Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC, I'm Alison Stewart. Tomorrow is going to be a great show. Director Spike Lee will be one of our guests. His new film is Highest 2 Lowest. It's a reimagining of a 1963 Akira Kurosawa film. It opens in theaters on Friday, but first, Spike will join us for a preview. We're going to talk about a great new play called, Well, I'll Let You Go. It's from playwright Bubba Weiler. It's about a grieving woman who lost her husband who, as it turns out, she may not have known at all. Bubba joins us along with stars Quincy Tyler Bernstein and Michael Chernus. Plus, we'll talk about a new thriller called, The Knife. It's with Nnamdi Asomugha, who also directed and co-wrote it. He joins us to discuss along with co-writer Mark Duplass. We got a big Thursday plan. That is in our future. Now let's get this hour started with our final Full Bio conversation about the life of Paul Gauguin.

[music]

Alison Stewart: 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 a 19th century self-taught French artist. It's called, Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin, by Sue Prideaux. For her book, Prideaux used historic and primary sources, including a recently discovered 213 page work Gauguin completed in his final years, and a memoir written by his son. She also used Gauguin's paintings and sculptures to help narrate what's going on in his life. You can see some of those on our Instagram, @AllOfItWNYC.

We've already covered the controversy around Gauguin and his early life as a fatherless child in Peru, and his adult life as a stockbroker turned struggling artist. You can listen to those on our show page. We turn now to Gauguin's time in Haiti-- Tahiti. Tahiti, excuse me. A place where he was looking for authenticity and where he could afford to live. He was broke and his wife left him. She took his five children and split to Copenhagen. He first arrived in Tahiti in 1891 and stayed there for at least two years before returning to France to sell his paintings. The paintings are some of his most famous work, but not at the time. Here's Sue Prideaux, the author of Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin.

[music]

Alison Stewart: Sue, when did Paul Gauguin first visit Tahiti?

Sue Prideaux: Oh, yes, he visited Tahiti in 1891. He was 43. Why Tahiti? France was paying people to go out and live in the colonies. Gauguin thought this was a very good idea. Japan was, in fact, his first choice. He was fascinated by Japanese art, as we've said, but he was planning to go to travel with another artist called Émile Bernard. Bernard didn't want to go to Japan. He'd been reading up on Tahiti and wanted to go there basically for sun, sand, and sex. Gauguin wasn't keen because there really wasn't much culture, as far as he could see, but he gave in.

In fact, the Arts Ministry appointed Gauguin the first official French artist to Polynesia and promised to buy his paintings. A promise they never kept, of course. The stupid thing was that Émile Bernard backed out at the last minute. So Gauguin went to Tahiti alone. As I said, he was 43, he had let his hair grow long on the voyage, and he disembarked wearing a purple suit, Buffalo Bill cowboy boots, and a Stetson hat.

Alison Stewart: That's a look.

Sue Prideaux: [chuckles] He'd seen Buffalo Bill show in Paris and was absolutely entranced by the whole thing. He had long hair. He'd let his hair grow during the voyage. The Tahitians, never seen anything like this. They said, "Mahu, mahu, mahu." They giggled. The most accurate translation of the word mahu is man woman. Mahu there was a man who wore women's clothing and lived as a woman. They weren't necessarily gay or straight, they just had their own special position in Polynesian society. The Polynesians had never seen a Western mahu before, so they were riveted.

At that time, Polynesia had been a French colony for about 10 years, and the Frenchmen, of course, were either administrators wearing smart tropical suits or soldiers and gendarmes in uniform. So, Gauguin really stood out, and he didn't realize why. [laughs]

Alison Stewart: I want to ask you a little bit about Tahiti at the time, in the 19th century. There were the Indigenous people, the French colonizers, and the Chinese. So, please forgive me, but when did the French take control?

Sue Prideaux: They took control 1880-something. Basically, it's 11 years before Gauguin arrives, and he arrives in '91. So we can work it out from there, but actually, the first-- it was a French colony, but with a Tahitian king. The first night that Gauguin arrived, the Tahitian king, King Pomare V died. Actually, the first morning when Gauguin woke up, he was woken up by these cannons. He had a terrible hangover, because he had been partying the night before, when he arrived. He woke up with these awful cannons. He thought, "Gosh, do they start every morning with cannons in Tahiti?"

