Turning Savage to Create a New World

Sarah Moorhouse reads Sue Prideaux’s “Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin.”

By Sarah MoorhouseJune 2, 2025

• Art & Architecture

• Biography & Autobiography

IN W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM’s 1919 novel The Moon and Sixpence, Paul Gauguin—veiled under the name Charles Strickland—is mythologized as art history’s ultimate scoundrel. According to Maugham’s telling, “Strickland” was a singularly unfeeling man who thought nothing of deserting the people who loved him. Having forged a stable career as a stockbroker and raised two children with his loving wife, he vanishes for Paris, taking his friend’s wife as a mistress, and sets out to become the greatest painter of his age. Disgusted by conventionality, Strickland seeks a more “authentic” existence in communion with nature; this, he feels, will allow him to paint properly. He then deserts Europe for Tahiti, where, after marrying a teenage local, he achieves artistic triumph before suffering a horrible, prolonged death: penance for his sins, perhaps.

In life as in fiction, Gauguin operated as he painted—outlandishly. Typically, statements about the artist’s shocking actions (he abandoned his family for Tahiti, he had affairs with pubescent girls) precede discussions of his art. In conversation, he’s often reduced to a sound bite, like Vincent van Gogh, the one who cut off his ear. The Moon and Sixpence ventures an explanation for this phenomenon: “To my mind,” Maugham declares at the outset, “the most interesting thing in art is the personality of the artist.” People, he insists, hold a “craving for the extraordinary”; our imaginations latch on to scandal, and the more outrageous an artist’s life, the surer their “passport to immortality,” as Maugham describes it.

Of course, Maughan’s novel shouldn’t be read as a reliable record of the facts. He adjusted the circumstances of, for example, the artist’s abandonment of his family to create a portrait of what The Guardian, in a review of The Moon and Sixpence from May 2, 1919, characterized as the “pure selfishness which is sometimes supposed to produce great art.” But the myths about Gauguin’s character perpetuated by Maugham have proved hard for subsequent biographers to shift. In his 1995 biography, Paul Gauguin: A Complete Life, David Sweetman attempted to soften the artist’s caddish reputation, suggesting that, rather than Gauguin abandoning his family, it was his wife who cast him off, and that the painter spent his subsequent career tortured by regret about the people and places he left behind.

Still, straightforward badness is more memorable than ambiguity. The idea that Gauguin was a terrible person has only gained traction in recent years: he’s a ripe target for cancel culture, with its contention that, previously issued passports to immortality be damned, we might be best off avoiding the work of morally questionable artists altogether. In Monsters: What Do We Do with Great Art by Bad People? (2023), Clare Dederer delivers a scathing assessment of Gauguin. Asserting that “the stain is indelible in this one,” she presents his affairs with young Tahitian girls as “an act of sexual colonization that he himself was only too happy to mythologize.”

Like Maugham, Dederer suggests that we can only see Gauguin’s art through the lens of his scandalous life. To Dederer, this makes him one of her book’s eponymous “monsters”: a term she assigns to artists from Woody Allen to Richard Wagner, those “whose behavior disrupts our ability to apprehend the work on its own terms.” But she also claims that Gauguin was “like a savant of image creation—he conflated his life story with his paintings.” If Dederer is right, and Gauguin wanted us to make the “conflation” she herself performs elsewhere, then how do we approach an artist whose work isn’t so much “stained” as it is intentionally saturated with the identity of its creator? What might it mean to try, in however “disrupted” a way, to apprehend Gauguin’s work on its own terms?

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Enter Sue Prideaux, with her aptly titled Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin (released in September last year in the United Kingdom and out this spring in the United States). Using new primary research—including the resurfaced 213-page manuscript of Avant et après, which Gauguin completed during the last two years of his life; an untranslated memoir by Gauguin’s son; and a sample of Gauguin’s teeth that casts doubt on the rumor that syphilis killed him—the award-winning British biographer has set out to dispel the myths, both heroizing and punitive, swirling around Gauguin’s name and work. Straightforward badness may be a convenient label but, for Prideaux, it isn’t fit for purpose. From the outset, she contends that “the recent appearance of so much new material coinciding with contemporary debate around his troubling reputation made it seem important to re-examine Gauguin’s life: not to condemn, not to excuse, but simply to shed new light on the man and the myth.”

