The restless life of a very bourgois rebel

Alexander Lee

Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin Sue Prideaux (Faber & Faber, £30) “WHO IS GAUGUIN?” ASKED Augustus Strindberg in 1895. It was a good question. Then in his late forties, Gauguin was not an artist who lent himself to categorisation. Plenty of names had been bandied around over the years. Impressionist. Post-Impressionist. Even Synthesist-Symbolist. But for Strindberg, there was only one way to describe him — “the savage”. Strindberg wasn’t the first. As far back as 1887 — when Gauguin was just starting out — the anarchist Félix Fénéon had praised him for “his barbarism, irascibility, and the force of his brushstrokes”. Nor was he the last. Soon enough, another critic, Eugène Tardieu, matter-of-factly described him as “the wildest of all the innovators” — gaily breaking with every “civilised” norm…

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The Critic (Digital) - 1 Issue, November 2024

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