This detailed biography complicates our perception of the bad boy of French art and illuminates his fraught friendship with Van Gogh
Sue Prideaux begins her biography of Paul Gauguin with an account of his long-lost teeth. Four of them were discovered in the year 2000 in a well near the site of his last bamboo hut in French Polynesia. The artist had secreted them there in a jar, for whatever reason, and investigation by the Human Genome Project proved them to be his. It was thought that the teeth might also offer conclusive evidence for the popular belief that Gauguin had been “the bad boy who spread syphilis around the South Seas”. But no trace of any treatments for the disease, arsenic or mercury, were discovered. “What other myths,” Prideaux asks, as she embarks on her reassessment of his life, “might we be holding on to?”
Prideaux is drawn to wild men as a writer; her previous biographies include award-winning lives of Edvard Munch and Friedrich Nietzsche. She has been helped in this project by the discovery in 2020 of a 213-page manuscript, Avant et après, handwritten by Gauguin during his last desperate two years in the Marquesas islands. It complicates the settled caricature of Gauguin as a sort of diehard libertine; instead, for example, detailing the importance of a string of legal battles he stubbornly fought on behalf of local Polynesian people in the French colonial courts.