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All Of It with Alison Stewart
Full Bio: The Early Life of Paul Gauguin
00:24:22
Sue Prideaux, author of the book Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin, discusses the life of the controversial french artist.
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- [00:08]
Alison Stewart
This is all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. Coming up this week, Cynthia Nixon joins us tomorrow to talk about starring in the Gilded Age. And just like that, we also have a week of classic books that you can read to compete to complete your summer reading challenge. That's all in the future, but first we kick off with this month's Full Bio. Full Bio is our book series where we spend a few days with the author of a deeply researched biography to get a fuller understanding of the subject. The book we are discussing is a profile of the 19th century self taught French artist whose most famous work showed his vision of life in South Polynesia. It's called Wild A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prudho. Perdo has written biographies of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and playwright August Strindberg. With the subject of her new biography, Prudho faced a challenge. While Gauguin's works are in art museums around the world, his life story can lead one to wonder if he was a problematic man or a madman or a person whose passions took over reason or a visionary artist. For her book, Prudho uses historic and primary sources, including a recently discovered 213 page work Gauguin completed in his final years. She also used a memoir written by his son. She used his paintings and sculptures. Photos of them are in the book to help narrate what's going on in his life. I spent the first part of the interview asking Perdo about the challenge and then moved on with Gauguin's story. And his life story is quite one. Gauguin was the grandson of a feminist fighter, the child of activists who had to flee France. His father died when Paul was a baby and he was raised in Peru before returning to France to begin his adult life. Here's my conversation with Sue Prudho, the author of Wild A Life of Paul Gauguin. So you've written biographies of artist Edvard Monk, writer August Strindberg, German philosopher Nietzsche. Why did you want to write about Paul Gauguin?
- [02:27]
Sue Prudho
It's a very good question. It was in 2019, the National Gallery at London had an exhibition of Gauguin's portraits. And I've always loved his art and I mean, some of his pictures just give me goosebumps. But the reaction to the show was it was pequote moment and people were saying that Gauguin should be cancelled and his picture should be burnt. And I had just come out of writing a biography of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. And so sort of matters moral and philosophical were rather on my mind. And I thought, well, you know, I really can't get away with the idea of loving Gauguin's art and hating the man. So I thought, well, I'd better investigate and, you know, see. See if he really was as bad as they said he was. And so then I investigated and my investigations really became the book because there were so very many new discoveries. There hadn't been a biography for 30 years, and there was a lot of new stuff.
- [03:41]
Alison Stewart
It's very interesting. My friend and I always say, we're just going to throw the skunk on the table. All right, so I'll read you a few headlines about Paul Gauguin. Gauguin. It's not just genius versus monster. Gauguin. He was a violent pedophile. Do we really need to vindicate Gauguin? Gauguin. The dilemma. How does your book handle the controversy around Gauguin's behavior?
- [04:06]
Sue Prudho
Well, of course, I'm a biographer. What I do is I research and then I write up the results. You know, truth as far as you can ever get to the bottom of truth. Okay, so Gauguin was a pedophile who spread syphilis throughout the South Seas. So you start with pedophile. Okay, so we're talking 1880s, 1890, when Gauguin was out in Polynesia, and then Polynesia was a French colony. The age of consent in France and the colonies was 13. And this actually is pretty typical of the time. And without sounding rude, I'm English, you're American first home in the States at the time, ages varied between 10 and 12, except I'm horrified to say, the state of Delaware, where it was seven. And in fact, actually on a more modern context, when I was coming to the end of writing the book, Japan raised the age from 13. So it's disgusting and it's horrible, but actually within the context of the time, Gauguin was doing nothing illegal or, or indeed at all unusual. So you just have to, you know, stare that in the eye and take it. So then, okay, so syphilis, the other charge. Well, Gauguin died in 1903, and in the year 2000, the mayor of Atuona, on the little island where he lived called Hiwa Oa, decided that he was going to restore Gauguin's house. Okay, they knew where it was, they had photographs, etc. Etc. So Gauguin had a well in the garden. And when they were excavating the well, they discovered this screw top glass jar with four disgusting old teeth in it. So the Jar was sent to the Human Genome Project in Cambridge. Compared to the DNA taken from his father, actually his father was exhumed for the purpose and a known grandson, and they were definitely Gauguin's teeth. So then they pinged off all around the world to various other labs for testing for cadmium and mercury and the other heavy metals that were used to treat syphilis. And nothing was found. And, well, you know, it's all