Wild Thing - a life of Gauguin by Sue Prideaux

 ‘Wild Thing - a life of Paul Gauguin'  by Sue Prideaux, 2024

 

 

Another book on Gauguin, this time covering his whole life and evidently using extensive new research.
It’s also vividly written - a page turner of art history- and has a lot of illustrations.
Sue Prideaux is good at evoking the era and context in which Gauguin lived - whether the decadence of modernised Paris or the colonial impositions on Tahitian culture.

She brings her own insights, such as how Gauguin admired Manet’s ‘Olympe’ and shocked the art world in Paris with his South Seas versions of female nudes and black versions of Christian stories which the Pope had declared forbidden blasphemy.

I hadn’t realised that a stock market crash left stockbroker Gauguin needing to find and fail at other jobs, or that he long wanted to be reconciled with Mette his wife and their children and that he was faithful to her for a longtime and unlike Van Gogh did not visit brothels.

It was a long time before Gauguin became a success as a painter. However Theo Van Gogh, so strangely unable to sell Vincent’s pictures, sold one of Gauguin’s for 300 France 1988, which my googling tells me would be £3,000 in today’s money.

It seems his wife Mette was a prominent entertainer of avant garde friends in Denmark. Also Gauguin had a circle of cultural friends in Paris such as Strindberg, and at that time there was great interest in Norway and in symbolism.

The author emphasizes Gauguin’s support of womens’ rights and his lack of racism and  his practical helping of Polynesian folk against the inequities of colonial rule. He was very interested in the  culture of the islands, where French missionaries were in conflict with a very different attitude to sexual conduct. Gauguin was provided by his local neighbours with offers of their young daughters, with several of whom he formed relationships and had children. The age of consent was both in France and in her colonies only 13
It’s rather a confused picture Prideaux gives where native cannibalism and infanticide  is hinted at and for all the talk of freedom there was an expectation that young women would be sexually available to much older men they scarcely knew, whilst at the same time they were able to leave them and unmarried pregnancy and abortion were accepted.
Gauguin had a lot of health problems, some stemming from injuries during a fight in France, but was not syphylitic - three teeth found of his after he died having been extensively examined by scientists.

Prideaux writes carefully about Gauguin’s art, getting the reader to look again at long known paintings such as one of women on a bench which was in my classroom at my girls’ grammar school in the sixties but turns out to be of prostitutes.

 

Gauguin frequently clashed with the French authorities, wrote articles for a satirical political magazine  and was arrested at the end of his life for libelling  an official. He was by now much wealthier and had had built a house he entitled ‘The house of pleasure.’ 

 Gauguin evolved from devoted family man and establishment member however rebellious  at heart to being the wild man in the tropical jungle with a string of pubescent lovers. A great story with the topical problem of predatory male figure in a society that allowed this, and with subject matter he made his own - of a sort of mythic shangrila in which he lived an all too difficult life living on tinned food and sending out his colourful visions of life in a distant place to sell in the western art market.