This article is taken from the November 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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“Who is Gauguin?” asked Augustus Strindberg in 1895. It was a good question. Then in his late forties, Gauguin was not an artist who lent himself to categorisation. Plenty of names had been bandied around over the years. Impressionist. Post-Impressionist. Even Synthesist-Symbolist. But for Strindberg, there was only one way to describe him — “the savage”.

Strindberg wasn’t the first. As far back as 1887 — when Gauguin was just starting out — the anarchist Félix Fénéon had praised him for “his barbarism, irascibility and the force of his brushstrokes”. Nor was he the last. Soon enough, another critic, Eugène Tardieu, matter-of-factly described him as “the wildest of all the innovators” — gaily breaking with every “civilised” norm going. 

Even today, we tend to think of Gauguin in much the same terms and perhaps with good reason. Particularly in the Polynesian paintings for which he is best known, such as Manaò Tupapaù (1892), he deliberately rejected “classical” Western ideals of beauty and instead embraced a “different kind of beauty; the beauty of an indigenous people and their culture”. Bold colours clash and compete; nude, buddha-like figures inhabit strange, dream-like landscapes; mystical creatures hover into view and reality itself dissolves into a deeper, less tangible, truth. 

Gauguin’s “savagery” is not without its problems, though. Precisely because he was so preoccupied with assimilating Polynesian culture into his art, Gauguin has often been accused of rampant colonialism. As Nicholas Thomas has pointed out, he is now habitually censured for “multiple counts of cultural appropriation” — if not worse. Predictably, there has been little forgiveness in the press. Writing in Apollo earlier this year, Matthew Kelly opined that, whilst Gauguin’s paintings may be “intriguing … that doesn’t excuse his behaviour”. The New York Times even asked whether it’s time to “cancel Gauguin”. 

In this densely researched, elegantly written new biography, Sue Prideaux sets out to complicate this picture. As she admits, there couldn’t be a better time. Over the past few years, a wealth of new material has suddenly become available. The most remarkable of these is Gauguin’s Avant et après. Part memoir, part meditation, it is his most important written work. 

Since the manuscript disappeared shortly after Gauguin’s death, earlier biographers had to make do with a bowdlerised version, riddled with distortions and errors. In 2020, however, the manuscript was rediscovered, purchased by the Courtauld Gallery and made publicly available. This gives Prideaux a completely new insight into Gauguin’s “life, relationships, thoughts, fears, and beliefs” — the perfect basis, in short, on which to attempt a re-evaluation. 

And what a re-evaluation it is. Prideaux makes it abundantly clear that nothing in Gauguin’s life is simple. Right from the beginning, he was an “outsider” at heart. Born in 1848, the year of revolutions, he was the son of an anti-Bonapartist journalist and the grandson of a trailblazing feminist who befriended Karl Marx. 

He was barely more than a year old when he was whisked off to Peru in a fruitless quest to recover a family inheritance. His earliest memories were of his “great-uncle’s fortress-like palace”, of dusty afternoons and freedom. Returning to France whilst still a schoolboy, he would warn off bullies by growling: “I am a savage from Peru.” It would be the leitmotif of his life. 

An “essentially sociable introvert”, he forced himself apart from French society, joining the merchant marines, then the navy; he had taken off for Panama and Martinique long before he had even heard of Tahiti. 

Yet, at other times, Gauguin seems painfully settled, conventional — bourgeois, even. His marriage was, until quite late, the epitome of respectability. 

Although he and his Danish wife Mette lived in different countries for many years, he was remarkable for his devotion: he constantly fretted about sending her money and was always asking after the children. An early painting, Clovis Asleep (1884), for example, combines a disorienting, dream-like atmosphere with a portrait of his son shot through with a father’s tenderness.

He rarely strayed. He never liked brothels. When Van Gogh insisted they paint one in Arles, he confessed that “it isn’t my cup of tea … the low-life local colour doesn’t suit me … It’s how I was brought up and you can’t change that.” In Brittany, his fellow artists teased him about his monk-like celibacy. Only in 1891, almost six years after Mette went back to live in her native Denmark, do we get the first whiff of a mistress.

He was obsessively neat. His Self-portrait (1885) at the easel was painted in acute poverty; yet still, he looks as if he had just stopped by on his way to the office. His hair is neatly parted, his clothes carefully maintained: every inch the middle-class professional — or he would be, if it weren’t for the garret beam looming in the background. 

This is most clearly evident in Prideaux’s account of his time living with Van Gogh in Arles, perhaps the most startling and brilliantly written part of the entire book. There, Van Gogh’s chaotic ways nearly drove him mad. He hated seeing tubes of paint without their caps on and was fastidious about keeping track of his (limited) finances. He was also remarkably well-read, having a good knowledge of Latin and Greek. He loved music and — most unexpectedly — had a fascination with Wagner. 

Even more complex is Gauguin’s relationship with Polynesia. Of course, Prideaux does not deny that he was a man of his time. The image of Polynesian culture he attempted to portray in his art was just that — an image. He was keenly aware that, when he first set off for Tahiti in 1891, he had in mind only what he had read in Pierre Loti’s romantic adventures and the French government’s rose-tinted literature for prospective expatriates. 

Nor did he hide his disappointment when the reality failed to live up to his expectations. Beyond the trees, he saw “a landscape of loneliness and submission”. Even during his second visit to Polynesia, when he should have known better, he was constantly looking for something that lived up to his impression of whatever the opposite of “civilisation” was.

Not that he had any intention of seeing the local population as his equals even there. His language retained a whiff of condescension; his attitude a certain aloofness. Setting off for Hiva Oa in September 1901, six years after returning to Tahiti, he described his destination as “a still almost cannibalistic island” where he hoped to find “in savage surroundings, complete solitude … before I die”. 

He wasn’t above a bit of casual racism either. In a vicious speech against Chinese shopkeepers — “worthy,” Prideaux notes, “of Donald Trump” — he admitted that “[t]his yellow blot on our country’s flag makes me blush with shame”. 

But Gauguin was also ferociously anti-colonialist. As Prideaux points out, the rediscovered manuscript of Avant et après rails against the abuses of French colonial government and preserves many of the letters he wrote “fighting for the native Polynesians’ rights”. True, he still assumed that the local people needed a white “saviour” like him to fight for them; but the fact of his campaigning nevertheless remains.

Despite his increasingly frail health, he founded his own newspaper and wrote scathing articles for the opposition magazine Les Guêpes. He acted on behalf of Polynesians in the courts during a bitter dispute over land rights; he attacked lazy and corrupt local gendarmes and he thoroughly enjoyed annoying the local administrators. 

So who is Gauguin? Prideaux does not give a definite answer — and wisely so. She paints him as an infinitely more complex and subtle figure than either his modern critics or his contemporary defenders would allow. Savage is going too far; but perhaps Prideaux is right that “wild” is nearer the mark. 

Not wild in the sense of uncivilised. Nothing so crude as that. Rather, wild in the sense of growing untended — of a rough seed, roaming far and wide, yearning for the true, yet somehow never finding it; a peregrinus ubique, an artist without a home, a man without a singular identity. 

In Prideaux’s telling, he is far from straightforward. He is challenging, unsettling and painfully elusive. He slips from our grasp at every turn. But that, in a sense, is Prideaux’s achievement. Her magnificent, captivating biography offers the most compelling portrait of Gauguin to date — and yet leaves us wondering if anyone will ever truly know him. Who is Gauguin indeed?