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In 2019, the National Gallery held an exhibition of Paul Gauguin’s portraits that provoked uproar. Was Gauguin not a French colonialist who spread syphilis to underage girls throughout the islands of the South Seas? The London show was caught in the crosshairs of cancel culture and there were calls for his paintings to be burned.
I have always loved Gauguin’s pictures. Having just written I Am Dynamite!, a biography of controversial philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, and feeling a strong sympathy with #MeToo, I couldn’t live in the dishonest and hypocritical position of loving the paintings and hating the man. I embarked on research.
My purpose was simply to discover the facts so I could measure my feelings against the truth. But my research turned up so many new sides to the story that this private project turned into a book, which I titled Wild Thing, as that is what Gauguin called himself. His first seven years were spent in Peru, but they ended when he was brought back to France to go to school. He hated it: fitting in was never Gauguin’s forte. He put up his fists and snarled: “I am a wild thing from Peru.” Schoolmates quailed.
Did he have syphilis? Gauguin, who died in 1903 at the age of 54, spent his last three years on the tiny island of Hiva Oa in French Polynesia. In 2000, its mayor decided to restore his hut on its original site in time for the centenary of the artist’s death. Excavations discovered a glass jar containing four human teeth. Examined by the Human Genome Project in Cambridge, they proved to be Gauguin’s. Further tests were carried out for cadmium, mercury and arsenic – standard treatments for syphilis at the time. No trace was found. This was written up in the scientific journal Anthropology in 2018.
But I wanted to know more. Syphilis was widespread in the islands in Gauguin’s time. I discovered that his doctor in Tahiti, the largest of the French Polynesian islands, knew the disease well and concluded that the painter did not have syphilis, but rather eczema and erysipelas, aggravated by infected bites of the Simulium buissoni fly. The two doctors who later treated him on Hiva Oa were of the same opinion.
Next, the question of underage girls. The age of consent in France and the colonies was 13. This was not untypical of the world at the time. In the US, it varied between 10 and 12. As I finished the book in 2023, Japan raised the age from 13 to 16. These facts horrify and disgust me. However, within the context of the time, Gauguin’s Polynesian lovers were without exception “of age”. Revolting as it is, he was doing nothing illegal or even unusual for that time.
Gauguin had three serious relationships. Tehamana, the best known partner, had been supposed to be 13 but a recently discovered birth certificate shows her to have been 15. Within these relationships, Gauguin followed local custom. Sexually experienced girls were offered by their families. No money changed hands. After a couple of weeks, the girl went home to her family for a period, to decide if she then wanted to go back to her new husband. Tehamana returned to Gauguin. There was no coercion. She, like Gauguin’s later lovers, was free to come and go, to return home for good if she liked, and to take other lovers.
There was no financial advantage in staying: Gauguin in his beach hut was no richer than the average villager. When he went back to Paris for a couple of years to sell his paintings, Tehamana remarried. On his return, she went to live with him for a couple of weeks for old times’ sake. It argues affection.
Wild Thing is the first full biography of Gauguin for 30 years. It has been shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford prize and won the Duff Cooper award. I feel particularly proud to be on the longlist of the Women’s prize for nonfiction, too. Let’s face it, given Gauguin’s historic reputation, it would have been much easier for them to leave it off.
The book is based on the discovery of much new information: not only the teeth and Tehamana’s birth certificate, but also a crucial new literary source that emerged as I started writing. In 2020, the manuscript of Gauguin’s most important written work – Avant et Après, or Before and After – reappeared. Missing for a century, it contains 200 handwritten pages of Gauguin’s thoughts on life, art, religion and everything. Then, a year later, the Catalogue Raisonné was completed. This is like the official bible of the artist, gathering every bit of information on all the verified works.
I discovered a great-great-granddaughter, too, with family stories, papers and letters. Gauguin had a Danish wife and a son who lived in Norway. There are letters in both languages and a lengthy untranslated family memoir by the son. Norwegian is my mother tongue and I can read Danish, too. One of the most surprising things I discovered was Gauguin’s strong belief in equality between the sexes. His grandmother, Flora Tristan, was a fierce fighter for women’s rights and much admired by Karl Marx. Gauguin cherished her published writings. He actively encouraged the women in his circle, including his wife, to find fulfilment through independence.
