Awards

• Long-listed for Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction 2024

Overview

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).

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9781324020424

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Reviews

""This sympathetic biography is a heroic rehabilitation . . . Prideaux is one of the finest biographers working today."" -- Pratinav Anil - Times (UK) ""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 ""This detailed biography complicates our perception of the bad boy of French art and illuminates his fraught friendship with Van Gogh . . . Prideaux examines the facts and contexts of the painter’s South Sea life in greater detail than before, while refusing to begin to judge any of those choices."" -- Tim Adams, Book of the Day - Observer ""An immaculate biography: even handed, scholarly, comprehensive and historically informed."" -- Michael Prodger - New Statesman ""Scintillating . . . [a] triumph . . . As a man, as an artist, Gauguin was more than one thing, and Prideaux colourfully fleshes out his story with nuance and detail."" -- Financial Times ""Ambitious, clear-eyed... A complex, intractable man to the last."" -- The Economist ""A vivid, revisionist picture of the controversial artist’s life, from France to Tahiti."" -- Flora Bowen and Cal Revely-Calder - Daily Telegraph ""Sumptuous . . . magnificent."" -- Daily Mail ""A 'scintillating' achievement."" -- The Week, Book of the Week ""Reflective and lyrical."" -- Nikhil Krishnan - Telegraph

Author Information

Sue Prideaux is the author of three prize-winning biographies: I Am Dynamite! A Life of Nietzsche, Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream, and Strindberg: A Life. She has written for the Economist and the Spectator, among other publications. She lives in London.

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