Gauguin's long teeth

By the end of his life, Gauguin had gone virtually blind, was addicted to laudanum and morphine, and suffered excruciating pain in one leg as a result of a bar fight in Brittany, where he had been kicked by a mob of clog-wearing men. The tormented painter struggled around the tiny island of Hiva Oa in French Polynesia, had lost his home, ate a disastrous diet of canned food, and had pustules all over his limbs—evidence for all to see that the French colonizer was a syphilitic pervert. But the doctors who treated him in Tahiti never diagnosed him with a sexually transmitted disease, despite the common and familiar characteristics of the disease. Their shared opinions were that the painter's condition was a combination of eczema and erysipelas exacerbated by insect bites.

But, let's see, wasn't Gauguin that bad boy who spread syphilis throughout the South Seas? The same one for whom the most visceral #MeToo movements have even called for the burning of his paintings? Sue Prideaux, author of a new and acclaimed biography, Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin, maintains that this is actually a dark myth, that nothing like this ever happened. The painter himself has come out in his own defense, embodied in four teeth that, for some reason, he hid inside a jar in a well near his last cabin. Discovered and examined by the Human Genome Project in Cambridge, they turned out to be his, and after numerous tests, researchers could detect no trace of cadmium, mercury, or arsenic, the standard treatments for syphilis at the time.

A new biography denies that he was the bad boy who spread syphilis across the South Seas.

So, if that story isn't true, "what other myths might we be clinging to?" the author asks. That of the pedophile and predatory sex tourist who abused girls as young as 13 and 14? Prideaux recalls that the age of consent in France and the colonies was 13, that in the United States it ranged from 10 to 12, and that Japan didn't raise the age from 13 to 16 until 2023. "These facts horrify and repulse me. However, in the context of the time, Gauguin's Polynesian lovers were, without exception, of legal age. They were free to come and go, and to have other lovers or not. He didn't do anything illegal or unusual for that time," the biographer says.

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He claims to have been a staunch defender of sexual equality and that, horrified by the oppressive French colonial regime, he turned to political journalism and founded his own newspaper in which he denounced the officials, who ended up persecuting him while the Polynesians adored him. Our image of artists is influenced not only by their works but also by the stories we are told about them. What do we do if we don't like them, do we throw them away? Gossip masquerading as art history is a direct ticket to erasure. Reality is always more complex.