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Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin
Current price:
$39.99
Publish Date:
Publisher:
W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN:
9781324020424
Pages:
416
Language:
English
Stock Information
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Description
One of The New York Times 10 Best Books of 2025
One of The New Yorker's Top Books of 2025
One of Vogue's Best Books of 2025
One of the Wall Street Journal's Best Books of the Year
One of the New York Public Library's Best Books of 2025
One of the Chicago Public Library's Best Books of 2025
Shortlisted for the 2024 Baillie Gifford Prize
Winner of the 2025 American Library in Paris Book Award
Longlisted for the 2025 National Book Critics Circle Awards
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).
Praise for Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin
Enthralling [and] terrific… When it comes to Gauguin, [Prideaux] is everything you might want in a biographer: diligent, judicious, compassionate without being indulgent.
— Jennifer Szalai - New York Times
Gruesomely fascinating… 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.
— Anne Higonnet - Wall Street Journal
Remarkable… Reëxamines [Gauguin's] vision.
— Alexandra Schwartz - New Yorker
A remarkable, important portrait… Prideaux has a gift for illustrating the intricacies of an artist's perspective.
— Sarah Moorhouse - Los Angeles Review of Books
Invites us to reconsider everything we thought we knew about Gauguin… [Wild Thing] brims with reputation-redeeming surprises.
— Kelly Horan - Boston Globe
A gift for disrupting snap judgments… [Prideaux] chooses to consider events in view of historical circumstance rather than moral dicta.
— Susan Tallman - Atlantic
Wise, engaging. . . . [Prideaux has] an unusual and compelling degree of sympathy.
— Max Carter - Air Mail
A spirited biography… [Wild Thing] is an ode to both a singular visionary and a world, not unlike ours, in the throes of political and artistic turmoil.
— Hamilton Cain - Minnesota Star Tribune
Sue Prideaux’s highly readable biography argues that Gauguin’s life was far more complicated and nuanced than previously understood.
— Terry W. Hartle, Christian Science Monitor, Ten Best Books of the Month
Lively and absorbing… Wild Thing offers a rich retelling of the Gauguin story.
— Hannah Stamler - American Scholar
Engaging… A vivid portrait of Paul Gauguin.
— Diane Scharper - Washington Examiner
Newly definitive, impeccably researched, and lavishly illustrated… See[s] a pioneering artist in a new light.
— Kirkus Reviews
A rich psychological portrait that is buttressed by abundant historical detail. [Wild Thing] makes for a revealing window into a unique artistic mind.
— Publishers Weekly
This sympathetic biography is a heroic rehabilitation . . . Prideaux is one of the finest biographers working today.
— Pratinav Anil - Times (UK)
An immaculate biography: even handed, scholarly, comprehensive and historically informed.
— Michael Prodger - New Statesman
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
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
As an art critic and cultural historian Sue Prideaux is thoughtful and knowledgeable. As a biographer she is witty and bold. She writes with panache about the artist’s prosperous years and with unshockable sympathy about his hard times. A scintillating account of a richly complicated life.
— Lucy Hughes-Hallett, author of Peculiar Ground
The definitive biography of an artist like Gauguin rolls around once in a generation, and this might well be the one for ours.
— Stephen Smith - Literary Review
