Spotlight On Biography: Visual Artists

--by Hanje Richards
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Every time I browse the Copper Queen Library's "Biography" section, I find all sorts of people I want to learn more about. This time, I was looking specifically for visual artists, and I found some great books. The following list is just sample. In addition to these titles, you'll also find books about Aubrey Beardsley, Henri Matisse, Grandma Moses, Diego Rivera, and Frida Kahlo.
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It is a fascinating section of the library, and you might be surprised by what you find!
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Marc Chagall
Chagall : A Biography (Jackie Wullschlager) - Born into near poverty in Russia in 1887, the son of a Jewish herring merchant, Chagall fled the repressive “potato-colored” tsarist empire in 1911 for Paris. There he worked alongside Modigliani and Léger in the tumbledown tenement called La Ruche, where “one either died or came out famous.” Wullschlager makes plain in this groundbreaking biography that he never ceased giving form on canvas to his dreams, longings, and memories..
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His subject, more often than not, was the shtetl life of his childhood -- the wooden huts and synagogues, the goatherds, rabbis, and violinists — the whole lost world of Eastern European Jewry.
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Wullschlager brilliantly describes this world and evokes the characters who peopled it: Chagall’s passionate, energetic mother, Feiga-Ita; his eccentric fellow painter and teacher, Bakst; his clever, intense first wife, Bella; their glamorous daughter, Ida; his tough-minded final companion and wife, Vava; and the colorful, tragic array of artist, actor, and writer friends who perished under the Stalinist regime.
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Wullschlager explores in detail Chagall’s complex relationship with Russia and makes clear the Russian dimension he brought to Western modernism. Wullschlager provides a breadth of knowledge on Chagall’s work, and at the same time she brings Chagall the man fully to life —ambitious, charming, suspicious, funny, contradictory, dependent, but above all obsessively determined to produce art of singular beauty and emotional depth.
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Judy Chicago
Beyond The Flower : The Autobiography Of A Feminist Artist (Judy Chicago) - Twenty years after the publication of her autobiography, Through the Flower, the renowned artist and feminist continues the story of her life and takes a provocative look at late twentieth-century American culture and the allocation of our resources..
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Summing up her career, she evokes the collaborative energies that went into such projects as The Dinner Party, a multimedia, symbolic history of women, and Birth Project, an installation that portrays the childbirth experience as a heroic struggle. She and her husband, photographer Donald Woodman, rediscovered their Jewish roots in working on Holocaust Project, a touring exhibition that uses the Nazi genocide as a prism to probe the global structure of abusive power and powerlessness.
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Paul Gauguin
Paul Gauguin: A Biography (David Sweetman) - Explores the often contradictory history of artist Paul Gauguin, considering the scandalous rumors that surrounded him, the inspirations for his work, the influences of his contemporaries, and his painful death.
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As he patiently reconstructs the intricate puzzle of Gauguin's multifaceted life, David Sweetman dismantles the cherished legend about the artist's transformation from Euro-businessman to Tahitian noble savage, an alluring myth attributable in great part to Gauguin himself. Sweetman also emphasizes the importance of Gauguin's early childhood, which was spent in Peru under the protection of his great-uncle, the last Spanish viceroy.
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It was this interlude, Sweetman convincingly argues, that shaped Gauguin's sense of self, non-European aesthetics, and obsession with regaining a lost paradise. Another curious aspect of Gauguin's life was his relationships with unconventional women, from his famous socialist-feminist grandmother to his resilient mother and mannish wife.
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Writings of a Savage (Paul Gauguin) - Autobiography. Familiarity with Gauguin the writer is essential for a complete understanding of the artist. The Writings of a Savage collects the very best of his letters, articles, books, and journals, many of which are unavailable elsewhere. In brilliantly lucid discussions of life and art, Gauguin paints a triumphant self-portrait of a volcanic artist and the tormented man within.
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Robert Mapplethorpe
Mapplethorpe: A Biography (Patricia Morrisroe) - With Robert Mapplethorpe's full endorsement and encouragement, Morrisroe interviewed more than 300 friends, lovers, family members, and critics to form this definitive biography of America's most censored and celebrated photographer and discover how a middle-class Catholic boy from Queens became one of the world's most controversial artists.
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Morrisroe, who met Mapplethorpe at the pinnacle of his fame and the beginning of his rapid descent toward death from AIDS, provides as cogent an explanation as possible in an excellent biography notable for its dramatic structure and candor. She tracks Mapplethorpe's brief and excessive life from his awkward boyhood, through his miasmic college and ROTC years, to his abrupt sexual and artistic liberation when he discovered drugs and gay S & M bars, habits in which he overindulged right up to his death at age 43. Mapplethorpe's story is tied inextricably to the life story of his closest friend, sometime lover, and most important muse, Patti Smith, who Morrisroe also portrays with skill and ardor.
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Georgia O’Keeffe
Portrait Of An Artist: A Biography Of Georgia O'Keeffe (Laurie Lisle) - Georgia O'Keeffe, one of the most original painters America has ever produced, left behind a remarkable legacy when she died at the age of ninety-eight. Her vivid visual vocabulary -- sensuous flowers, bleached bones against red sky and earth -- had a stunning, profound, and lasting influence on American art in this century.

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O'Keeffe's personal mystique is as intriguing and enduring as her bold, brilliant canvases. Here is the first full account of her exceptional life -- from her girlhood and early days as a controversial art teacher... to her discovery by the pioneering photographer of the New York avant-garde, Alfred Stieglitz... to her seclusion in the New Mexico desert, where she lived until her death.
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And here is the story of a great romance -- between the extraordinary painter and her much older mentor, lover, and husband, Alfred Stieglitz. ..

Renowned for her fierce independence, iron determination, and unique artistic vision, Georgia O'Keeffe is a twentieth-century legend. Her dazzling career spans virtually the entire history modern art in America.
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Georgia O'Keeffe, 1887-1986: Flowers In The Desert (Britta Benke) - If you enjoy the works of Georgia O'Keeffe, this is a book you'll want to savor. The reproductions of her paintings are marvelously printed, and the accompanying essays on O'Keeffe's life and work are erudite and lucid.
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There are also pictures of O'Keeffe at various stages of her life and career, ranging from her time as a young student at the University of Virginia, into her weathered, mature age, the last one featuring her at 90 at Ghost Ranch in the desert.
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N.C. Wyeth
N.C. Wyeth: A Biography (David Michaelis) - N.C. Wyeth was hailed as the greatest American illustrator of his day. For forty-three years, starting in 1902, he painted landscapes, still lifes, portraits, and murals, as well as illustrations for a long shelf of world literature. Yet he proclaimed "the uselessness of clinging to illustration and hoping to make it a great art." He judged himself a failure, believing that illustration was of no importance.
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A family saga that begins and ends with the accidental deaths of small boys, a gothic tale that shows how N.C., while learning to live a safe and familiar domestic life, endangered himself and his children by concealing part of the family legacy--depression, suicide, incest.
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According to David Michaelis, Wyeth’s mother's emotional instability and his father's strictness set the stage for his profoundly divided personality. He found in fatherhood the foremost expression of his character -- trying to create in the Wyeth homestead his dream of childhood at its most enchanting. He held his children enthralled throughout their adult lives. He persuaded his inventor son, Nat, to live at home, shepherded his daughter Ann's career as a composer, and taught his three other children -- Henriette, Carolyn, and Andrew (N.C. was Andrew's only teacher) -- to paint.