Jackson Arn/Wen; Ponderosa/Compilation
In 1550, the Renaissance Italian art theorist Giorgio Vasari completed The Biography of a Famous Man (the life of the best painter, sculptor and architect), and his artists were gifted and miraculous almost at birth.
Since then, almost all biographies of artists have implicitly asked, "How did they do it?" Vasari replied with "God." But the current era does not tolerate such a simple answer, and people are beginning to wonder if the great creativity vasari celebrates really exists. The journal American Art recently published an article by Jackson Arn reviewing artist biographers about how they explored the connection between works of art and artists' lives.
Gauguin, Where Did We Come From? Who are we? Where are we going? 1897-1898, Oil on canvas, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
In 1543, Cardinal Alessandro Farnese entertained guests in a Roman palace, and one of the doctors and historians named Paolo Giovio told him that he wanted to write a series of biographies of great contemporaries such as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. The cardinal introduced Geovio to another guest, George Vasari, a heavily indebted painter and architect who claimed to have studied with Michelangelo and provided Giovio with so much information about the artist that Heyovio began to question his qualifications and suggested that Vasari take over the project, and the Who's Who was born.
Titian, Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, circa 1545-1546, oil on canvas, National Museum of Capodimonte, Naples
Vasari got the job because of his excellent grasp of the facts, but to this day no one thinks that The Celebrity Biography is completely real. Every life in a celebrity has its own pages—Michelangelo 75 pages, Da Vinci 15 pages, and Ghiberti 17 pages in the Oxford Classics. Vasari surveyed hundreds of Italian artists, among whom there were almost as many errors as correct, for example, he said that the sculpture was born in Florence, which is not; He said That Andrea del Castagno had murdered a rival painter, but he did not.
There are also some inaccuracies that are more like myths. Vasari's artists are gifted almost as soon as they are born, and the talent of the young Giotto is "incredible", the product of "God's grace", the version created by God: "God created life, and little Giotto drew a lifelike fly, and the people who saw it tried to shoot it away." "There are also some artists' gossip in The Celebrity Biography – Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo are at odds, Piero di Cosimo eats only hard-boiled eggs... This makes the artist's work tend to miracles.
Portrait of Vasari, originally published in 1550.
A Renaissance art book that tells about Geberti more than Da Vinci sounds strange, but makes sense. Nearly 500 years later, writers still get opportunities through socializing, and accuracy is still important, but it's also relative. Artist biographies still sell well because people think art is fun, and artists must be fun.
The basic formulas that make up an artist's biography have also remained the same—human, accompanied by an analytical but unexplainable talent. But today artist biographies are hundreds of pages, not dozens. Those gossip and talents must be spread with more words until the juice is squeezed out, and the genius does not seem special.
Although the success of the works has aroused concern about the lives of artists, often their lives are not directly related to the cultural value of art.
Some artists rose to fame in their 20s and spent years in honor; There are also those who work in obscurity for decades to gain favor and have a very limited life history that they can tell. But artist biographers need to pay attention to the artist's various stages from birth to death, regardless of whether what happens in between is attractive enough. As a result, a properly detailed biography is often time-consuming.
One way to avoid a lengthy biography is to ignore the others and detail the particularly interesting years in the artist's life. Alexander Nemerov's Intense Balance: Helen Frankenseler and New York in the 1950s (2021) is one of the most lighthearted and interesting artist biographies in recent years. He focuses on the painter's decade in 217 pages, and tells everything else in just 10 pages. This biography is not, and does not want to, be conclusive for the artist.
Helen Frankenseler, Mountains and Seas, 1952
Pollock (left), Clement Greenberg (second from left), Frankenseler (second from right), Lee Krasner (first from right)
Some biographies seek clarity at the outset, but fail to achieve their goals for unforeseen reasons. Alex Danchev, for example, declared at the beginning of Magritte: A Life (2020) that Magritte was "the most important image provider in the modern world," and the book has since revolved around this theme. But Danchev died of a heart attack in 2016, and the last two decades of Magritte's biography were not completed. Art historian Sarah Whitfield, who continues the book's final chapter, argues that simplification is a way to deal with a painter who ultimately repeats himself.
Left to Right: Barbara Brominck's Biography of Florin Steetheimer (2022); Jade Pearl's Calder: Conquering Time (2017); Alexander Nemerov's Intense Balance: Helen Frankenseler and New York in the 1950s (2021)
Even with money and glory aside, there are plenty of good reasons to write a long biography of an artist. After all, some artists create great works and still find time to live interesting lives. Even if they are busy, they are still observers of their time, so their biographies are more like biographies of the times. Writing a biography can also uncover the importance of the obscured artist, and if the goal is to do so, the author may need sufficient authority.
All the biographies of artists seem to be asking implicitly, "How did they do it?" Vasari in the 16th century answered with "God." But the current age doesn't tolerate such simplicity: we know that artists take inspiration from college classes, beloved siblings, dead parents, lovers, pets, television, advertising, jokes, mentors, whiskey, diseases.
The process by which these things become art is unknown, but Vasari's Renaissance "heroes" inhale the divine spirit, while modern artists have had to breathe the air of everyday life and still produce masterpieces. Unsure of what inspired which works of art, biographers tend to look for more possibilities, which books they read, what movies they watched, whose parties they attended, what names the cats were called... The answer to each question has the potential to piece together a result.
Perhaps seeing a hot air balloon land on the roof of your house without warning as a teenager could indeed uncover the secrets of Magritte's art, or, as Dancheff put it, just part of it. This brings to the popularity of 21st-century artist biographies: in detailing the details of everyday life, readers find that artists are just like us. This, in turn, is a major advantage of biography over critical research, where the details of life don't easily change or disappear.
