Readers drawn to lushly imagined quasi-historical fiction that dramatizes the importance of art in people’s lives are in luck — as the current bumper crop of novels about well-known painters and paintings attests.
Why such affinity between novelists and artists? For starters, they share keen observational skills and an ability to see more than meets the eye. Their work entails constantly facing down a blank page and trying to fill it — often painstakingly — with what they make of the world. One way writers deal with that daunting challenge is to start with a known entity — whether an intriguing personage or an enigmatic painting that suggests a moving tale — rather than create a character from whole cloth.
But Anka Muhlstein reminds us in The Pen and the Brush, her new study of the importance of art in the works of nineteenth-century French novelists, that for centuries the flow of inspiration ran in the opposite direction: Artists were more likely to find inspiration in literature — including the Bible and mythology — than the other way around. Muhlstein finds it striking that “not one well known [French] novelist of the 1800s failed to include a painter as a character in his work,” while in the 1700s, the only French writer who took an interest in art was Diderot. What happened? In a word: museums. The creation of museums after the French Revolution opened up new access to art, which previously had been cloistered in palaces, mansions, and churches. Writers flocked to the Louvre and found inspiration in the masterpieces they saw. So, it appears, do contemporary novelists — and their readers.
Famous art and artists have become mainstays of historical fiction in particular. Irving Stone’s blockbuster biographical novels, Lust for Life (1934), about Vincent Van Gogh, and The Agony and the Ecstasy (1919), about Michelangelo, were as popular in their day as Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch (2013). Somerset Maugham’s still-fresh 1919 novel, The Moon and Sixpence, inspired by the life of Paul Gauguin, explores the heavy toll of creativity with a penetrating portrait of a stockbroker who abandons his wife and children to pursue his art in Tahiti. Maugham’s narrator comments on the very first page, “To my mind the most interesting thing in art is the personality of the artist; and if that is singular, I am willing to excuse a thousand faults.” It’s an issue that has surely fueled as many books as faults.
Dawn Tripp’s Georgia animates Georgia O’Keeffe’s passionate but stormy relationship with Alfred Stieglitz in a fictional memoir. Her book explores the intersection of life and art by portraying a fiercely independent woman who, championed and guided by the accomplished older photographer and art dealer, struggled to shape her own story.
Georgia dramatizes the couple’s battles for control, especially after the 1921 exhibition of Stieglitz’s at-the-time scandalous nude photographs of O’Keeffe, which attracted attention to his young protégée’s work but, to her dismay, also framed her art as a collection of emblems of feminine sexual experience. As Tripp writes in her author’s note (an ever-important feature of historical novels that separates fact from fiction), “While O’Keeffe allowed passion — creative and sexual — to be a key inspiration for her art, she would explicitly come to resist and ultimately refuse to allow her art to be cast in gendered terms.”
Tripp strains to translate into words what O’Keeffe was attempting to capture in light and color on canvas, sometimes descending into triteness or mawkishness. But her admiration for the iconoclastic artist extends well beyond her bold abstractions, calla lilies, and cow skulls to O’Keeffe’s personal fearlessness and unconventionality, a trailblazer who insisted on autonomy. It’s a theme that still resonates today.
Tracy Chevalier’s Girl with a Pearl Earring (1999) shifted the focus from artist to subject with her indelible portrait of a Delft household in the 1600s and the maid who modeled for Vermeer. This enormously popular book unleashed a spate of novels springing from a focused appreciation for a single work of art. One of my favorites is Marisa Silver’s Mary Coin (2013), which fleshes out the harsh life behind Dorothea Lange’s iconic Depression-era photograph, Migrant Mother — deepening the reader’s understanding of both Lange’s portrait and the human condition.
Christina Baker Kline’s new novel, A Piece of the World, follows in this vein, spinning an atmospheric if none-too-subtle fictional memoir, narrated by the woman in the pale pink dress straining across a field toward a desolate grey farmhouse in Andrew Wyeth’s haunting 1948 painting, Christina’s World. Her emaciated arm and twisted position, we learn, was the result of a crippling, congenital nerve-damaging disease, for which she refused treatment or a wheelchair. (Kline spells out the motor sensory neuropathy as Charcot-Marie-Tooth syndrome only in her author’s note, since it was never diagnosed in her character’s lifetime.)
