Sue Prideaux’s latest biography paints a vivid portrait of Paul Gauguin, the towering artist whose bright colors, flat planes, symbolism, and naked, dark-skinned Polynesian women paved the way for modernist art. She covers Gauguin’s life from his infancy and childhood in Peru to his adolescence in France and later as a Merchant Marine to his adulthood. She follows his life in Paris, Brittany, Denmark, as well as French Polynesia, where he created most of his 500-plus works of art, including portraits, ceramics, woodcarvings, prints, and sculptures.
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Gauguin (1848-1903) was also self-taught in music and played several instruments, but he was mostly in painting. Prideaux suggests that Gauguin had synesthesia, a crossed-wires neurological condition that causes one sense to produce experiences in another sense, such that a synesthete may smell sounds or see tastes. When Gauguin played music, he was able to see colors.
Some said Gauguin was a monster, and others said he was a master. Prideaux implies he was both. But she doesn’t condemn or excuse him. She investigates the myths that developed about Gauguin, both those he invented and those others created about him. She combs through his numerous writings while presenting his paintings, exemplifying his many undertakings and lovers. He had a Danish wife, Mette Gad, with whom he had five children, and four or five Polynesian child wives who were about 14 years old, with whom he also had offspring.
Prideaux’s biography was released in England last year and was just published in the United States. It’s the first biography of the legendary artist in 30 years. Her earlier books covered Edvard Munch, whose use of color was inspired by Gauguin; the philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, who, like Gauguin, was disappointed by traditional religious teachings; and the dramatist, August Strindberg, who shared an interest in symbolism and the occult with Gauguin.
Besides being a prolific memoirist, Gauguin was an avid correspondent, sending frequent letters to Mette, their children, his sister, and numerous friends and artists. Prideaux quotes from his journals and letters and includes his descriptions of his art, his theories about Christianity, primitive people, French colonialism, life in Peru, Paris, Brittany (where he launched his post-impressionist style), and Polynesia. She even includes his prayer at the death of his daughter.
Gauguin referred to himself as a savage Inca from Peru, although his Peruvian ancestors were Spanish nobility. His father was French, and he was born in Paris. He, his older sister, Marie, and their parents fled to Peru from Paris after Napoleon III’s coup d’etat. Gauguin spent the next seven years living with his maternal grandmother’s family in Lima, an experience Prideaux describes as “Rousseauian.”
Although the family was wealthy, Gauguin didn’t attend school. He played in the streets, barefoot and half-naked, with the family’s slaves. Sometimes, he ran away, a game he pursued throughout his life. He would travel to exotic places to find what he called “the other,” a spiritual connection inspiring him to paint. He found that inspiration in Brittany and Polynesia, as seen in two of his most famous paintings: The Vision of the Sermon (1888, Brittany), in which women envision Jacob wrestling an angel, and Where Do We Come From? What are We? Where are We Going (1897, Polynesia), in which he retells the story of creation.
Prideaux’s biography relies heavily on Gauguin’s memoir, Avant et Après, which was recently discovered. Another inspiration for Prideaux was, surprisingly, Gauguin’s teeth found in a glass jar in a well in Atuona, the capital of Hiva Oa, where Gauguin spent his last years and is buried. The teeth are decayed but show no signs of cadmium, mercury, or arsenic, the usual treatment for syphilis, leading Prideaux to believe that Gauguin did not have syphilis and was perhaps not the wild thing he depicted himself to be. However, the absence of treatment is not evidence that he did not have the disease. Most biographers believe Gauguin had untreated syphilis partly because he had many sexual partners and because Polynesia, where he spent many years, was rife with the disease.
Missing for a century, Avant et Après is part memoir and part manifesto. It consists of 213 handwritten pages and contains numerous drawings. It includes Gauguin’s thoughts about his childhood, his beloved mother, Aline, his friend, Vincent Van Gogh, his other artist friends, such as Camille Pissarro, Edgar Degas, and Paul Sérusier, and hypocritical Catholic priests. Gauguin was Roman Catholic, but he hated the church. However, he did love Jesus Christ and identified with him. He portrayed himself beside a crucified Christ and in the Garden of Olives in Self-Portrait Near Golgotha (1896).
Avant et Après was composed during Gauguin’s last two years of life, when he was ill from heart trouble, a broken and poorly set ankle, and a painful rash on his legs that may have been eczema or syphilis. He was 54 years old and a broken man. The morphine he was taking made him tired, and his vision was failing. He was too sick to paint, so he wrote letters, some protesting the injustice of colonial rule in Polynesia, others to family and friends.
There was no electricity in his house. As Prideaux hauntingly describes in her engaging book, when the sun set, Gauguin would crawl out of his bed and sit at his harmonium, playing music into the dark night.
Diane Scharper is a regular contributor to the Washington Examiner. She teaches the Memoir Seminar for the Johns Hopkins University Osher program.