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Because your personal best is greater than anything.
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Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Leila Ismail. Our guest today is biographer Sue Prideaux who is best known for her award winning biographies on Friedrich Nietzsche and Edvard Munch. In her latest biography, Wild Thing, Prido turns her sharp lens on the life.
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C
Of 19th century French artist Paul Gauguin.
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B
Joining her in conversation is executive producer of Intelligence Squared, Hannah Kaye.
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C
Let's join Hannah now with more. Hello, I'm Hannah Kaye and welcome to Intelligence Squared. I'm delighted to be joined by Sue Prideaux. Her biographies of Edouard Munch, August Strindberg and Friedrich Nietzsche have all won major book awards and today she's here to talk about her new book Wild A Life of Paul Gauguin, which has been shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for nonfiction. Sue, welcome to Intelligence Squared, and congratulations on a magnificent book.
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B
Thank you, Hannah. Thanks a lot.
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C
Now we live in a time when the legacies of many great artists have been reassessed in the light of new sensitivities towards race, gender, colonialism, and so on. And Paul Gauguin in particular has come under the spotlight. So, for this podcast, I did a little research, and I found that nowadays he's generally thought to be, one might say, a pretty awful person. In 2010, I found that Vicente Todoli, who was then director of Tate Modern in London when it staged a major Gauguin exhibition, said of Gauguin, the person I can totally abhor and loathe, but the work is the work. But for me in particular, it was the 2019 exhibition of Gauguin portraits at the National Gallery in London, where I realized that Gauguin had become, as it were, problematic. So to remind myself, I went back online to see how they'd framed Gauguin in the exhibition. And I found that the audio guide had asked, is it time to stop looking at Gauguin altogether? And the wall text said, of his time on Tahiti, the artist repeatedly entered into sexual relations with young girls, marrying two of them and fathering children. Gauguin undoubtedly exploited his position as a privileged Westerner to make the most of the sexual freedoms available to him. And then I looked up some of the reviews of the exhibition at the time. The headline of the New York Times read, is it Time Gauguin got cancelled? And Alastair Suk in the Telegraph described him as this 19th century Harvey Weinstein. Now, Suke, that's pretty strong stuff.
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B
It certainly is. It certainly is. And I went to the same exhibition, of course, in 2019, and with a particular purpose, really. I had just come out of writing and publishing my biography of Friedrich Nietzsche. I am dynamite. And so I was definitely in sort of, you know, in mood for moral examination. And I'm not historian, I've always loved Gauguin's work. I mean, some of his works just make my hair stand on end. And of course, you know, with all these captions and so on and so forth, I hadn't really thought about it before because I hadn't really sort of thought about his life. I thought, my God, well, okay, is it all right to love the art and hate the man? This is not a very good moral position. So I went. I still adored the pictures. And of course, the main story was he was a bad boy who spread syphilis throughout the South Seas to underage girls. So I thought, well, okay, yeah, well, my job is to research and to find the truth as best I can as what you do as a biographer. So let's go. Of course, the simple one was the underage girls. So you go into what the age of consent is in France and the colonies at the time, and the age of consent in France and the colonies is 13. And then you spread your net wider and you realize that this is pretty average for the 1880s. And in fact, in the United States of America, it varied between 10 and 12, except in the lucky state of Delaware, where it was seven, which is pretty shocking. I mean, it means basically that Gauguin was doing nothing illegal, but more importantly, nothing unusual within the context of the time. And actually, as I was coming to the end of the book, June last year, Japan raised the age from 13. I mean, it gives you goosebumps. It's just so awful. But, you know, that's the correct picture for that. So, you know, you know what's going on, you know the truth. So then you get to the syphilis. And Anschel, the National Gallery, were quite remiss because the year before, in 2018, there was an article published in a scientific journal called Anthropol, which is the Journal of Anthropology. Surprisingly enough, four of Gauguin's teeth had been discovered. They had been verified as his teeth by the Human Genome Project. The Cambridge, you know, DNA was established up and down. His father was exhumed, by the way, to get the DNA, and there was grandson. So anyway, there were his teeth, and then they were sent for strontium isotope testing to various labs around the world. Anyway, the conclusion is that he didn't have, or he was most, most, most, most, most unlikely to have had syphilis. And so you get those two major charges. Well, exploded, really. You know, he was doing nothing illegal or unusual with the girls and he didn't have syphilis. Well, you know, that's a bit of a jumping off point, really.
