The life of Paul Gauguin is the stuff of legend. Or several legends. There's the Romantic visionary invoked by his friend August Strindberg''a child taking his toys to pieces to make new ones, rejecting and defying and preferring a red sky to everybody else's blue one.' There's the voracious malcontent whom Edgar Degas pegged as a 'hungry wolf without a collar.' There's the accomplished swordsman and brawny genius hammed up by Anthony Quinn in Lust for Life, who takes a break from bickering with Vincent van Gogh to growl, 'I'm talking about women, man, women. I like 'em fat and vicious and not too smart.' And there's the 21st-century trope of the paint-smattered, colonizing Humbert Humbert, bedding 13-year-old girls and sowing syphilis throughout the South Seas. This arc from rebel to swashbuckling art hero to repellent villain tells us less about the artist than it does about the audience (Quinn won an Oscar for that moody growling in 1957). Still, given the hand-wringing and...
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