Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) and his erstwhile friend Vincent van Gogh, are two of my favorite painters, though I like van Gogh’s work better. But nobody from the post-Impressionist era ever went off to Polynesia like Gauguin, bent on living and depicting what he conceived as the natural life, unspoiled by the trappings of the West. He produced some marvelous paintings (and sculptures, which he also was good at), though he was largely unappreciated and ignored during his life.
I first saw a lot of Gauguins at the famous Boston Museum of Fine Art’s exhibit in 2004, which displayed more than 150 of the painter’s works. I was mesmerized, not only by the colors and exoticism, but by narrative works like “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?” (see below).
Gauguin is buried on Atuona in the Marquesas Islands, his grave sporting a bronze cast of one of his wood sculptures:
I just finished a recent biography of Gauguin: Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin, written by Sue Prideaux and published by W. W. Norton in May of last year. You can see the Amazon version by clicking on the cover below, which shows a photo of the painter. It’s thorough and well documented but not academic: that is, the narrative is up to date, replenished by recently available sources, and it’s an engaging read. If you have any interest in art, I’d recommend it highly. Gauguin was an important figure in the history of art, sui generis in his work but influential in the work of painters like Matisse and Picasso.
One could characterize Gauguin’s life as that of the classic “tortured artist”—tortured not by mental illness (as was van Gogh) but by an endless search for a place to escape civilization, a tortuous marriage, an endless search for money to live on, and, in the latter part of his life, severe medical issues. (His heart was bad, he had chronic eye problems, and he suffered from open sores on his legs, the result of a stomping in France by clog-wearing bullies.) That, combined with his love of lots of red wine and an odious diet of tinned food, led to his death at only 54.
Yet he had moments of great joy and beauty, and this is expressed on his canvas. In that way he resembled van Gogh. His most pleasurable moments were at his easel, where he spent a lot of time, and his paintings from Brittany, but especially Tahiti and the Marquesas, are splendid. I show a few below.
Prideaux’s book recounts a tumultuous life, with four years of Gauguin’s infancy spent in Peru (he called himself “the Peruvian savage” for the rest of his life) and later a stultifying stint as a stockbroker in Paris. He was a self-taught painter who married a Danish woman. Circumstances forced her and their two children to move back to Denmark, where Gauguin joined them on occasion. Money was always an issue, and Gauguin, like van Gogh, simply couldn’t gin up much interest in his paintings. His need to sell his art to buy food, paints, and lodging persisted throughout his life.
In 1888, Vincent van Gogh, obsessed with the idea of starting a colony of artists, invited Gauguin to live with him at the famous “yellow house” in Arles, France. They didn’t get along well, and it was during this period that, after an argument with Gauguin, van Gogh cut off his own ear and deposited it at a brothel. After only nine weeks, Gauguin fled, but not before they had painted each other’s portraits. Here is van Gogh’s depiction of Gauguin:
Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin (Man in a Red Beret), 1888, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam:
The rest is history—and in Prideaux’s book. Gauguin took off for Tahiti in 1891, returned to France for a few years, and set out for his second visit to Tahiti in 1895, where he took up residence with young Tahitian women (13 or 14 was the age of “marriage” for many of them) and produced many canvases. But dissatisfied with the fact that French colonialism was spoiling his “paradise,” Gauguin repaired to the Marquesas in 1901, where he spent the last three years of his life. After becoming integrated into local society, he eventually stopped partying and took seriously to painting. He was found dead in his bed on May 8, 1903.
Here are a few paintings I like from Gauguin’s stay in Polynesia. Click to enlarge them.
Below is his most famous painting. Gauguin captioned it Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, (1897, oil on canvas, 139 × 375 cm (55 × 148 in), Boston Museum of Fine Arts. It is his vision of the span of life, starting with an infant on the right and moving an old woman on the left. Prideaux explains all the imagery of this and other paintings, which are reproduced in color in her book.
Maternity, 1899:
Spirit of the Dead Watching 1892, Albright–Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY. This was apparently painted after Gauguin returned home at night, with his young mistress, left in the dark, scared to death. There is a lot going on here; note the iconography at the bottom and the weird figures at the upper right.
Among the Mangoes (La Cueillette des Fruits), 1887, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. Gauguin loved color and lots of it; he was always sending back to Europe for more and different paints.
Tehura (Teha’amana), 1891–3, polychromed pua wood, Musée d’Orsay, Paris
Here’s Gauguin about 1891. The book describes him as a handsome man, one who had no trouble attracting ladies either in Europe or Polynesia, where he lived with several women from the islands. But he was often laid low by his many maladies.
