The life of Paul Gauguin is the stuff of legend. Or a number of legends. There’s the Romantic visionary invoked by his buddy August Strindberg—“a baby taking his toys to items to make new ones, rejecting and defying and preferring a pink sky to everyone else’s blue one.” There’s the voracious malcontent whom Edgar Degas pegged as a “hungry wolf and not using a collar.” There’s the completed swordsman and brawny genius hammed up by Anthony Quinn in Lust for Life, who takes a break from bickering with Vincent van Gogh to growl, “I’m speaking about ladies, man, ladies. I like ’em fats and harsh and never too good.” And there’s the Twenty first-century trope of the paint-smattered, colonizing Humbert Humbert, bedding 13-year-old women and sowing syphilis all through the South Seas.
This arc from insurgent to swashbuckling artwork hero to repellent villain tells us much less in regards to the artist than it does in regards to the viewers (Quinn received an Oscar for that moody growling in 1957). Nonetheless, given the hand-wringing and self-righteous mudslinging which have accompanied latest Gauguin exhibitions, the time is ripe to ask what we truly know, and the way that data ought to impinge on our expertise of artwork, if in any respect.
Wild Factor, Sue Prideaux’s new biography of Gauguin, goals “to not condemn, to not excuse, however merely to shed new gentle on the person and the parable.” Charting his life from beginning (in Paris in 1848) to loss of life (in French Polynesia in 1903), she makes use of the not too long ago recovered manuscript of his stream-of-consciousness semi-memoir, Avant et après, in addition to recent conclusions about his sexual well being steered by his tooth. Extra broadly, she chooses to contemplate occasions in view of historic circumstance quite than ethical dicta. (Prideaux, whose earlier books have examined the lives of Strindberg, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Edvard Munch, has a present for disrupting snap judgments about troublesome males.) If the Gauguin who emerges right here just isn’t simple to like, he does appear of a bit with the willfully contradictory, persistently gripping artwork he left behind.
The biographical info are improbably cinematic. On his mom’s aspect, he traced his ancestry again to the Borgias; the household tree included a pope, a saint, the viceroy of Peru, and his grandmother, the rabble-rousing feminist Flora Tristan. (Karl Marx was a fan.) Gauguin’s childhood may need been dreamed up, tag crew, by Gabriel García Márquez and Émile Zola. When he was an toddler, his household set sail for Peru, the place his journalist father deliberate to ascertain a left-wing newspaper and his mom hoped to reclaim an inheritance. His father dropped useless en route in Tierra del Fuego, however his mom continued on to Lima together with her two babies, becoming a member of the palatial family of a great-uncle. She by no means acquired the cash, however as one of many uncommon Europeans to take a critical curiosity in pre-Columbian artwork, she acquired a considerable assortment of historical Moche ceramics. These animated canines and portrait heads would burrow deep into her son’s creativeness.
For his half, Gauguin recalled operating free within the streets with the enslaved lady who was his closest companion and being visited within the evening by a madman who lived on an adjoining roof. When he returned to France on the age of seven, he couldn’t communicate the language and understood not one of the social codes. “I’m a savage from Peru” was the belligerent self-explanation he would use for the remainder of his life. Boarding college supplied a little bit of classical training and a behavior of skeptical inquiry, however he flunked out of upper training and, with no discernible expertise, went to sea as a lowly ship’s boy at 17.
Returning six years later, he took up a place buying and selling futures on the Paris Bourse organized for him by Gustave Arosa, a financier, an artwork collector, and his de facto stepfather. (Arosa and Gauguin’s mom had had a really French association.) Improbably, Gauguin excelled. He disdained most of his colleagues—“prosperity didn’t make him clubbable,” Prideaux notes—however he made plenty of cash, fell in love, and married a Dane, Mette Gad, who shared his indifference to bourgeois conference. “Carelessly wealthy, gleefully opulent,” Gauguin started, for the primary time, to take an curiosity in artwork—initially as a collector of the brand new Impressionism after which dabbling on his personal. He enlisted the assistance of Arosa’s buddy Camille Pissarro and started portray softly churning landscapes en plein air. Inside just a few years, he was displaying with the Impressionists himself. Cash continued to roll in from the Bourse and, Prideaux writes, “pleasant infants magically appeared at two-year intervals.”
