Wild Thing

A Life of Paul Gauguin

De: Sue Prideaux

Narrado por: Elizabeth Wiley

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.

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 newspaper and acting as advocate for the Tahitian people in the French colonial courts. His unconventional career and bold 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. Sue Prideaux illuminates the extraordinary oeuvre of a visionary artist vital to the French avant-garde.

©2024 Sue Pridreaux (P)2025 Tantor Media

Reader struggled

This audiobook’s reader sounded like she was trying to make out the text without her glasses.

Didn't know he was a pedophile, his art is okay

I basically changed my career from artist to nurse practitioner while reading about Gaugin's life because I can't be poor with typhoid in Tahiti and have a 14-year old child bride

Poorly chosen reader

Book moves around a little too much , would have liked more linear in a non fiction worm

A new look at a complex man

I found this book very illuminating. Prior to reading this book I had a two dimensional view of Gauguin. This book, without glossing over the controversy of his time in Tahiti, created an entirely new appreciation for me of the artist, his art and his humanity. As is often the case he was much more complex than I realized.

Gauguin’s biography out of historical context

The biography tells a good enough story about Paul Gauguin and his family. But the biographer distorts their importance, casting them as the first bohemian/rebellious/artistic beings in the history of the world; everyone who preceded them was conformist, boring, and unworthy of our attention. Gauguin divides the World between the Old and the New. Such an exaggeration isn’t necessary to attract the reader to Gauguin’s unusual life and only shows the shallowness of the author’s expertise.

The narrator is terrible. She has emphasizes nearly every sentence as if it were one of the Commandments. This habit wearies the reader, because if every sentence is read as important, then the reader can’t distinguish, from the narration, the difference between the more important and the less important. Exhausting.