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C
But also, you found this memoir, this document, written by Gauguin at the end of his life, which threw a whole new light on our perception of his life.
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B
Yes, yes. I mean, I was very lucky. And that actually, that started well, I mean, that was discovered after I had signed the contract to write the book. So I was already committed to signing the book because I thought, these are such huge things. We've got to reassess his life. But then I think it was 2020 Avant et Apres, which is a 200 page handwritten, beautifully hand illustrated book that Gauguin wrote at the end of his life, the last two, three years of his life was his sort of testament really. And it was lost soon after his death. But then in 2020 it resurfaced and was offered to the British government in lieu of death duties. They accepted it and it's now housed in the courtauld. And they were incredible. They gave me full access and full permission to quote and et cetera, et cetera. So, you know, that was pretty amazing. The other sort of literary thing that happened was in 2021 the catalogue raisonne of his work was completed. And so there was such big things, such big changes.
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C
So in many ways you were rather lucky having decided to write the biography in 2019. His various things subsequently came to light and you've been able to incorporate them all in this wonderful book.
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B
Yes, I was incredibly lucky also, actually. I was incredibly lucky in contact with the family. And there's a wonderful granddaughter who lives in Oxfordshire actually, and she had a lot of family papers. My, I grew up. Well, my childhood was in Norway. My first language is Norwegian. Govin married a Danish wife and. And Norwegian and Danish are extremely similar, so I can read all those things. And one of his sons, Pola, lived in Norway and wrote some memoirs of his parents in Norwegian, so I could read those too. So I mean, the concatenation of all this stuff was just amazing.
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C
You as the biographer with your linguistic abilities and then these revelations that came to light, it couldn't have been a better moment to. To write this biography and you couldn't have been a better person. Yes. Just stepping back a bit to just give us a picture about Gauguin. Why is he so important as a painter? What is his position in the canon of Western art?
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B
Well, he started as an impressionist, you know, 1874, 1875 he was then. Well, Gauguin is absolutely fascinating because he didn't pick up a paintbrush till he was 25 in the year really that the Impressionist exhibition started. And he was a very rich stockbroker at the time, actually. And so what did he spend his money on? He bought Impressionist paintings. Degas, Manet and Cezanne was his absolute hero. But he didn't dare sort of have contact with them. So in the evenings he taught himself to paint. Paint by copying these canvases that he had bought in the evenings and at weekends, obviously. And then by the fourth Impressionist exhibition, he was actually exhibiting with them. So he started very much as an Impressionist, but then in 1882, there was a big crash, a big financial crash in Paris. And he lost his job as a stockbroker. He lost everything, really. And he went off to Brittany to paint. And when he was kind of away from the Paris hot house, he really found his voice. And he then felt that the Impressionists were really too scientific in the way that they broke down colors into the colors of the prism and then put them together with little dots next to each other. And then your eye blends those colors and you're doing the work. And there's an Impressionist painting also. The Impressionists still adhered to the good old fashioned Renaissance picture books. You know, stuff is 3D. You know, there's a horizon and an up and a down. But Gauguin, by that time was very fascinated by the Japanese prints and woodcuts that came to Paris. And they, of course, the Japanese tell stories in the most wonderful sort of comic strip way, disregarding our Westboro one point perspective. They have multiple point perspective. Things get flung about all over the place. And these two things appealed to Gauguin because what he wanted to convey was emotion in his paintings and the inner life rather than the reality of what you see. And so that was his big sort of breakthrough in Brittany. And he was, in fact, he was scolded by Pissarro who said, you've let the spiritual back into painting. You know, we don't do that.
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C
And he'd chosen Brittany because he thought this was a place that was somehow sort of undeveloped, wild. It resonated with this idea he had of a lost Eden, a sort of vanished paradise. Can you tell us a little bit about that idea and where it originated in him?