And here is his last self-portrait, painted only a year before he died. To me this image looks like the middle-aged Eric Clapton:
Below is the NYT review by Jennifer Szalai. Click the headline to read from the NYT site or find it archived here:
As you see, it’s laudatory. One excerpt from the review:
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. . .
. . . Given how eventful Gauguin’s life was, it’s remarkable how much Prideaux packs into this briskly readable volume, which clocks in at barely 400 pages. She elegantly recounts his artistic struggles and his persistent money worries. She offers lucid re-creations of key moments, like the time Vincent van Gogh, his friend and roommate in the south of France, ran at him with a razor. (The next morning, Gauguin learned that van Gogh had cut off his own ear and handed it to a brothel worker.)
But it’s Gauguin’s experiences in French Polynesia that have understandably become the most notorious. (The last major biography of Gauguin, published in 1995, called him a “syphilitic pedophile.”) By the time he died, at 54, on the tiny island of Hiva Oa in 1903, he had gotten two Indigenous girls — each about 14 years old — pregnant. Prideaux does not deny this fact, reminding us only that in France and the colonies, the age of consent at the time was 13.
“Wild Thing” is not a whitewash of Gauguin’s legacy; instead, Prideaux fills it in with more detail. As a Frenchman in a French colony, he excoriated himself for his moral hypocrisy and became a pamphleteer, taking a job writing for the opposition party’s newspaper. He also helped locals with their petitions against the colonial authorities. In a letter to the inspector of the colonies, he noted the “singular irony” of “the hypocritical proclamation of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” when it came to “men who are no more than tax fodder in the hands of a despotic gendarme.”
Toward the end of his life, Gauguin — who never fully healed from a nasty leg injury sustained in Brittany when he was almost kicked to death in a melee by a clog-wearing mob — hobbled around his island paradise, subsisting mainly on a calamitous diet of canned food. After his death, the administrator in charge of selling the contents of Gauguin’s home did not believe it would be possible to pay back creditors in full: “The liabilities will considerably exceed the assets, as the few pictures by the late painter, who belonged to the decadent school, have little prospect of finding purchasers.”
Again, I highly recommend Wild Thing. And tell us below what you’ve read and liked lately.
OK, it’s on my list now.
Thanks for the recommendation, it’s very timely. I’m taking French at the moment, and the class was discussing favorite artists, where I noted Gaugin and said I’d carried a few posters of his works to all my various undergrad residences/flophouses. Did you read the hardcover? I’m just wondering if the Kindle has examples of his work or if I should go for the hardcover.
I read the hardcover, but I got it through Interlibrary Loan from my university. I no longer buy books save travelguides, and my three big bookshelves are absolutely jammed.
I hear ya – my husband and I have 2 (!) homes creaking under the weight of our books. I’ve managed to get rid of a bunch of mine, but getting him to part with one is a challenge, to put it mildly.
HA! We’re in a similar position here Loretta. But where do you get rid of old books? (I also have many CDs).
It feels … somehow wrong, like throwing out food, or one’s children perhaps (I don’t have any kids but I imagine)…to just dispose of them in the trash.
This is a weird psychological thingie I’ve thought a lot about but have no answer to, and too many books I don’t need.
best,
D.A.
NYC 🗽
There’s a second hand book store near my house in DC, called Second Story Books, that will take in old books and give you store credit in return. Rare or valuable stuff they’ll pay you for. They’ll also come out and do estate valuations. You may find similar places near you – I think places like this also list the books they acquire on Amazon and/or ebay. Not sure about CDs, we’ve got a lot of those too but I figure hubby will need to get hit by a bus before I’m able to deal with it all…
Second Story Books. One of the few things I miss about DC! I’ve spent many, many hours in the warehouse.
Go for the hardcover — I have the book. Though I can’t quote from it at the moment, as my copy is back home in Auckland, while I am on holiday in Paris, the explication of ‘Spirit of the Dead’ ( reproduced above in Jerry’s post ) is the most thorough I have encountered. Sadly, a lot of commentary on Gauguin has degenerated in the past 20 years into censoriousness, eg he was worse than the standard male chauvinist pig 19th C painter as he objectified female bodies outside of his own ethnicity. The London show a few years ago of his portraits is almost an object lesson in this, as it coincided more or less with the BLM moment. This biography is worth reading as it tells us what the artist, and others of his circle, actually thought, ( and also gives a voice to the Tahitians ).
