Gauguin: The Other World

In 1891, Paul Gauguin arrives on the French polynesian island of Tahiti. In this lush paradise, he is liberated from the concerns of the city-dwelling European. He is free: to love, to sing, and to create. In Copenhagen, gauguin's wife enjoys no such freedom. She would rather forget her odious husband and his degenerate artwork. Instead, in a city resistant to the avant-garde, she is tasked with selling a collection of his extravagantly priced Tahitian paintings. When they finally go on sale – in Paris, shortly after gauguin's return – sales are catastrophic. For Monet, Renoir and others, nothing points to the significance of these bizarre, visionary works. Gauguin: the other world is a revelatory biography of an artist whose qualities as a man won him few admirers in his own lifetime, but whose talents as a painter would have an enormous influence on the art of Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and many more.