Transnational Perspectives on Artists’ Lives

Marleen Rensen, Christopher Wiley, Marleen Rensen, Christopher Wiley

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030451998
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030452001
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

This book demonstrates the significance of transnationality for studying and writing the lives of artists. While painters, musicians and writers have long been cast as symbols of their associated nations, recent research is increasingly drawing attention to those aspects of their lives and works that resist or challenge the national framework. The volume showcases different ways of treating transnationality in life writing by and about artists, investigating how the transnational can offer intriguing new insights on artists who straddle different nations and cultures. It further explores ways of adopting transnational perspectives in artists' biographies in order to deal with experiences of cultural otherness or international influences, and analyses cross-cultural representations of artists in biography and biofiction. Gathering together insights from biographers and scholars with expertise in literature, music and the visual arts, Transnational Perspectives on Artists' Lives opens up rich avenues for researching transnationality in the cultural domain at large.

© The Author(s) 2020

M. Rensen, C. Wiley (eds.)Transnational Perspectives on Artists’ LivesPalgrave Studies in Life Writinghttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45200-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. Writing Artists’ Lives Across Nations and Cultures: Biography, Biofiction and Transnationality

Marleen Rensen¹ and Christopher Wiley²

(1)

European Studies Department, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

(2)

Department of Music and Media, University of Surrey, Guildford, UK

Marleen Rensen (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

Christopher Wiley

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

In her novel How to Be Both (2014), Ali Smith entwines two life stories: those of the fictional teenage girl George, living in Cambridge in the twenty-first century, and Francesco del Cossa, a real-life fresco painter in Renaissance Italy. Unusually, the book is published in two editions, one starting with the story of George and the other with that of Cossa. Implicit in this double publication is the suggestion that it does not matter which of the stories you read first, since, one way or the other, they make up one. They converge at the level of the narrative in several ways. George, for instance, studies the biography of Cossa, whose life and works are little known. In his classic Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, the famous Renaissance writer on art, Giorgio Vasari, ignored the School of Ferrara’s mural paintings, of which Cossa was an exponent, and even confused him with another artist. In Smith’s modern treatment of the same subject, she turns the painter into a living and speaking character, who appears as a ghost in twenty-first-century Britain, following George through the streets of Cambridge and to the National Gallery in London, which displays one of his paintings.

When George discusses her biographical research on Cossa with a friend, they humorously imagine Cossa’s commenting on it with the words: ‘alas I am being made up really badly by a sixteen-year-old girl who knows fuck all about art and nothing at all about me except that I did some paintings and seem to have died of the plague’ (Smith 2015, p. 139). In the part of the novel where the painter takes centre stage and tells his life story, his voice is direct and forceful as a result of Smith’s use of the stream of consciousness technique. In a creative and playful way, her novel thus counters the existing image of Cossa, based on a few biographical sources. She presents the painter as a girl who has dressed up as a man in order to find employment, which may fall within the realm of imagination. At least, art histories do not offer any indications for such a gender shift.

The biographical parallels between Cossa and George—the gender confusion, the premature loss of the mother, the artistic aspiration and the ‘mural art’ (George decorates the walls of her bedroom with pictures)—express connections between the two characters, just as much as does the form of the novel. In a vein similar to fresco painting, where a layer of paint is applied over fresh plaster, this story is layered in such a way that the one portrait shines through the other. This confirms sameness as the central theme of the story, bringing together past and present, life and death, man and woman, fact and fiction, painting and literature, and Britain and Italy. How to Be Both not only fundamentally reveals how art and artists’ lives can speak to us across centuries, cultures and nations, but it also illustrates how they can be reimagined and recreated in new, experimental ways. As such, it intersects with the issue at the heart of this volume: writing artists’ lives across different nations and cultures. This, in turn, relates to a number of subsidiary themes that will be raised in the course of its chapters, including the cross-cultural representation of artists’ lives, the artist’s interest in the lives of other artists, the rewriting of history and canons, and experiments with new modes of life writing, both in biography and in biofiction.

Artists’ Lives and the Return of the Author

Smith’s How to Be Both exemplifies the strong contemporary interest in the biographies of painters, writers, musicians and other artists evidenced in various forms of life writing. Most visible, perhaps, is the burgeoning corpus of biographical fiction, also termed ‘biofiction’, examples of which form the basis of discussion in multiple chapters of this volume.¹ Even though there is no agreement on the precise definition of biofiction, it can generally be understood as the literature that presents hypothetical or imagined lives, relying on real-life stories yet containing a certain degree of creative invention.² This can take many different shapes and forms, ranging from realistic tales to postmodernist experiments. Among the diverse types of historical figures that are portrayed in biographical fiction—which includes political leaders, adventurers and migrants—artists are particularly well represented. Artemisia Gentileschi, Rembrandt van Rijn, Henry James, Maurice Ravel, Stefan Zweig, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, Dmitri Shostakovich, Frida Kahlo and Charlotte Salomon are just a few of the artists whose lives have been the subject of literary works of fiction in recent years. Aside from, or parallel to, the proliferation of biofiction, ‘real’ biographies of artists equally enjoy popularity in our time, emblematic of the recent interest in the genre of biography more generally. Biographies frequently figure on bestselling lists and seem to attract more media attention than ever before (Lee 2009, pp. 17–18).

