersed with blank pages for Morice's poems. But after several years without news, Morice preferred to publish a version entirely rewritten by himself in 1901. Gauguin, therefore, copied his manuscript and illustrated it during his second stay in Polynesia, with sketches, watercolors and collages. This album, that the artist enriched and safely preserved until his death, is preserved today at the Musée d'Orsay.


It is, therefore, from this manuscript, the only one illustrated, that Monfreid composed the edition of Gauguin's Noa Noa. However, although Monfreid's publication was forward, it took more than twenty years to complete, in part due to a copyright dispute with Charles Morice who wanted to be co-author of the forthcoming edition and whose poems would eventually be preserved.


The result of several years of reflection and work, the 1924 edition is both faithful to the watercolors and woodcut engravings illustrating the precious manuscript, and to the whole of Gauguin's Tahitian work, who died in indifference. Monfreid thus engraves several drawings from the original notebook and enriches it with woodcuts made from other works of which he is the custodian. Some of these compositions combine several paintings, while scrupulously respecting the artist's line, transforming the work into a true journey through the painter's works. The very choice of using wood engraving is a tribute to this technique prized by Gauguin, who, in Pont-Aven, produced 10 woodcuts to illustrate his manuscript between his two Polynesian stays. The intermediate woodcuts, until then unknown, testify to the slow work of composition to restore the artistic richness of Gauguin's work by his most faithful artistic companion and first champion: “When I saw Gauguin for the first time, I was greatly disconcerted by the details of art that radiated from his works as well as from the conversations of this extraordinary man... You immediately felt that he was the Master” (in L'Hermitage, 1903).