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At the end of the 19th century, while Claude Monet, Edgar Degas and other Impressionist luminaries were lapping up the artistic pleasures of Paris, their colleague Paul Gauguin was elsewhere. To be precise, he was at home in the town of Punaʻauia in Tahiti, French Polynesia, sick, chronically short of money, and working on paintings that would soon wrench western art into a new era.
Degas once described Gauguin as a “hungry wolf without a collar”, which seems apt for an enigmatic figure allergic to authority, one who made many friends and many more enemies.
Gauguin began painting in his early twenties, and it stands as testament both to how badly he managed money and to his lack of broad recognition that he was so often driven to try earning a living in other ways. He was, at one time or another, a seaman, a stockbroker, a journalist, a failed tarpaulin salesman, and, at one particularly low moment, paid a pittance to paste posters on Paris billboards.
Some of these moments are touched on in Gauguin’s most important written work Avant et après, a quasi-memoir written in the final two years of his life. The original 200-page manuscript, which was thought lost until it resurfaced in 2020, is a key source for Sue Prideaux’s scintillating new biography of the artist, which she bills as a “re-examination” of Gauguin’s life and “troubling reputation”. Wild Thing’s purpose is “not to condemn, not to excuse,” Prideaux writes, “but simply to shed new light on the man and the myth.”
Gauguin was born in Paris in 1848 and moved a year later to Peru, where he, his sister and mother, Aline, lived in splendour with Aline’s wealthy relatives. Though the family returned to France in 1855, this formative experience gave him, Prideaux says, “what he referred to as ‘the dream’, an enduring vision of a spiritual world pervading the material world: the place he would seek all his life”.
After completing his schooling, Gauguin joined the merchant marine and, later, got a break with a stock-trading firm in Paris, learning to paint and sculpt in his spare time and exhibiting with the Impressionists. He also married a “self-determined” Danish woman called Mette — a happy match, although it eventually foundered after Gauguin lost his job in the Paris Bourse crash of 1882. The couple and their five children moved to Copenhagen, where Mette’s family could support them, but, after failing to find work there, Gauguin moved back to Paris, in the hope of making a success of his art. It was the start of the dreadful financial insecurity that dogged Gauguin his entire life.
In 1891, the year after the suicide of his friend Vincent van Gogh, he left his family behind and travelled by steamer and schooner to Tahiti, an island that would become his home. About half of this beautifully illustrated book — which includes reproductions of more than 50 of his paintings — is spent unveiling the 12 years he spent there and on the Marquesas Islands, where he died in 1903.
It was in Tahiti that Gauguin found a new artistic language, one that would pave the way for Henri Matisse and others. His subjects — often locals and animals in natural settings — are drenched in colour and mythology. His figuring of indigenous themes into western art, as much as his depictions of the Holy Family as indigenous Polynesians, smashed the western canon and scandalised Parisian art circles.
Part of the “troubling” legacy Prideaux refers to is the broad assumption that Gauguin was a colonialist — a reading complicated by his excoriation of French colonialism and the fact that he spent his later years fighting so doggedly for Polynesians’ equal rights that the French authorities took him to court.
Another more scrutinised part is Gauguin’s relationships with several Polynesian girls — 13 or 14 years old — with whom he fathered children. Prideaux draws on new material to foreground the artist’s earlier “sexual abstinence” and loyalty to his wife, but it can feel as if she is overcompensating, and only makes his later exploits more jarring.
But presenting us with these contradictions is part of the book’s triumph. Prideaux casts little moral judgment on Gauguin, leaving the inconsistencies of his beliefs and actions a problem for the reader. Was it really the same Gauguin who advised one young female student to avoid the trappings of marriage and start thinking of herself as “androgyne, without sex”, who also praised his 14-year-old Tahitian bride as having “the gift of silence”? How does this mean we should judge him?
As a man, as an artist, Gauguin was more than one thing, and Prideaux — biographer of Edvard Munch, August Strindberg and Friedrich Nietzsche, other 19th-century iconoclasts — colourfully fleshes out his story with nuance and detail. The extent of his influence is hard to overstate: his blazing palette would come to shape Pierre Bonnard’s work; his Polynesian subjects would inspire Pablo Picasso to research African art, which in turn gave rise to Cubism.
He felt, as he wrote in Avant et après, just like everyone else, “a ship tossed about by every wind”, but the course he ultimately charted pointed the way for modern art.
Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux Faber £30, 416 pages
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