written up in a scientific journal anyway, the, the, the conclusion really is that, you know, it's 99.99, he definitely didn't have syphilis. So there, you know, Bango's a big myth. Yeah. So there were two things and so I was interested in them. And then just before I started writing in 2020, a very important manuscript came to light. Gauguin spent the last three years of his life writing. He called it Avant et Apres and it was a sort of recollection of his life, a sort of last will and testament, really summing everything up. And it was 200 pages, beautifully illustrated. Of course it was known about, but it disappeared shortly after his death. And then in 20, yeah, 2020, I think it was, it was offered, the manuscript, the handwritten manuscript was offered to the British government in lieu of death duties. So they accepted it and it was lodged in the Courtauld Institute. And they have been incredibly generous. They just let me do whatever I wanted, you know, quote, et cetera, et cetera. And so that was the most amazing new resource, really. And then the other thing that happen happened was that the Wildenstein Platner Institute completed the catalogue raisonne of Gauguin's paintings. And the catalogue raisonne is the bible of an artist, really. You know, every single painting, you get all the information on it, you know, when it was painted, when it was exhibited, the literature on IT, the materials, etc. Etc. So that was another amazing resource. And then I'm 3/4 Norwegian. Gauguin was married to a Danish wife and one of his sons lived in Norway and wrote a big family memoir in Norwegian that wasn't published. So I could read Danish and I could read, I can read Norwegian. And I also discovered, actually nearby, near Oxford in England, a wonderful great granddaughter of Gauguin and she had all these papers in Danish and Norwegian and again was fantastically generous. So, I mean, I just had so much new material, I just really had to write a book about it.
- [09:24]
Unknown
My guess is Sous Prudhoe, the name of the book is Wild A Life of Paul Gauguin. It's our choice. For full bio, let's get into the history. Gauguin was born in 1848 to Clovis and Aileen Gauguin. Now that's an important year in European history, a year that would affect him and his parents. Why did his parents choose to leave Europe when he was just a year old?
- [09:50]
Sue Prudho
Well, his parents, she was called Eileen and his father was called Clovis and they were both Republican journalists in France. And if you think about 1848, when Gauguin was born, Charles Louis Napoleon was the President of the French Republic. And it was absolutely obvious to everybody that he was preparing to restore the monarchy, to sit on the throne as Emperor Napoleon iii, which indeed he did in due time. And both Eileen and Clovis were Republicans. Both were on the list of the secret police as anti Napoleonic agitators. And so they knew that when Napoleon came to power there'd be clapped in the Bastille, probably. So they fled France to Peru, Taking, taking baby Paul. He was, you know, a few months old and so why did they go to Peru? Well, Eileen's mother, Flora Tristan, had family there and they wanted to claim her inheritance. So they took a boat to Peru. That took months. And Clovis, the father, had a heart attack and he died on the journey. He was only 34. And so Eileen had no alternative really, but to continue with the children, Paul and his elder sister Marie. And they showed up at the very grand family palace owned by Eileen's uncle. He was called Don Pio Tristo, Don Pio Tristan in Moscosa. And he had been governor of Peru and he lived in this huge palace with a large extended family and lots of slaves and servants and things. And Gauguin absolutely loved it. He adored it. He writes about it. It's like a sort of magical realist Eden. And he's running wild in the rainforest and there are parrots and jaguars and snakes and the earth shakes and there are earthquakes and volcanoes and it's just totally magic. And really all his life and actually in a way, all his art looks back to those days.
- [12:04]
Alison Stewart
Did Eileen consider herself to be of this, this higher class in Peru?
- [12:10]
Sue Prudho
No, no, no, no, not. No, she didn't. No, she was just a sort of. She thought of herself as a French woman. So when she was. When Gauguin was seven and the inheritance she was hoping for didn't materialize, she decided to take him back to France.
- [12:33]
Alison Stewart
Let me ask you about that inheritance.
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Unknown
What, what had she hoped would happen in Peru?
- [12:41]
Sue Prudho
You know what big Families are like. And you know, what sort of powerful men are like. And I think that, you know, Don Tristan had promised something to Flora, but I don't think there was anything in writing or anything like that, you know. So anyway, Eileen realized that nothing was forthcoming at all. And Gauguin was seven years old and he couldn't read and write and so on and so forth. So it was really time to take him back to France. And it was disastrous for him, poor darling. He couldn't speak French and he could only speak Spanish. He was rather small and rather sort of dark and swarthy. And they teased him and they bullied him and he into fights. And when he got into fights, he'd put up his fist and he'd say, I'm a Welton from Peru. And which, in fact is a cry that he sort of brought to the fore at various times in his life. He always felt, you know, I definitely that Peru, you know, he was Peruvian. He was very proud of it. He wasn't really, but, you know, that's what he liked.