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B
Yes, Though Gauguin was born In Paris in 1848, that great year of revolutions, his father was a political journalist who was an anti monarchist, he was a republican. And Charles Louis Napoleon was about to seize the throne and make friends. France, a monarchy again, an empire again, really. And so Gauguin's father fled to Peru, where there were family connections. Unfortunately, the father died en route, leaving Gauguin's mother in charge of Gauguin, who was then practically a year old, few months old really, and his sister and she made her way up to the family palace where Gauguin's great uncle, who had been governor of Peru, lived. And it's the most amazing. You can only see engravings of it now, but it was a huge sort of dark palace with barred windows, very dark interiors, very sort of Caravagesque. And Gauguin Describes it in his written memoir in Avant apres and. And he says, you know, there were pools of light lit by candlesticks as high and as heavy as a man. And then outside he was completely free. He just ran barefoot through the jungle and there were volcanoes, snow capped volcanoes, belching fire and he was in an earthquake and it was pure bliss and he adored it. And all his. That's. He was there until he was seven and that's really his core arcadia that he's always looking for. But then when he was 7, his mother thought it was time for him to learn to read and write. So they went back to France and he was at school in Auverglion and he absolutely hated it. He was quite small and quite swarthy and at that time, of course, he couldn't speak French, he only spoke Spanish. And he was teased and bullied and he put up his fists and he says, I'm a wild thing from Peru. And really from then on that was his alter ego, that was his core. I'm a wild thing from Peru, I'm not going to fit into all this nonsense.
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C
So he's gone off to Brittany, begins to sort of find his style there, but he's not hugely successful, comes back, then he goes off to Panama on a sort of ill fated trip to try and make some money that doesn't work. And then on his way back he ends up on Martinique and that's really the beginning of the sort of the love affair with what we might call in his terms, the exotic. Is that right?
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B
Yes, yes. Panama, unfortunately went to dig the Panama Canal, but the Panama Canal Company won't bust within a fortnight so he had to make his way home. And yes, Martinique. And that is where, you know, his eyes were open to this tropical beauty. And of course it's very interesting then because when he comes back to Paris, Vincent van Gogh sees the Martinique paintings and becomes absolutely on fire to paint with Gauguin and approaches him and he sends Gauguin a self portrait, inviting him to come and join him and paint in the Yellow House. And then Gauguin sends back a self portrait with his acceptance. I think it's just a lovely way to do that really. And then of course in 1888 he goes down to the Yellow House. And a lovely sort of historical thing is that when Gauguin accepted, Van Gogh was so excited in that August that that's when he paints his famous sunflowers to welcome Gauguin, he says, as a welcoming bouquet in Gauguin's Bedroom. There are the sunflowers, which is pretty amazing really. And actually you can see them. You can see the two sunflower pictures that he painted for Gauguin's bedroom in the, in the National Gallery at the.
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C
Moment, just as he wanted them.
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B
Yes, well, not quite, no, because Van Gogh wanted them with their frames touching. Ah, yes, in the exhibition they're quite separate.
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C
But they do actually they look a bit too far apart, don't they?
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B
I think they are.
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C
I agree, I agree. Anyway, do you want to just tell us a little bit more about this rather than ill fated but famous episode in Arles?
