Gauguin: Metamorphoses

New York: The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2014. Hardcover. VG (no dj). Orange cloth, illus. flyleaves, 248 pp., many color illus. Issued in conjunction with a 2014 exhibition focusing on Paul Gauguin's "rare and extraordinary prints and transfer drawings, created between 1889 and the year of his death, 1903. Painting was the constant in Gauguin's life as an artist, yet, as this exhibition dramatically demonstrates, his engagement with other mediums, including sculpture, drawing, and printmaking, ignited his creativity. He repeated and recombined key motifs from one image to another, allowing them to metamorphose over time and across mediums. Of the approximately 160 works of art in the exhibition, some three-quarters are works on paper and approximately one-quarter are paintings and sculptures -- an inversion of the usual ratio of mediums in a retrospective -- foregrounding elements of the artist's oeuvre that are typically sidelined and yet are arguably even more radical and inventive than his justly celebrated paintings." (foreword) With essays by Starr Figura, Elizabeth C. Childs, Hal Foster, and Erika Mosier, a chronology, a selected bibliography, and many examples of the artist's work.