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Sydney Morning Herald
6 days ago
- Politics
- Sydney Morning Herald
She was the face of Picasso's Weeping Woman. But there was more to Dora Maar than a woman crushed
A notable surrealist photographer and painter in her own right, Dora Maar is best remembered for her eight-year relationship with Pablo Picasso. Often regarded as a muse to Picasso's genius, Maar modelled for many of the artist's anguished 'weeping women' portraits, painted while he created his anti-fascist masterpiece, Guernica. Yet, Paris-born Maar also painted Picasso, transforming him into her subject and similarly distorting his features. 'What most people also don't realise is that Maar was a radical, subversive and respected artist before she met Picasso,' says David Greenhalgh, the National Gallery of Australia's expert on international art. 'Her photography, her politics and her Surrealist provocations challenged Picasso.' Maar's artistic legacy is highlighted alongside Picasso's in the National Gallery of Australia's blockbuster Cézanne to Giacometti: Highlights from Museum Berggruen/ Neue Nationalgalerie which runs until September. The exhibition draws from the extraordinary collection of art dealer Heinz Berggruen, who, after World War II, established a small gallery on Paris's Left Bank and collected avant-garde works. The exhibition will feature some 100 major works by six modern masters – Picasso, Paul Klee, Georges Braque, Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, and Alberto Giacometti. These will be shown with 75 works from the National Gallery's collection to demonstrate the revolutionaries' influence on Australia's leading artists. The exhibition notably features works by Maar, with whom Berggruen felt a particular affinity, perhaps due to his empathy for her tragic life and tumultuous, ultimately destructive relationship with Picasso. 'She never quite recovered from her separation with Picasso, and turned away from her great talent as a photographer and a painter,' Berggruen's son Nicolas says. Long-overdue credit finally came to Maar with a 2019 retrospective of her work at Tate Modern, part of an international curatorial effort to reframe collections with greater biographical honesty. This move followed the highlighting of Cézanne's muse, Hortense Fiquet, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Madame Cézanne exhibition five years earlier. Cézanne to Giacometti offers another important opportunity, says co-curator Deirdre Cannon, to examine who these women painted by the modernists were and their true role in the creation of the art. Maar's most striking photograph, Portrait of Ubu – an extreme close-up of an armadillo fetus – will hang alongside four other works by her. Her 1936 pastel of Picasso similarly depicts her lover in a fractured, Cubist-inspired style, emphasising his wide cat's eyes, moustache, distinctive nose, and wide mouth in cool green shades, all composed like an inverted comma. 'We acknowledge now that artists do not work in a vacuum, and the idea of the sole, primarily male genius making art from god-given talent or through an act of divine intervention has been repudiated for a long time now,' Cannon says. 'This has included a reappraisal of the subjectivity of the muse. These individuals, often artists in their own right, influenced other aspects of artists' practice and personal lives.' The concept of the muse dates back to Greek mythology, where nine sister goddesses, daughters of Zeus, served as patrons of the arts. Homer himself invoked these ethereal women of divine inspiration to narrate the tales of Achilles and Odysseus in The Iliad. Later, masters from Raphael to Rembrandt embraced the muse as an object of beauty, personifying their creative expression. In the 19th century, model Elizabeth Siddal embodied the ideal of virginal beauty and rectitude in John Everett Millais's Ophelia, leading the BBC to describe her as art's greatest supermodel. 'Often, those identified as muses are depicted in a very idealised manner and described in literature as having striking physical attributes or a distinctive presence,' Cannon says. 'Or, in the case of an artist like Picasso, their likenesses are rearranged and experimented with in pursuit of breaking new artistic ground. Traditional understandings of the muse involve feminine subservience to the creative will of men. 'The term itself has specific connotations that prompt reflection on the role of inspiration in visual art.' Among European modernists, Cézanne's radical yet doubt-laden experiments in colour and composition were the first to challenge accepted artistic ideas of the figurative form, emboldening generations of subsequent artists. 'Every artist in Cézanne to Giacometti is linked in a huge genealogy or family tree of influence, as they found inspiration in each other's example,' says Greenhalgh. 