Paul Gauguin: A Complete Life

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Sweetman's brilliantly illuminating biography scrupulously lays to rest any number of myths surrounding Gauguin as it dismantles the conventional image of the bourgeois Parisian stockbroker who abandoned his wife and children in search of a Tahitian paradise. By combing the records of the bourse, Sweetman, biographer of van Gogh and Mary Renault, establishes that Gauguin (1848-1903) was not a stockbroker-he was an accountant, an ``office-bound drudge'' who arranged the paperwork for stock settlements. Far from being a conventional bourgeois, the French painter was raised by his widowed, half-Spanish mother, Aline Chazal, who had been kidnapped and abused by her unstable father and neglected by her mother, Flor Tristan, a socialist revolutionary and one of France's first feminists. Gauguin, who called himself ``the Savage from Peru,'' was taken to Peru when only 18 months old by his parents (his father died on shipboard) and spent the next six years there; his great-uncle was Peru's last viceroy, and Sweetman shows that Gauguin's art synthesized pre-Columbian, Christian and Polynesian myths. Mette-Sophie Gad, Gauguin's mannish, boisterous, gruff, cigar-smoking wife, had separated from the painter before he left for Tahiti in 1891; he mourned the loss of his five children, who, raised in Copenhagen, ``were now little Danes with few traces of any Frenchness left.'' Although Sweetman calls Gauguin a ``syphilitic paedophile'' who took a succession of Polynesian ``child-brides,'' he rejects feminist assessments of the artist as a sexual tourist and colonialist, arguing that Gauguin celebrated and integrated himself into a disappearing culture on the verge of extinction. Illustrated. (Feb.)

Library Journal

A romantic artist, abandoning everything to seek inspiration in an unspoiled, exotic land; a drug-addicted pedophile escaping jail by dying, at 54, of syphilis; an adventurer, speculator, and exploiter; a representative of the new vision of early 20th-century art...these are the many faces of Paul Gauguin, the myths and the realities examined in this excellent biography. The current perception of this elusive artist is far darker than the brilliant colors of his art, but Sweetman provides a breadth of vision that allows readers to form their own conclusions. With insight and sensitivity, to the art as well as the artist, the author offers that too-rare combination of superb scholarship and nonpolemical literary style. Highly recommended for all art libraries as well as general collections in public and academic libraries.-Paula Frosch. Metropolitan Museum of Art Lib., New York

Donna Seaman

Sweetman's magisterial biography of Gauguin--a painter known as much for his romanticized life as for his ravishing paintings--does exactly what a fresh look at a familiar subject should do, it presents newly discovered facts and an original perspective. As he patiently reconstructs the intricate puzzle of Gauguin's multifaceted life, Sweetman, who has also written acclaimed biographies of Vincent Van Gogh and Mary Renault, dismantles the cherished legend about the artist's transformation from Euro-businessman to Tahitian noble savage, an alluring myth attributable in great part to Gauguin himself. Sweetman also emphasizes the importance of Gauguin's early childhood, which was spent in Peru under the protection of his great-uncle, the last Spanish viceroy. It was this interlude, Sweetman convincingly argues, that shaped Gauguin's sense of self, non-European aesthetics, and obsession with regaining a lost paradise. Another curious aspect of Gauguin's life was his relationships with unconventional women, from his famous socialist-feminist grandmother to his resilient mother and mannish wife. Sweetman's astute portrait of Gauguin as a perpetual outsider fueled by contradictory passions and driven halfway around the world by his need to make art is the best biography on the artist yet published.