Writing about the lives of artists, of course, has a long and rich history. Giorgio Vasari’s previously mentioned series of artists’ biographies, Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550), often referred to as Lives or Vite, opened up the subject centuries ago. The classical authors Duris of Samos and Pliny the Elder can arguably be considered the founders of the genre of lives of the artists, yet, while they focused on a variety of ‘great men’, including men of state and military men, Vasari was the first to concentrate on subjects who were visual artists exclusively (Kisters 2017, p. 26). Since Vasari’s time, there has hardly been a change in the basic structure of artists’ biographies, which attributed a mythological status to the figure of the artist through anecdotes relating to their exceptional talent (Kris and Kurz 1979; Soussloff 1997). The genre has flourished particularly since the Romantic era, owing to the rise of the notion of ‘genius’ and the changed appreciation for imagination, originality and artistic freedom. The Künstlerroman, which originates in this period, portrays fictional artists (such as Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus and the character of Johannes Kreisler in several E. T. A. Hoffmann novels), but the genre also epitomises the Romantic cult of the artist, in which actual artistic ‘geniuses’ became cult figures, set apart from ordinary people not only by virtue of their special gifts, but also by their eccentric personalities and extravagant lifestyles. The study and writing of biographies of real artists have remained popular ever since and expanded into increasingly rich, diverse and complex modes, forms and genres (Hellwig 2005). The present-day interest in artists’ lives among literary writers, practising biographers and scholars alike is closely related to two wider developments within and outside academia: the flourishing field of ‘life writing’ and the ‘Return of the Author’.

Since the early twenty-first century, ‘life writing’ has become a widely used umbrella term for a broad range of genres and modes of telling stories of one’s own, or someone else’s life. As Margaretta Jolly’s Encyclopedia of Life Writing indicates, life writing encompasses autobiographical forms, such as memoir, diary and autofiction; biographical forms, such as biography and biographical novels; as well as auto/biographical crossovers (Jolly 2001).³ Even if the term is predominantly used in the Anglo-Saxon world and has different connotations in different countries and disciplinary areas, life writing has undisputedly emerged as a lively area of research and writing practices. It is especially relevant for writing and studying the lives of artists, for, as an open and inclusive field, as well as a fundamentally creative one, it allows us to bring together and explore the two narrative forms that are central to this volume: biography and biographical fiction. It furthermore enables us to take into account experimental forms of writing lives at the intersections of biography and literature, or biography and autobiography, which are prominent in contemporary life writing (Boldrini and Novak 2017, pp. 1–36). This approach, however, by no means suggests that generic distinctions are insignificant.

Even if biography is considered to be at the junction between art and craft, or art and science, it differs markedly from biofiction. Like many literary writers, biographers endeavour to bring to life a historical character, making use of their imagination and storytelling skills—yet they are bound to facts. Biographers are often described as ‘artists under oath’ (Desmond McCarthey, quoted in Parke 2002, p. 28). This illuminates that their creative freedom is restricted: they cannot simply ‘make stuff up’ about their subjects,⁴ nor may they change facts, or fill in the gaps of knowledge about their subjects’ lives by inventing a story in the manner that Smith does in How to Be Both. As writer David Lodge stated, in distinguishing biofiction from biography: ‘Respectable biographers regard modern biography as an evidence-based discourse. Everything has to be verifiable’ (quoted in Lackey 2019, p. 119). Critics in biography studies have also emphasised that biography is a ‘scholarly method’ in historical research, one that searches for the truth about the past, and as such, it is distinct from biofiction (Renders et al. 2017, p. 4). Undoubtedly, biographers differ among themselves in their understanding of the genre, but no matter how creatively they deal with their biographical material—for example, in extrapolating dialogues based on the evidence of diaries or letters—they are all restricted in their use of the techniques of fiction.

Biofiction is, by definition, a hybrid genre, merging biography and fiction. Even though the term is not widely used until the 1990s, this literary form dates back at least to the beginning of the twentieth century and had an initial flurry around the 1930s, when, for example, Irving Stone published Lust for Life (1934), his now classic novel about Vincent van Gogh (Lackey 2019, p. 88), and when Virginia Woolf’s experimental biography Orlando (1928), a thinly veiled portrait of Vita Sackville-West, first appeared. Michael Lackey has noted that biofiction, despite its popularity, has long been considered ‘a bastard genre of secondary rate’—being neither a ‘real’ work of art, nor a ‘real’ biography. However, its status has considerably changed, Lackey argues, as biofiction has become ‘a dominant literary form’ in the twenty-first century. The creative impulse towards imagination,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Writing Artists’ Lives Across Nations and Cultures: Biography, Biofiction and Transnationality
• Part I. (Re)Thinking Biography—Artists in Between Nations and Cultures
• Part II. Writing the Lives of Transnational Artists
• Part III. Artists on Transnational Artists
• Part IV. Fictional Representations of Artists’ Lives Transnationally
• Back Matter