'In a sense, the 'muse' we investigate is how artists inspire each other.' Cézanne's model across two decades of often plodding experimentation was Hortense Fiquet, the mother of his only son, Paul, whom he first met in 1869 when she was a 19-year-old model. Among the works on display in Cézanne to Giacometti are one of 29 paintings and four of the approximately 50 drawings he made of Fiquet, including Portrait of Madame Cézanne (c. 1885). Her inscrutable expression has led historians to suggest emotional distance between the pair or to interpret it as evidence of Fiquet's dour character. British critic Roger Fry even described her as 'that sour bitch,' and her husband's friends nicknamed her 'La Boule' (French for 'the ball'). However, Greenhalgh argues that characterising muses like Fiquet as 'crones' or Maar as 'unstable' is simply an example of misogyny. 'But we must remember that history is a discourse, and that we can always see things from new perspectives.' Context is everything. Cézanne and Fiquet lived an unconventional life; she resided in cosmopolitan Paris while the artist painted the Provence countryside. Their relationship was characterised by social and financial inequality, common in many marriages of the period. They only married to secure his family's inheritance. 'Cézanne was incredibly slow when he painted, and it is thought that this was because he doubted everything he created,' Greenhalgh says. 'It drove his sitters crazy, as they had to pose motionless for a dozen hours each day, sometimes for hundreds of sittings, only for him to abandon the painting. 'There are letters that demonstrate Fiquet's supportive business dealings to try and sell Cézanne's work, but the most direct and simple evidence we have of her importance to his practice is that she sat for Cézanne's paintings time and time again, and that to me is a demonstration of their love for one another.' European art history is full of stories where the female perspective is hidden or missing, says artist Natasha Walsh. At best, the women subjects are frequently depicted either as passive vehicles for the artist's talent or in an exploitative and violent manner. 'When artists are painting, they are painting their own perception,' Walsh says. 'It's only problematic when the muse exists solely in the context of the artist, when we look at it as a child does, only within the frame.' Walsh is one of several contemporary artists who are reimagining the portrayal of the female sitter. Instead of a passive subject, these artists seek to show the creative insight originating from the female subject herself, or through a collaborative, reciprocal exchange between the artist and their subject. As a teenage art student, Walsh often faced requests to sit for male painters, which she declined. She recalls one artist advising her to agree soon, 'as if my worth were reduced to solely my physical appearance and my value was temporary and fleeting'. In her series Hysteria, Walsh challenged the male gaze by reinterpreting Gustav Klimt's 1907 painting Danaë, which romanticised an ancient Greek myth of rape. Reimagining herself as the mother of Perseus, she painted her eyes actively gazing back at the viewer – Klimt painted them closed – and vanished Zeus's impregnating shower of 'golden rain' that glossed over rape in the original painting. Walsh has since painted fashion duo Nicol and Ford in the likeness of 16th-century Gabrielle d'Estrées and one of her sisters. It was a finalist in the 2024 Archibald Prize. Walsh has continued to reinterpret art history, painting fashion duo Nicol and Ford in the likeness of the 16th-century Gabrielle d'Estrées and One of Her Sisters (a finalist in the 2024 Archibald Prize). She also depicted musician Montaigne as Medusa, and posed artist Atong Atem as Matisse's Yellow Odalisque, shifting the focus to Atem's African heritage. Walsh collaborated with writer Bri Lee on a collage of Picasso nudes, created in the Brett Whiteley studio. Their aim was to reimagine a nude free from Picasso's gaze, depicting the figure in an act of self-pleasure. Lee later posed for Walsh's Hysteria exhibition the following year, with Walsh stating, 'We wanted to create a nude that existed for herself.' Walsh is particularly scathing of Picasso's depiction of Dora Maar as an archetypal figure of suffering. It was a portrayal that Maar herself rejected. 'All these portraits of me are lies. They are all Picasso; none is Dora Maar,' she says. 'Picasso does an immense disservice to Maar's practice and rich individual identity present in her work to reduce her to mad crying women.' According to independent curator and writer Julie Ewington, the reevaluation of women's roles has significantly increased over the last 50 years, running 'absolutely hand in glove with social movements' like women's equality and #MeToo. 'By 1975, when the UN recognised International Women's Day, it was already well established that women were not just the subject of other people's pictures, they were the makers of their own,' Ewington says. 'Younger women are very clear where they stand on all this. That doesn't mean there isn't still a lively trade in pictures of beautiful and desirable women.' Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, a pioneer of self-expression, famously declared, 'I am my own muse. I am the subject I know best. The subject I want to know better.' She depicted her disability, physical pain, and emotions, even as her relationship with Diego Rivera influenced both their lives and art. Julie Ewington also points to earlier female artists who challenged norms: Suzanne Valadon defied 19th-century conventions by painting nudes of herself and other women, and German expressionist Paula Modersohn-Becker was the first woman artist to depict herself pregnant and nude. Georgia O'Keeffe, whose fame was initially overshadowed by her partner, photographer Alfred Stieglitz, is now celebrated as a feminist icon, her legacy casting a far greater shadow today. Progress, says Walsh, is when 'everyone becomes a muse to someone'. It doesn't have to be a beautiful, young woman serving the artist in some way. If we embrace all kinds of perspectives, then all kinds of muses can come into being. Artist Deborah Kelly, whose animation Beastliness was included in Art Gallery of NSW show Her Hair, a collection of 'sexy and salty' collage and animation works, now considers an artist's muse to be 'the curator who believes in your work, encourages your wildest dreams, and helps you realise them.' Her Hair examined how female hair has functioned as a powerful symbol in art, with braided hair representing profane love and long, unruly hair signifying penitence, virginity, or youth. Loading 'For me, it's mainly been other women who are keen to enable the more preposterous of my aspirations – I mean, right now, I'm founding a religion of climate change and queer identity and giving it meaning and expression in art and performance – and I see this as a significant historical shift from the era when women were supposed to view each other primarily as rivals for male attention,' Kelly says. 'So that makes me think that the idea of the muse is obsolete – but that actual human beings make and hold space for artists and their support is priceless.' As new generations of artists find fresh inspiration, so Dora Maar is being recognised as a more fully rounded artist. Only Maar was allowed to photograph the painting of Guernica. Her radical leftwing politics stood behind Picasso's rage at the bombing of the Spanish town of Guernica, which gave rise to his masterpiece, painted in a monochromatic style, almost photographic in its detail, and said to have borrowed from her work.
The Age
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Age
She was the face of Picasso's Weeping Woman. But there was more to Dora Maar than a woman crushed
A notable surrealist photographer and painter in her own right, Dora Maar is best remembered for her eight-year relationship with Pablo Picasso. Often regarded as a muse to Picasso's genius, Maar modelled for many of the artist's anguished 'weeping women' portraits, painted while he created his anti-fascist masterpiece, Guernica. Yet, Paris-born Maar also painted Picasso, transforming him into her subject and similarly distorting his features. 'What most people also don't realise is that Maar was a radical, subversive and respected artist before she met Picasso,' says David Greenhalgh, the National Gallery of Australia's expert on international art. 'Her photography, her politics and her Surrealist provocations challenged Picasso.' Maar's artistic legacy is highlighted alongside Picasso's in the National Gallery of Australia's blockbuster Cézanne to Giacometti: Highlights from Museum Berggruen/ Neue Nationalgalerie which runs until September. The exhibition draws from the extraordinary collection of art dealer Heinz Berggruen, who, after World War II, established a small gallery on Paris's Left Bank and collected avant-garde works. The exhibition will feature some 100 major works by six modern masters – Picasso, Paul Klee, Georges Braque, Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, and Alberto Giacometti. These will be shown with 75 works from the National Gallery's collection to demonstrate the revolutionaries' influence on Australia's leading artists. The exhibition notably features works by Maar, with whom Berggruen felt a particular affinity, perhaps due to his empathy for her tragic life and tumultuous, ultimately destructive relationship with Picasso. 'She never quite recovered from her separation with Picasso, and turned away from her great talent as a photographer and a painter,' Berggruen's son Nicolas says. Long-overdue credit finally came to Maar with a 2019 retrospective of her work at Tate Modern, part of an international curatorial effort to reframe collections with greater biographical honesty. This move followed the highlighting of Cézanne's muse, Hortense Fiquet, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Madame Cézanne exhibition five years earlier. Cézanne to Giacometti offers another important opportunity, says co-curator Deirdre Cannon, to examine who these women painted by the modernists were and their true role in the creation of the art. Maar's most striking photograph, Portrait of Ubu – an extreme close-up of an armadillo fetus – will hang alongside four other works by her. Her 1936 pastel of Picasso similarly depicts her lover in a fractured, Cubist-inspired style, emphasising his wide cat's eyes, moustache, distinctive nose, and wide mouth in cool green shades, all composed like an inverted comma. 