“L’espirit m’emmerde!”
Wednesday, August 20th by jamie
Translation:”Wit bores the crap out of me!” — Paul Cezanne
I’ve never met an artist worth knowing who wasn’t, in some way, certifiable. In her very entertaining and informative work, Secret Lives of Great Artists: What Your Teachers Never Told You About Master Painters and Sculptors, Elizabeth Lundy lives up to the second half of her book’s title by dishing the dirt on some of history’s best visual artists.
Secret Lives is one third comic book, one third history text, and one third People Magazine for people with brains. C’mon, even us smarty-panties love a good dirty story. Right? Right??
Each artist has his own comic-book style bio: author birth/death dates, astrological sign, standout work, medium, artistic style, and where you can see the cited work. This is followed by a brief run-down of why this artist is notable (and often, but not always, arguably crazy), and some salacious facts about his or her life. What’s not to love?
For example, early in her career, Georgia O’Keeffe was told by one of her male colleagues, “It doesn’t matter what you do [in art school]. I’m going to become a great painter and you’re just going to end up teaching art in some girl’s school.” As Lundy points out, how many “Edward Speicher’s*” do you know? None? Good. (A*^hole. *My note.)
My favorite “quotable” thus far is from Rene Magritte, who said: “I detest resignation, patience, professional heroism and obligatory beautiful feelings. I also detest the decorative arts, folklore, advertising, voices making announcements, aerodynamism, boy scouts, the smell of mothballs, events of the moment, and drunken people.”
As for dirt: da Vinci was an alleged sodomist; Caravaggio a convicted murderer. Edward Hopper used his wife as a punching bag, Michelangelo smelled like a bucket of chum, and Van Gogh apparently often used his paints as toppings for crackers (or, if no crackers were available, sucked it straight from the tube…like Cheez-Wiz.)
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