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Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin
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74/99
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About This Book
An original and revealing portrait of the misunderstood French Post-Impressionist artist. Paul Gauguin's legend as a transgressive genius arises as much from his biography as his aesthetically daring Polynesian paintings. Gauguin is chiefly known for his pictures that eschewed convention, to celebrate the beauty of an indigenous people and their culture. In this gorgeously illustrated, myth-busting work, Sue Prideaux reveals that while Gauguin was a complicated man, his scandalous reputation is largely undeserved. Self-taught, Gauguin became a towering artist in his brief life, not just in painting but in ceramics and graphics. He fled the bustle of Paris for the beauty of Tahiti, where he lived simply and worked consistently to expose the tragic results of French Colonialism. Gauguin fought for the rights of Indigenous people, exposing French injustices and corruption in the local newspaper and acting as advocate for the Tahitian people in the French colonial courts. His unconventional career and bold, breathtaking art influenced not only Vincent van Gogh, but Matisse and Picasso. Wild Thing upends much of what we thought we knew about Gauguin through new primary research, including the resurfaced manuscript of Gauguin's most important writing, the untranslated memoir of Gauguin's son, and a sample of Gauguin's teeth that disproves the pernicious myth of his syphilis. In the first full biography of Paul Gauguin in thirty years, Sue Prideaux illuminates the extraordinary oeuvre of a visionary artist vital to the French avant-garde. The result is "a brilliantly readable and compassionate study of Gauguin—not just as a painter, sculptor, carver and potter, but as a human soul perpetually searching for what is always just out of reach" (Artemis Cooper, Spectator).
Reviews
"Prideaux is a sympathetic biographer."
"The resulting book is, in its measured approach, essentially sympathetic to its subject."
"Gauguin may have idealized the noble savage, but here Prideaux attempts to romanticize him as the savage ..."
"The author does a superb job of re-examining the ways in which Gauguin 'smashed the established Western canon' ..."
"It was a sloppy life, full of colliding impulses, thwarted aspirations, and scattered commitments."
"An ode to both a singular visionary and a world, not unlike ours, in the throes of political and artistic turmoil."
"By the time we arrive at the last years of Gauguin's life, Ms."
"Metaphors leap off the page, to the extent that the careful reader may start to be suspicious as to how much they are being led to conclusions ..."
"Prideaux combines archival research, access to newly found source material and her own considerable talent for conveying works of art with arresting immediacy ..."
"Prideaux draws on new material to foreground the artist's earlier 'sexual abstinence' and loyalty to his wife, but it can feel as if she is overcompensating, and only makes his later exploits more jarring."
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