Ramesh 49% Indian 49% Chinese ; 2% Denisovan
Definitely “Eric Clapton” in that last image! Just looking at the image brings the “Layla” riff to mind.
I just finished A Philosophy of Walking by Frederic Gros. A very short book. It is about philosophers and writers who used the exercise of walking to expand their philosophical ideas. I’m not sure if the word exercise is the correct word as they more approached walking as a meditative exercise. The philosophers are Rousseau, Nietzsche, Kant, Thoreau, Gandhi, Kierkegaard, and Kant. They used walking as a way of developing their ideas. I do recommend.
I also just finished Stolen by Richard Bell. This was an incredibly disturbing story of five black boys stolen into slavery from Philadelphia where they were living as free boys, except for one who was owned. They were mostly under the age of 12. They were kidnapped to the southern areas were it was easy to sell slaves. Their treatment was horrendous but their liberation was fairly satisfying to read about. This was in beginning 1800s. Their liberation was almost a fluke of luck finding few people who cared to help liberate them. This kind of kidnapping in the north was fairly common and most did not find their way out from living in hell as slaves. These were very young children, although women and men were also victims at the time.
Darwin was another who thought as he walked, perambulating around his “sandwalk” morning and evening most days.
This one sounds interesting too (like the hare book the other day).
I recently finished “Defying Hitler” by Sebastian Haffner. It’s great, especially to get an “insider look” at early 1930s Germany.
I’m about 75% into Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance, about India, and it’s awesome.
From a layman’s perspective, I really enjoyed a recent read, “Great Adaptations: Star-Nosed Moles, Electric Eels, and Other Tales of Evolution’s Mysteries Solved,” by Kenneth Catania. I don’t suppose you’ll learn too much from it professor!
Here is an alternative perspective based upon years of research by Hans Kaufmann and Rita Wildegan regarding what happened between Van Gogh and Gauguin resulting in the cutting off of Vincent’s left ear.
Van Gogh’s Ear: The Pact of Silence
https://vangoghsear.com/
I’m a big fan of Gauguin’s work also and I saw a retrospective of his at one of the galleries here a few years ago.
Lucky he’s dead or he would have been #metoo’d into hell if he lived today.
🙂
One of the galleries here tied itself in knots, rending their garments and screaming to the heavens about the exhibit as I recall. Tiresome.
D.A.
NYC 🗽
I think my appreciation of Gaugin was badly tainted by Bernard Williams – a philosopher of morals, for god’s sake – and his argument that it was right and ethical for Gaugin to abandon his wife and children for the sake of his art. What really got my gorge up, though, was that it logically followed from William’s premise that the only thing that would have been unethical is if Gaugin’s family had succeeded in pressuring him to sacrifice his ‘life project’ for the sake of the four screaming brats he just so happened to have fathered.
Also, Gaugin is not portrayed in a terribly flattering light in the biographies I’ve read of Van Gogh or in movies.
All the same, I’m going to read that biography. Impressionism is my favorite style and era. Also, I’ve read all about Gaugin and the Yellow House from Vincent’s perspective. It’s time to hear from Paul.
As for my own reading, someone recently linked me to a BBC article about the “Top 100 books you need to read before you die,” and I discovered that I’m still 50 books short! I have to get cracking. So, I’ve just started War and Peace (yep, missed that). Next up after that is Moby Dick (ditto)…
My list isn’t from the BBC, but from a very long conversation I had with Gemini starting with my request to provide a minimum essential list of world literature. Original response had 45 titles, but I was unable to leave it alone, and have the list at 175 now (and trying to hold the line there, and not go to 200). So far (not counting the 53 I’d read before compiling the list), I’ve read The Master and Margarita, Gulliver’s Travels, and Heart of Darkness from the list, and will be finishing Hamlet soon. Up next is Kristin Lavransdatter. After that, a Korean classic, The Story of Hong Gildong. Moby-Dick and War and Peace are both on the list, of course, but (unfortunately) I can only read one classic at a time.
Thank you for the delightful piece about Gauguin. I have always enjoyed his paintings and have been privileged to see many of them in person. Now it’s time to read the new biography!
Given the abundance of fruits, taro and fresh seafood in Polynesia I am surprised that Gaugin only ate tinned food.
Thank you for your book recommendation, Jerry. I just finished another of your recommendations, Comanche history Empire of the Summer Moon. Excellent. Paul Gaugin ordered. Thanks