Gauguin

What would you prefer? A beautiful painting of an ugly person, or a horrid painting of a beautiful person? Paul Gauguin (1892) Flemming Friborg's forthcoming Gauguin biography posits Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) as being central to the artistic circles of Impressionism, yet also as someone who soon marginalised himself vis-à-vis its basic tenets. With an elaborately staged, seemingly overnight personal turnaround from stockbroker and bourgeois to bohemian painter at the centre of his artistic persona, Gauguin embodies the turbulent and transformative struggles of his era - from the lucid dreams of a splendid new world to a loss of faith in humankind.

The double image of the artist as an uncompromising genius as well as a scumbag is highly relevant in the light of the present debate on both #MeToo and postcolonial issues. However, Gauguin was also one of the very first to recognise the ascent of those market mechanisms which govern the art world today, and the first to act upon them.

Gauguin - The Master, the Monster and the Myth is the first biography of the artist by a Danish author. Analysing the main phases of Gauguin's life and work, the book introduces a number of novel interpretations of both in what is intended as a study of his ambivalent character as a man and artist. It is also an exposé of the differing and often self-contradictory art historical attitudes to Gauguin over the past 100 years.

Friborg points out that Gauguin's two Polynesian sojourns should not define his art and life to the extent which is still often the case, but that the years between 1888 and 1891 do hold more important clues to his oeuvre. In this important reassessment of his beginnings as an artist, which are still shrouded in mystery today, it is shown how Gauguin might have stumbled upon Impressionism more by chance than design, and a chapter devoted to a short but significant stay in his wife's native Denmark in 1884-85 shows this may well have been a seed for the artist's subsequent idée fixe about the Tropics.

The section 'Oceania - en sauvage' demonstrates how the era's European concepts of 'Primitive Cultures' became the material through which Gauguin sculpted a carefully wrought-out position for himself as an outsider and genius above and beyond all artistic circles in the West, all the while watching and partaking in the shattering of his self-declared Tropical Paradise through European morals and 'progress'.

This book does not champion for or against Gauguin, either as an artist or as a man. Its ambition is to nuance the dual concepts of the gifted seer-cum-maudite and pariah which the artist carefully cultivated, and to do so for all aspects of his life and work, including his fascination with prepubescent girls, which remained a constant fixation for him. As Friborg points out, we must address these complexities in order to understand and appreciate Gauguin's work.

Paul Gauguin threw himself with fervour into multiple artistic media. He painted, explored the rich terrain of graphic arts, and was a master potter and a prolific writer of essays, treatises and satiric journalism, with more than one venture into auto-fiction. The illustrations in this monograph constitute a treasure trove of both well-known works and more rarely seen documents and material about the artist and his day.