Paul Gauguin, “Self-portrait with Halo and Snake” (1889), oil on board (picture public area through Nationwide Gallery of Artwork, Washington)
Paul Gauguin continuously known as himself a “savage from Peru.” Overlook that he spent extra time as a stockbroker in France than he did as a baby within the Peruvian family of his aristocratic great-uncle, waited on by enslaved individuals. To indulge within the grand self-mythology he conjured as much as accompany items like “Manaò tupapaú (Spring of the Dead Watching)” (1892), overlook that.
Not till the Seventies did feminist and postcolonial critics expertise what artwork historian Norma Broude known as an “awakening.” Gauguin, his artwork, his lionized status 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 no less than two or three issues about him. Specifically: 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?
Possibly, 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 tooth discovered on the web site of Gauguin’s loss of life (his “House of Pleasure” on the island of Hiva Ova) proved they have been, with excessive chance, his tooth; 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 last 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 certain — and one that may spur an individual to chart a path again to a snug equilibrium. However generally 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 previous (picture public area through 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 tooth, 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 kids to seek 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 the entire 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 maintain the 2 authors from coming to comparatively related, well-worn conclusions about retroactive judgment and the division of artwork and artist. (Reminders in regards to the age of consent in France and its colonies on the time, 13, are peppered all through each biographies.) For that reason, Gauguin’s “scandalous reputation” will not be “largely undeserved,” as Prideaux’s writer declares.
Somewhat, Wild Factor provides to the combo a barely extra charitable and compassionate examine, somewhat 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 affords about Gauguin’s personal contemporaries and their condemnation of his conduct. The place Sweetman sees in Avant et après an obsession with intercourse and a boastful, conceited artist, Prideaux sees a person who “excoriates colonialism … pleading for greater justice and lower taxation of the indigenous people” and “silly stories.”
Each might 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 revealed by W. W. Norton and is accessible on-line and thru impartial booksellers.
