I understand from reviews that at least some readers and professional reviewers are relieved that Sue Prideaux in her new biography, Wild Thing, exonerates Gauguin’s egregious sexual relationships with girls and women because the times were different. How nice. [The French, among others, have long struggled to recognize sexual exploitation of female children, not to mention adults, but there has never been a time when misogyny and outright cruelty were not objectionable to those who suffered. It’s one thing to acknowledge that bigotry such as antisemitism and racism and sexism were tolerated and even encouraged by those in power; it’s quite another to insist that these attitudes and transgressions went unnoticed, that such bigotry was somehow rendered benign because a few declared it was.]