life of an artist essay

Essay on Art

500 words essay on art.

Each morning we see the sunshine outside and relax while some draw it to feel relaxed. Thus, you see that art is everywhere and anywhere if we look closely. In other words, everything in life is artwork. The essay on art will help us go through the importance of art and its meaning for a better understanding.

What is Art?

For as long as humanity has existed, art has been part of our lives. For many years, people have been creating and enjoying art.  It expresses emotions or expression of life. It is one such creation that enables interpretation of any kind.

It is a skill that applies to music, painting, poetry, dance and more. Moreover, nature is no less than art. For instance, if nature creates something unique, it is also art. Artists use their artwork for passing along their feelings.

Thus, art and artists bring value to society and have been doing so throughout history. Art gives us an innovative way to view the world or society around us. Most important thing is that it lets us interpret it on our own individual experiences and associations.

Art is similar to live which has many definitions and examples. What is constant is that art is not perfect or does not revolve around perfection. It is something that continues growing and developing to express emotions, thoughts and human capacities.

Importance of Art

Art comes in many different forms which include audios, visuals and more. Audios comprise songs, music, poems and more whereas visuals include painting, photography, movies and more.

You will notice that we consume a lot of audio art in the form of music, songs and more. It is because they help us to relax our mind. Moreover, it also has the ability to change our mood and brighten it up.

After that, it also motivates us and strengthens our emotions. Poetries are audio arts that help the author express their feelings in writings. We also have music that requires musical instruments to create a piece of art.

Other than that, visual arts help artists communicate with the viewer. It also allows the viewer to interpret the art in their own way. Thus, it invokes a variety of emotions among us. Thus, you see how essential art is for humankind.

Without art, the world would be a dull place. Take the recent pandemic, for example, it was not the sports or news which kept us entertained but the artists. Their work of arts in the form of shows, songs, music and more added meaning to our boring lives.

Therefore, art adds happiness and colours to our lives and save us from the boring monotony of daily life.

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Conclusion of the Essay on Art

All in all, art is universal and can be found everywhere. It is not only for people who exercise work art but for those who consume it. If there were no art, we wouldn’t have been able to see the beauty in things. In other words, art helps us feel relaxed and forget about our problems.

FAQ of Essay on Art

Question 1: How can art help us?

Answer 1: Art can help us in a lot of ways. It can stimulate the release of dopamine in your bodies. This will in turn lower the feelings of depression and increase the feeling of confidence. Moreover, it makes us feel better about ourselves.

Question 2: What is the importance of art?

Answer 2: Art is essential as it covers all the developmental domains in child development. Moreover, it helps in physical development and enhancing gross and motor skills. For example, playing with dough can fine-tune your muscle control in your fingers.

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Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History Essays

Impressionism: art and modernity.

Garden at Sainte-Adresse

Claude Monet

Porte de la Reine at Aigues-Mortes

Jean-Frédéric Bazille

La Grenouillère

The Bridge at Villeneuve-la-Garenne

Alfred Sisley

Edouard Manet

Madame Georges Charpentier (Marguerite-Louise Lemonnier, 1848–1904) and Her Children, Georgette-Berthe (1872–1945) and Paul-Emile-Charles (1875–1895)

