Gauguin's Paradise Lost

A new edition of the 1971 classic that for weeks was a New York Times “Book of the Times.” Reviewed extensively and favorably across the US and the UK, this book soon became out of print. This new edition is more richly illustrated with reproductions interlaced with the text, and has an expanded first chapter to take into account the Peruvian Nobel laureate, Mario Vargas Llosa’s book The Way to Paradise. Gauguin has been widely admired and emulated as an artist who discarded traditional pictorial values for an intensely personal approach to color and form. Yet the documented accounts of his life and the richly symbolic content of his work indicate that Gauguin could escape neither himself nor his times. In this searching biography, Andersen dispels at last the romantic haze surrounding Gauguin’s life and career, presenting us with a realistic psychological portrait and a completely original and consistent study of the artist’s intricate use of symbolism.