In 1903, the year of his death, Paul Gauguin wrote from his home on the Marquesas Islands in French Polynesia to his painter friend George-Daniel de Monfreid in Paris. He was thinking of giving up life on this volcanic mote in the middle of the Pacific, he said, and returning to Europe to head to Spain to paint. Gauguin was probably not even half serious but De Monfreid posted back an extraordinary response. Whatever the circumstances, don’t do it, he counselled; the paintings that he was sending to France had made him a “legendary, unforgettable artist” and “a great man who has supposedly disappeared from the world”. His reappearance would spoil everything. “Simply stated, you are blessed with the immunity of the dead and famous, you have passed into art history.”
Gauguin certainly didn’t feel blessed. Although a stipend from the art dealer Ambroise Vollard meant that his perennial money worries had lessened, he was nevertheless in trouble with the French administration on the islands, which had long seen him as an unruly provocateur, and his health was a catastrophe. He had eye problems, sores on his leg, and eczema; he had suffered heart attacks, spells of “violent twitching” and vomiting blood. He had attempted suicide. The “legendary, unforgettable artist” was a wreck, and he didn’t last long.
Gauguin’s heady paintings and the story of his piquant life inspired a century of writing that confirmed his “immunity”. Accompanying a steady stream of art historical studies he has appeared in fiction by William Somerset Maugham (The Moon and Sixpence, 1919) and Mario Vargas Llosa (The Way to Paradise, 2003), in operas, in three films of his own life and as a major character in several Van Gogh biopics too.
In recent decades, however, that immunity has given way: the extreme youth of the girls he lived with on Tahiti and the Marquesas has been folded into a reassessment of colonialism to leave him, in the eyes of many, a reviled and irredeemable figure. However, to muddy matters, his paintings continue to sell regardless: in 2015, a Polynesian scene, Nafea Faa Ipoipo (When Will You Marry?) (1892), fetched $210m (£155m), making it the fourth most expensive work of art ever sold. As recently as 2022, another Tahitian painting, Maternitè II (1899), went for nearly $106m (£72m). It makes for a complicated legacy – a sexual predator to some, but an art-world darling to others – but then, as Gauguin himself wrote: “No one is good; no one is evil; everyone is both, in the same way and in different ways…”
Earlier this year, the anthropologist and cultural historian Nicholas Thomas published Gauguin and Polynesia, which took some of the shrillness out of Gauguin’s most controversial period by examining the very different mores of island society. Now Sue Prideaux, the biographer of other morally contested figures such as Friedrich Nietzsche and August Strindberg, has written a full life. It is an immaculate biography: even handed, scholarly, comprehensive and historically informed. She draws not just on the voluminous Gauguin literature, including his own Noa Noa: Voyage to Tahiti, an illustrated travelogue-journal of his sojourn, and The Modern Spirit and Catholicism, his musings on faith, but a recently discovered memoir, Avant et Après.
The Gauguin who emerges is very much the man who declaimed: “Prudence… How you bore me with your endless yawning.” He rarely did the conventionally sensible thing. Even during the decade he spent as a Parisian stockbroker, a trade for which he had a surprising talent, he would alienate his fellows on the bourse by arriving at work in a taxi, which he would keep waiting until he decided to return home. Nor, says Prideaux, were his peers enamoured of the fact that he boasted of owning 14 pairs of trousers.
Prudence had no place in his art either. “I am a savage from Peru,” was a continual refrain, referring to the fact that his mother was descended from a wealthy and prominent Peruvian family. Indeed, as a boy, Gauguin spent seven years in the country as his mother sought financial recognition from her relatives, living in such luxury that he even had a solid-silver chamber pot.
Later, after a spell in the merchant marine and when his stock-dealing career came to an abrupt halt with the financial crash of 1882, he decided to become a full-time artist and committed himself to the avant-garde. He allied himself with the outré Impressionists and declared that: “Literal pictures are the business of the sign painter.” It was not a sure route to acceptability.
His personality was similarly intractable. A fellow painter described him as “a person who was to be placated rather than roused”, while the bourgeois family of his Danish wife Mette dismissed him as “the missing link” (he didn’t speak Danish so he didn’t understand). Gauguin himself claimed to have “two natures, the savage and the sensitive” and his art reflected this.