Not at all. It was the king. So, one of his early paintings, he calls it The King's End. It was a very strange painting. It's much more symbolic than literal or realist because, I mean, King Pomare just naturally kept his head to the end of his life, but this is more like a picture of John the Baptist. The king's head beheaded, really, on a platter. I wonder if maybe Gauguin felt it symbolized the ghastly fate of Pomare's people, the Tahitians, who really were sacrificed to French colonial greed.

Alison Stewart: That was my question. What happened to the Indigenous people?

Sue Prideaux: Well, indeed, there were only a few thousand of them on the islands of Tahiti. They were ruled over with great brutality by about 400 soldiers and administrators, not to mention the missionaries, and they too were brutal. They smashed all the Polynesian religious temples and artifacts and they destroyed their culture. They forbade dancing and nudity and making free love. They forced people to wear ridiculous head to toe clothes, which is stupid in that climate. Missionary dresses, known as Mother Hubbards, sort of from neck to floor, that concealed every inch of sinful flesh. They terrorized them with hellfire evangelism, really. So they were most, most oppressed.

Alison Stewart: Then the Chinese were brought in to provide labor?

Sue Prideaux: They were. To provide agricultural labor. I think it was, they thought that they would be able to have good sugar cane crops on Tahiti, but it doesn't grow there. The Chinese, well, some, were shipped off to dig the Panama Canal, of course, but some enterprising ones did what a lot of enterprising Chinese do. Was they became storekeepers. You know, general stores, that sort of thing. Not very many of them. They were very resented, because they didn't integrate, because really, they were just making money from the stores so that they could go back to China and buy themselves a splendid tomb, because from their religion, that was what they should do.

Alison Stewart: Where did Paul Gauguin fit into this ecosystem that we've just described?

Sue Prideaux: Yes. Well, obviously, he started in Papeete, because he was the official artist. He was commissioned to paint a portrait of a rather important local woman called Suzanne Bambridge. Of course, being Gauguin, it wasn't the sort of flattering portrait they expected. After that, nobody asked him to paint anything at all. In fact, they thought the picture so bad it was put away in a cupboard. They thought he couldn't possibly be a painter, but he must be a spy sent from Paris to report on them. So they shunned him. He was very happy with that.

He didn't want to live in the capital, which was basically a French provincial town, but he wanted to live out in the country. Unlike the other Frenchmen, he took Polynesian lessons, he wanted to speak the language, and he moved out of the claustrophobic capital, down the coast to live the authentic life. He wanted to live with the locals as a local, but this, of course, was not as easy as he imagined. There weren't exactly supermarkets around and when local bought him food to share, he was too proud to accept. Eventually it worked, and he became known as the man who makes men, because Polynesia didn't have a culture of painting.

Their arts were carving and tattooing and dancing and textiles, but they hadn't seen paintings. It's quite interesting, because they immediately could read it. They understood what he was putting on the canvas. So they called him the man who makes men. His first lovely, lovely lady came to see him and he painted a lovely portrait of her called the Woman with a Flower. After that, people weren't self-conscious. He took his easel out and painted them doing their everyday thing and they didn't mind at all. That was fine.

Alison Stewart: When he sent his paintings back to Europe, how were they received?

Sue Prideaux: Well, the painter Degas got it at once. He called Gauguin the magician. Gauguin called Cezanne the magician, and Degas called Gauguin the magician. He bought his paintings, and he studied them, and he lived with them, and he absolutely adored them. Otherwise, they were absolutely, let's say, unappreciated. People were in love with Impressionism. It was nice. One of the first major paintings that Gauguin made out in Polynesia was called, Te Orana Maria, Hail Mary, 1891. It shows a Polynesian Mary carrying a Polynesian Christ child and their halos merge.

There are Polynesian bare-breasted girls, vahines, bringing tributes, rather than the three wise men, and so on and so forth. When it was shown in Paris, it was uproar. It was scandalous, to show the Holy Family with brown skin, which is pretty stupid if you think about where they came from. Believe it or not, I researched this, and it wasn't until 1951 that a papal encyclical made it permissible to represent such a thing. So Gauguin raged against the church and raged against racism.

Alison Stewart: He wrote sort of a version of what he was experiencing, called-- was it Noa Noa?

Sue Prideaux: Yes.