The resulting book is, in its measured approach, essentially sympathetic to its subject. Over 19 chronologically arranged chapters that seamlessly weave together biography with visual analysis, Prideaux makes a convincing case that both the artist and his art deserve revisiting. Her argument benefits from the inclusion of beautifully printed images: reproductions (dispersed throughout the text) that allow us to follow the development of Gauguin’s paintings, from the early portraits of his wife Mette and son Clovis to the depictions of Tahitian women and landscapes completed during the last 20 years of his life (and which have become his most famous works). In The Moon and Sixpence, the artist’s paintings are of significance because they “suggest a personality which is strange, tormented, and complex.” Prideaux’s biography presents life and art as inextricable, yes—but also of equal interest. With her as guide, we recognize that, regardless of whether it was the “right” thing to do, relinquishing his family in Europe enabled Gauguin to evolve from an amateur painter to one of the most compelling artists of his age.

Similarly, though Gauguin’s subsequent marriage to the 13-year-old Tehamana is outrageous to a modern sensibility, Prideaux argues that the relationship “released a great flood of creativity,” compelling him to create masterpieces such as the unsettling 1892 painting Manaò tupapaú (Spirit of the Dead Watching). Moreover, Tehamana was technically of legal age when she married him at 13. Prideaux is careful to acknowledge Tehemana’s status as a “double victim,” trafficked to Gauguin by her own family. Still, in pointing out the ordinariness of such an arrangement in Tahiti at that time, Prideaux provides important context (if not exculpation).

For Prideaux, Gauguin’s discovery of Tahiti in 1891 was essential because it represented a return to the “tropical Illyria” of his early childhood. She outlines how, a year after his birth in 1848, Gauguin’s anti-Bonapartist family fled France for Peru to live among his mother’s relatives. There, the young Gauguin led a “Rousseauian childhood.” In the newly recovered Avant et après, Gauguin recalls how he “ran free” in “that delicious country, where it never rains.” This period, during which he received no formal schooling, offered the boy “a series of strange dreamlike experiences”; the rules of civilized life did not apply. After Gauguin returned to “ghost-grey” France at the age of seven, Prideaux tells us,

he […] never ceased to yearn for the lost beatitude, the harsh, primitive place which had given him what he referred to as “the dream,” an enduring vision of a spiritual world pervading the material world: the place he would seek all his life, and would believe he had found when he at last reached Tahiti.

Such “beatitude,” of course, existed primarily in the artist’s imagination. Reality itself was deeply blemished; the family kept slaves in the household, and throughout their time in Peru, Gauguin’s mother Aline was engaged in a frustrating battle over an inheritance that was being denied her. Yet for a young Gauguin, all of that was relegated to a hazy periphery. The bucolic scenes he went on to paint, such as 1896’s Nave Nave Mahana (“Delicious Days”), suggest an attempt to recapture not only the beautiful landscape of his childhood but also the untroubled perspective that characterized it.

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What is art if not a way of recasting the world the way one wants, however selfishly, to see it? In painting, Gauguin could omit or adjust the stains of reality to suggest “a spiritual world pervading the material world.” In her chapters about Gauguin’s early, unguided experiments painting his family in Paris and his ill-fated stay with van Gogh in Arles in 1888, Prideaux succeeds in chronicling an artist’s attention: what it includes as well as, crucially, what it leaves out.

Particularly compelling is her comparison of the work that Gauguin and van Gogh did while staying together (which culminated, as Prideaux describes with flair, in the infamous loss of van Gogh’s ear). Even when the two artists shared a subject, the results were utterly distinct. Gauguin’s Night Café, Arles (1888) and van Gogh’s The Night Café (1888) both depict a local brothel. Gauguin, who was “apprehensive” about painting such a scene, makes his work a portrait of the proprietor, Madame Ginoux, who looks, as Prideaux puts it, “mellow and a little squiffy.” Drifts of smoke “curl lightly across the canvas,” abstracting it: “Might everything be happening in Madame Ginoux’s head?” Prideaux wonders.

