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Wall Street Journal

‘Wild Thing' Review: The Sorcery of Paul Gauguin

Sue Prideaux's gruesomely fascinating 'Wild Thing' begins with four teeth in a well. Local inhabitants of Hiva Oa, in French Polynesia, found them in 2000 while restoring the nearby hut in which Paul Gauguin lived. Scientific analysis proved the teeth were indeed the famed painter's. When Gauguin died in 1903, he had been on Hiva Oa for two years. All his life he had been in pursuit of wild things. Born in Paris in 1848, he had spent several childhood years with his maternal family in Lima, Peru. For the rest of his life, he would belligerently call himself 'a savage from Peru.' Gauguin always considered himself an outsider. Even while thriving as a young Parisian stockbroker, his amateur painting defied rules. In early works such as 'The Market Gardens of Vaugirard' (1879), he rejected the tight, smooth realism of Academic art and caught up with the variegated brushwork and unblended colors of his mentor, the Impressionist Camille Pissarro. Several of the core Impressionists incubated the generation after theirs, even though the post-Impressionists were moving rapidly toward distinct and remarkably individual styles. The last of the Impressionist exhibitions, held in 1886 and financed in large part by Mary Cassatt, Edgar Degas and Berthe Morisot, launched not only the career of Gauguin but also Georges Seurat, with the latter's monumental 'A Sunday on La Grande Jatte' (1886). Degas would be one of Gauguin's most stalwart collectors for the rest of his life. Post-Impressionism quickly delivered more than its fair share of images that have stayed in our collective imagination. By 1889, Vincent van Gogh, who had attended the 1886 exhibition and tried to become Gauguin's friend, had painted 'The Starry Night.'