This halcyon bliss was too good to final. When the market crashed in December 1882, Gauguin was worn out and misplaced his job. He and Gad had saved nothing, and Arosa, his security internet, died inside months. In lieu of any new employment alternatives, Gauguin determined that he would help his spouse and 5 youngsters as an avant-garde painter. (Like many individuals who take pleasure in early success within the markets, he did plenty of magical excited about cash.) To economize, they moved to Copenhagen, however his portray stalled, so that they determined that he ought to return to France and ship for the household as soon as he was once more on a safe footing. Gad would keep in Copenhagen with the kids, instructing French and generally promoting issues from his artwork assortment to make ends meet.
Prideaux depicts Gauguin’s ensuing poverty with out romance—the chilly, the filth, the meals insecurity. The son he briefly had cost of grew malnourished and contracted smallpox. The one job Gauguin managed to get was pasting up posters. As for the Paris artwork world, it was abuzz with Georges Seurat, coloration principle, and Pointillism. Gauguin, who by no means met a system he didn’t despise, was exasperated. He decamped to Brittany, with its dramatic coast and folkloric peasants talking their unusual Celtic tongue, and there his artwork stopped trying like anyone else’s.
The place Impressionist landscapes had dissolved in gentle, Gauguin’s grew strong. The brushwork flickered, however the edges have been laborious. Breton Girls Chatting (1886) is full of elbows and aprons and acrobatic headdresses. He cribbed its tipped-up perspective from Japanese woodcuts; the square-shouldered, profile posture from historical Egypt; the lady fiddling together with her shoe from Degas. This sort of appropriation and stitching-together had been practiced by Degas and Édouard Manet, however Gauguin’s portray doesn’t appear to be theirs both. The unusual mixture of naturalism and frozen poses, the lasso-like outlines, the wedding of the acquainted and the otherworldly would grow to be his model.
Gauguin’s new mode attracted fervent acolytes amongst youthful artists, but it surely produced nothing resembling an revenue stream, so he sailed to Panama with a buddy in pursuit of a job by way of his sister’s husband. He was once more upset. From there he went to Martinique (“I’ve at all times had a flowery for operating away,” he wrote), the place he lived in a hut, contracted malaria, and painted dense landscapes that counsel the interlocking shapes and eventful surfaces of tapestries. These work shocked Vincent van Gogh and his art-dealer brother, Theo, who proposed that the 2 painters spend some months collectively in Arles, residing and dealing on Theo’s dime. The experiment led to a bloody spectacle, with a straight razor, a severed ear, and Gauguin briefly accused of homicide when the police thought that the razor was his and that Van Gogh was useless. (The Van Gogh brothers held him innocent, however the expertise was harrowing for everybody.)
Quickly afterward, the 1889 Exposition Universelle, with its unprecedented show of distant cultures, gave recent gasoline to Gauguin’s wanderlust. He was much better traveled than most Europeans, however the Javanese dancers and the full-scale reproduction of a tower from Angkor Wat have been revelations—alternative routes of conceptualizing narrative and area, of arranging figures, of residing. He was now in his 40s and years had handed since he’d left Copenhagen, however he and Gad remained married and he continued to hunt technique of uniting his household. He started making use of for jobs in French colonies, hoping for one thing in Tonkin (for its proximity to Angkor Wat) or maybe Madagascar with a buddy. In the long run, he headed for Tahiti, and not using a job however with an settlement from the federal government to purchase a portray produced there. Earlier than leaving, he wrote Gad promising that they might all be collectively inside three years.
Papeete, the capital, was a disappointment: brick buildings specified by a grid, populated by pompous Frenchmen and Native ladies cloaked in missionary-imposed smocks often called Mom Hubbards. It was, he wrote, “the Europe which I had thought to shake off” solely worse, given “the irritating circumstances of colonial snobbism, and the imitation, grotesque even to the purpose of caricature, of our customs, fashions, vices, and absurdities of civilization.” He alienated the officers who may need provided him work and washed out as a portrait painter. (Flattery was not in his wheelhouse.) So he went off to a distant village seeking the prelapsarian Tahiti of his creativeness.