'We acknowledge now that artists do not work in a vacuum, and the idea of the sole, primarily male genius making art from god-given talent or through an act of divine intervention has been repudiated for a long time now,' Cannon says. 'This has included a reappraisal of the subjectivity of the muse. These individuals, often artists in their own right, influenced other aspects of artists' practice and personal lives.' The concept of the muse dates back to Greek mythology, where nine sister goddesses, daughters of Zeus, served as patrons of the arts. Homer himself invoked these ethereal women of divine inspiration to narrate the tales of Achilles and Odysseus in The Iliad. Later, masters from Raphael to Rembrandt embraced the muse as an object of beauty, personifying their creative expression. In the 19th century, model Elizabeth Siddal embodied the ideal of virginal beauty and rectitude in John Everett Millais's Ophelia, leading the BBC to describe her as art's greatest supermodel. 'Often, those identified as muses are depicted in a very idealised manner and described in literature as having striking physical attributes or a distinctive presence,' Cannon says. 'Or, in the case of an artist like Picasso, their likenesses are rearranged and experimented with in pursuit of breaking new artistic ground. Traditional understandings of the muse involve feminine subservience to the creative will of men. 'The term itself has specific connotations that prompt reflection on the role of inspiration in visual art.' Among European modernists, Cézanne's radical yet doubt-laden experiments in colour and composition were the first to challenge accepted artistic ideas of the figurative form, emboldening generations of subsequent artists. 'Every artist in Cézanne to Giacometti is linked in a huge genealogy or family tree of influence, as they found inspiration in each other's example,' says Greenhalgh. 'In a sense, the 'muse' we investigate is how artists inspire each other.' Cézanne's model across two decades of often plodding experimentation was Hortense Fiquet, the mother of his only son, Paul, whom he first met in 1869 when she was a 19-year-old model. Among the works on display in Cézanne to Giacometti are one of 29 paintings and four of the approximately 50 drawings he made of Fiquet, including Portrait of Madame Cézanne (c. 1885). Her inscrutable expression has led historians to suggest emotional distance between the pair or to interpret it as evidence of Fiquet's dour character. British critic Roger Fry even described her as 'that sour bitch,' and her husband's friends nicknamed her 'La Boule' (French for 'the ball'). However, Greenhalgh argues that characterising muses like Fiquet as 'crones' or Maar as 'unstable' is simply an example of misogyny. 'But we must remember that history is a discourse, and that we can always see things from new perspectives.' Context is everything. Cézanne and Fiquet lived an unconventional life; she resided in cosmopolitan Paris while the artist painted the Provence countryside. Their relationship was characterised by social and financial inequality, common in many marriages of the period. They only married to secure his family's inheritance. 'Cézanne was incredibly slow when he painted, and it is thought that this was because he doubted everything he created,' Greenhalgh says. 'It drove his sitters crazy, as they had to pose motionless for a dozen hours each day, sometimes for hundreds of sittings, only for him to abandon the painting. 'There are letters that demonstrate Fiquet's supportive business dealings to try and sell Cézanne's work, but the most direct and simple evidence we have of her importance to his practice is that she sat for Cézanne's paintings time and time again, and that to me is a demonstration of their love for one another.' European art history is full of stories where the female perspective is hidden or missing, says artist Natasha Walsh. At best, the women subjects are frequently depicted either as passive vehicles for the artist's talent or in an exploitative and violent manner. 'When artists are painting, they are painting their own perception,' Walsh says. 