Auguste Renoir

The Monet Family in Their Garden at Argenteuil

The Dance Class

Edgar Degas

Mademoiselle Bécat at the Café des Ambassadeurs, Paris

Côte des Grouettes, near Pontoise

Camille Pissarro

Mary Cassatt at the Louvre: The Etruscan Gallery

Allée of Chestnut Trees

Young Woman Seated on a Sofa

Berthe Morisot

Two Young Girls at the Piano

Dancers in the Rehearsal Room with a Double Bass

Young Girl Bathing

Young Woman Knitting

The Garden of the Tuileries on a Spring Morning

Margaret Samu Institute of Fine Arts, New York University

October 2004

In 1874, a group of artists called the Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors, Printmakers, etc. organized an exhibition in Paris that launched the movement called Impressionism. Its founding members included Claude Monet , Edgar Degas , and Camille Pissarro, among others. The group was unified only by its independence from the official annual Salon , for which a jury of artists from the Académie des Beaux-Arts selected artworks and awarded medals. The independent artists, despite their diverse approaches to painting, appeared to contemporaries as a group. While conservative critics panned their work for its unfinished, sketchlike appearance, more progressive writers praised it for its depiction of modern life. Edmond Duranty, for example, in his 1876 essay La Nouvelle Peinture (The New Painting), wrote of their depiction of contemporary subject matter in a suitably innovative style as a revolution in painting. The exhibiting collective avoided choosing a title that would imply a unified movement or school, although some of them subsequently adopted the name by which they would eventually be known, the Impressionists. Their work is recognized today for its modernity, embodied in its rejection of established styles, its incorporation of new technology and ideas, and its depiction of modern life.

Claude Monet’s Impression, Sunrise (Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris) exhibited in 1874, gave the Impressionist movement its name when the critic Louis Leroy accused it of being a sketch or “impression,” not a finished painting. It demonstrates the techniques many of the independent artists adopted: short, broken brushstrokes that barely convey forms, pure unblended colors, and an emphasis on the effects of light. Rather than neutral white, grays, and blacks, Impressionists often rendered shadows and highlights in color. The artists’ loose brushwork gives an effect of spontaneity and effortlessness that masks their often carefully constructed compositions, such as in Alfred Sisley’s 1878 Allée of Chestnut Trees ( 1975.1.211 ). This seemingly casual style became widely accepted, even in the official Salon, as the new language with which to depict modern life.

In addition to their radical technique, the bright colors of Impressionist canvases were shocking for eyes accustomed to the more sober colors of academic painting. Many of the independent artists chose not to apply the thick golden varnish that painters customarily used to tone down their works. The paints themselves were more vivid as well. The nineteenth century saw the development of synthetic pigments for artists’ paints, providing vibrant shades of blue, green, and yellow that painters had never used before. Édouard Manet’s 1874 Boating ( 29.100.115 ), for example, features an expanse of the new cerulean blue and synthetic ultramarine. Depicted in a radically cropped, Japanese-inspired composition , the fashionable boater and his companion embody modernity in their form, their subject matter, and the very materials used to paint them.

Such images of suburban and rural leisure outside of Paris were a popular subject for the Impressionists, notably Monet and Auguste Renoir . Several of them lived in the country for part or all of the year. New railway lines radiating out from the city made travel so convenient that Parisians virtually flooded into the countryside every weekend. While some of the Impressionists, such as Pissarro, focused on the daily life of local villagers in Pontoise, most preferred to depict the vacationers’ rural pastimes. The boating and bathing establishments that flourished in these regions became favorite motifs. In his 1869 La Grenouillère ( 29.100.112 ), for example, Monet’s characteristically loose painting style complements the leisure activities he portrays. Landscapes , which figure prominently in Impressionist art, were also brought up to date with innovative compositions, light effects, and use of color. Monet in particular emphasized the modernization of the landscape by including railways and factories, signs of encroaching industrialization that would have seemed inappropriate to the Barbizon artists of the previous generation.

Perhaps the prime site of modernity in the late nineteenth century was the city of Paris itself, renovated between 1853 and 1870 under Emperor Napoleon III. His prefect, Baron Haussmann, laid the plans, tearing down old buildings to create more open space for a cleaner, safer city. Also contributing to its new look was the Siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71), which required reconstructing the parts of the city that had been destroyed. Impressionists such as Pissarro and Gustave Caillebotte enthusiastically painted the renovated city, employing their new style to depict its wide boulevards, public gardens, and grand buildings. While some focused on the cityscapes, others turned their sights to the city’s inhabitants. The Paris population explosion after the Franco-Prussian War gave them a tremendous amount of material for their scenes of urban life. Characteristic of these scenes was the mixing of social classes that took place in public settings. Degas and Caillebotte focused on working people, including singers and dancers , as well as workmen. Others, including Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt , depicted the privileged classes. The Impressionists also painted new forms of leisure, including theatrical entertainment (such as Cassatt’s 1878 In the Loge [Museum of Fine Arts, Boston]), cafés, popular concerts, and dances. Taking an approach similar to Naturalist writers such as Émile Zola, the painters of urban scenes depicted fleeting yet typical moments in the lives of characters they observed. Caillebotte’s 1877 Paris Street, Rainy Day (Art Institute, Chicago) exemplifies how these artists abandoned sentimental depictions and explicit narratives, adopting instead a detached, objective view that merely suggests what is going on.