Alison Stewart: In 1893? First of all, what was the purpose of Noa Noa? I'm curious, if you found it. Was it an accurate description of what was going on at Tahiti, or was it a Paul Gauguin description?

Sue Prideaux: No, it was really, after a couple of years, he went back. He had 100 paintings to show, so he went back. Good old Degas organized the exhibition. Not a success. People, nobody bought anything. That was where Hail Mary, Te Orana Maria, cause such a scandal. To make people comprehend this exhibition, Gauguin wrote Noa Noa. It was really telling Polynesian stories and legends. It was sort of fairy tales and romantic things illustrated. At the same time, he made his studio. He called it the Studio of the South Seas. He kept open house.

He painted it bright, bright yellow. He even painted the glass in the windows yellow. He played Polynesian music, and he demonstrated Polynesian dancing, and storytelling, and food, and so on and so forth. It was really just, Noa Noa was to make people understand. He made a series of Noa Noa woodcuts as well. Actually, the only people who really paid attention to him were people who couldn't afford to buy his paintings. The young artists thought it was great, but no profit came of it.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Sue Prideaux. We're talking about her book, Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin. It's our choice for Full Bio. Your book was described in The New York Times as, "Not a whitewash of Gauguin's legacy. Instead, Prideaux fills it with more details." In it, he had interactions with Indigenous girls, some with parental approval. I personally think people should read the book to understand its nuances, and then they can decide for themselves about whether they think it's appropriate, whatever their level is.

Sue Prideaux: Agree. I agree.

Alison Stewart: How would you describe how Gauguin's interactions with the Indigenous people made it into his art, however he saw it?

Sue Prideaux: Oh, you're talking about-- you're asking really about colonialism and cultural appropriation?

Alison Stewart: Maybe, maybe not. I'm curious what you think.

Sue Prideaux: No, I mean, that's one of the charges against him. Colonialism and cultural appropriation.

Alison Stewart: Or was he choosing to do-- it's funny, because this makes me wonder when I was-- been thinking about this all week. I read your book, and I've been thinking about it all week. I've been thinking, "Well, maybe not." Maybe this is what he thought was authentic, but then again, we have to think, "Well, we're watching it through his male gaze. His male white gaze." Right?

Sue Prideaux: Yes, yes, yes. Okay, okay, okay. Yes, yes, yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. There are several points here, really. Well, of course, if you're talking about cultural appropriation, there was nothing for him to appropriate, because there was no drawing or painting on the island. So what he does, in fact, is he paints what's in front of him. He doesn't romanticize. It's not tourist art. He doesn't exoticize. He's painting what's in front of him. If you go out there, you'll see he is painting what's in front of him.

This contrasts with earlier artists like Delacroix and Ingres, who when they painted exotic people, North Africa or Turkey or whatever, they basically painted the people as sort of brown washed European bodies. You know? Hourglass figures, tiny waists, elegant limbs. The European ideal just kind of colored up a bit. If you look at Gauguin's paintings, A, he shows them going about their business, day to day stuff, but he shows them actually as they are.

Alison Stewart: I see.

Sue Prideaux: The physiques of working people. Broad shoulders, strong bodies, not terrifically defined waists, big spreading feet because they don't wear shoes. It's not tourist art. He shows a colony in transition, in terms of colonial occupation. Sometimes in his landscapes, this wonderful landscape called Mata Mua, which is totally idyllic. Just Polynesian girls sitting in jungle. More often than not, I'm thinking of horses on the beach and things like that. He's showing contemporary reality. Painting individuals' real situations. Real people, not propaganda. Does that answer your question? [laughs]

Alison Stewart: Absolutely. I want to describe-- I want for people to understand that he had a very bad beating, at one point, and I believe it was on the French coast.

Sue Prideaux: Yes, that's right. That's right.

Alison Stewart: Yes, and it really affected the rest of his life.

Sue Prideaux: Yes.

Alison Stewart: He wasn't treated particularly well by the courts. How important was that street fight in his life?

Sue Prideaux: Well, it was important. It was very important. We talked about when he came over to Paris after two years in Tahiti, and he had the exhibition, and he had the Noa Noa. He wrote the Noa Noa catalog to make people understand. He was giving lessons in art school to make money. One of the models there was-- she was known as Annah the Javanese. I don't know if-- what her real name was, actually. I don't think anyone knows. She'd come-- she was Javanese. She'd been trafficked to Paris to be a maid to an opera singer, but she was pretty feisty and she soon put pay to that. She became a model in an art school.