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Unknown
He often said, though, that his grandmother was responsible for his painting, or at least his talent in some way. Her name was Flora Tristan and she was a feminist writer. What did you find interesting about Flora Tristan?
- [14:06]
Sue Prudho
Flora was absolutely amazing, actually. She was a real political activist. She was a firebrand. Her dates are she's sort of 1803 to 1844. So she's working the 1820s, 1830s. And she fought for workers rights, early trade unionism and for women's rights, of course. I mean, you know, women were paid nothing and so on and so forth. And she was a writer and her work was much admired by Karl Marx, who came along a little after her. One of the things that Flora did was she wanted to see how Parliament worked in England. And so she dressed up as a man to get into the Houses of Parliament because women were not allowed in anyway. She was quite an agitator. And the right wing newspapers called her Madame Encolaire, Madam in a temper. And, well, these days she's, you know, she's an icon of the French feminist movement. And Gauguin rarely idolized her. He kept his books with him all his life. But then Paul Flora married Frederick Chazal, who was a terrible scoundrel. And he sexually abused their daughter, Eileen, Gaug's mother. And Flora took him to court for the crime and won. But when he was released from prison, he was obviously a horrible man. He stalked Flora and he shot her. And the bullet couldn't be removed because it was three centimeters from her heart. She continued her political work and she put her daughter Eileen safely away from him, into boarding school, in fact, under the guardianship of George sand, another feminist. And both of them, they were determined that Eileen should have a proper education so she could support herself and not be reliant on a man. So that was Flora Tristan, and she was quite a woman.
- [16:09]
Unknown
We're talking to Sue Prudho. The name of her book is Wild A Life of Paul Gauguin. Before we leave Peru and we go back to Paris, before he's a teenager, I did want to ask about. Eileen began collecting pottery. And it was pottery, you said, that was influential on Paul, these vessels. Would you tell us a little bit about these vessels?
- [16:32]
Sue Prudho
Yes, indeed. They are pre Columbian remnants. And they weren't so sort of felt precious by the Spanish because the Spanish took all the gold and all the silver and so on and so forth. But what actually remained in Peru were these Moche pots. And they're earthenware pots. They date really from 100 AD to about 800 AD. So they're early. They are earthenware. If you think about Greek pottery, you know, the red and black Greek pottery, they have that same sort of the same coloring, the same slip glaze, that sort of thing. But they are very, very. They're like kind of woo. The pots are. They're anthropomorphic. They relate to their gods. You know, sometimes they'll have a dog's head, they'll have paws coming out of strange places, snakes winding around them. They look. They almost look like sort of props from a hammer horror movie, some of them. It's obviously a sort of great explosion of what the early Peruvians believed in and what they were representing.
- [17:46]
Alison Stewart
And why were they so important to Paul Gauguin in his life?
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Sue Prudho
Well, Eileen just was fascinated by them. She was a very artistic person and she brought a whole collection of them back to France, which of course was, you know, the first ones, really. And Paul, I think they just lodged in his subconscious, actually. And then at a later moment, he's invited to make pots in Paris, which he does. And his are like these mochi pots, but they're a bit of a. More of a European Peruvian blend, because, of course, it's his memories sort of superimposed on these primitive objects. And also he experiments with glazes, but they're marvelous, actually. And after he died, there was a show of them, I think, in 1905, and Picasso saw them. And this was really what started Picasso's ceramics and his interest in indigenous and African art.
- [18:58]
Alison Stewart
And before we leave Peru, you talked about it briefly before, but I want to get into it a little bit more. How do we see his childhood? It was only until he was seven years old, but where do we see that in his work? Can you give us an example of a painting where we see some of his childhood in Peru?
- [19:19]
Sue Prudho
Yes. Well, you know what he does, he never really specifically paints Peru, but when he gets to Tahiti and to the Polynesian islands, he is stylizing the jungle. And it's really, it's. He melds the two tropical places. He never, in fact, after he's seven years old, goes back to Peru. So it's a Peru of the mind, a Peru of the soul. He doesn't want to be literal ever.
