Is it time to uncancel Gauguin?

Boston Globe

13-05-2025

Gauguin's reputation did not have far to fall. Already, he'd scandalized the art world with his depictions of canonical Christian icons — Eve, the Virgin Mary, the Christ child — as contemporary Polynesians. He'd been arrested — briefly — on suspicion of having murdered his troubled friend Vincent Van Gogh (who had, in fact, severed his own ear, leaving a bloody mess the police mistook for a murder scene). And he'd long since abandoned his wife and their five children to live in service to his twin callings: making art and chasing an Arcadian dream.
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Redemption came in 1917 when Edgar Degas, an early champion and avid collector of Gauguin's work, died. The sales of Degas's vast collection of Gauguins in 1918 and 1919 sparked a triumphant reappraisal of Gauguin's work. Matisse swooned over and adopted Gauguin's emotion-driven, imaginative use of color. Picasso thrilled to Gauguin's exotic figures and was inspired to travel to Africa in search of unconventional subjects of his own.
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But if Gauguin's work had at last won him a place among Europe's big men on canvas, unsavory insinuations clung to his legacy as a man. Even artistic genius can't undo the stain of being viewed as a pedophile sex tourist, a libertine colonizer spreading louche morals — and syphilis — through the South Seas. As recently as last summer, a sprawling Gauguin exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia was plagued by controversy for soft-pedaling the artist's misdeeds — colonialist exploitation, taking child brides — in the Marquesas Islands.
Sue Prideaux's new biography of French artist Paul Gauguin relies on newly discovered material that recasts his legacy in a less damning light.
W. W. Norton & Co.
How unexpected, then, that in this time of looking through parted fingers at the art of terrible men, of grappling with whether or not we can separate the masterpiece from the monster, comes a new official account that invites us to reconsider everything we thought we knew about Gauguin. We might even call it an uncanceling.
Sue Prideaux is a biographer of Friedrich Nietzsche and Edvard Munch. Now, to her other lives of complicated men she has added 'Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin,' a biography that mines new source material to deliver something previous accounts have lacked: Gauguin's side of the story. I spoke with Prideaux from her home in London. Our conversation has been edited and condensed.
What compelled you to write a biography of Paul Gauguin?
I was coming out of my biography of Nietzsche when, in 2019, London's National Gallery put on an exhibition of Gauguin's portraits. And it was the absolute height of cancel culture, and there was a great furor around that show. People were calling for him to be canceled and for his paintings to be burned because of his interest in young girls and because he apparently spread syphilis throughout the Polynesian islands. So I, being sort of in a philosophical mood, thought, well, I've always adored Gauguin's paintings. But it's certainly not good enough to love the paintings and hate the man. So let's do a bit of exploration.
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What did you discover?
In 2000, the mayor on the island of Hiva Oa had decided to build a replica of Gauguin's bamboo hut that he lived in for the last three years of his life. When they were excavating Gauguin's well, they found a glass jar with four human teeth in it. Those teeth were analyzed by the Human Genome Project at [the University of] Cambridge. Long story short, they turned out definitely to be Gauguin's. They then went on a trip through laboratories, being analyzed for cadmium, mercury, and arsenic — what people were given to treat syphilis. No traces were found. So that kind of set me off. I thought:
No syphilis? Gosh
.
What else don't we know?
And then a remarkable bit of literary serendipity followed just a year later. What happened?
Gauguin, in his last three years, had written this wonderful manuscript — 200 pages, lots of pictures — and he called it '
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I was surprised to read that Gauguin had an almost Rousseauian early life in Peru. You call it 'the lost beatitude' he would seek all his life and find only once he landed in Tahiti. Why were those years in Peru key to the man he would become?
Gauguin is 2½, 3 years old, and his mother and his sister — his father died during the voyage — arrived in Peru to live with his mother's uncle, who had been a governor and lived in this incredible, huge palace. And then you look out the window and there's a line of volcanoes erupting from time to time. And he plays in the jungle, barefoot, with jaguars.
But suddenly, when he's 7 years old, his mother decides that he must learn to read and write and she takes him back to France, and he goes to school and he can't speak French. He is rather small for his age and swarthy-looking and the other boys bully and tease him. And he puts up his fists and he says, 'I am a savage from Peru!' And from then on, he says 'I have two natures, the civilized and the savage.'
That duality is a through-line in Gauguin's biography. So is his early education — Greek tragedies, Roman histories. He learns to 'question everything.' How do we see that in his work?
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Really he challenges the whole canon upon which the idea of white Western 'civilized' assumptions was founded, so that on his arrival in Tahiti, one of the first pictures he painted, 'Ia Orana Maria' ['Hail Mary,' 1891], showed a brown-skinned Tahitian Virgin Mary carrying a brown-skinned Tahitian Christ child, and he shocked the white-skinned world.
He was called blasphemous when that painting made its debut. More recently, he has been accused of cultural appropriation. You say he was ahead of his time?
He was indeed. And as I say in the book, it's only in 1951 that there was a papal encyclical that permitted the depiction of the holy family as nonwhite. And there's Gauguin doing it in 1891, saying, you know, we're all brothers, we're all part of this universality.
Paul Gauguin, "Ia orana Maria," ("Hail Mary"), 1891.
W. W. Norton & Co.