Born in 1893, Christina Olson grew up in rural Maine in an austere coastal farmhouse with no running water or electricity. Jilted by an early lover, she bears her hard, constricted life with steely, bitter resignation. When young Andrew Wyeth, who marries a local summer resident, finds inspiration in the barren Olsen homestead, he lets a crack of light into Christina’s dark existence. With A Piece of the World Kline imagines a stark life redeemed (somewhat) by art and the flash of unexpected transcendence that occurs when one is truly seen and understood.
The complex plot of Ellen Umansky’s debut novel, The Fortunate Ones, also revolves around a single painting, albeit a fictional composite of Lithuanian-born artist Chaim Soutine’s many portraits of bellhops. This painting plays a pivotal role in the lives of two women, one born in Vienna in 1927, the other a child of 1970s New York.
Rose Zimmer, sent to England as part of the Kindertransport in 1938, spends years after the war searching first for evidence of her parents’ deaths, and then — as a sort of proxy — for her mother’s beloved Soutine painting, stolen by the Nazis. Although she realizes she’s lucky to be alive, she is wracked by survivor guilt. New York lawyer Lizzie Goldstein’s life has also been derailed by guilt — over the disappearance of two of her father’s artworks, a Picasso drawing and Soutine’s Bellhop, the night when she threw an unauthorized high school party at their Los Angeles home while he was out of town.
In the wake of Lizzie’s father’s sudden death, both women are keen on solving the mystery of what happened to the twice-stolen Soutine. But it’s noteworthy that neither actually loves the painting. Umansky’s novel is more concerned with the emotional attachment to a work of art than with what that art expresses in itself.
Bernhard Schlink’s The Woman on the Stairs is another tale involving a long-lost painting. The novel conjures a fictional celebrated artist and one of his canvases, his answer to Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase. Schlink tells us in his author’s note that his imaginary painting bears some resemblance to Gerhard Richter’s Nude on a Staircase.
But the real focus of this frequently far-fetched narrative is on three men’s obsession with the woman in the painting. Irene Adler disappears, along with the canvas, for decades — to the consternation of her ex-husband, who commissioned the work; the artist, who briefly seduced Irene but now just wants his work back; and the narrator, a rigid lawyer who improbably gets pulled into the mess. The painting becomes a pawn and a stand-in for the inaccessible woman, but Schlink’s ultimate concern is with the choices we make about how we want to live.
In contrast, Ali Smith, the brilliant Scottish polymath who revels in drawing unexpected connections between different art forms and seemingly disparate subjects, deploys art in her novels to flag what really matters. In How to Be Both, fifteenth-century Renaissance painter Francesco del Cossa’s gender-bending tale about the creation of his allegorical fresco of the seasons is book-matched with the story of a teenage English girl mourning the sudden death of her smart, wily mother, who took her daughter to see del Cossa’s work shortly before she died.
Smith’s latest novel, Autumn, the first of a planned seasonal quartet, weaves a tribute to Pauline Boty (1938−66), the talented blonde bombshell who was the only female member of the 1960s British pop art movement, into a tale of intergenerational friendship that champions kindness, hope, and a love of art and language over the dismaying breakdown of civility following the Brexit vote. Boty, she writes, was a “free spirit . . . equipped with the skill and the vision capable of blasting the tragic stuff that happens to us all into space, where it dissolves away to nothing whenever you pay any attention to the lifeforce in her pictures.”
In other words, Smith wields art as neither commercial commodity, sentimental attachment, nor metaphor but as a plumb line into what is best in humanity. And indeed, all of these novelists are drawn to paintings that pare away the inessential to capture a vibrant lifeforce. A museum curator could bring the chain of inspiration full circle by mounting quite a spectacular exhibit with artwork culled from these books.
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Sig Nordal 