Episode Details

Paul Gauguin abandoned his wife and five children, fled to Tahiti, and painted a tropical paradise of golden-skinned women in lush landscapes that the art world celebrated as visionary primitivism. The reality was far darker: he took child brides as young as thirteen, spread syphilis through the island population, and constructed an exotic fantasy that served his art while exploiting the people he painted. The paradise was a fiction; the exploitation was real.

This episode traces Gauguin from his stockbroker career in Paris through the break with his family, the Tahiti years, the paintings that made him famous, and the colonial exploitation that modern scholarship has forced into the open.

• Gauguin's abandonment of his banking career and family to pursue art full-time
• The Tahitian paintings and the "primitivist" vision that captivated the European art world
• The child brides, the syphilis, and the exploitation masked as artistic freedom
• The modern reckoning with Gauguin's legacy and the question of separating art from conduct