Reviewed by Harriet
Before I started this very interesting and comprehensive book, I probably knew as much about Gauguin as most people. I’d seen countless reproductions of his powerful, imaginative paintings. I knew that he’d spent some time on the coast of Brittany, not a million miles from where I now live. I knew that’s he’d lived for a while in the South of France with an increasingly unstable Van Gogh. And I knew that he’d spent long periods in Tahiti where some of his most celebrated work was created. What more was there to know? Well, a great deal, as I discovered from Sue Prideaux’s meticulously researched biography.
‘The artist’s unfair reputation as a syphilis-spreading paedophile has overshadowed his work,’ says the reviewer of the Times, and indeed an exhibition of his paintings at the National Gallery in 2019 provoked an uproar on these grounds. It also proves to have been completely mistaken. More than twenty years ago, four of what were conclusively identified as Gauguin’s teeth were discovered in a buried jar near his last home in Polynesia, and when analysed shown no sign of any form of treatment for that venereal disease, and the doctors who treated him at the times concluded that he did not suffer from it. As Sue Prideaux says at the start of this book, “What other myths might we be holding on to?’ Prideaux was greatly helped to uncover the truth by the recent discovery of the artist’s long lost autobiography, Avant et Après, written during the last years of his life. Among other things, it reveals that far from being a thoughtless coloniser, as has often been thought, he fought tirelessly for the rights of the Polynesian islanders, fiercely attacking the policies of the governing French and the missionaries, to the detriment of his own secure residence there. As for the paedophilia, it is undoubtedly true that Gauguin had relationships with some very young Polynesian women, though the age of Tehamana, often cited as thirteen at the time of their relationship, has been proved to be actually fifteen. Still far too young by Western standards, of course, but thirteen was in fact the age of legal consent in Polynesia, and in the case of all three of his serious relationships the families consented and indeed encouraged them.
Though he referred to himself as a ‘wild thing’, the Gauguin who emerges from these pages was a serious thinker, and a believer in the right of women to have a fulfilling and independent life. These ideas were undoubtedly partly owing to his grandmother, the French-Peruvian writer and activist Flora Tristan, whose works he greatly admired. Having spent his early years in Peru, he was proud of his Peruvian heritage and his art was certainly influenced by the richness of the South American environment of his early years. Back in Paris, he proudly told his schoolfellows that he was a ‘savage’. There’s no evidence of any real interest in art until about 1882 when, at the age of 24, his lucrative job as a stock-broker fell apart after the financial crash. Then what had been a hobby quickly became an obsession and, with no academic training, he began experimenting seriously with painting. Failing to support his family, he sent his Danish wife and their children to Denmark, while he went to paint in Brittany. From this point on he was dedicated to painting but never enjoyed the success he felt he deserved He did have some admirers, among them Degas, who loyally bought a number of his paintings, and the art dealer Theo van Gogh, through whom he made the acquaintance of his brother Vincent, with whom he spent a rather terrifying period in Arles. But financial success completely eluded him, and his hope that his Polynesian paintings would finally sell and bring in the income he so much needed and wanted proved not to be fulfilled.
The Gauguin that Prideaux presents here is a fascinating and seemingly much misunderstood figure. He emerges as deeply philosophical and with many – though perhaps sometimes misguided – ideals, so it seems sad that the reception of his powerful, original art has been affected by often mistaken views of his reputation. The book has more than seventy full colour images of his paintings, nicely placed just when you feel the need to look at the one Prideaux is describing. They prove conclusively, to me at least, that he was undoubtedly a great artist. The Musée d’Orsay has a whole room dedicated to his paintings, which I shall visit next time I’m in Paris. So, even if you are not convinced of Prideaux’s defence of his Polynesian lifestyle, perhaps it is time to give him the benefit of the doubt as an artist way ahead of his time.
Harriet is one of the founders of Shiny and a co-editor.
Sue Prideaux, Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gaugin (Faber & Faber, 2024). 978-0571365937, 416pp., hardback.
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