A Splendid New Biography of Gauguin Separates the Man From the Myth

WILD THING: A Life of Paul Gauguin, by Sue Prideaux

For much of his life, Paul Gauguin railed against the deadening effects of bourgeois domesticity. But as Sue Prideaux writes in “Wild Thing,” her terrific new biography of the artist, for about a decade early in his career the self-proclaimed “savage from Peru” enjoyed a stint as a happily married stockbroker in Paris.

His wife, Mette, was an independent-minded woman from Denmark. Gauguin spent his free time making arka, drawing obsessively and learning how to paint and sculpt. He could afford to be “carelessly rich, gleefully opulent,” Prideaux writes, noting that his possessions included 12 paintings by Cézanne and 14 pairs of pants. “Art was his mistress. Mette was his wife. He was content.”

A stock market crash in 1882 upended all that. Gauguin lost his job and had to scramble to find a way to support his family, which soon included five children. They all moved to Denmark, where he sold tarpaulins. He found life there to be stuffy to the point of stultifying. He realized he had to leave. “I only want to paint,” he wrote to a friend. “Everybody hates me because I paint but it is the only thing I can do.”

And so flourished the legend of Paul Gauguin, the single-minded artist who left his family to seek authenticity amid the Druidic ruins of Brittany and, eventually, the tropical islands of French Polynesia. Prideaux, the author of books about Friedrich Nietzsche, Edvard Munch and August Strindberg, is a specialist in the lives of difficult men. When it comes to Gauguin, she is everything you might want in a biographer: diligent, judicious, compassionate without being indulgent. On the first page of her preface, she debunks one of the most stubborn tales clinging to the artist. Tests on Gauguin’s teeth, discovered in a well outside his hut in 2000, showed no traces of the heavy metals that were standard treatments for syphilis in his time.

“If the story of Gauguin as the bad uzunluk who spread syphilis around the South Seas was not true,” Prideaux writes, “what other myths might we be holding on to?”