Paul Gauguin’s grave on the Marquesan island of Hiva Oa is a sad yet beautiful spot, and the life of the artist, whose work was pivotal in the development of western post-Impressionist painting, is by turns sad, fascinating and highly troubling.
After her excellent biography of Friedrich Nietzsche, I am Dynamite, Sue Prideaux’s take on Gauguin, Wild Thing is a more conflicting read. The rediscovery in 2020 of Gauguin’s missing writings, Avant et Après, and of a jar of his teeth, hidden for some reason in a well, spurred the work, which the author claims offers a major reassessment of the myths about the man. As these included the charge of spreading syphilis to underage girls in his Polynesian paradise, it would be dynamite itself if true.
Prideaux is a dynamic and engaging writer. Metaphors leap off the page, to the extent that the careful reader may start to be suspicious as to how much they are being led to conclusions. How much is conjecture and colour, and how much real biographical fact? Still, she tumbles us into a heady world in which casual racist exoticism abounds at world fairs, where Vincent van Gogh and Roderic O’Connor (not “a major talent”) are pals, Manet and Degas are volunteer gunners in the Franco-Prussian war, and August Strindberg pops by for the odd snifter of absinthe.
Initially a stockbroker, Gauguin also did time digging the Suez Canal, and as an artist was perennially broke. He was obsessed by money, arguing by letter with his wife Mette, who remained in Europe taking care of the couple’s children, over the proceeds of the sales of his paintings. He is one of those people who abandon their families and then speak frequently of how much they miss them, and yet Prideaux does not question this. Instead, she writes of his reaction on losing a lawsuit aimed at getting some paintings back from their purchaser: “He loved those pictures as he loved his children.” Quite.
15 brilliant short books to get you back in the habit of reading
Single writers looking for love should avoid other writers
Author Nicola Dinan: ‘Working as a lawyer taught me how much can turn on a single word’
Bonnard by Isabelle Cahn review: Shrewd and illuminating on an artist more radical than Picasso
The discovery of the artist’s teeth apparently “proves”, from a lack of traces of cadmium, mercury and arsenic, a classic if ineffective treatment, that Gauguin did not suffer from syphilis. And yet we read of him rubbing the open sores on his legs with arsenic, and of attempting suicide with the poison at one point. Gauguin, who died in 1903, was born in a different era, with different values, and it is up to us how we choose to judge him. But it is also up to a biographer to be clear in how they present their case. Read with fascination, and relish the evocations of time and place, but reader, read with care.