Gauguin's views about women were not at all what I thought they would be. In Brittany, he meets a smitten young female painter. Instead of taking her to bed, he writes her a letter offering some advice: Earn your own living. Don't rely on a man. Am I right to trace a line from his notions about women's autonomy and worth to his grandmother and mother?
You are absolutely right. His grandmother was Flora Tristan [the proto-feminist French-Peruvian writer and activist, a survivor of domestic abuse, who fought for women's progress]. He kept Flora's published works with him all his life. They were very, very precious to him. And then his mother is widowed on the voyage to Peru, yet on she goes. She could have stayed there, but no, no, no, she knew that life must be forged, and back she went to France with her two children. She was a very brave woman and very artistic, tasteful, civilized. She took her Peruvian ceramics and artifacts back with her and really made Paris interested in pre-Columbian art, which was extraordinary. So yes, this incredibly strong grandmother, an incredibly strong mother. Lucky man. How could he not realize that women are just as good as men?
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Their influence shows in his choice of a wife. Mette Gauguin was strong, opinionated, independent. That must have rung some bells for him?
Absolutely. I'm pleased you picked up on all that because I think it's pretty cool, really. Mette's independence shocked Gauguin's friends. That he let her have such freedom. But in 'Avant et Après,' he writes that society's most appalling theft from women, apart from taking from them the right to develop their gifts and talents, was the fact of their forced material dependency on men.
Yet he left Mette and their kids in Copenhagen to go paint wilder shores in Brittany and, later, French Polynesia. Just when I'm relieved to find he's more sympathetic than I thought, I think he must also have been impossible to live with.
Absolutely. I think both things are completely true.
OK, but how to reconcile the side of Gauguin that valued women's freedom and equality with the 40-something version of himself taking pubescent lovers in Tahiti?
His reputation as a pedophile, to put it bluntly? Well, of course if you go into the age of consent in France and the colonies at the time, the age of consent was 13, which is pretty average for the world. In the United States, it was between 10 and 12 depending on the state. And as I came to the end of writing the book in June 2023, Japan raised the age of consent from 13. This is all very horrifying and not something I approve of or like in any way. But what it does show is that Gauguin was not doing anything unusual or illegal within the historical context. And in fact he was quite appalled to learn that the Polynesians did not view women as equals. They were not even considered worthy of human sacrifice.
What about this idea of Gauguin as the worst kind of colonialist? You write that in 'Avant et Après,' Gauguin 'excoriates colonialism.' How so?
It's the most extraordinary story, really. He wrote a letter to the paper in Tahiti complaining about the French governor's corruption and oppression, and that got him employed by the paper. He wrote many political articles, which he illustrated most wonderfully. And then it all became rather serious on Tahiti when he wrote to Paris charging the governor with corruption. Gauguin knew that if the matter went to court, he'd lose because the colonial courts were corrupt. And that was when he took the 500-mile journey to the island of Hiva Oa as a refugee, whereupon arriving he was greeted as a celebrity, not for his art, because they really didn't know or care about it, but as a political journalist. And it went on from there, with his urging the Polynesians not to pay their taxes and fighting on their behalf with the colonialist authorities.
There is a touching coda to Gauguin's friendship with Vincent Van Gogh that I want to end on, because I believe it reveals something important about Gauguin. First, how did those two become friends?
Vincent saw Gauguin's Martinique paintings and became terribly enthusiastic about painting with Gauguin, and they exchanged portraits the way that painters did in those days, which is a lovely thing. And Vincent wanted Gauguin to live with him in Arles in what he called the Studio of the South.
Vincent Van Gogh's "Self-Portrait Dedicated to Paul Gauguin," 1888.
W. W. Norton & Co.
I had no idea that Van Gogh painted his sunflower series — a dozen paintings in all — over just five days, in a frenzy of anticipation for Gauguin's arrival. What did you learn about their time together?
They spent nine weeks in the yellow house in Arles, just the two of them painting away. Their painting progressed most wonderfully. Vincent had this wonderful collection of Japanese prints that they both used to look at in the evening, and they would go out and they would paint the same subject together and they would learn from each other's interpretation of the subject. But unfortunately poor Vincent's mind was getting worse and worse. And of course it culminated in the terrible evening after Vincent's brother Theo, an art dealer in Paris, told Vincent that he was getting engaged, and Vincent felt very lost because without his brother, who would look after him?
Gauguin and Vincent went down to the pub that night, and Vincent pursued Gauguin with a knife, which rather frightened Gauguin, who spent that last night in a hotel because he feared that Vincent would attack him again. And when he woke up the following morning, going back to the yellow house to pick up his luggage to leave, he found the place surrounded by a crowd. And the chief of police, a little man in a bowler hat, said, 'What have you done to your friend? You've killed him.' And Gauguin was arrested. But they went into the yellow house, and Gauguin describes the floor covered in wet towels that were pink from mopping up blood. Gauguin said, 'Let's go upstairs and see,' and that is when they discovered that Vincent was in fact still alive and just had cut off his ear.
They never see each other again. Poor old Vincent shoots himself in 1890. But then, 10 years later, when Gauguin is back in Tahiti, he sends to Paris for sunflower seeds. They didn't grow sunflowers in the islands. They still don't grow out there. But Gauguin grew them and brought them to flower and painted them on a chair 'in memory,' he wrote, 'of my gentle friend Vincent.'
Paul Gauguin, "Sunflowers on a Chair," 1901.
W. W. Norton & Co.
Kelly Horan is the deputy editor of Ideas. She can be reached at