Misadventures in Paradise : BIOGRAPHY : PAUL GAUGUIN: A Life,<i> By David Sweetman (Simon & Schuster: $35; 600 pp.)</i>

Few great artists can have made a worse mess of their lives than Paul Gauguin. Just when he was beginning to win some public recognition in Europe, he read a popular and misleading novel about Tahiti, left his family in Denmark and crossed the world in search of mythical paradise and a life of savage innocence among the natives of the French Pacific colonies. The paintings he made there were widely regarded as a record of such a life. In fact, his life in Tahiti was less than idyllic: He died of heart failure and syphilis in solitude, poverty and great pain, at war with the local colonial administration in 1903 at age 54.

But myth is more powerful than fact and, fueled by Gauguin’s art, the myth of Pacific innocence lives on today. Not daunted, David Sweetman sets out in this well-researched new biography to correct the record of Gauguin’s life.

Though Paul Gauguin liked to describe himself as “a savage from Peru,” he is more usually seen as a Paris stockbroker who started as a Sunday afternoon painter and abandoned bourgeois life when he found that art paid better than commerce. In fact, as Sweetman reveals, he had a remarkable ancestry. His grandmother, Flora Tristan, was a revolutionary socialist and an early French feminist who sometimes claimed to be descended from “a Bourbon of Aragon” whose family also produced the Borgia popes and Lucrezia Borgia, “the legendary seducer and poisoner.” It is always intriguing when genius jumps several generations to reappear in the same bloodline, but Gauguin seems never to have mentioned his kinship with the legendary seducer and poisoner.

Tristan married a French engraver who became so violent that he was eventually locked up for 20 years. Their daughter, Aline Chazal, was Gauguin’s mother. His father, Clovis Gauguin, was a journalist who was descended from a long line of Orleans market gardeners and who died when his son was an infant. As a small child, Paul was taken by his mother to Peru to live with an eccentric but affectionate great-uncle, Don Pio Tristan, a sometime field marshal, insurrectionist and the last Spanish viceroy of Peru. Don Pio kept mulatto servants and had a madman chained to the roof, a favor to the government, which reduced his local taxes. Gauguin lived in this unusual house until he was 6, when his mother took him back to France. It is possible that in this exotic and restless childhood lies the explanation for the adult painter’s attraction to distant lands; perhaps if he had passed his early years in Orleans, he would have been content to paint still-lifes and landscapes like Cezanne.

Gauguin did not do well at school and, having failed his final exams at the age of 17, joined the merchant navy as an ordinary seaman, as Edouard Manet had done before him. It was during his six years at sea that he took to sketching as a form of amusement. He never had formal training as a painter. Upon the death of his mother, he left the navy and, with the help of one of her wealthy friends, found a job as a clerk with a firm of stockbrokers in Paris. The author’s description of this period of Gauguin’s life is full of new discoveries and sheds new light on the rest of the artist’s life.

For 14 years, Gauguin lived the life of a prosperous bourgeois and developed his interest in Sunday afternoon painting under the tutelage of Camille Pissarro. So it was that the amateur painter and man of commerce was allowed to exhibit with the Impressionists in 1881, although until then he had been known only as a collector of their work. During his years on the Bourse he married Mette-Sophie Gad, a forceful Danish woman who wore men’s clothes, smoked cigars and took little interest in his hobby of painting. She was under the impression that she had married a serious man of business. They had five children.

Gauguin’s life lurched toward the unconventional with the 1881 stock market crash, when he decided to devote himself to painting. It was a bad moment to choose: No one was buying pictures, and before long he found himself in Denmark with his exasperated wife working as a tarpaulin saleswoman. Again, Sweetman’s research enables him to make a convincing reassessment. His Danish family, bourgeois to the hilt, referred to him as “the missing link”; his wife was humiliated by the humble address to which they were forced to move.

As this biography shows, the failure of Gauguin’s marriage was central to the failure of his life and the triumph of his art. As his relationship with Mette-Sophie broke up and he gradually lost touch with his children, whom he adored, he became more and more obsessed with his destiny as a painter. So he lived, and helped to create, another enduring myth, that of the artiste maudit, the doomed soul, the man cursed by genius. In 1887, after a disastrous voyage to Martinique, where he nearly died of starvation, he returned to Paris and met Vincent Van Gogh.

After months of hesitation, Gauguin agreed to join the unstable Dutchman in Arles, where Van Gogh hoped to establish a commune he called “the Studio of the South.” Sweetman shows that though the brief collaboration between the two men was marked by violent arguments, it was also of great help to both. It ended when Van Gogh, in a famous incident, first threatened Gauguin with an open razor and then mutilated his own ear. Van Gogh was deeply impressed with Gauguin, whom he described as “a virgin creature with savage instincts.” “With Gauguin,” he wrote, “blood and sex prevail over ambition.” And he approved of Gauguin’s plan to go to the tropics, since he thought that “the future of a great renaissance in painting lies there.”

The objection, of course, was practical. The tropics were a hostile environment for a painter. There were no patrons there, no galleries, no like-minded spirits, no money. It seems clear that some demon drove Gauguin to overlook all these obstacles and abandon everything familiar, including his beloved children whom he last saw eight years before his death, in favor of this unrewarding paradise. But what it was we may never know, despite the new material uncovered by the author of this splendid portrait.

Sweetman suggests that part of Gauguin’s motive was a repressed homosexual pedophilia but the evidence for this is inconclusive. There is one passage written by the painter in which he confesses to being momentarily attracted to a native boy but decides to do nothing about it in view of the boy’s obvious innocence.

In the absence of stronger evidence the search for Gauguin’s demon, despite Sweetman’s efforts, is not yet over. Certainly his relations with his wife remain mysterious. For years after their separation he asked her to return to him. When his favorite daughter died while he was in the South Seas he attempted suicide. And when this death was followed by that of his son, his forceful wife could not find the courage to write to him again.

After his first voyage to Tahiti, Gauguin returned with 55 paintings to a triumphant welcome when he was hailed as the leader of the new school of Symbolism. But before long he grew to loathe Europe all over again. His celebrated dealer, Ambroise Vollard, cheated him, even his landlady stole his paintings. So he returned to his distant paradise, where he soon had to barter drawings for tins of food. And there was to be no second triumph, only hardship, neglect, despair and the fruitless wait for the mail boat. Back in Paris, Vollard had turned his attention to a more profitable relationship, with Cezanne.