Gauguin took her down to Brittany for a summer holiday together. Annah was very colorful. She went nowhere without her parrot and her tame monkey. Down in Brittany, which was very, very rural, very old-fashioned, really, the sight of the white painter out walking with the Black girl and her exotic pets was too much for the local fishermen, and they set on Gauguin. Nearly kicked him to death with their wooden clogs. In fact, his ankle was splintered and his shattered shin bone stuck out through the skin. It was an injury, actually, that he would never recover from.

He always walked with a stick afterwards. Of course, when he got back to Tahiti, it wasn't totally healed. The doctors there-- this is where the legend, this contributes greatly to the legend of Gauguin's syphilis, because the wound never healed. It kept suppurating. The doctors out in Tahiti, where syphilis was rife, so they knew syphilis very well, they diagnosed eczema with erysipelas. This was aggravated by a fly that they called the no-no fly out there. This fly, actually, funnily enough, when I went out, their beaches are still closed because of the fly, because it fastens on any sort of open wound and it eats and eats and infects. You can't get rid of it.

They can now, I mean, but it would be complicated. Of course, in Gauguin's day, you couldn't. So this open wound actually never healed on his leg, which was absolute hell on earth. At the end of that visit to Paris, that's when he goes back to Tahiti, determined, "I'm never going to go back to France again. This is how they treat me."

Alison Stewart: When we come back, Gauguin's final days.

[music]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It from WNYC, I'm Alison Stewart. Let's get back into our Full Bio conversation with Sue Prideaux, the author of, Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin. We pick up with Gauguin's activism in French Polynesia.

[music]

Alison Stewart: In the later years of his life, he took on corruption in the Polynesian government. What did he see as the problem? How was he going to help solve it?

Sue Prideaux: Well, he saw the corruption in Tahiti. He saw the oppression of the Indigenous people, the corruption, the injustice, the taking bribes, et cetera, et cetera. He wrote to a local newspaper in Tahiti. An indignant letter. They took him on as, if you like, a political correspondent. He wrote these wonderful sort of satirical articles about the local officials, illustrating them cruelly, as you can imagine. He also, actually, he wrote to Paris exposing the injustices and the corruption. Anyway, eventually the governor of Tahiti was so fed up that he decided that he would sue Gauguin for libel.

Gauguin knew that he would never win in the local court. So, in fact, he fled. Yes, he started to fight for Indigenous rights in the newspapers, he exposed the corruption of the governor, who threatened a libel suit. Gauguin knew he had no chance of winning, so he fled, in fact, to a tiny island 900 miles away called Hiva Oa, which was also a French colony. On arrival, in 1901, he only has three years to live, really. Two and a half more years to live. On arrival, he was amazed. He was mobbed like a celebrity, but not for his painting, and not-- it was for his crusading journalism.

They'd all read his articles, and they were so thrilled that he fought for them. As he walked down the only street in Hiva Oa, he was followed by a crowd. At the general store, he entertained everyone to tea and cakes. He decided that he would stay there. Everything on Hiva Oa was run by the Roman Catholic bishop, Father Martin. If Gauguin went to church every day, he'd get his plot of land to build a house. It took 11 days, and he never set foot in the bishop's church again. In fact, they became deadly enemies, as Gauguin set about championing the local people and restoring the old ways.

He started, very provocatively, by building a Maison du Jouir, a traditional communal house that had been banned by the missionaries. A gathering place for the locals who could behave as they had in the old days before Christianity. They could sing and dance and drink and flirt and maybe pair up for a little sex if they felt so inclined. So the islanders loved him. He was invited to exchange names, which was the highest honor. It's like becoming a blood brother. When you exchange names, you exchange souls, and you hold your property in common, including your wives.

The French, of course, hated him. Particularly Bishop Martin, who was a terrible puritan. Who'd forbidden the usual things. Nudity, polyandry, tattooing, dancing. Everyone knew that Bishop Martin had a 15-year-old mistress called Thérèse. Gauguin carved two figures, two sort of 4 foot figures, of the bishop and his mistress, and he set them up in his garden. So, everyone giggled as they went by. You can imagine the bishop's fury. Yes, he's really his greatest-- well, he continued his work as the people's champion. A murder occurred and the wrong man was accused, plainly because he was Black. Gauguin fought and won the case.