Magritte, Gorleida, 1953
Reading a good artist biography will make you realize how much art history has been oversimplified. The painter, poet, and stage designer Florine Stettheimer was considered an idle foodie, and Barbara Blomingke's biography corrected that stereotype, but did not abandon it entirely. Described as childish and unpolitical, Alexander Calder devoted some of the most thought-provoking passages to the artist's philosophy of freedom in his biography of Calder. Picasso claimed to be able to paint as well as Raphael at the age of eight, and in his four-volume biography, John Richardson showed how unlike Raphael Picasso's boyhood was.
Calder and his work in 1952.
This is not only a correction of the record of art history, the observation of biographers, the erasure of labels such as "hedonism" and "Raphaelism" for artists, and seeing the true face of art and artists. But Rosalind Krauss argues that the real problem is that the connection between artists and art is oversimplified. In October 1980, more than a decade before the publication of the first volume of Richardson's biography of Picasso, Klaus mocked Richardson in an article published in the New York Review of Books, suggesting that he could analyze Picasso's style in terms of love life and friends.
Klaus argues that this autobiographical interpretation of Picasso, weakening ambiguous content, is destroying his work. For example, Picasso's 1903 Blue Period work Life includes a portrait of his friend Carles Casagemas, who committed suicide two years earlier. This encouraged art historians to interpret the picture from the perspective of "Casa Gimas". "When the work was named 'Casa Gimas,' we (or we think) cracked the code for the painting, and it had no more secrets to hide." Of course, Klaus exaggerates this—no art historian would argue that once It was known who Casa Gimas was, There was nothing worth exploring in Life. But behind this irony lies a serious point – that biographies of contemporary artists are indeed oversimplified, and even though they are four volumes long and full of myth-breaking complexities, they still overemphasize external facts and ignore the inner world of artists.
Picasso, Life, 1903, oil on canvas, collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art
The critic Craig Brown once wrote in the Times Literary Supplement: "Biography is dominated by information, and when you need it, information rarely appears." But there is definitely more information about external facts than on the inside. Whatever you think about psychology or human nature — you can't know what's going on in an artist's head as you would know the outbreak of war or the wedding date of a cousin. But compared to other biographies, inner life may be the driving force of the artist. But the window into the inner world is limited, and the tools to express it are equally limited.
In the first volume of Picasso' biography, Klaus announced that the portrait of Casa Gimas in Life was originally a self-portrait, "Life is considered a deification of Casa Guimas, or an allegory of his suicide." In other sections, Richardson uses the subtle expertise that Klaus believes is lacking in Picasso's biography experts to unravel the "meaning of contradiction or opposition" in Life: he discusses the suicide of Casa Guimas, and also discusses Picasso's research on El Greco and Gauguin, and his interest in tarot cards with his father.
El Greco, The Illusion of St. John, circa 1608-1614, oil on canvas, collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
The artistic process that emerges from these pages is a fascinating mixture of rigidity and flexibility, caution and carelessness. Picasso should have remembered Gauguin's Where Did We Come From Almost Before He Started Life? Who are we? Where are we going? 》（1897-1898）。
Richardson candidly admits that some of his thoughts about Life are hypotheses. He resisted the temptation of overinterpretation, believing that some of the seemingly symbolic elements of the painting were merely "coincidences". He said the painting reminded him of Eliot's poem. With the agility of a biographer, he gives one of the most candid descriptions of artistic creation, frankly because he makes the existence of Life seem far from inevitable—a work by a loud 22-year-old from Malaga, Spain, rather than a legend. This is not a depiction of Picasso's inner life, but through the collection of external facts, or is approaching his inner life.
Left: Picasso, Self-Portrait (partial), 1901, collection of the Musée Picasso, Paris; Right: El Greco, Portrait of an Old Man, circa 1595-1600, collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Richardson spent decades gathering "every piece of information" he could gather about Picasso. Individual debris may just be debris, but coming together is different. These fragments of information also prove how much desk work is needed to write a biography that makes artistic creation seem vivid, and biographers can convey this vividness very little. But curiously, "creativity" is the fundamental reason why an artist becomes an artist, but it is also the least good at interpreting in biography.
And, compared to 1543, there is now no more understanding of the sources of creativity. Although neurological studies claim to have answers, they have been slow to come to fruition. Writer Malcolm Gladwell insists that it is related to 10,000 hours, and he has a lot of admiration for this magical number. Others insist that the great creativity vaunted by Vasari did not exist and never existed. For art historian Linda Nochlin, "greatness" is an artistic remnant of masculinity; For the cultural critic Louis Menand, it's a self-promotion by artists like James Baldwin and Robert Rauschenberg.
John Richardson's four-volume biography of Picasso was published between 1991 and 2021
Artist biographies remain a religious genre hundreds of years after Vasari. Biographers patiently study the lives of artists, and even accompany them throughout their lives. Richardson, who died in 2019 at the age of 95, spent more than half of his adult life researching and writing about Picasso, a form of piety. Perhaps, the shimmer of Vasari divinity, which Giotto recognized, is still there, and when you read the biographies of the artists you love, it is the kind of shimmer you seek.
The artist's biography is four or five hundred or six hundred pages long and tries to express creativity in words, but it is not perfect. Or it's precisely because it's not achieved that creativity shines brighter.
Note: This article is compiled from the June/July 2021 issue of American Art and was originally titled "From God to 10,000 Hours".
Editor-in-Charge: Weihua Gu
Proofreader: Luan Meng