NOTE NEW LOCATION
Our August book is non-fiction, but reads like an adventure novel. “Wild Thing” by Sue Prideaux is a biography of the Peruvian French artist Paul Gauguin. He lived a fascinating life. His early childhood in Lima, Peru, then in France. He worked as a sailor, then became a very successful stockbroker in Paris. He lost everything in a market crash and began to focus completely on his art, primarily painting. The book is 364 pages, so get started soon. But it’s an easy read, nice writing style, and the eBook does an excellent job reproducing his art. It available as an eBook on Amazon on other eBook sales sites.
(From the Amazon summary): 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 gorgeously illustrated, myth-busting 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 local newspaper and acting as advocate for the Tahitian people in the French colonial courts. His unconventional career and bold, breathtaking art influenced Vincent van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso, and many others.
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. In the first full biography of Paul Gauguin in thirty years, Sue Prideaux illuminates the extraordinary oeuvre of a visionary artist vital to the French avant-garde. The result is “a brilliantly readable and compassionate study of Gauguin—not just as a painter, sculptor, carver and potter, but as a human soul perpetually searching for what is always just out of reach” (Artemis Cooper, Spectator).
