Sue Prideaux
Monday 30th September
Topping & Company Booksellers of Edinburgh, 2 Blenheim Place, Edinburgh EH7 5JH
7pm
7.30pm
This autumn, join us in the bookshop for what is sure to be a charming and enlightening introduction to one of the bedrocks of modern art, Paul Gaugin. In her latest biography, Wild Thing, Sue Prideaux invites readers into the world of this brilliant and eccentric artist, unravelling the myths and legends around this great thinker.
Wild Thing
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 that he was a stockbroker in Paris and that after the 1882 financial crash he struggled to sustain his artistry, and worked as a tarpaulin salesman in Copenhagen, a canal digger in Panama City, and 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: his privileged upbringing in Peru and rebellious youth in France; the galvanising energy of the Paris art scene; meeting Mette, the woman who he would marry; 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 invites us to see Gauguin anew.
About Sue Prideaux
Sue Prideaux’s first biography, Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Strindberg: A Life was awarded the Duff Cooper Prize and was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize. I Am Dynamite! was awarded the Hawthorden Prize, longlisted for the Caundhill History Prize and Rathbones Folio Prize and was The Times Biography of the Year for 2018.