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B
Yes, I mean, it was wonderful and it was very, very important to both men's art, which progressed amazingly over the nine weeks. They went out and they painted en plein air, the same subjects and then they would take them in and you know how different those paintings are if you look at them. But then sadly, in November, I mean, Van Gogh was, you know, basically, well, Van Gogh knew that he was not meant to stable. And before Gauguin arrived, Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo saying, I'm really worried that I'm so excited about this. It's going to be too much for my mental health actually. And so come November, suddenly there were weeks and weeks of rain and Van Gogh was getting more and more, you know, off the wall and they were kind of restive in this tiny little house. And then Gauguin finds the idea of, look, let's paint our chairs. You know, you're sitting in this tiny room, okay, you can't paint outdoors. Let's paint our chairs. And so then there are those two famous paintings of Van Gogh's chair and Gauguin's chair. You know, one with the pipe on and the other with the, with the books, you know, the learned, the learned artist. And then of course there's that terrible moment when Van Gogh tips over the edge. He chucks. They go to a cafe together and he chucks a whole glass, the glass as well as the contents of absinthe at Gauguin. And then he pursues him with a razor. And Gauguin's so frightened he spends another night in the hotel. When he comes back to the yellow house in the morning, there's a great crowd around and the chief of police says, arrests him for the murder of his friend. He arrests him for the murder of Van Gogh. So Gauguin says, hold on a minute, you know, oh, so let's go and have a look inside the house. And they go in and I find this detail extraordinary. You know, Gauguin writes, you know, we went in and the ground floor was full of wet, blood stained towels that he had obviously been mopping his ear with. So they go up. Van Gogh is alive. Gauguin leaves. Van Gogh admits himself to the, to the, you know, what's it called, the mental asylum. Basically, the first person he asks for is Gauguin. The first letter he writes from there is Gauguin is to Gauguin saying, you know, I'm sorry I frightened you. And from then on until Van Gogh dies a year later, well, kills himself a year later. They keep up the correspondence. And Van Gogh always wants to paint with Gauguin again. And Gauguin is always making little excuses, excuses, kind excuses to get out of it because he was so damn frightened. Understandably so. But then, so then Van Gogh, you know. Well, you know, shoots himself. But there's a lovely postscript to the story which happens 10 years later when Guga is in Tahiti and he sends for sunflower seeds. He, he sends to Paris for sunflowers and he plants them and he gets them to flower and he paints them in a vase. He writes, in memory of my gentle friend Vincent.
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C
Very touchy.
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B
It's tearjacking, isn't it?
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C
Yeah, yes, yes. So after that episode, Gauguin comes back to Paris and then there's another great influential turning point which is the, the exposition Universelle in 1889 in Paris, which is a sort of a world collection, one of These weights of 19th century exhibitions where they bring everything from around the world. Can you tell us a little bit about that and what influence that had on Gauguin?
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B
Yes, of course. I mean, that is what the Eiffel Tower was built for, which is amazing. And then worked just like the Illuminati Olympics this year, really. They had, all over Paris they had these pavilions, world pavilions. And what they were doing, I mean, it's very shocking. They were celebrating not only industrialization, which Gauguin hated, he hated industrialization, but they were also celebrating France's missions, civilisatrice, France's civilizing mission, which interestingly, I think has its roots in the French Revolution. And the idea was that really all the world should be like France. And so their colonization was much more, can you call it homogenous, much more insistent on French values, et cetera, et cetera. Then in fact, British colonization, which is quite interesting. We wanted to, well, we, the British wanted to preserve the local character and lay alongside it, whereas the French destroyed, really. And you get this in, in New Zealand and in Polynesia. I mean, when Gauguin went to Polynesia, the French had really destroyed all the artifacts, all the art. They had forbidden dancing of certain dances, they had forbidden nudity, they had forbidden polyandry, etc. Etc. But at the same time, when Gauguin went to New Zealand, on his way out to Polynesia, he saw all the New Zealand art in the New Zealand Museum, which had been preserved and which was linked to the Polynesian art. So that gave him an idea of what Polynesian art had been. I mean, I'm not making a political point, it's just interesting historically and visually, really.
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C
Yes, yes. So what was. There's a general French view of Tahiti as they saw it in the exhibition. And from what they deemed from earlier explorers who'd been there.
