Books: Big Bad Wolf

MY FATHER PAUL GAUGUIN—Pola Gauguin—Knopf ($3-75) When Paul Gauguin died of syphilis in 1903, few were really sorry. He had always been a lone wolf: as stockbroker, family man, runaway painter he had always pursued his own proud, peculiar way, and his enemies were thicker than his friends. When he died alone in his hut in the Marquesas Islands, his wife and their five children, long strangers to him, were half the world away in Denmark. Since 1903 many a critic has climbed over the fence and given Gauguin's painting nearly as high marks...