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 work, Sue Prideaux reveals that while Gauguin was a complicated man, his scandalous reputation is largely undeserved.
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.
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.
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.