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B
The French had very romantic notion of Tahiti and Polynesia because there was a very successful, basically romantic novelist called Pierre Loti, and he had been in the navy, but he then made so much money writing novels, and he set them in the various places where he'd sailed to. One of them, Madame Chrysantheme became Madame Butterfly because he'd been to Japan. And then there was another novel. God, what was it called? The Tahitian one. Anyway, so everyone. And basically Loti's novels were all the same. This pront. Sailor would go to an exotic place, Japan, Polynesia, wherever, fall in love with a very pretty, very young girl. He would have to sail away, she would be so heartbroken, she would commit suicide. And then on he'd go to the next. And these sold in their thousands. And it's quite interesting that Pierre Loti was made a fellow of the French Academie, whereas Zola, who at the same time was writing rather good realist novels, was not. Pierre Loti was given a state funeral and everyone believed, really, that Polynesia was like his novels. Not Gauguin, not Gauguin, because he had been in the navy. But there was this young French painter who was very keen to paint with Gauguin, and Gauguin was very keen to paint with his. And he was called Emile Bernard. Incidentally, I rather love the way these painters want to, you know, say, paint with me. Our paintings will progress together, you know that it's a cooperative thing rather than just an individual thing. I like that. Anyway, Gauguin wanted to go to Japan to paint with Bernard, because Gauguin so loved Japanese prints. He really wanted to get deeper into this. But Bernard said, no, no, no, no, no, I want to go to Tahiti. Gauguin's letter says, you do realize it's not like the Pierre Loti novel, don't you? Bernard said that ought to go anyway. So then they get their passage, Gauguin as the first official French artist to Polynesia, and then at the last minute, Bernard backs out. So Gauval goes alone.
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C
You paint a wonderful vignette when Gauguin's on the boat approaching Tahiti and what he sees on the shore is not really what he expected, is it? Can you just describe that? Yes.
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B
Well, you have to. When you're getting into Tahiti and into Papeete, the harbor's quite treacherous because, of course, all these Polynesian islands, they look rather wonderfully like Hokusai's Mount Fuji because they're all extinct volcanoes with tremendous ridges down the side. And so you've got the coral reef all around. So you have to wait until daylight to get there. Well, for the ship to go in. So he waited underneath these lovely stars reflected in the phosphorescence of the sea. And it was all so exciting. And then when they got in, there's a lovely line of trees, flame trees, along the beach, which is great, you know, what excitement. But then once you get through the flame trees. Tahiti had been a colony for about nine years then. And already in that time, the French in the mission, so called Civilize a Trisse, had forbidden native huts because they were fire risk. And so it looked like any sort of really wild west shanty town, you know, with ghastly sort of corrugated iron roofs and non flammable houses and a very depressed population oppressed by 400, you know, gendarmes and administrators and things. And of course, the missionaries have been incredibly, well, forceful. And as well as forbidding polyandry and nudity, they dressed them all in what became known as Mother Hubbards because flesh was sinful. So they had to go absolutely top to toe, right to the fingertips and the toes in these long dresses. So flesh had totally disappeared. They were in these long dresses, most of which were made from cotton that was woven in Manchester.
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C
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- [33:15]
C
But what what were what were the sexual mores in in Polynesia? Obviously there was this myth of of, you know, freely available so sexually unbridled women. But how did it actually work? Because certainly when when go there arrived, things did seem rather different from the way that they were organized in in Europe. How did men and women interact and what was the status of women on Tahiti?
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B
You know, remember, what a short time, you know, not really even a generation. What a short time, you know, it had been a French colony so Everything. Everything within living memory was as it had been in the olden days. And it was a. As Anne said, it was a polyandrous society. They worshipped various gods, obviously. They had lovely. Actually lovely load of gods. And you can relate them to the Norse gods and the Greek gods and the lovely things they get up to. Except, of course, everything is based around the sea rather than the land. But, you know, that is that. But I mean, basically, in Polynesian society, men and women were very divided. Each had their own responsibilities. Women, interestingly enough, didn't have souls. And this was quite an advantage because it meant they couldn't be human sacrifice because they were not really worth sacrificing to the gods. But there was human sacrifice up to 40 years before Pope Gaga arrived. But it's. It's interesting because it's not, oh, let's all have a feast on our enemies. Once you had actually conquered your enemy and he was sacrificially killed, you just had a little. Little bit of him to take his soul into your soul. And that persisted the idea of the extreme exchange of souls. And eventually, when Dugin had been on the islands for a long time and was much beloved by the locals because he fought their corner against the French, he was invited to exchange souls with a Polynesian, which is really rather wonderful. So, yes, you asked about how was it all, and how was sexual mores?
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C
Well.
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B
Actually, even before children hit puberty, they would be sexually active with each other, and indeed, with older, you know, particularly the girls would be initiated by the older men.
