Book Launch | Wild Thing: a life of Paul Gauguin

Wednesday 4th December | 6pm

With author Sue Prideaux

A vital re-examination of the trailblazing and controversial artist Paul Gauguin, by the prize-winning author of I Am Dynamite!
You wish to teach me what is within myself: learn first what is within you . . . I believe life has no meaning unless one lives it with a will, at least to the limit of one’s will.

Paul Gauguin is chiefly known as the giant of post-Impressionist painting whose bold colours and compositions rocked the Western art world. It is less well known how he struggled to sustain his artistry – from a career as a stockbroker in Paris to a door-to-door salesman in Copenhagen, a canal digger in Panama City to a journalist exposing the injustices of French colonial rule in Tahiti.

In Wild Thing, the award-winning biographer Sue Prideaux re-examines the adventurous and complicated life of the artist. She illuminates the people, places and ideas that shaped his vision - from his eccentric upbringing in Peru and rebellious youth in France, to the galvanising energy of the Paris art scene and meeting Mette – the woman who he would marry, to the formative encounters with Vincent Van Gogh and August Strindberg and the ceaseless draw of French Polynesia.

Prideaux conjures Gauguin’s visual exuberance, his creative epiphanies, his fierce words and his flaws with acuity and sensitivity. Drawing from a wealth of new material and access to the artist’s family, this myth-busting work challenges us to see Gauguin anew.

About the Author
Sue Prideaux’s first biography Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream (2005) won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Strindberg: A Life (2012) won the Duff Cooper Prize, and was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize. I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Nietzsche (2018) was awarded the Hawthornden Prize, longlisted for the Cundhill History Prize and Rathbones Folio Prize, shortlisted for the Historical Writers' Association Non-Fiction Crown and was The Times Biography of the Year.

A LIVE Lit & Phil Event | £5

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