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Unknown
Let's talk about his mother in Paris.
- [20:00]
Alison Stewart
She gets a job as a dressmaker.
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Unknown
And you said when he returned and during his teenage years in Paris, you write that it provoked a teenager age Gauguin to obstinacy. What was he like? What kind of problems did he cause?
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Alison Stewart
What did he do?
- [20:19]
Sue Prudho
Poor man. Well, okay, so arriving In Orleans, age 7 in 1855, Gauguin was a misfit, as we've said. He couldn't speak French, etc. Etc. Quite soon, Eileen was bored of the provinces in Orleans. So she decided to try her luck in Paris, in fact, as a seamstress, which is, you know what women did. They got a Singer sewing machine, you know, God bless you, Winona Singer. And they, you know, they got independent life. So she put Gauguin to boarding school. And it was, in fact, it was a huge seminary for trainee priests. Gauguin slept in a dormitory with 40 boys. And he hated it. And the whole thing was impossible and he felt like a prisoner. But there was a saving grace because the school was run by Cardinal Dupontlu, a super intelligent cardinal who believed in boys reading the classics in the original Roman and Greek, rather than, you know, sort of French versions and of course the Bible. And so when Gauguin becomes an artist, he's totally fluent in mythology and symbol. He understands the whole canon of Western civilization, which of course makes it all the more interesting when he synthesizes it. I was talking about synthesis with Peru, with the culture that he's seen in the wild in the wider world, in Japan and Martinique and Peru and Polynesia. But to finish about Gauguin at boarding school in his awkward teenage. Yes, yes. I made a very important discovery, actually. As I was researching his school days, Gauguin's Most famous painting is called Where Do We Come From? Who Are We? Where Are We Going? It's gigantic in scale. He painted it towards the end of his life to sum up what he believed in. And as I researched his school days, I discovered that every day the boys had to recite a special creed written for them by Cardinal Dupontloup. And it begins with those words, where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going? So these were the questions he asked all his life. I mean, he may have been a wild thing, and he was a wild thing and a rebel, but he was also an intellectual, widely read, he was thinking deeply, he had a philosophical bent. He read Nietzsche, and he definitely didn't think that God was dead. In fact, he left school with a lifelong love of Christ, but also a lifelong hatred of what he saw as the hypocrisy of the Church. And so, of course, after school, Eileen didn't know what to do next with her problem son. So eventually, he joined the merchant navy and knocked about the world. The French Merchant Navy. He lost his virginity to an opera singer in Brazil. And then in 1870, the Franco Prussian War broke out. By Now, Gauguin was 22, and his ship was seconded to transport prisoners. And he really hated this. He really couldn't bear the imprisonment of anybody, himself or anybody else. So he jumped ship and made his way to Paris. By now, Eileen was dead and her house was destroyed. But her lover, Gustavo Rosa, very decently took Gauguin under his wing and found him a job on the Bourse, on the stock exchange. And now begins a new stage in Gauguin's life.
- [24:12]
Alison Stewart
That was Sue Prudho, author of Wild Thing, A Life of Paul Gauguin, our choice for full bio. Tomorrow, we'll hear about Gauguin's close relationship with Vincent van Gogh.
- [24:23]
Sue Prudho
Morning. One sausage McMuffin with egg, please.
- [24:26]
Unknown
Okay, your total is.
- [24:27]
Sue Prudho
Wait. Let's negotiate. How's about you throw in hash browns for a dollar?
- [24:32]
Unknown
Well, yes, sir, that price is already a dollar.
- [24:35]
Sue Prudho
Take it or leave it. Take it, I guess.
- [24:40]
Unknown
Buy one, add one for a dollar on sausage McMuffin with egg, hash browns and more with McValue. Most locations open 5am or earlier. Price and participation may vary. Limited time only. Valid for item of equal or lesser value.
- [24:51]
Sue Prudho
Ba da ba ba ba.
- [24:53]
Ira Flatow
This is Ira Flato, host of Science Friday. For over 30 years, the science Friday team has been reporting high quality science and technology news, making science fun for curious people by covering everything from the outer reaches of space to the rapidly changing world of AI to the tiniest microbes in our bodies. Audiences trust our show because they know we're driven by a mission to inform and serve listeners first and first and foremost with important news they won't get anywhere else. And our sponsors benefit from that halo effect. For more information on becoming a sponsor, visit sponsorship.wnyc.org.