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C
So when Gauguin arrives, these women, as it were, come very easily into his life. And on the first trip in Tahiti, there, there are two women. We can call them wives, if you like. The first one was Titi, which, interestingly apparently meant breasts in the local language.
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B
Titi. No, she. She was local prostitute. And when.
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C
And he doesn't get on with her very well, does he? He sort of takes her away from the capital city and.
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B
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yes. No, he's. He's disgusted by papier. By the. By the capital city and all the uniforms, and Frenchman in linen suits lording it over the natives. And he says, well, okay, okay, Titi, I'm going off to adventure to see if I want to live in the country. And she says, yeah, I'll come with you. So off they go. And, of course, that is when he leaves Pampiete and finds the proper Polynesian countryside that he realizes, you know, he's found his first version of Arcadia. Titi, however, does not enjoy living in a hut. And she certainly doesn't want to just sit all day being painted. She's a city girl, she's a bright lights girl. So he takes her back to Paviote and that's absolutely fine. That's no problem for either of them. And then he, during his explorations of the island, he comes across a village where they offer him. Where a mother offers him. He offers him a girl to be his swadizol wife. And he says yes, and this is tehamanna and she's 15 and she goes with him. And the custom then was that the wife would. I mean, I say wife because there's no marriage, but it's an understanding. It's a worthless piece of paper, really. She stays with him for a week and then you go. Then the bride goes back to the family for a week to see if they want to save the husband. And if they do, they come back and Tejamane came back and they had two years together which were extremely happy, really. And the relationship was that basically she was, you know, Gauguin was her main man, but she was free to come and go, to take other lovers. It was. There was nothing coercive about it. And of course, he. She was the most wonderful. She was wonderful in two ways. She really, really suited an artist because she loved to. She had a very still quality about her. She was a thoughtful. She was an intellectual girl, really, though obviously she couldn't read and wr. But she was certainly an intellectual and she taught him all the Polynesian legends of their gods, their myths. And so she gave him that tremendous resource. And she liked to sit still, she liked to pose.
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C
And he painted some wonderful paintings of her that are major parts of his oeuvre, which. Let's talk a little bit about that.
- [39:33]
B
Yes, absolutely. He painted. One of the first ones is Tehamana has many parents. And it's a picture really of the synthesis on Tahiti that is going on at the time, because there she is, this gorgeous girl, and she's in her terrible striped missionary Mother Hubbard, you know, up to there and down to there. But she's holding a Polynesian, which was a royal symbol. And then behind her is a line of hieroglyphs, like the missionaries had destroyed the hieroglyphs. And there's the figure of Hina, the goddess of the moon that Tehamanna had told him about. And so there's a lot going on. He calls it. Tehamana has many parents and it's the synthesis of everything that has gone into Tehamana at this particular moment. And of course, he, in his art and in his thought, he is always synthesizing things. And one of the first pictures he painted when he got out there was called Te Orania Maria Hail Mary and it's a picture of the Virgin Mary carrying the Christ child on her shoulders. And both of them have halos that merge and both of them are Polynesian. And the angel Gabriel has come down to make the Annunciation in her Mother Hubbard dress. And instead of the wise men worshipping, there are two traditional Polynesian bare breasted Bahinians who were bringing, worshipping the child. And so when this was sent back to Paris, it was a terrible, terrible hue and cry. You can't have a Polynesian holy family. Brown holy family. And in fact, I researched and it was not until 1951 that there was a papal encyclical permitting the holy family to be painted as well as indigenous people. Which of course, you know, if you think of where Mary and Joseph came from, you know, it's pretty stupid really. Yeah.
- [41:58]
C
But this is something that he was sort of doing repeatedly within the canon. He was the first to put a non whiter, a dark fleshed woman front and center in a painting. I mean, I'm thinking of. And you flag this up in your book, Manet's Olympia, where you have the sort of the white fleshed prostitute lying back on the bed with the black servant girl, bringing her a bunch of flowers, presumably with a message from a client. But Gauguin is putting his Tahitian women, you know, in the same sort of, you know, prostrate position. Supine or prostrate, whatever. But for the first time ever, we are seeing a, you know, a non white nude female in the center of these paintings, which must have seemed very radical at the time.
