Paul Gauguin, “Self-portrait with Halo and Snake” (1889), oil on board (picture public area by way of Nationwide Gallery of Artwork, Washington)
Paul Gauguin often referred to as himself a “savage from Peru.” Neglect that he spent extra time as a stockbroker in France than he did as a toddler within the Peruvian family of his aristocratic great-uncle, waited on by enslaved folks. To indulge within the grand self-mythology he conjured as much as accompany items like “Manaò tupapaú (Spring of the Dead Watching)” (1892), neglect that.
Not till the Nineteen Seventies did feminist and postcolonial critics expertise what artwork historian Norma Broude referred to as an “awakening.” Gauguin, his artwork, his lionized fame as the fashionable primitivist, and primitivism itself as a motion confronted a deconstruction so thorough that the Twenty first-century museumgoer normally is aware of at the least two or three issues about him. Particularly: He was a French, middle-aged pedophile who preyed on, and reportedly unfold syphilis to, 13- and 14-year-old women in French Polynesia.
Is it time to reappraise?
Perhaps, Sue Prideaux argues in Wild Factor: A Lifetime of Paul Gauguin (2025), the primary main biographical examine of the artist in 30 years. Extra exactly, she writes, it’s time “to re-examine Gauguin’s life; not to condemn, not to excuse, but simply to shed new light on the man and the myth.”
Why now? Prideaux cites three causes. A 2018 examine carried out on enamel discovered on the web site of Gauguin’s dying (his “House of Pleasure” on the island of Hiva Ova) proved they had been, with excessive likelihood, his enamel; they confirmed no traces of mercury or arsenic, minerals thought for use as a therapy for syphilis on the time. The unique, long-lost manuscript of Gauguin’s Avant et après resurfaced in 2020. And the Wildenstein Plattner Institute launched its ultimate quantity of Gauguin’s catalogue raisonné in 2021.
Maybe extra tellingly, although, Prideaux wrote candidly within the Guardian in March that she felt she “couldn’t live in the dishonest and hypocritical position of loving the paintings and hating the man.” An uncomfortable dissonance acquainted to many an admirer of many an artist, to make sure — and one that may spur an individual to chart a path again to a snug equilibrium. However typically the concrete proof wanted for this redemption merely doesn’t exist.
Paul Gauguin, “Merahi metua no Tehamana (‘Tehamana Has Many Parents’ or ‘The Ancestors of Tehamana’)” (1893), an oil portray on canvas of Teha’amana, whom Gauguin “married” in 1891 when she was 13 years outdated (picture public area by way of Artwork Institute of Chicago)
This isn’t to say that Prideaux fails to scrupulously analyze Gauguin’s life. Removed from it. The report on Gauguin’s enamel, for instance, lacks concrete solutions on the syphilis query. It’s unimaginable to “confirm or deny,” the researchers write, whether or not he had or died from the sexually transmitted an infection. However coupled with a recorded analysis from Gauguin’s physician and visible connections between the rashes and sores induced by syphilis, eczema, and the bites of sandflies, Prideaux’s argument that it was merely a long-lasting rumor appears grounded in actuality.
However the concern over whether or not Gauguin unfold syphilis to teenage women ceased to matter to me by the top of Wild Factor. Gauguin nonetheless had intercourse with and “married” a number of as a person in his 40s and 50s; deserted his first spouse and youngsters to search out societies untouched by the “civilization” he claimed to despise; and perpetuated colonial narratives that tie total cultures to an open-handed sensuality, giving males like himself permission to bask in violent sexual fantasies.
Prideaux straightforwardly acknowledges all the above all through Wild Factor. However so, too, does David Sweetman in his 1995 Paul Gauguin: A Full Life, one of some main biographies of the artist. Slight variations in entry to supplies don’t hold the 2 authors from coming to comparatively comparable, well-worn conclusions about retroactive judgment and the division of artwork and artist. (Reminders concerning the age of consent in France and its colonies on the time, 13, are peppered all through each biographies.) Because of this, Gauguin’s “scandalous reputation” is just not “largely undeserved,” as Prideaux’s writer declares.
Quite, Wild Factor provides to the combination a barely extra charitable and compassionate examine, moderately than one which upends or transforms. It invitations us to sympathize with Gauguin, and there are moments when Prideaux convinces us to — like in her fascinating examination of Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh’s turbulent friendship — simply as Sweetman convinces us to not within the proof he provides about Gauguin’s personal contemporaries and their condemnation of his habits. The place Sweetman sees in Avant et après an obsession with intercourse and a boastful, smug artist, Prideaux sees a person who “excoriates colonialism … pleading for greater justice and lower taxation of the indigenous people” and “silly stories.”
Each could be true. However Wild Factor‘s warm critical reception illustrates two things: the complex nature of Gauguin’s legacy and the truth that, in 2025, redemption arcs promote.
Wild Factor: A Lifetime of Paul Gauguin (2025) by Sue Prideaux is printed by W. W. Norton and is obtainable on-line and thru unbiased booksellers.
