Wild thing: a life of Paul Gauguin

Abstract

"A vital re-examination of the trailblazing and controversial artist Paul Gauguin - and the first full biography in over thirty years - written by the award-winning author of I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Nietzsche. Paul Gauguin is chiefly known as the giant of post-Impressionist painting whose bold colours and compositions rocked the Western art world. It is less well known that he was a stockbroker in Paris and that after the 1882 financial crash he struggled to sustain his artistry, and worked as a tarpaulin salesman in Copenhagen, a canal digger in Panama City, and a journalist exposing the injustices of French colonial rule in Tahiti. In Wild Thing, the award-winning biographer Sue Prideaux re-examines the adventurous and complicated life of the artist. She illuminates the people, places and ideas that shaped his vision: his privileged upbringing in Peru and rebellious youth in France; the galvanising energy of the Paris art scene; meeting Mette, the woman who he would marry; formative encounters with Vincent van Gogh and August Strindberg; and the ceaseless draw of French Polynesia. Prideaux conjures Gauguin's visual exuberance, his creative epiphanies, his fierce words and his flaws with acuity and sensitivity. Drawing from a wealth of new material and access to the artist's family, this myth-busting work invites us to see Gauguin anew"--Publisher's description.

Contents

List of illustrations -- Preface -- Revolution Road -- "I am a savage from Peru" -- Outsider -- Becoming -- Impressionism and bourgeois bliss -- Lost -- Evolution of a dream -- "I 've never painted so clearly" -- Vincent. "My God, what a day!!" -- March of science -- Throw of the dice -- Poisoned paradise -- Tehamana -- "I hate nudity, the halfway" -- Pent up in Paris -- Return to Taihiti -- Reinventions -- Koke -- Barefoot lawyer -- Acknowledgements -- Select Bibliography -- Notes -- Permission credits -- Index.