- [42:45]
B
Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.
- [42:47]
C
Gauguin goes back to Paris because his paintings are beginning to sell. He needs to feels he needs to be there to get things going a bit. And then he goes back to Brittany for a final time. And this time disaster really strikes. Can you tell us about what happens there on that?
- [43:03]
B
Yeah, it's so sad. He was making some money teaching at an art school in Paris. And one of the models was a wonderful woman called Anna the Javanese. And she had been trafficked to Paris to be a black maid to a white opera singer, just exactly like Manet's Olympia. But she had a lot of character on her. She was, she modeled at the art school. And so she and Gauguin went off to Brittany. Anna went Nowhere without her parrot and her pet monkey. And so one day they went for a walk, the white painter and the black model with her parrot and her pet monkey. And this was really too much for the fishermen of Brittany. And 15 of them set upon him and basically tried to kick him to death with their wooden clogs and did him well. They basically shattered his ankle and his shin bones showed through the flesh, etc. And he was, you know. Well, he was very near death. But anyway, he survived. But from then on, he always walked with a stick. And he was just disgusted by France, really, and went back to Paris. Oh, sorry. Went back to Tahiti. And this is when he really takes up the cause of the indigenous people. And he becomes a political journalist. He exposes the corruption, et cetera, of the French officials. He writes to Paris exposing it, and so on and so forth. And then the governor of. Of Tahiti then brings a lawsuit against him for libel. Gauguin knows that he won't win this lawsuit in the prejudice court, so he runs. He takes about 900 miles to a tiny little island called Hiwa Oa, where, to his amazement, he's greeted like a hero at the quay. They all say his name, you know, and they follow him and he takes them to the general store and he buys them all tea and cakes. It's not because he's a great painter, but it's because he's fought their corner against the French regime. And he continues to do this on Hiva. And that's when he becomes a blood brother and much beloved by them and much hated by the French.
- [45:33]
C
So any idea that he was this colonial interloper really is put paid by that evidence that you found very much championing the cause of the indigenous people against the French colonial authorities.
- [45:48]
B
Yes. Against their exploitation. This terrible moment when a tidal wave, something like a tsunami, comes through the whole island, washing, of course, all their huts away and. And destroying their houses. And Gauguin goes to the governor and he says, look, you've got to allow these men to repair their homes, rebuild their homes, before they do this road mending program that you've got scheduled for them. Governor says, no, no, no, no, no. Road mending comes first. I mean, just cruel, heartless, horrible. And then Gauguin gives a piece of his own land to one of the islanders because this piece of his own land is higher and so it won't get washed away. No, he loved them and they loved him.
- [46:36]
C
And he also got the young girls released from this awful boarding school that they'd all been sent away to.
- [46:41]
B
That was the most extraordinary thing. Yeah. Because the island, the guy with a vice like grip on it was the Roman Catholic bishop, Bishop Martin, who incidentally had a 15 year old mistress himself. He carved two wonderful carvings. One of the bishop, one of Bishop Martin, which he writes on the bottom, father Lechery. And then one of Claire's who was very pretty and she has a great hairdo. And he set these up in his garden. And so everyone who went past his garden had a tremendous giggle. But of course Bishop Artet did not have a tremendous giggle at all and he had shut up. All the children between 7 and 14 in Catholic boarding schools. He just told the islanders this was compulsory. So a whole generation were only taught in French, only speaking French, only learning the Catholic faith, only learning Western history and stuff. And the idea really was to deracinate, to obliterate the Polynesian language and culture in one generation. Just like that. It's what the Russians are doing to kidnap Ukrainian children at the moment.
- [47:55]
C
Exactly.
- [47:57]
B
Anyway, Gauguin, good man, discovered a. He did his research and he discovered minor French bylaw that said that children only had to go to school, to a school within 4km of their home. So you can imagine mass relocation ensued and go down one lap, huh? You know. Terrific.
- [48:22]
C
Yes, yes. Shall we just say a few words about, about the wife that he had at that time, Pahura? Because I think, I mean she rather gives the light to the idea that she was a sort of exploited juvenile because he was very unwell at that time. His, his wound still wasn't healing. He was taking, was it opium and laudanum and in huge pain and effectively she nursed him as he was dying. And then there's some evidence at the end of her life. Can you tell us about that long after he died?
