WILD THING

Seeing a pioneering artist in a new light.

In an 1895 interview in L’Écho de Paris, Paul Gauguin is described as “the wildest of all the innovators, and of all the ‘misunderstood’ artists the one least inclined to compromise.” Prideaux (Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream, Strindberg: A Life, and I Am Dynamite! A Life of Nietzsche) revisits Gaugin’s legacy, which has been marred by controversy; his time in Tahiti, where he sought to escape European civilization, was complicated by accusations of appropriation and problematic relationships with young Tahitian girls. Prideaux bases this work on an unpublished manuscript, Avant et après, which Gauguin wrote during the last two years of his life and sheds new light on his more progressive thinking about women, morality, and the Catholic Church. Long admired for his innovative and bold use of color, his rejection of Western artistic conventions, and his lasting impact on modern art, Gauguin’s reputation, however, had been long tainted by colonialism. Gauguin may have idealized the noble savage, but here Prideaux attempts to romanticize him as the savage. She reminds us that Gauguin thought of himself this way; as an outsider in France, he’d shout: “I am a savage from Peru!” The notion was corroborated by his friends: Edgar Degas described him as “a hungry wolf without a collar,” and playwright August Strindberg, inspired by Gauguin, claimed, “For I, too, begin to feel a great need to turn savage and to make a new world.” What others see as appropriation Prideaux rebrands as forward thinking: About works such as Ia orana Maria (Hail Mary), she writes, “Gaugin had taken the foundational legend of Christianity and synthesized it through a multi-racial lens.”

Newly definitive, impeccably researched, and lavishly illustrated.