Prideaux lucidly explains his advances towards a signature style. In Pont-Aven he drew inspiration from a Brittany that was in many ways pre-modern. There he lived among a polyglot cluster of artists and sought to express the religious authenticity of the region in canvases that combined the temporal and the spiritual. In his key work of the 1880s, Vision of the Sermon (1888), a group of traditionally-dressed Breton women witness Jacob wrestling with the angel, from the Book of Genesis. The struggle takes place in a red field, with the space between watchers and combatants demarcated by a tree trunk. “For me the landscape and the fight only exist in the imagination of the people praying after the sermon,” he said. He offered the picture to the local priest, who turned it down. However, the transformative power of imagination, in both artist and viewer, was to remain the key to his painting.
For all Gauguin’s admiration for the Impressionists he never adopted their short brush strokes, their devotion to capturing rapidly changing nature or their scientific understanding of colour. He was touched with synaesthesia, so colour for him carried emotion. It meant, for example, that during the intense and ultimately tragic nine weeks he spent living and working with Van Gogh in Arles in 1888 he understood that the yellow of the Dutchman’s sunflowers carried the painter’s aspirations and personality too. In Polynesia he sent to France for packets of sunflower seeds to plant in memory of his one-time friend.
It was on the Pacific islands during two stays, 1891-93 and 1895-1903, that he explicitly sought a prelapsarian realm in which to make pictures that rejected the “timidity of expression of our bastardised races”. It was there, as a natural outsider, that he fully realised what Prideaux calls his “reverberant luminosity” by rejecting the French overlords and living among the local people and depicting them as a fusion of real and idealised.
He thought them admirably “primitive and simple” and was fascinated by their pre-Christian heritage and the prevalence of a spirit realm that had an active presence in everyday life. He found love among them too. In France he had remained committed to Mette, even when she returned to her family in Denmark. Then he was gifted a 13-year-old girl, Tehamana, not the first of his vahine – young local women – but, says Prideaux, the most important: she “synthesised his vision of Tahiti” and released a flood of creativity – more than 60 paintings poured out of him in 1891-92.
It is here that one might expect Prideaux to tackle the perception of Gauguin as colonial seducer head-on but instead she neither damns nor exculpates, but more subtly drops into the narrative a great deal of context and information about indigenous sexual norms. There was nothing illegal in his behaviour: the age of consent in France at the time was 13 and younger still in many American states – in Delaware in 1880 it stood at seven. Captain Cook had reported public sex between an 11-year-old and a grown man when he visited Tahiti in 1769. Monogamy was not a privileged status and Gauguin’s vahine chose whether to live with him or not. In 1896, his neighbours offered him another girl, Pau’ura, then 14, as Tehamana had married a local man. As he wrote, she “came and went as she pleased”, and he was well aware that it was not her but him who was “on to a good deal”. As a part-time journalist in Tahiti he also advocated for women’s rights, as well as railing against the taxation of the locals, separation in schools, prohibitive drinking laws and corrupt gendarmes.
Prideaux is equally unfussy in showing how Gauguin’s often baffling personal mythology – full of spirits and avatars such as the Moche fox of Peruvian folklore and Oviri, the Polynesian goddess of mourning – was born from innumerable sources. In 1889 he visited the Exposition Universelle in Paris where he encountered temple carvings from Cambodia, tomb reliefs from Egypt and artefacts from Japan (he also saw “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show” and treated himself to a revolver, Stetson and a pair of yellow high-heeled cowboy boots). He bought postcards of the art and added examples from western painters, including Manet’s scandalous Olympia (1863). He called this visual resource his “little friends” and, with literary additions such as Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven”, it informed the belief that there was a global interconnectedness, both artistic and spiritual, that made his art so potent.
“I would rather be a wretch than a plagiarist,” Gauguin once told a journalist, and he was as good as his word. In Prideaux’s persuasive telling, however, the degradation contained a rich seam of nobility.
Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin
Sue Prideaux
Faber & Faber, 416pp, £30
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[See also: Van Gogh in the yellow house]
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This article appears in the 18 Sep 2024 issue of the New Statesman, What’s the story?