- [48:56]
B
Yes. She's the only one who was interviewed and there's a sweet picture of her and as an old lady when she, she was breeding guinea pigs. That's what she did. And no, she was, she was interviewed and she just, she laughed and giggled and she said, oh, c' est un cocaine. He was a rascal. And so, you know, obviously she had good memories.
- [49:22]
C
Yeah. So I mean, we don't know about. Well, Titi was just rather short lived. But to Hamura and Pahura, I mean, clearly the evidence is that they were genuinely fond of him. They. There doesn't seem to be any evidence that these were juvenile exploited women.
- [49:38]
B
They were free to come and go, you know, within that society.
- [49:42]
C
Yes, yes, yes. And Perhaps just one more thing to say is that throughout his life, G had just a huge respect for women. He liked strong women and he wanted women to be independent and to be able to realize their potential. That seen through his. His mother and grandmother and the way he treated his wife, metting and so on.
- [50:02]
B
That's right, that's right, yeah. No, I mean, his grandmother, Flora Tristan was a pioneering campaigner for women's rights and for workers rights, who, in fact, was much admired by Karl Marx and. Yeah, no, she was a real activist. His mother, of course, when she was widowed when Gauguin was just a year old, and she really, you know, she made her way in the world and she, in fact, was a seamstress, but also she was an art collector, which, you know, had a big influence on Gauguin. When they were in Peru during his first seven years, she collected up the pre Columbian artifacts that remained mostly pottery, because, of course, all the valuable stuff had been taken by the Spanish conquistadors at the. But there was wonderful pre Columbian pottery, and she brought that back to France, and that had had a big influence on Gauguin's art and his vision. And then he married lovely Mette, independent Danish woman. Her father had died when she was 10. She'd been sort of head of the family ever since. She'd become governess to the prime minister of Denmark's children. And when she left Gauguin went back to Denmark, he said, look, one way you can make money is you can translate Zola's novels into Danish, which she did. You know, he enabled her to do that, and it was very successful. He liked women, you know. Yeah, he liked strong women.
- [51:44]
C
Yes. Yeah. And also, I mean, to be fair to him, he did always dream that one day he would make enough money to be able to reunite the family. It never happened. He never came back from Tahiti. He never made enough money. But at some level, he did want to be a good family man to met him and the children. Anyway, so he dies in 1903 in this island on Hivaoa and nursed by pahora and buried there. So I think that's where we'll have to leave the story. I just have one more question for you, Sue. I was just wondering, are you hoping that your book will now have an influence on curators and art historians? So, for example, I looked up the painting Nevermore, which is the. One of. This is Pahura, isn't it? Which I have certainly looked at dozens and dozens of times at the Courtauld without really actually understanding very much what it was about. But it's a very striking picture. She's lying on her side on a bed. There's a black raven in your background and her eyes are a scarlet. She looks very sad. I now understand it's because she's recently lost a child. But anyway, the courthouse gallery website accompanying the picture says that Gauguin took advantage of his position as a European colonizer. Pahora was one of several teenagers that he took on as wives in universal commas. The widespread racist fantasy of Tahitian girls as sexually precocious led to their unabashed exploitation. So are you hoping that the curators and the art historians of the Courtauld and other galleries will read your book and perhaps re express some of their accompanying texts in the light of this?
- [53:40]
B
Yes. Could do with a bit of revision, couldn't it?
- [53:43]
C
I think so. I think so. Well, let's wait and see. Anyway, I'm sure this book is going to have a terrific impact amongst the public. Let's hope amongst art historians as well. Here we are again. It's Wild A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Priddeaux. So thank you, sue, so much for a riveting conversation. There's so much more that we could have talked about. It's such a rich book, but we are limited in time. But you've given us really so much to think about. So now from me, Hannah Kay and everyone at Intelligence Squared, thank you for joining us. Thank you for listening and watching and goodbye.
- [54:21]
B
Thank you. Bye bye. Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by me, Layla, Ismail.
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