SUE PRIDEAUX Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin. Reviewed by Ann Skea

Sue Prideaux separates the man from the myth in this new account of the controversial nineteenth-century French artist.

Who was Paul Gauguin? Was he a ‘colonialist’; ‘the bad boy who spread syphilis around the South Seas’; a ‘defender of native vices’, a ‘subverter of the rule of law and a dangerous anarchist’? Or an innovative artist who attracted ‘devoted’ disciples and became known as the ‘reputed leader of the Symbolist-Synthetist painters’?

Sue Prideaux wastes no time in debunking the accusations of spreading syphilis. In her preface she tells of the DNA identification of three teeth that were found in a well beside Gauguin’s house at Atuona on the French Polynesian island of Hiva Oa. These were proved to be his, and a forensic examination showed no sign of ‘cadmium, mercury and arsenic, the standard treatment for syphilis at the time’.

She sets out, too, to ‘re-examine Gauguin’s life’ in the light of newly available material and contemporary debate: ‘not to condemn, not to excuse, but simply to shed new light on the man and the myth’. In the process, she reveals the multiple facets of Gauguin’s character, the great variety of his life experiences, his shifting identity (displayed in his writings, where he adopts alter-egos and pseudonyms), and his determination to express himself, his feelings and ideas, through his art.

Two things brought Prideaux to write this book. One was the sudden reappearance in 2020 of the ‘long-lost’ manuscript of Gauguin’s Avant et Aprés, which

includes the text of some of the letters he wrote pointing out cases of injustice and corruption in the French colonial government of the Polynesian islands and pleading for greater justice and lower taxation of the indigenous people. He writes of his strong belief that women should be treated as equals. He loves Jesus but hates the Church … [and] he tells silly stories, and much more.

The second was the 2021 completion and publication of the catalogue raisonné of Gauguin’s works, ‘covering the paintings between 1891 and 1903’.

In Prideaux’s richly illustrated book, she charts the development of Gauguin’s art alongside the way in which his life influenced it, and she discusses many of his paintings in detail. For a man who did not seriously begin painting until he was in his early twenties and who was largely self-taught, his achievements were, and still are, remarkable.

He smashed the established Western canon, ignoring rules laid down over the centuries, trading Renaissance picture-box perspective for multipoint perspective, distorting scale and privileging decorative line over believable solidity, employing colour emotionally rather than realistically and pioneering the assimilation of indigenous themes in Western art.

Prideaux shows, too, how Gauguin’s ‘conceptual approach and stylistic simplification fanned out through Henri Matisse and the Fauves through Bonnard, Vuillard and the Nabis, influencing Edvard Munch [and] German Expressionists’; and how his Polynesian pictures and sculptures ‘led Picasso to explore African art’, and ‘evolved Cubism’.

These claims are stated with certainty, but her close examination of Gauguin’s life, especially his times in Paris, where he joined the debates and experimentation of artists who are now known as ‘impressionists’, ‘pointillists’, ‘expressionists’, etc., shows that it was not just Gauguin, but also developments in science, psychology and philosophy that influenced these movements. In Paris, Gauguin was

pondering the wider questions of what actually is painting, and what is its relationship to the other branches of art? This was the sort of thing he would have hammered out at the café table with the Manet gang over a glass of absinthe, or with Pissaro during their painting trips.

Scientific discoveries about colour perception and the role of rods and cones in the eye were, for example, set out as a theory that

each line and each particle of colour should be treated as words are treated. Each word is separated by a white space on the page, so each colour must be treated as a separate entity, because each is possessed of a different identity to every other. Colours must not be blended. This theory of colour separation explains Seurat’s pictures, entirely constructed from little coloured dots, often with a little white space between.

Gauguin experimented with pointillism but ‘did not persevere’, believing that ‘strict application of a repertoire of “scientific” rules to art was both intolerable and absurd’. He called the pointillists ‘little green chemists who pile up tiny dots’, and he went on to perpetrate a literary hoax, writing a ‘newly discovered’ ancient treatise on art from the pen of Mani-Vehbi-Zanbul-Zadi, who had purportedly lived in the time of Tamerlane. Mani’s text disapproved of leaving white spaces. He instructed artists to ‘let the background of your paper lighten your shades and provide the white, but do not leave it absolutely bare’, and declared that ‘The maker of patchwork blunts sensibility and immobilises colouring.’ This text was accepted as genuine and caused much debate.

Gauguin’s obstinate and individualistic character was clearly shaped by his early years as a wild child running free on the estate of his wealthy uncle in Peru. By the time his mother moved the family to France and he first attended school, he was an outsider, unable to speak French, and reacting to bullying with his fists, saying he was ‘a savage from Peru’.