'It's only problematic when the muse exists solely in the context of the artist, when we look at it as a child does, only within the frame.' Walsh is one of several contemporary artists who are reimagining the portrayal of the female sitter. Instead of a passive subject, these artists seek to show the creative insight originating from the female subject herself, or through a collaborative, reciprocal exchange between the artist and their subject. As a teenage art student, Walsh often faced requests to sit for male painters, which she declined. She recalls one artist advising her to agree soon, 'as if my worth were reduced to solely my physical appearance and my value was temporary and fleeting'. In her series Hysteria, Walsh challenged the male gaze by reinterpreting Gustav Klimt's 1907 painting Danaë, which romanticised an ancient Greek myth of rape. Reimagining herself as the mother of Perseus, she painted her eyes actively gazing back at the viewer – Klimt painted them closed – and vanished Zeus's impregnating shower of 'golden rain' that glossed over rape in the original painting. Walsh has since painted fashion duo Nicol and Ford in the likeness of 16th-century Gabrielle d'Estrées and one of her sisters. It was a finalist in the 2024 Archibald Prize. Walsh has continued to reinterpret art history, painting fashion duo Nicol and Ford in the likeness of the 16th-century Gabrielle d'Estrées and One of Her Sisters (a finalist in the 2024 Archibald Prize). She also depicted musician Montaigne as Medusa, and posed artist Atong Atem as Matisse's Yellow Odalisque, shifting the focus to Atem's African heritage. Walsh collaborated with writer Bri Lee on a collage of Picasso nudes, created in the Brett Whiteley studio. Their aim was to reimagine a nude free from Picasso's gaze, depicting the figure in an act of self-pleasure. Lee later posed for Walsh's Hysteria exhibition the following year, with Walsh stating, 'We wanted to create a nude that existed for herself.' Walsh is particularly scathing of Picasso's depiction of Dora Maar as an archetypal figure of suffering. It was a portrayal that Maar herself rejected. 'All these portraits of me are lies. They are all Picasso; none is Dora Maar,' she says. 'Picasso does an immense disservice to Maar's practice and rich individual identity present in her work to reduce her to mad crying women.' According to independent curator and writer Julie Ewington, the reevaluation of women's roles has significantly increased over the last 50 years, running 'absolutely hand in glove with social movements' like women's equality and #MeToo. 'By 1975, when the UN recognised International Women's Day, it was already well established that women were not just the subject of other people's pictures, they were the makers of their own,' Ewington says. 'Younger women are very clear where they stand on all this. That doesn't mean there isn't still a lively trade in pictures of beautiful and desirable women.' Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, a pioneer of self-expression, famously declared, 'I am my own muse. I am the subject I know best. The subject I want to know better.' She depicted her disability, physical pain, and emotions, even as her relationship with Diego Rivera influenced both their lives and art. Julie Ewington also points to earlier female artists who challenged norms: Suzanne Valadon defied 19th-century conventions by painting nudes of herself and other women, and German expressionist Paula Modersohn-Becker was the first woman artist to depict herself pregnant and nude. Georgia O'Keeffe, whose fame was initially overshadowed by her partner, photographer Alfred Stieglitz, is now celebrated as a feminist icon, her legacy casting a far greater shadow today. Progress, says Walsh, is when 'everyone becomes a muse to someone'. It doesn't have to be a beautiful, young woman serving the artist in some way. If we embrace all kinds of perspectives, then all kinds of muses can come into being. Artist Deborah Kelly, whose animation Beastliness was included in Art Gallery of NSW show Her Hair, a collection of 'sexy and salty' collage and animation works, now considers an artist's muse to be 'the curator who believes in your work, encourages your wildest dreams, and helps you realise them.' Her Hair examined how female hair has functioned as a powerful symbol in art, with braided hair representing profane love and long, unruly hair signifying penitence, virginity, or youth. Loading 'For me, it's mainly been other women who are keen to enable the more preposterous of my aspirations – I mean, right now, I'm founding a religion of climate change and queer identity and giving it meaning and expression in art and performance – and I see this as a significant historical shift from the era when women were supposed to view each other primarily as rivals for male attention,' Kelly says. 'So that makes me think that the idea of the muse is obsolete – but that actual human beings make and hold space for artists and their support is priceless.' As new generations of artists find fresh inspiration, so Dora Maar is being recognised as a more fully rounded artist. Only Maar was allowed to photograph the painting of Guernica. Her radical leftwing politics stood behind Picasso's rage at the bombing of the Spanish town of Guernica, which gave rise to his masterpiece, painted in a monochromatic style, almost photographic in its detail, and said to have borrowed from her work.
