Noble savage: Paul Gauguin

Sue Prideaux’s Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin (Norton, 401pp, £30/$40) is a lively, sympathetic and always interesting narrative, enhanced by 68 well-placed illustrations.  The author does not attempt to whitewash Gauguin, but presents new information—about his relations with Polynesian girls, medical condition and attitude toward colonialism—that makes him more appealing as a man and artist.  Now that we know more about Gauguin, museum visitors no longer have to avert their eyes (as I’ve seen them do) when rushing past his pictures.

The new-found manuscript of Avant et après (Before and After), Gauguin’s “stream-of-consciousness autobiography, part reminiscence, part wish, part fantasy, part self-mockery, part mocker of the world”, casts new light on his life and ideas. Gauguin followed the local customs during his ten years in Polynesia.  With the enthusiastic agreement of their families, he took four nubile and well-contented girls as his models and lovers (including one with a pet monkey), and had three children with them.  One of his Tahitian models never stopped chattering.  Another, with whom he fell in love, “knew instinctively when to speak to him without disturbing the creative process.”  The recent discovery of Gauguin’s teeth in the well near his house proves, after forensic analysis, that he did not have syphilis.

Gauguin’s contemporaries considered Tahiti either a paradise to be preserved from corrupting French influence, or a savage place that had recently practiced ritual murder, human sacrifice and cannibalism and had to be civilised by a European country.  Gauguin did not try to justify colonialism.  His articles in local newspapers fiercely attacked the injustice and corruption of French rule in Polynesia.

Despite her desire to do justice to Gauguin, Sue Prideaux adopts the trendy feminist and anti-colonial party line.  She mistakenly calls Gauguin’s 19th-century art dealer—who held the traditional view that the duties of women were to look after the house, be good wives and take care of the children—a misogynist.  She believes that the local sorcerer had “mighty magic and secret knowledge”, but does not explain how his mysterious powers actually worked.  She also criticizes the teaching of French that would bring Tahitians, who had no written language, into the modern world and give them greater knowledge and opportunities.

Like the rich and lean years of the biblical Joseph, Gauguin, who sailed from France when he was a year old, spent seven years in Peru and the next seven in France.  Like the young Rudyard Kipling, he was sent from an idyllic tropical landscape to urban life in Europe.  Gauguin declared: “I am a savage from Peru” with an Inca nose, but a sensitive noble savage, unspoiled by civilisation.

The captain of the ship taking them to Peru and their lecherous relative Don Pío in Lima both tried to seduce Gauguin’s mother, Aline.  But Prideaux doesn’t explain how, or if, the vulnerable widow escaped their sexual assaults.  Like Joseph Conrad, the young Gauguin joined the merchant marine; like Charles Baudelaire, Edouard Manet and Edgar Degas he widened his experience by taking a long sea voyage to distant lands.  Gauguin lived at various times in Peru, Brazil, Denmark, Panama and Martinique; and painted in Brittany, Provence, Tahiti and the Marquesas.

In Paris after his voyages, Gauguin was introduced to Mette Gad, “a tall, well-built, statuesque Danish blonde of independent views”.  Within weeks of meeting they were secretly engaged.  He was strongly attached to his wife and five children, and did not abandon his family.  When the stock market collapsed and he lost his lucrative job as a broker, he could no longer support his wife and children, and sent them back to Denmark to live with her family.  But he always hoped (in vain) to be reunited with them.

When Gauguin and his wife met briefly in Paris between his journeys, Mette was afraid of getting pregnant and refused to sleep with him.  Later on, they quarreled bitterly about money.  She sold his collection of precious paintings by other artists.  When he was desperately poor and needed his share of their inheritance from his Peruvian uncle, she again kept all the money to support herself and the children.  When his favourite child, the 19-year-old Aline, died of pneumonia, he exclaimed: “I have just lost my daughter. I no longer love God.”  While living in Polynesia, he was not told that his 21-year-old son Clovis had also died.

Gauguin had been a successful businessman, but was forced to work in many menial jobs, including pasting posters, like the hero of Vittorio de Sica’s classic film The Bicycle Thief, and digging trenches for the Panama canal.  He frequently experienced degrading poverty.  In Martinique he had to sleep on piles of seaweed instead of on a bed and suffered real starvation.  He lamented: “I’m without a penny and up to my ears in shit. . . . I’ve never been so unhappy.  I have failed to support both my vocation and my family. . . .  It has been that way my whole life; I stand on the edge of the abyss, yet I do not fall in. . . .   My god, how I rage!  It is really anger that keeps me going.”

Gauguin, whose first language was Spanish, and Van Gogh, who first spoke Dutch, conversed with each other in strongly accented French.  Both were also talented writers and corresponded frequently.  Van Gogh wanted to paint with Gauguin, as Gauguin had wanted to paint with the Impressionist Camille Pissarro.  But his cloistered time with Vincent in the Yellow House in Arles was tempestuous, and Van Gogh threatened him with an open razor just before he cut off his own ear.  Gauguin recalled, “when Van Gogh went insane, I was just about done for.”  During another violent episode, a street brawl in Brittany in the summer of 1894, Gauguin was severely beaten, had his shinbone and ankle broken, and was crippled for the rest of his life.

Wild Thing deserves high praise, but contains an astonishing number of errors.

The Statue of Liberty is 46 meters high, not eleven.  Colonial officials wore sola topees, not top hats.  Gauguin’s swarthy son Emil had a simian profile, not the face of a “stereotypical Nordic officer” Prideaux writes, “literature he consigned to the bottom of the pile,” but also says that he “would spend entire days on mountain tops reading Virgil.”  She refers to Edgar Allan Poe 20 times in this book but, except for Gauguin placing the Raven on Mallarmé’s shoulder in his portrait of the poet, never explains Poe’s influence on the painter.