This sheds new light on Gauguin’s complex relationship with Tehamana, who appears in several paintings. Tehamana Has Many Parents, completed in 1893, is a portrait of an individual, but also a portrait of a culture in flux. Tehamana wears a missionary dress but carries a Polynesian fan. On a wall behind her, a line of mysterious hieroglyphs reference the ancient island culture, much of which was destroyed by missionaries. Below them stands Hina, the Polynesian goddess of the moon and creation. Gauguin shows Tehamana as a synthesis of many cultures and many bloodlines, as Gauguin believed we all are.
But Manao Tupapau, or Spirit of the Dead Watching, is the picture that has done greatest damage to Gauguin’s reputation. I can easily see why. The 1892 painting, showing Tehamana naked and face down on a bed, can be seen as misogynistic, exploitative and colonialist. But there are other ways of viewing it, which suggest a more sympathetic, caring Gauguin.
For Tehamana, as for most Polynesians, Christianity was a veneer – she believed in tupapau, malign spirits who stole your spirit in the dark. For that reason, she always kept an oil lamp burning in their hut. One evening, the lamp had gone out and Gauguin found her terrified by the dark. He embodies her fear in the figure of the old woman, symbolising the tupapau, standing at the foot of the bed for our benefit. But what he wanted to capture, he said, was Tehamana’s terror of the unseen.
When Gauguin sent the picture back to his wife, Mette, to exhibit and sell in Denmark, she was not offended by it. Rather, she thought it “wonderful”. Mette herself was also frightened of the dark, always keeping a lamp burning.
Gauguin believed in cultural synthesis, which today is often condemned as cultural appropriation. He saw the human race as a great synthesis of race, creed and colour. One of the first pictures he painted in Tahiti was Ia Orana Maria, or Hail Mary. This 1891 work depicts a Polynesian Mary carrying the Polynesian Christ Child on her shoulder. Exhibited in Paris, the picture caused a scandal. A non-white holy family! It was not until 1951 that a papal encyclical made it permissible to represent such a thing.
Horrified by Tahiti’s oppressive and exploitative French colonial regime, Gauguin took up political journalism. He wrote articles for a local newspaper and later started his own paper exposing the corruption and injustice of French officials. He also wrote to the government in Paris pleading for fairer taxation and treatment. Tahiti’s governor brought a libel suit against him but there wasn’t a chance Gauguin would get justice in the corrupt French colonial court, so he fled 500 miles to Hiva Oa, also a French colony. On arrival, he was surprised to be mobbed like a celebrity – not, he discovered, for his painting, but for his journalism.
Hiva Oa was run by Bishop Martin, a fearsome puritan who had forbidden nudity, polyandry, the sacred art of tattooing, and any performance of the erotic Upa Upa dance. Bishop Martin compelled all Indigenous children to attend French Catholic boarding school until the age of 14. They were taught the French curriculum and allowed to speak only French, the aim being to erase the Polynesian language, culture, family structure and national identity in one generation.
The children’s families were distraught. But Gauguin discovered a minor French law stating that only children living within two miles of a school need attend it. Mass relocation to the countryside ensued. Language, culture and family unity survived on the island and Gauguin became more popular than ever. He was asked to exchange names. When you did this, it was believed, you exchanged souls and had all your property in common, including wives. It was the greatest honour you could confer, the equivalent of becoming a blood brother.
On Hiva Oa, Gauguin continued to petition Paris for fairer treatment of Indigenous people and to act as their lawyer in the local court. The Polynesians loved him, the French hated him. The governor reported back to Paris that Gauguin was “a defender of native vices. A subverter of the rule of law and a dangerous anarchist.”
He was a marked man. When he accused a gendarme on a nearby island of accepting bribes, the governor responded with a charge of libel. The case was heard by the local French magistrate and Gauguin was found guilty, fined 500 francs and sentenced to three months in prison. Barely a year later, the case would be re-examined and Gauguin’s accusations found to be correct. But by that time, the artist was dead.
Wild Thing was driven by all the new material that began appearing in 2019, which coincided with the reopening of the debate about Gauguin’s troubling reputation. It seemed important to re-examine his life: not to condemn, not to excuse, but simply to shed new light on the man and the myth.
