‘Wild Thing’ Review: The Sorcery of Paul Gauguin
The painter’s work was celebrated by his fellow artists in Paris, but he eventually sought to live and work far away from conventional society.
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.”
Gauguin began formulating his own iconic post-Impressionism in Brittany, during the first of many escapes to places he believed to be primitive. He had grown increasingly alienated from industrialized European society. Though Brittany was a French province, it was considered to be so superstitiously Catholic as to verge on the pagan. In 1888 Gauguin painted one of the great masterpieces of Western art history, “Vision of the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling With the Angel).” Looming undulations of white Breton headdresses in the foreground direct their wearers’ gaze, along with ours, to an epic struggle between man and divinity in an alternate reality of glowing red (perhaps inspired by Brittany’s fields of buckwheat in the fall).
From there to Pablo Picasso and on to Jackson Pollock, it was one straight line. “Vision of the Sermon” unleashed color, line and space from the optical world we inhabit, and in its very title endowed that vision with a sacred aura. For almost a century, beginning with the Impressionists, each generation of painters looked at the degree of abstraction achieved by their elders and pushed further in the same direction. Today, we see how many types of Modernism have flourished around the world, but the self-consciously direct lineage of which Gauguin was a crucial part remains astoundingly inventive and productive.
Brittany turned out to be neither primordial enough nor affordable enough. After a financial crash terminated his stockbroking career, Gauguin, who never saved a franc, abandoned his wife and five children, borrowed money from friends, and taunted the art world by forswearing its Parisian sophistication in favor of a supposedly greater authenticity elsewhere. Unsatisfying trial runs in Panama and Martinique were followed by a serious move to Tahiti in 1891, with occasional stints back in Paris and Brittany.
Gauguin’s motives can be debated, but he painted some aesthetically fantastic canvases, among them his 1892 “Manaò tupapaú (Spirit of the Dead Watching),” a hymn, in lush purples, brown and golden yellow, to naive eros (and whose nude subject was 13 years old). When he finally relocated to Hiva Oa, in the Marquesas Islands, Gauguin turned against the French colonial government and the Catholic church. He defended local friends from legal or clerical persecution with petitions and in court. He did not, as tales have commonly told, spread disease among unwitting local girls. (Analysis of his teeth discovered in Hiva Oa proved he did not have syphilis.)
This twist surprises. By the time we arrive at the last years of Gauguin’s life, Ms. Prideaux’s astringent sympathy has accustomed us to one violent or egotistical episode after another. When in 1888 Van Gogh slices off his ear in despair of keeping Gauguin’s friendship, we have come to expect nothing milder.
Gauguin’s artistic reputation has also taken a recent turn. A 2017-18 exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Grand Palais in Paris reoriented our attention away from his paintings and toward his sculptures, many made in carved wood and molded ceramic. Gauguin’s statues, panels and vessels, long overshadowed, now feel almost more original, skilled and, most unexpectedly, self-aware than his paintings. In one of Gauguin’s more rueful moments, influenced by the Moche Peruvian ceramics he collected, he fashioned a mug into an astute self-portrait, with blood-tinged glaze oozing down its sides, as if to say: May my enemies drink to their health in my savage skull.
Ms. Prideaux’s title invokes the title of the 1966 Troggs song, to which this biography bids me respond: “Your art makes my heart sing.” This is a biography for anyone who wants to know about the man behind some irrepressibly memorable art, about one of the most creatively magic moments of European history and about a vividly extreme version of a recurring human situation. Who among us has not heard of stars who leave the care of their parents to a quieter sibling, spouses who ignore their partners’ contributions to their career, parents who neglect their children to pursue their own dreams? Who gets credit for the works of genius? Who should? The accomplishments of the selfish are real.