She also makes serious mistakes when discussing operas and art.  Giacomo Puccini’s La Bohème has an austere setting, but does not take place in the “mouldy rat-and-cockroach-riddled flophouse immortalised in opera.”  Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata is not a “tearjerker.”  The scene between Violetta and Alfredo’s father shows her as a sympathetic and sacrificial heroine, not as a “harlot who deserves her miserable fate.”  Gauguin’s treasured Peruvian jug has the square head of a lion, not the pointed muzzle of a fox.  Degas did not, like Claude Monet, paint plein air landscapes of drifting clouds and water.  The reproduction behind the photograph of Gauguin’s stunning, sensual and gentle—not fearful—Marquesan lover is Hans Holbein’s Portrait of the Artist’s Family (1529), not Woman and Child.  Sir Joshua Reynolds’ magnificent portrait of the Tahitian Omai (1776), in flowing white robes and turban beneath a stormy sky, is certainly not “patronising and insulting”.  But it is, as she says on the same page, “the personification of noble simplicity and self-confident grandeur.”  She calls the crouching figure in The Barbarian (1902) a devil, though he has the same unusual red hair as the nude Marquesan woman in the foreground, who may have a bit of the devil in her.

Gauguin first lived in Tahiti from 1891 to 1893 and again, after his return from France, from 1895 to 1901.  He spent his last three years, from 1901 to 1903 in Marquesas, 900 miles northeast of Tahiti.  At first he was sadly disillusioned by the capital Papeete, and sought a remote part of Tahiti: “I had come this long way for the very thing I had fled from.  The dream that had brought me to Tahiti had been cruelly unmasked by actuality.”  (When I visited Tahiti in 1969, I was also disappointed by the noise and squalor of Papeete, but found my paradise on the nearby island of Moorea.)

Gauguin was self-taught, and his greatest paintings were created in the South Seas.  In industrialised 19th century Europe, he provided the visual equivalent of the paradisal visions of Herman Melville, Robert Louis Stevenson and Pierre Loti.  In Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, as in Loti’s novels, a beautiful woman in an exotic land falls in love with a European naval officer.  After he sails away and abandons her, she fades away and dies.

An art critic and contemporary of Gauguin described his exotic and stunning “tawny golds, poisonous greens, hallucinatory statuettes, sexual flowers, tempting convolutions, the whims of his imagination and the dreams of this man who had seen everything, mourned everything.”  Woman with a Flower (1891), painted with these separately defined colours, moves from the broad yellow background decorated with green leaves, to her long black parted hair, brown statue-like face, red sofa, dainty white collar, white cuffs and blue dress.

Paul Gauguin – Tahitian: Vahine no te tiare (1891)

Prideaux provides a useful summary of his talents and achievements: “Gauguin’s art was, and is, influential.  He smashed the established Western canon, ignoring rules handed down over the centuries, trading Renaissance picture-box perspective for multipoint perspective, distorting scale and privileging decorative line over believable solidity, employing colour emotionally rather than realistically and pioneering the assimilation of indigenous themes into Western art.”

Yet she seriously misinterprets Edouard Manet’s Olympia (1863), reproduced in this book.  Three sets of eyes appear—in the nude, the maid and the cat—two of them looking straight ahead.  Flowers bloom in Olympia’s hair, in her bouquet and embroidered on her bedspread.  She has a black choker around her neck, a Black maid and a black cat; a white pillow, white sheet and white paper around her bouquet.  On the left, a draped sheet falls beneath a draped green curtain.  She lives in luxurious surroundings and is presented with a bountiful gift of coloured flowers, sent by the wealthy lover who keeps her in high style and is about to appear.  Prideaux calls her a cheap “streetwalker”.  But there’s not the slightest evidence in the painting that the pampered Olympia “sells herself” and solicits customers on the pavements of the city.

Edouard Manet – Olympia (1863)

Prideaux doesn’t notice that Gauguin’s The King’s Wife (1896), set in a luxuriant tropical landscape, has precisely the same pose as Manet’s Olympia.  She is a bare-breasted reclining nude, facing the spectator, with a red fan instead of a pink flower decorating her dark hair, and a black cow instead of a Black maid.  She also holds a white shawl and covers her genitals with her left hand.

Gauguin – La donna dei manghi (1896)

Gauguin’s masterpiece Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897-98) portrays idealised languid, sensual, golden-skinned people in a harmonious and paradisal landscape with sinuous fruit trees and lush gardens.  The background has a green meadow, dark mountain, calm azure sea and nearly cloudless sky.  The painting conveys both the pleasures of an idyllic life in an innocent Eden and a vital sense of kinship, culture and religion.

Paul Gauguin – D’où venons-nous? Que sommes-nous? Où allons-nous? (1897-98)

In middle age Gauguin suffered a tornado of disease: eczema, dysentery, malaria and hepatitis; an infected suppurating leg wound, suffocating fits, lung hemorrhage and hammering heart.  His parents both died early and it’s amazing, when he lived so far from proper medical treatment, that he lasted until the age of 54.  He died of an overdose of morphine, taken to relieve the intense pain of his many illnesses.

Prideaux concludes with Gauguin’s defiant Nietzschean apologia from Avant et après: “I believe life has no meaning unless one lives it with a will, at least to the limit of one’s will.  Virtue, good, evil, are nothing but words, unless one takes them apart in order to build something with them; they do not gain their true meaning until one knows how to apply them.  To surrender oneself to the hands of one’s creator is to cancel oneself out and to die.”

Jeffrey Meyers has published five books on art: Painting and the Novel, The Enemy: A

Biography of Wyndham Lewis, Impressionist Quartet, Modigliani: A Life and Alex Colville: The Mystery of the Real.

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