“Not Just a Pristine White”: A Contemporary Look at the Artist’s Biography

Historicizing the literary genre of the artist’s biography requires acknowledging its origin in 1550, when Giorgio Vasari published the first edition of his Lives of the Most Eminent Architects, Painters, and Sculptors of Italy.

Vasari’s method of scouring for tales about artists from a range of sources—from Sienese oral tradition to Italian novelettas—culminated in biographies that hovered between hearsay and fact, a condition further exacerbated by his lack of due diligence (at least by modern standards). Nevertheless, even with today’s advanced research practices and their insistence on exactitude, the concept of accuracy remains at play in an artist’s biography because a portrait of another’s life, to put it simply, is an intersubjective affair; we must account for the author and his or her engagement with the subject. Perhaps this explains why Vasari detailed his own biography in Lives, as if to underscore the nonobjective nature of his enterprise (although it is more likely, and consistent with his character, that he took this opportunity to self-invent). Here, I venture to peek behind the scenes of writing artists’ biographies and give voice to three prominent contemporary authors: Steven Naifeh, who cowrote Jackson Pollock: An American Saga (1998) and Van Gogh: The Life (2012), as well as Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan, who cowrote de Kooning: An American Master (2006).

To produce biographical accounts of Jackson Pollock (1912–1956), Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890), and Willem de Kooning (1904–1997) necessitated not only extensive research but also literary finesse—finesse that renders consideration of these authors’ accounts as definitive for three artists whose lives had already swelled to mythical proportions by the late twentieth century. Each biography, as the authors note, entailed a decade-plus of investigation and writing, years in which scholastic attitudes toward the genre altered. “Since Greg Smith and I began working on the Pollock biography in 1981,” writes Naifeh, “there was a sea change in art biography. Formalism had such a hold on art history before that time that biographies of artists rarely stood comparison to biographies of writers or politicians.” Even today, with the arguably slackened grip of formalism over art history, Stevens detects lingering skepticism from some art historians who “dislike biographies of artists just because they are not art history and because they take into account the untidy and vulgar, which is part of life itself. It seems somehow a dirty business to talk about the life.” At the same time, Stevens admits being “sympathetic” toward why art historians may distrust the genre, given how frequently biographies become “a symptom of trivializing celebrity culture.”

That said, it takes trained judgment to discern the ambiguous fault line of disclosing sensitive details about an artist’s life. “The important thing is to present your subject warts and all,” writes Swan. However, she concedes that her selection of information, good or bad, must also align with her end goal of telling a compelling and cohesive story: “That de Kooning wound up—literally—in the gutter in the late 1950s after a night of binge-drinking, or that in the late eighties he churned out unedited paintings as dementia took over, these are important themes in his life that could not (and should not) be smoothed away. In the end, his story of being forever in doubt, forever betwixt and between, was enriched by telling the truth.” Likewise, for Naifeh, a rationale for relevancy and revelation in storytelling had to be present when choosing to confront a controversial issue in Pollock’s life. “A good example is our discussion of Pollock’s complicated sexuality. It seemed to us cowardly and even absurd not to address it given the fact that Pollock made paintings about ambiguous sexuality,” he writes. Implicit in Naifeh’s statement is the understanding that his own thorough immersion in Pollock’s life permits him to sketch a suggestive map of the artist’s intentions in producing specific works of art. For biographers, ascribing intentions to works of art is precarious; even witnessing the very moment of a work’s conception does not guarantee entry into the artist’s mind and clarification of why that work was made. “It’s best to tell the story around an artist and a work of art, let the artist and those around him speak about the work and the life, and then allow the reader to develop a rich, reading intuition about what motivates the making of a particular painting,” writes Stevens, who also notes his good fortune that de Kooning himself was “a wonderful observer and astute critic who said many extraordinary things about his own and others’ paintings.” And yet, even when armored with the artist’s own descriptions, the act of translating a painting by de Kooning into words remained a Sisyphean task. “If art is apples, words are oranges,” claims Stevens. In the case of Pollock, who did not keep any journals, limited self-reflective commentary was offset by the copious literature about the artist’s renowned drip technique. The task of translation also then became a balancing act of accommodating these previous voices while generating original and vivid writing: “It is extremely difficult to describe one of his drip paintings in a way that is both clear enough to be comprehendible but also poetic enough to convey the astonishing beauty and stylistic originality of each work,” writes Naifeh.

Capturing any work of art by Pollock, de Kooning, or Van Gogh—and the convictions that these artists ascribed to their works—begs inquiry into what it meant to be an artist during the period when the work was created. Take de Kooning in the 1930s and 1940s. Though tempting to project onto this not-so-distant past our contemporary understanding of the profession, Stevens stresses that art had yet to move into the mainstream during these decades; de Kooning and his colleagues in New York City “were all unknown together” and therefore came together to create an “unusual community, one less exposed than usual to competition, fame, and money.” Just as Stevens and Swan resisted sentimentalizing this era, their commitment to accuracy also meant breathing life into the supposed pitfalls of what happened to this community when artists became celebrities in the 1950s. And so their biography illustrates how the shifting grounds underlying the profession during de Kooning’s lifetime (essentially the twentieth century) contributed to the varying working conditions in which the artist found himself.

As much as Naifeh, Stevens, and Swan strive to make the reader feel as if he or she knows these artists as people, they also treat geographical places like protagonists to be encountered and experienced. “It’s essential,” writes Swan, “to recreate those places and times so thoroughly for the reader that he or she can feel what it was like, say, to grow up in the Rotterdam of de Kooning’s childhood.” In addition to visiting the places that de Kooning lived and consulting a wide range of historical sources, Stevens and Swan then navigated seeing these locations through de Kooning’s eyes by interviewing more than two hundred artists and friends. Naifeh recounts adopting a similar approach for Pollock. Van Gogh, on the other hand, presented a unique situation for the authors. “The first thing he did when he moved somewhere was to draw it,” writes Naifeh, also mentioning how Van Gogh produced word paintings of those same places. “We didn’t have to imagine how Van Gogh saw those places—there is a record of his personal experience of them.”

Van Gogh’s investment in documenting places—specifically those where he lived—squares perfectly with his lifetime preoccupation with the role of biography in art, culminating in his extensive archive of artists’ biographies, with materials ranging from cumbersome tomes to gossipy tidbits. In their book’s prologue, Naifeh and his coauthor, Greg Smith, quote Van Gogh in 1881 during the nascent stages of his career: “In general, and more especially with artists, I pay as much attention to the man who does the work as to the work itself.” Van Gogh’s statement intimates at the metonymic relationship between art and life. Neither biography nor oeuvre is a finite form. Instead, both are involved in an ongoing affair of mutual projection that the biographer intercepts, an interception that Stevens poetically encapsulates when writing: “It pleases me to know that the great classical works of art were gaudily painted, and not just a pristine white, however much I love that white.”

Erica Cooke

Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Art and Archaeology