Review: A Spirited Biography of ‘Odd,’ ‘Visionary’ Paul Gauguin

Review: A spirited biography of ‘odd,’ ‘visionary’ Paul Gauguin

It’s hard to know what to make of Paul Gauguin. Postimpressionism is an umbrella term for European painters such as Gauguin who moved beyond the plein-air (“outdoor” ) breakthroughs of Degas, Renoir and especially Monet. Its practitioners turned toward symbolism…

A Splendid New Biography of Gauguin Separates the Man From the Myth - 3 Quarks Daily

Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times: For much of his life, Paul Gauguin railed against the deadening effects of bourgeois domesticity. But as Sue Prideaux writes in “Wild Thing,” her terrific new biography of the artist, for about a decade early in his career the self-proclaimed “savage from Peru” enjoyed a stint as a happily married stockbroker in Paris. His wife, Mette, was an independent-minded woman from Denmark. Gauguin spent his free tim…