Gauguin had little cash, lacked the power to fish or farm, and was unhealthy at languages, but the Tahitians accepted and assisted him. Someway he quickly grew to become “married” to a teen named Teha’amana, or so the story goes; our key supply of details about her and the connection is Gauguin’s romanticized account of his early Tahitian adventures, Noa Noa, written after the actual fact for a French viewers to construct a poetic context for his work. (Noa noa means “perfume.”) In a single passage, he writes about one other lady in his village, calling her “in no way good-looking in response to our aesthetic guidelines. She was lovely.” The identical is perhaps mentioned of the work that now poured forth, described by Prideaux as “a collective hymn of affection” for Teha’amana “and, by way of her, for the place and its individuals.”
In his extraordinary 1891 portray Ia Orana Maria (“Hail Mary”), an Indigenous Mary carries an Indigenous Christ baby on one shoulder (each with halos), whereas Indigenous worshippers pray and a yellow-winged angel lurks in flowering bushes. (The nonwhite casting, Prideaux notes, was thought of “blasphemous for over half a century.”) It’s a mash-up of Renaissance iconography, Javanese postures, and the busy patterning of the Pre-Raphaelites, however the whole lot suits along with the form of breathless sublimity you see in Fra Angelico: a world that’s each bodily and metaphysical, intoxicating and inevitable.
This idyll was interrupted by, of all issues, success. Van Gogh had died in 1890, however in Copenhagen, the primary joint exhibition of his work and Gauguin’s, in 1893, had stirred nice pleasure. Urged to return to Europe, Gauguin made the 10-week voyage again. Remarkably, he nonetheless aimed to deliver his European household to Tahiti, however as soon as once more, his gross sales proved inadequate. He took a studio in Paris, after which, on a visit to Brittany, he acquired right into a row with some locals, who shattered his leg. Months within the hospital have been adopted by years of dependence on laudanum and morphine. The leg by no means absolutely healed, however by July 1895 he was properly sufficient to re-embark for the South Seas.
Although Papeete was even worse than he remembered, his want for medical consideration stored him close by. He constructed a hut in a village just a few miles from the capital. Teha’amana came around for just a few days, however in Gauguin’s absence she had taken a Tahitian husband, to whom she returned. A brand new teenager, Pau’ura, crammed her place, and Gauguin returned to his easel, portray dreamy narratives with mythological overtones, akin to The place Do We Come From? What Are We? The place Are We Going? (1897–98), however his life refused to settle into the previous idyll. He misplaced his dwelling, and even tried suicide. Unable to pay his hospital payments, he was declared “indigent.”
Finally Gauguin acquired a job as a draftsman for the division of public works and started writing political commentary for a neighborhood paper, however his sense of getting betrayed his values and presents in Tahiti’s colonial milieu solely grew. In 1901, he moved on to the distant island of Hiva Oa, within the Marquesas. Pau’ura selected to stay in Tahiti with their toddler son. In Europe, his work started to show a revenue in the end, however two years later he was useless, at 54.
Posthumous exhibitions cemented Gauguin’s standing as probably the most transformative of the post-Impressionist painters. His willingness to reimagine the seen world pointed the best way to symbolism, expressionism, and abstraction. In the meantime, the heat and muscular grace of his Polynesian work made them perennially widespread. For a time, this mixture of wayward emotional expression and cultural openness, this embrace of different types of magnificence, appeared to embody a brand new, trendy ultimate.