People even wrote to him from other islands, to right their wrongs. His greatest legal victory really was over the bishop, because Bishop Martin compelled all the children, boys and girls, to attend French Catholic boarding school to the age of 14. They were taught only in French, and the aim was to erase the Polynesian language, culture, family structure, and national identity in one generation.

Alison Stewart: Wow.

Sue Prideaux: So the children were distraught, of course. Gauguin discovered a minor French law that only children living within 4 kilometers of a school need attended. So, of course, mass relocation ensued, and language and culture and family unity survived. Gauguin became more popular than ever. The governor reported back to Paris. He wrote, more or less quote. More or less. "Gauguin was a defender of native vices, a subverter of the rule of law, and a dangerous anarchist."

Alison Stewart: Oh, he must have loved that.

Sue Prideaux: Well, he did. Yes, exactly. Then that, really, then all hell broke loose. When Gauguin then accused a gendarme on a nearby island of accepting bribes, the governor responded with a charge of libel again. This time the case was heard by the local French magistrate, and Gauguin was found guilty, fined 500 francs and sentenced to three months in prison. In fact, barely a year later, the case would be re-examined and Gauguin's accusation was found to be correct, but by that time he was dead.

Alison Stewart: He died in 1903.

Sue Prideaux: He did.

Alison Stewart: Paul Gauguin died in 1903.

Sue Prideaux: Yes, yes, yes. Actually, there's a theory that Gauguin committed suicide after this sentence to the fine and the prison. That unable to pay the fine, he took an overdose of morphine. We'll never know for sure, but the two medically qualified men on the island, both doctors, both believed that Gauguin's heart, in fact, gave out. This seems perfectly feasible to me. His father had died of heart disease, age 34, his mother at 41. Gauguin had suffered at least two heart attacks. He was 54. Older than both his parents, really.

Well, it's not impossible that the prospect of prison and a fine he couldn't pay brought on the fatal attack, but there's a postscript to this, which is that when his corpse was discovered by his Polynesian blood brother, Tioque, he planned to bury him next day in the common cemetery for Polynesian people, but early next morning, Bishop Martin snatched Gauguin's body away to be buried in the Catholic cemetery to claim his soul for the Catholic Church. He reported to the French authorities of the sudden death of a fellow called Gauguin, a contemptible individual, a reputed artist, but an enemy of God and everything that is decent. Not very nice.

Alison Stewart: Paul Gauguin believed in authenticity.

Sue Prideaux: Yes.

Alison Stewart: What did that mean to him?

Sue Prideaux: What did that mean to him? That's a very good question, isn't it? Well, authenticity. He was obviously, a great artist. Obviously, his art was authentic, because it was his very own. He was authentic. He was dedicated to his art, his loves, his children. He was obviously a very magnetic personality, had lots of charisma, pugilistic, and a man-- yes, authenticity. He was a man of great integrity, according to his own rather eccentric ideals. Authentic is a word he used very often. He hated pretense, hypocrisy. He was prepared to suffer a great deal for his art, and indeed, prepared to suffer personally for social justice for the Polynesian people.

That, I think, is an interpretation of authenticity. He never ducked issues. Whatever life threw at him, he took it on at full throttle enough. For me, to research and write his life, it's been a great learning curve and a great-- a terrific adventure. Yes, I think maybe authenticity, the idea, you can say it. I can say it as a scholar, and he could say it about his life. That history and art and life are not there to be comforting or to be condemned. They're there to be understood.

Alison Stewart: The name of the book is, Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin. It is by my guest, Sue Prideauxe. Sue, thank you for spending so much time with us.

Sue Prideaux: Thank you so much, Alison. It's been an honor and a great, great pleasure. Thank you.

Alison Stewart: Thanks again to Sue Prideaux. Check out our Instagram, for more images of Gauguin that I took at the Met. Remember, you can always download our 100 pieces of art you should see in New York City. We put out a curated list on Instagram. I've been doing it at the Met all summer long and it's just a whole lot of fun. Head to Instagram, @AllOfItWNYC. Full Bio is post produced by Jordan Lauf, engineered by Jason Isaac, and written by me. Up next on Full Bio, James Baldwin, by Nicholas Boggs. The first biography of the writer in 30 years, and let me tell you, it is so good.