An enthralling account of an artist whose life was as inventive as his art ... Terrific ... When it comes to Gauguin, she is everything you might want in a biographer: diligent, judicious, compassionate without being indulgent ... It’s certainly a tantalizing opener, but to reduce Wild Thing to myth-busting revisionism would be to fail to do justice to such a rigorous and vibrant book. Prideaux combines archival research, access to newly found source material and her own considerable talent for conveying works of art with arresting immediacy ... Prideaux, is also a nimble and witty storyteller as she guides us through the life ... Briskly readable.
Spirited, rangy ... Prideaux argues that Gauguin’s Tahitian works add up to anti-colonial rebuke, rather than decorative appropriation of the Other. Your mileage may vary ... She charts the painter’s complex legacy while avoiding the traps of granular biography, illuminating the bridge from fin de siècle innovations to the surge of modernism, as Matisse and Picasso drew on Gauguin’s zeal for color and pre-Colombian pottery ... An ode to both a singular visionary and a world, not unlike ours, in the throes of political and artistic turmoil.
Gruesomely fascinating ... 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 ... 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.
If the Gauguin who emerges here is not easy to love, he does seem of a piece with the willfully contradictory, persistently gripping art he left behind ... For a man whose sex life has attracted so much attention, Gauguin appears surprisingly circumspect in Prideaux’s telling ... It was a sloppy life, full of colliding impulses, thwarted aspirations, and scattered commitments. But in his paintings, prints, and sculptures, he could make it right—building a world where unreasonable combinations contrive to make unexpected sense and things that don’t belong nonetheless fit.
Drawing as it does on both of these discoveries, Sue Prideaux’s new biography has real bite ... The author does a superb job of re-examining the ways in which Gauguin 'smashed the established Western canon' ... Gauguin’s artistic and sexual primitivism was, as Prideaux’s edgy and engrossing book shows, always both radical and deeply traditional.
The concrete evidence needed for this redemption simply doesn’t exist ... This is not to say that Prideaux fails to rigorously analyze Gauguin’s life. Far from it ... Adds to the mix a slightly more charitable and compassionate study, rather than one that upends or transforms.
The resulting book is, in its measured approach, essentially sympathetic to its subject. Over 19 chronologically arranged chapters that seamlessly weave together biography with visual analysis, Prideaux makes a convincing case that both the artist and his art deserve revisiting ... Prideaux’s biography is a remarkable, important portrait of a career pursued in defiance of convention: fertile conditions for wrongdoing, yes, but also for a disturbing, thrilling—yes, even transcendent—vision.
Prideaux makes full use of Avant et Après ... It is to Prideaux’s credit that she deals with the subject sensibly and sensitively ... There are a few lapses of judgment in this otherwise chiselled account, account ... Still, it is undeniable that Prideaux, who has also written about Nietzsche, Strindberg and Munch, is one of the finest biographers working today. Quite apart from possessing reserves of sympathy, she also has a feel for place, gleaned from visits to Gauguin’s many adopted homelands. Life in Polynesia was tough, she shows.
Scintillating ... 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. But presenting us with these contradictions is part of the book’s triumph. Prideaux casts little moral judgment on Gauguin, leaving the inconsistencies of his beliefs and actions a problem for the reader ... Colourfully fleshes out his story with nuance and detail.
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 [Gaugin's] choices.
After her excellent biography of Friedrich Nietzsche, I am Dynamite, Sue Prideaux’s take on Gauguin, Wild Thing is a more conflicting read ... Prideaux is a dynamic and engaging writer ... 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 ... Gauguin, who died in 1903, was born in a different era, with different values, and it is up to us how we choose to judge him. But it is also up to a biographer to be clear in how they present their case. Read with fascination, and relish the evocations of time and place, but reader, read with care.
In Sue Prideaux’s new life of the artist, the first work on such a scale since David Sweetman’s 1995 biography, she describes the painting in words both simple and evocative ... She writes in a tone of exasperated, frustrated love, anxious to understand and slow to denounce ... Gauguin’s views on the equality of women meant that he saw what others took to be his callous abandonment of his family as a way of respecting his wife’s autonomy. Prideaux is strictly even-handed in her portrayal of this conflict. Mette comes out of Prideaux’s story a complex figure, a woman who gave as good as she got, never a hapless victim ...
It’s jarring and regrettable when Prideaux lapses into the register of the academic critic ... It’s worse still when she lapses, in the opposite direction, into the breathless tone of the fashion magazine ... Fortunately, the prose of Wild Thing is for the most part brisk and undistracting.
Newly definitive, impeccably researched, and lavishly illustrated ... Gauguin may have idealized the noble savage, but here Prideaux attempts to romanticize him as the savage ... What others see as appropriation Prideaux rebrands as forward thinking.
