2019 Summer Reading: 10 Biographies for Art Lovers

Frida was more than pain and anguish. She tried to be true to her big personality and she became an artist who was full of life. Her paintings are party, color, blood, and life. She was a fighter who decided to take the world by storm and a passionate woman who wasn’t content with being in the shadow of her great friend, painter Diego Rivera. Frida decided to live with intensity, both in the misfortunes and in the joys that life brought her. Inspired by the experiences of the iconic Mexican painter, this book offers a beautifully illustrated tour through her life and work. (Courtesy of Penguin Random House.)

The Unfinished Palazzo: Life, Love and Art in Venice
by Judith Mackrell (Thames & Hudson) 

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Abandoned, unfinished, and left to rot on Venice’s Grand Canal, ‘il palazzo non finito’ was once an unloved guest among the aristocrats of Venetian architecture. Yet in the 20th century it played host to three passionate and unconventional women who would take the city by storm. The staggeringly wealthy Marchesa Luisa Casati made her new home a belle epoque aesthete’s fantasy and herself a living work of art; notorious British socialite Doris Castlerosse (née Delevingne) welcomed film stars and royalty to glittering parties between the wars; and American heiress Peggy Guggenheim amassed an exquisite collection of modern art, which today draws visitors from around the world.

Each in turn used the Unfinished Palazzo as a stage on which to re-fashion her life, with a dazzling supporting cast ranging from D’Annunzio and Nijinsky, through Noël Coward, Winston Churchill and Cecil Beaton, to Yoko Ono. Individually sensational and collectively remarkable, these stories of modern Venice tell us much about the ways women chose to live in the 20th century. (Courtesy of Thames & Hudson.)

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The Life of Leonardo da Vinci
By Girogio Vasari, Martin Kemp, and Lucy Russell

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Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Most Famous Painters, Sculptors and Architects (1550 and 1569) is a classic of cultural history. A monumental assembly of artists’ lives from Giotto to Michelangelo, it paints a vivid picture of the progress of art in the hands of individual masters. No Life is more vivid than that of Leonardo, a near-contemporary of Vasari—not even Vasari’s account of Michelangelo, whom he knew and idolized.

The Last Leonardo: The Secret Lives of the World's Most Expensive Painting
By Ben Lewis (Ballantine Books)

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An epic quest exposes hidden truths about Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi, the recently discovered masterpiece that sold for $450 million—and might not be the real thing... In 2017, Leonardo da Vinci’s small oil painting the Salvator Mundi was sold at auction. In the words of its discoverer, the image of Christ as savior of the world is “the rarest thing on the planet.” Its $450 million sale price also makes it the world’s most expensive painting. For two centuries, art dealers had searched in vain for the Holy Grail of art history: a portrait of Christ as the Salvator Mundi by Leonardo da Vinci. Many similar paintings of greatly varying quality had been executed by Leonardo’s assistants in the early sixteenth century. But where was the original by the master himself? In November 2017, Christie’s auction house announced they had it. But did they?

The Last Leonardo tells a thrilling tale of a spellbinding icon invested with the power to make or break the reputations of scholars, billionaires, kings, and sheikhs. Ben Lewis takes us to Leonardo’s studio in Renaissance Italy; to the court of Charles I and the English Civil War; to Amsterdam, Moscow, and New Orleans; to the galleries, salerooms, and restorer’s workshop as the painting slowly, painstakingly emerged from obscurity. The vicissitudes of the highly secretive art market are charted across six centuries. It is a twisting tale of geniuses and oligarchs, double-crossings and disappearances, in which we’re never quite certain what to believe. Above all, it is an adventure story about the search for lost treasure, and a quest for the truth. (Courtesy of Penguin Random House.)

Ninth Street Women: Five Painters and the Movement that Changed Modern Art

By Mary Gabriel (Little, Brown and Company)

 

 

Set amid the most turbulent social and political period of modern times, Ninth Street Women is the impassioned, wild, sometimes tragic, always exhilarating chronicle of five women who dared to enter the male-dominated world of twentieth-century abstract painting—not as muses but as artists. From their cold-water lofts, where they worked, drank, fought, and loved, these pioneers burst open the door to the art world for themselves and countless others to come.

Lee Krasner... Elaine de Kooning... Grace Hartigan... Joan Mitchell... and Helen Frankenthaler. These women changed American art and society, tearing up the prevailing social code and replacing it with a doctrine of liberation. In Ninth Street Women, acclaimed author Mary Gabriel tells a remarkable and inspiring story of the power of art and artists in shaping not just postwar America but the future. (Courtesy of Little, Brown and Company.)

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Lee Krasner: A Biography
By Gail Levin (Thames & Hudson)

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Lee Krasner’s stirring work and charismatic personality could have made her a superstar of the Abstract Expressionist generation. Yet for years she was better known as Jackson Pollock’s wife, her art ignored and her story mistold. Gail Levin redresses the balance with this engrossing biography of the pioneering painter, firebrand and trailblazer for women’s rights. Her personal interviews, original research and lucid prose restore Krasner’s voice and illuminate an exceptional artist who led a truly fascinating life.

Life with Picasso
By Françoise Gilot and Carlton Lake with an introduction by Lisa Alther (NYRB Classics)

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A captivating, spirited account of the intense relationship among four artists whose strong personalities, passionate feelings, and aesthetic ideals drew them together, pulled them apart, and profoundly influenced the very shape of twentieth-century art.

New York, 1921: Alfred Stieglitz, the most influential figure in early twentieth-century photography, celebrates the success of his latest exhibition—the centerpiece, a series of nude portraits of the young Georgia O’Keeffe, soon to be his wife. It is a turning point for O’Keeffe, poised to make her entrance into the art scene—and for Rebecca Salsbury, the fiancée of Stieglitz’s protégé at the time, Paul Strand. When Strand introduces Salsbury to Stieglitz and O’Keeffe, it is the first moment of a bond between the two couples that will last more than a decade and reverberate throughout their lives. In the years that followed, O’Keeffe and Stieglitz became the preeminent couple in American modern art, spurring each other’s creativity. Observing their relationship led Salsbury to encourage new artistic possibilities for Strand and to rethink her own potential as an artist. In fact, it was Salsbury, the least known of the four, who was the main thread that wove the two couples’ lives together. Carolyn Burke mines the correspondence of the foursome to reveal how each inspired, provoked, and unsettled the others while pursuing seminal modes of artistic innovation. The result is a surprising, illuminating portrait of four extraordinary figures. (Courtesy of Penguin Random House.)

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