WILD THING: A Life of Paul Gauguin, by Sue Prideaux
For much of his life, Paul Gauguin railed against the deadening effects of bourgeois domesticity. But as Sue Prideaux writes in “Wild Thing,” her terrific new biography of the artist, for about a decade early in his career the self-proclaimed “savage from Peru” enjoyed a stint as a happily married stockbroker in Paris.
His wife, Mette, was an independent-minded woman from Denmark. Gauguin spent his free time making art, drawing obsessively and learning how to paint and sculpt. He could afford to be “carelessly rich, gleefully opulent,” Prideaux writes, noting that his possessions included 12 paintings by Cézanne and 14 pairs of pants. “Art was his mistress. Mette was his wife. He was content.”
A stock market crash in 1882 upended all that. Gauguin lost his job and had to scramble to find a way to support his family, which soon included five children. They all moved to Denmark, where he sold tarpaulins. He found life there to be stuffy to the point of stultifying. He realized he had to leave. “I only want to paint,” he wrote to a friend. “Everybody hates me because I paint but it is the only thing I can do.”
And so flourished the legend of Paul Gauguin, the single-minded artist who left his family to seek authenticity amid the Druidic ruins of Brittany and, eventually, the tropical islands of French Polynesia. Prideaux, the author of books about Friedrich Nietzsche, Edvard Munch and August Strindberg, is a specialist in the lives of difficult men. When it comes to Gauguin, she is everything you might want in a biographer: diligent, judicious, compassionate without being indulgent. On the first page of her preface, she debunks one of the most stubborn tales clinging to the artist. Tests on Gauguin’s teeth, discovered in a well outside his hut in 2000, showed no traces of the heavy metals that were standard treatments for syphilis in his time.
“If the story of Gauguin as the bad boy who spread syphilis around the South Seas was not true,” Prideaux writes, “what other myths might we be holding on to?”
It’s certainly a tantalizing opener, but to reduce “Wild Thing” to myth-busting revisionism would be to fail to do justice to such a rigorous and vibrant book. Prideaux combines archival research, access to newly found source material and her own considerable talent for conveying works of art with arresting immediacy. She vividly describes a painting of Gauguin’s sleeping son whose haphazardly patterned wallpaper suggests a “whirling landscape of subconscious horror.” The enigmatic asymmetry of his ceramics is “powerful, puzzling, primeval, naïve, rustic, unlinked, like something glimpsed out of the corner of an eye.”
Prideaux, is also a nimble and witty storyteller as she guides us through the life. Gauguin was born in Paris in 1848, to anti-Bonapartist parents. His mother’s mother was the radical writer Flora Tristan, who had roots in Peru, and in 1849 Gauguin’s family fled Paris for Lima, his father dying from a heart attack en route. Paul spent the next six years running free with extended family, a “Rousseauian childhood” bolstered by creature comforts made possible by the enslaved people his great-great-uncle owned. He later recalled his early life in Peru in dreamy, almost hallucinatory, terms.
“He would always scorn people who elevated the realm of sight above the mysterious realm of thought and memory,” Prideaux writes. Presented with the opportunity to visit Lima again, while working as a sailor in his 20s, he decided against it, preferring instead what Prideaux mordantly calls “the Peru-of-the-mind, untouched by too much reality.” This might sound as if she’s slyly insulting him, but she’s not. Gauguin loved symbolic forms for their purity. A preoccupation with reality, with all of its pretenses and social expectations, was what allowed lying and hypocrisy to sneak in.
Given how eventful Gauguin’s life was, it’s remarkable how much Prideaux packs into this briskly readable volume, which clocks in at barely 400 pages. She elegantly recounts his artistic struggles and his persistent money worries. She offers lucid re-creations of key moments, like the time Vincent van Gogh, his friend and roommate in the south of France, ran at him with a razor. (The next morning, Gauguin learned that van Gogh had cut off his own ear and handed it to a brothel worker.)
But it’s Gauguin’s experiences in French Polynesia that have understandably become the most notorious. (The last major biography of Gauguin, published in 1995, called him a “syphilitic pedophile.”) By the time he died, at 54, on the tiny island of Hiva Oa in 1903, he had gotten two Indigenous girls — each about 14 years old — pregnant. Prideaux does not deny this fact, reminding us only that in France and the colonies, the age of consent at the time was 13.
“Wild Thing” is not a whitewash of Gauguin’s legacy; instead, Prideaux fills it in with more detail. As a Frenchman in a French colony, he excoriated himself for his moral hypocrisy and became a pamphleteer, taking a job writing for the opposition party’s newspaper. He also helped locals with their petitions against the colonial authorities. In a letter to the inspector of the colonies, he noted the “singular irony” of “the hypocritical proclamation of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” when it came to “men who are no more than tax fodder in the hands of a despotic gendarme.”
Toward the end of his life, Gauguin — who never fully healed from a nasty leg injury sustained in Brittany when he was almost kicked to death in a melee by a clog-wearing mob — hobbled around his island paradise, subsisting mainly on a calamitous diet of canned food. After his death, the administrator in charge of selling the contents of Gauguin’s home did not believe it would be possible to pay back creditors in full: “The liabilities will considerably exceed the assets, as the few pictures by the late painter, who belonged to the decadent school, have little prospect of finding purchasers.”
WILD THING: A Life of Paul Gauguin | By Sue Prideaux | Norton | 401 pp. | $39.99
Jennifer Szalai is the nonfiction book critic for The Times.
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