In 1891, Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) traveled to Tahiti in an effort to live simply and to draw inspiration from what he saw as the island's exotic native culture. Although the artist was disappointed by the rapidly westernizing community he encountered, his works from this period nonetheless celebrate the myth of an untainted Tahitian idyll, a myth he continued to perpetuate upon his return to Paris. He created a travel journal entitled Noa Noa (fragrant scent), a largely fictionalized account that recalled his immersion into the spiritual world of the South Seas. To illustrate his text, Gauguin turned for the first time to the woodcut medium, creating a series of ten dark and brooding prints that he intended to publish alongside his journal-a publication that was never realized. The woodcuts crystallized important themes from his work and are the focus of this major new study. Gauguin's Paradise Remembered addresses both the artist's representation of Tahiti in the woodcut medium and the impact these works had on his artistic practice. Through its combined sense of immediacy (in the apparent directness of the printing process) and distance (through the mechanical repetition of motifs), the woodcut offered Gauguin the ideal medium to depict a paradise whose real attraction lay in its remaining always unattainable. With two insightful essays, this book posits that Gauguin's Noa Noa prints allowed him to convey his deeply Symbolist conception of his Tahitian experience while continuing his experiments with reproductive processes and other technical innovations that engaged him at the time. Distributed for the Princeton University Art Museum Exhibition Schedule: Princeton University Art Museum(09/25/10-01/02/11)

Ink-Stained Hands fulfils a considerable gap in Irish visual arts publications as the first book to present the activities of printmakers in Ireland from the end of the nineteenth century to the present. The central narrative of this profusely illustrated and documented book is the foundation of Graphic Studio Dublin in 1960, an event which revolutionized the graphic arts in Ireland and made the European tradition of printmaking available to Irish artists.

'The underlying message of the series is, of course, that Death comes for us all, and if it interrupts the recreations of the wealthy rather more insolently than those of the poor, then let that be a lesson to us' Nick Lezard, Guardian A new departure in Penguin Classics: a book containing one of the greatest of all Renaissance woodcut sequences - Holbein's bravura danse macabre One of Holbein's first great triumphs, The Dance of Death is an incomparable sequence of tiny woodcuts showing the folly of human greed and pride, with each image packed with drama, wit and horror as a skeleton mocks and terrifies everyone from the emperor to a ploughman. Taking full advantage of the new literary culture of the early 16th century, The Dance of Death took an old medieval theme and made it new. This edition of The Dance of Death reproduces a complete set from the British Museum, with many details highlighted and examples of other works in this grisly field. Ulinka Rublack introduces the woodcuts with a remarkable essay on the late medieval danse macabre and the world Holbein lived in.