He was strongly influenced by his later schooling at the Petit Séminary, where the boys were schooled alongside priests being trained ‘to revive the Roman Catholic Church in France’. The Roman Catholic Bishop of Orléans, who was leader of the seminary, however, was ‘a churchman and a scientist’ who believed that ‘each individual must feel free to examine their own religious faith as critically as they examined any other subject, including scientific theory’. This was something Gauguin did throughout his life, and the bishop’s ‘catechism’ – ‘Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going?’ – became the title of a huge painting Gauguin created late in his life and which Prideaux analyses in detail.

Gauguin’s own belief was that he inherited his obstinacy, his artistic talent, and his ‘life-long readiness to battle for the underdog’ from his maternal grandmother, Flora Tristan, who had been a notable campaigner against ‘human exploitation and degradation’. Prideaux tells of Flora’s interesting life, and also that of Gauguin’s beautiful mother, Aline, who, as a widow, found a wealthy protector in Paris who set her up in business as a dressmaker. She and the children spent a great deal of time at his ‘splendid country house’, and after Aline’s death, this man, Gustave Arosa, became Gauguin’s guardian. The ‘seventy-seven important paintings’ that hung in Arosa’s country house were Gauguin’s first exposure to fine art, and it was Arosa who, through the influence of a son-in-law, found Gauguin work as a liquidateur, trading stocks on the Paris Bourse.

Gauguin excelled at this work, became affluent, began to paint and explore art galleries, and bought art that he would keep, always, as an investment. He also spent money on a lavish lifestyle. When the Paris stock market failed, his own shares became worthless and he lost his job with little prospect of finding anything similar. No-one had the money to buy art, and by that time, Gauguin had a beloved wife, Mette, and five children to support and little in the way of savings. He started to work furiously on his painting, producing ‘more or less’ one picture a day, but they were not good and did not sell. Pissaro, who had become Gauguin’s artistic mentor by that time, found them ‘petty and monotonous’.

Disasters, lack of sales at exhibitions, untrustworthy friends, promising investments that failed, deaths of those who had provided financial support, illness – all these seem to have hounded Gauguin throughout his life. Only in his last years on Hiva Oa did his art begin to be valued by French buyers. Yet, when Gauguin was becoming blind and immobile and thought of returning to France, his financial advisor dissuaded him on the grounds that

You are currently seen as that legendary, unforgettable artist who from the depths of Oceania is sending works that are bewildering and unique, works characteristic of a great man who supposedly disappeared from the world. Simply stated, you are blessed with the immunity of the dead and famous, you have passed into history.

Prideaux’s account of Gauguin’s life is fascinating and her analysis of many of his art works (a generous number are reproduced in the book) is informed and interesting, although the reader may not always agree with her interpretations. She shows the influence of Japanese art and of cloisonné on Gauguin’s evolving style, his use of symbols, and the way he expressed his synaesthesia, which, for him, linked colour and sound.

Gauguin’s wife, Mette, who for financial reasons lived for most of their married life in her home city of Copenhagen, where she taught French and conducted popular ‘salons’, corresponded with him frequently. It seems that their relationship was mutually passionate, and Gauguin was faithful to Mette for many years. She must have been remarkably tolerant, and she only seems to have lost patience with him late in their marriage when they fell out over the sharing of an inheritance.

It is left to the reader to make their own judgment about Gauguin’s now notorious relationships with the young Polynesian girls who, it seems, chose to live with him, and who became the subjects of his paintings. Prideaux describes the girls’ continuing close involvement with their families, and the customs of the islanders, where ‘marriages’ were arranged by the family when the girls were 13 or 14, and sexual relations were a matter of consenting parties unrestricted by Christian teaching of sin. Tohotua, who became an ‘important model’ for Gauguin, was married to the magician Haapuana, who, when asked if she and Gauguin had been lovers, replied: ‘If I have a friend and he temporarily desires my wife … I am glad if she is willing.’ Prideaux  also notes that the age of consent in France at that time was 13, at which age young girls were ‘considered independent beings in their own right, and sex with them was not only permissible but unremarkable’.

Overall, she chooses not to examine whether Gauguin was a man or a monster, instead she presents a detailed account of the life of a complex character who, as he wrote, believed that ‘life has no meaning unless one lives it with a will, at least to the limit of one’s will’.

Sue Prideaux Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin Faber 2024 HB 416pp $59.99

Dr Ann Skea is a freelance reviewer, writer and an independent scholar of the work of Ted Hughes. She is author of Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest (UNE 1994, and currently available for free download here). Her work is internationally published and her Ted Hughes webpages (ann.skea.com) are archived by the British Library.

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Tags: colonialism, French artists, Hiva Oa, Paul Gauguin, Polynesia, Sue | Prideaux, Symbolist-Synthetist artists, synaesthesia