Van Gogh’s version, meanwhile, lacks a single focal point. His composition leaves “nowhere for the eye to rest,” exemplifying a style that was growing “more vivid, more hectic,” as the artist’s mental state unraveled. Prideaux has a gift for illustrating the intricacies of an artist’s perspective: Gauguin’s controlled, van Gogh’s frenetic. For Prideaux, the characteristic feature of Gauguin’s style is his prioritization of inner states alongside the external: “[H]e would always scorn people who elevated the realm of sight above the mysterious realm of thought and memory.” But thought and sight are, for a painter, sides of the same coin. Details like the wisp of smoke above Madame Ginoux’s hair, a halo above the artist’s head in his Self-Portrait with Halo and Snake (1889), and the “red and yellow colour planes divided horizontally” in the background of the 1891 portrait Vahine no te tiare (Woman with a Flower) suggest an approach to painting unconcerned by the slavish description of appearances, but rather invested in expressing, as Gauguin himself put it, “the glowing wealth of latent forces.” In the brothel as outdoors, the artist took from the scene only what caught his eye.

For Gauguin, convention and realism were thereby incompatible with his vision of a spiritual world pervading the material world. He rebelled as much on the canvas as in life. By developing techniques such as, according to Prideaux, a “shocking use of colour, reverberant luminosity, and the weird geometry of his deliberately unrealistic scale, suggestive of the distortion of dreams,” Gauguin “upset the classical vision” of Western art. Indeed, the prospect of disapproval energized him. In Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, a monumental frieze he painted after a period of illness and depression in 1897–8, Gauguin injects the Garden of Eden with a host of non-European references, such as a Moche dog/fox and a mummy figure from Peruvian mythology. The result was a deliberate provocation to the establishment. Declares the eloquent Prideaux: “Wildness, anarchy, chance and lust have entered Eden,” creating a vision that is “powerful in alien, mystical spirituality.”

Today, Gauguin shocks for different reasons: his detractors might claim that his freewheeling use of Polynesian culture amounts to a colonial ransacking. It’s more complex than that, says Prideaux: Gauguin was fiercely opposed to the injustices of French colonial rule in Tahiti. And it’s hard not to admire the results of his exuberant mixing of cultures—the vitality of it, the dangerousness of it. Prideaux is persuasive in her narrative of an artist who dismissed rules in his quest to create paintings that would recapture the “chosen land” of his childhood, a land that, “unsmudged by civilised accretions,” was “untouched by too much reality.” In other words, to dismiss Gauguin’s work as “stained” would be to lose a record of distinct periods, places, and attitudes—to say nothing of their beautiful transmutation through a singular, albeit tormented and complex, imagination.

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Toward the end of the biography, Prideaux discusses the painter’s friendship with the playwright August Strindberg. In 1895, Gauguin asked Strindberg to write a preface for a catalog of the sale of his paintings to raise funds for his return to Polynesia. The writer took on the challenge but did not write the “expected encomium.” Instead, Strindberg wrote, “I cannot understand your art and cannot like it. […] [Y]ou have created a new earth and a new heaven, but I do not feel easy in your new universe.” Yet at the end of the preface, Strindberg admitted: “I, too, begin to feel a great need to turn savage and make a new world.”

Strindberg’s words not only reflect the complexity of Gauguin’s work and world; they also anticipate Prideaux’s own project. To appreciate Gauguin’s work, we don’t need to like it or, indeed, him. In any case, liking is too tame a word: to experience his paintings is to enter his “dream,” to feast on a riot of color and symbol and feeling. The price of doing so is to set aside reservations and to accept that Gauguin painted on his terms, not ours. He’s not an easy artist. Yet he’s a great one. His paintings offer suggestive sites of engagement with his moral shortcomings; they also (to use an unfashionable word) transcend them. Prideaux’s biography is a remarkable, important portrait of a career pursued in defiance of convention: fertile conditions for wrongdoing, yes, but also for a disturbing, thrilling—yes, even transcendent—vision.