Wild Thing
A Life of Paul Gauguin
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $26.99
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- $26.99
Publisher Description
One of The New York Times 10 Best Books of 2025
One of The New Yorker's Top Books of 2025
One of Vogue's Best Books of 2025
Oe of the Wall Street Journal's Best Books of the Year
One of the New York Public Library's Best Books of 2025
One of the Chicago Public Library's Best Books of 2025
Shortlisted for the 2024 Baillie Gifford Prize
Shortlisted for the 2025 American Library in Paris Book Award
Longlisted for the 2025 National Book Critics Circle Awards
An original and revealing portrait of the misunderstood French Post-Impressionist artist.
Paul Gauguin’s legend as a transgressive genius arises as much from his biography as his aesthetically daring Polynesian paintings. Gauguin is chiefly known for his pictures that eschewed convention, to celebrate the beauty of an indigenous people and their culture. In this gorgeously illustrated, myth-busting work, Sue Prideaux reveals that while Gauguin was a complicated man, his scandalous reputation is largely undeserved.
Self-taught, Gauguin became a towering artist in his brief life, not just in painting but in ceramics and graphics. He fled the bustle of Paris for the beauty of Tahiti, where he lived simply and worked consistently to expose the tragic results of French Colonialism. Gauguin fought for the rights of Indigenous people, exposing French injustices and corruption in the local newspaper and acting as advocate for the Tahitian people in the French colonial courts. His unconventional career and bold, breathtaking art influenced not only Vincent van Gogh, but Matisse and Picasso.
Wild Thing upends much of what we thought we knew about Gauguin through new primary research, including the resurfaced manuscript of Gauguin’s most important writing, the untranslated memoir of Gauguin’s son, and a sample of Gauguin’s teeth that disproves the pernicious myth of his syphilis. In the first full biography of Paul Gauguin in thirty years, Sue Prideaux illuminates the extraordinary oeuvre of a visionary artist vital to the French avant-garde. The result is “a brilliantly readable and compassionate study of Gauguin—not just as a painter, sculptor, carver and potter, but as a human soul perpetually searching for what is always just out of reach” (Artemis Cooper, Spectator).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Biographer Prideaux (I Am Dynamite!) presents a sympathetic portrait of 19th-century post-impressionist painter Paul Gauguin. Born in 1848 France, Gauguin spent much of his childhood in Peru, where his anti-Bonapartist parents had fled threats of government persecution. As an adult, he burned through a series of jobs—merchant marine, stock trader—before discovering painting from impressionists exhibiting in Paris. The author depicts her subject as a perennial outsider who spent much of his life wandering the world in pursuit of artistic success, from Panama during the digging of the canal, to Arles, where Van Gogh attempted to enlist him in plans to form a "Studio of the South," to Tahiti—where Gaugin painted his "mythical and monumental" 1898 work Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, which interwove "Polynesian, classical and Christian references" and inspired Pablo Picasso to explore African art, from which cubism evolved. Prideaux draws heavily on Gauguin's own writings, including a recently discovered autobiography, to draw a rich psychological portrait that is buttressed by abundant historical detail. It makes for a revealing window into an unique artistic mind. Illus.