The Advertiser
30-05-2025
- The Advertiser
Beyond the suits: meet the trailblazing women who shaped Australia's capital
VISIT: At Canberra's tiniest walk-in gallery, the colourful and eclectic Gallery of Small Things, you can browse the itty-bitty art and talk all things tiny with founder and ceramicist, Anne Masters. Conversely, this is where Australia's recent gift to the new Pope - a painting by South Australian artist Amanda Westley - was secretly purchased. EXPLORE: The National Gallery of Australia's 13-tonne, $14 million Ouroboros is a thought-provoking immersive outdoor sculpture where the experience changes every time one visits. LINGER: The National Portrait Gallery is often overlooked in favour of the other attractions, but it's worth devoting a serious chunk of time to ponder our national identity. STAY: East Hotel has big rooms, chic design and friendly service. Don't miss the carbonara scrambled eggs at Agostinis for breakfast. EAT: REBEL REBEL and Corella are both very special, very Canberra dining experiences that will have you dreaming about the food for weeks.
Perth Now
29-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Perth Now
Cézanne the modernist influencer in NGA blockbuster
Modernist artworks from Germany's Museum Berggruen are on show in Australia for the first time, including big names such as Cézanne, Matisse and Picasso. Cézanne to Giacometti: Highlights from Museum Berggruen is the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra's winter blockbuster show. The museum collection has been touring internationally while its Berlin building is closed for renovation, and the exhibition has already visited half a dozen cities and been viewed by about a million people. But the Australian version is different - it's no out-of-the-box show, instead integrating art from giants of European modernism with works by Australian artists. The result is a story of the dynamic exchange of 20th century artistic ideas over decades and across the world, and the development of modernism in Australia. "I think it is the most accomplished and the most meaningful venue so far in the entire tour in terms of research into art history, because of this dialogue," said the head of Museum Berggruen, Dr Gabriel Montua. More than 80 works from the museum sit alongside 75 works from the national collection, by artists such as Russell Drysdale, Grace Cossington Smith and Dorrit Black. The exhibition opens with Cézanne's experiments in form and perspective, on show with works by Australian artists like Drysdale and Ian Fairweather, who were influenced by his innovations. Rarely seen works by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque show the breakthroughs of Cubism, hung with Australian artists such as Dorrit Black, Grace Crowley and Roy de Maistre. There are sections devoted to Paul Klee, Dora Maar and Henri Matisse, while a sculpture by Giacometti measuring more than two metres high represents the first time a such large scale Giacometti has been displayed down under. All of the artists in the exhibition ultimately come back to Cézanne's innovations, according to NGA curator David Greenhalgh. "He is the figurehead who inspired so much of what came after," said Greenhalgh. "There's a real sense of a lot of these artists looking at one another and deriving inspiration from one another." The Berggruen collection is the life's work of art dealer Heinz Berggruen, who fled Germany before World War II and sold his collection to the German state in 2000, ensuring it would be available to the public. Many of the artists he collected were deliberately removed from German art collections, because they were deemed degenerate during the Nazi reign. The exhibition opens Saturday and runs till September 21. AAP travelled to Canberra with the assistance of the National Gallery of Australia.
Boston Globe
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Is it time to uncancel Gauguin?
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. Get The Gavel A weekly SCOTUS explainer newsletter by columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr. Enter Email Sign Up 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. Advertisement 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. Advertisement 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 ' Advertisement 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? Advertisement 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? Advertisement 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
