The Rascal of Pont-Aven - The American Scholar

The Rascal of Pont-Aven - The American Scholar

Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux; W. W. Norton, 416 pp., $39.99 In the crowded field of problematic male modernists, Paul Gauguin leads the pack. There is arguably no 19th-century painter with a lousier public approval rating. The charges against him are varied and severe. He drove Vincent van Gogh to madness, then abandoned him in Provence, severed ear and all. Years later, he pulled a similar vanishing act on his wife, tradin…