All of this acquired turned on its head starting within the Seventies, because the artwork world grew to become sensitized to the deep inequities between women and men, white and nonwhite, colonizer and colonized. Work whose reverence for Indigenous individuals had as soon as shocked have been now held in contempt, considered as defiling those self same individuals. Gauguin was castigated for failing to shake off European pictorial traditions, and for appropriating non-European traditions. The person who from the age of seven had thought of himself an outsider to Western civilization was now seen because the abusive beneficiary of its entitlements. As a result of political energy was vested in European males, interpersonal relations have been presumed to observe go well with. A narrative of exploitation was inferred. A Gauguin retrospective final 12 months occasioned the headline: “Paul Gauguin Was a Violent Paedophile. Ought to the Nationwide Gallery of Australia Be Staging a Main Exhibition of His Work?” Its description of the artist as a “serial rapist” has been broadly repeated on-line.
We’ve no testimony from Teha’amana, and aside from Pau’ura’s late-in-life recollections of a person she fondly known as a “rascal,” none from his different companions, so this accusation presumably displays present definitions of statutory rape. Prideaux sees Teha’amana as a sufferer of her circle of relatives, who apparently provided her up earlier than Gauguin had requested, in addition to of “the lust of the a lot older European man.” She can be at pains to notice that even in France itself the age of consent was then 13 (in most American states, it was even youthful), and that intercourse between youngsters and adults was “unremarkable.” Folks right now could discover this repugnant, however what Teha’amana felt about all of it, we can’t know.
New scientific proof, nonetheless, sheds gentle on one cost. An excavation of Gauguin’s Hiva Oa property in 2000 turned up 4 tooth whose DNA matched that of his father’s stays and of residing descendants in Europe and Polynesia. Assessments run for cadmium, mercury, and arsenic—the usual therapies for syphilis—have been adverse. Absence of therapy just isn’t absence of sickness, after all, however given how a lot time Gauguin spent in hospitals, that such a well-recognized illness would have been missed appears unlikely. Precise proof for his syphilitic standing seems to be nonexistent.
For a person whose intercourse life has attracted a lot consideration, Gauguin seems surprisingly circumspect in Prideaux’s telling. Surrounded by randy younger artists serving to themselves to the whole lot on supply in Brittany, he remained “strait-laced about informal intercourse.” Of brothels, he commented to a buddy: “Not my cup of tea.”
In artwork, he derided the pliant painted women who dotted the partitions of the Paris Salon clad in nothing however allegorical pretense, calling them “bordello artwork.” The ladies he depicted, against this, come throughout as particular person, self-possessed individuals. They not often smile and are by no means coy. The women in his Tahitian village, he wrote, “made me timid with their certain look, their dignity of bearing, and their pleasure of gait.” The one European nude he deeply admired was Manet’s Olympia, together with her hauteur, her calculating gaze, her hand clamped firmly over her crotch. He stored a copy with him all through his grownup life, together with the books of his radical-feminist grandmother. In a diatribe on the Catholic Church, he wrote {that a} lady “has the fitting to like whomever she chooses” and “to spit within the face of anybody who oppresses her.”
One is perhaps tempted accountable that “fats and harsh and never too good” line from Lust for Life on the macho artwork ethos of mid-century writers. However on web page two of Avant et après, you’ll be able to learn in Gauguin’s personal hand, “J’aime les femmes aussi quand elles sont vicieuses et qu’elles sont grasses” (“I additionally like ladies after they’re kinky and fats”).
He may need been talking from the guts, although his assertion—as so typically—has the ring of a provocation. Gauguin by no means outgrew the juvenile urge to scorn, shock, or simply prank the elders. For his final dwelling, he carved a horned portrait of the native monseigneur dubbed Father Lechery. And in spite of everything, contradiction was his stock-in-trade. Some pages additional on in Avant et après, he noticed that “precision typically destroys the dream, takes all of the life out of the Fable.”
It was a sloppy life, stuffed with colliding impulses, thwarted aspirations, and scattered commitments. However in his work, prints, and sculptures, he may make it proper—constructing a world the place unreasonable combos contrive to make sudden sense and issues that don’t belong nonetheless match.
This text seems within the July 2025 print version with the headline “Easy methods to Have a look at Paul Gauguin.”
Once you purchase a e book utilizing a hyperlink on this web page, we obtain a fee. Thanks for supporting The Atlantic.