The independent collective had a fluid membership over the course of the eight exhibitions it organized between 1874 and 1886, with the number of participating artists ranging from nine to thirty. Pissarro, the eldest, was the only artist who exhibited in all eight shows, while Morisot participated in seven. Ideas for an independent exhibition had been discussed as early as 1867, but the Franco-Prussian War intervened. The painter Frédéric Bazille, who had been leading the efforts, was killed in the war. Subsequent exhibitions were headed by different artists. Philosophical and political differences among the artists led to heated disputes and fractures, causing fluctuations in the contributors. The exhibitions even included the works of more conservative artists who simply refused to submit their work to the Salon jury. Also participating in the independent exhibitions were Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin , whose later styles grew out of their early work with the Impressionists.

The last of the independent exhibitions in 1886 also saw the beginning of a new phase in avant-garde painting. By this time, few of the participants were working in a recognizably Impressionist manner. Most of the core members were developing new, individual styles that caused ruptures in the group’s tenuous unity. Pissarro promoted the participation of Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, in addition to adopting their new technique based on points of pure color, known as Neo-Impressionism . The young Gauguin was making forays into Primitivism. The nascent Symbolist Odilon Redon also contributed, though his style was unlike that of any other participant. Because of the group’s stylistic and philosophical fragmentation, and because of the need for assured income, some of the core members such as Monet and Renoir exhibited in venues where their works were more likely to sell.

Its many facets and varied participants make the Impressionist movement difficult to define. Indeed, its life seems as fleeting as the light effects it sought to capture. Even so, Impressionism was a movement of enduring consequence, as its embrace of modernity made it the springboard for later avant-garde art in Europe.

Samu, Margaret. “Impressionism: Art and Modernity.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History . New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/imml/hd_imml.htm (October 2004)

Further Reading

Bomford, David, et al. Art in the Making: Impressionism . Exhibition catalogue.. New Haven and London: National Gallery, 1990.

Herbert, Robert L. Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society . New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988.

House, John. Monet: Nature into Art . New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986.

Moffett, Charles S., et al. The New Painting: Impressionism 1874–1886 . San Francisco: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1986.

Nochlin, Linda, ed. Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, 1874–1904: Sources and Documents . Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966.

Rewald, John. The History of Impressionism . Rev. and enl. ed. . New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1961.

Tinterow, Gary, and Henri Loyrette. Origins of Impressionism . Exhibition catalogue.. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994. See on MetPublications

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Essay on Art Is Life

Students are often asked to write an essay on Art Is Life in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Art Is Life

Art: a reflection of life.

Art is like a mirror that reflects life. It is a way for people to show their feelings and thoughts. Every piece of art tells a story about the artist’s life, their emotions, and their experiences. It is a way to communicate without using words.

The Beauty of Art

Art is also about beauty. It helps us see the world in a different way. Artists can take something ordinary and make it extraordinary. They show us the beauty in things we might not notice. This makes life more interesting and enjoyable.

Art as a Form of Expression

Art is a form of expression. It lets us say things we might not be able to say out loud. When we create art, we can put our feelings and thoughts into it. This can help us understand ourselves better. It can also help others understand us.

The Importance of Art in Society

Art is important in society because it brings people together. It can make us think about important issues. It can also make us feel connected to each other. Art is a part of every culture and it helps us understand different ways of life.

Art and Personal Growth

Art can help us grow as people. When we make art, we have to make choices and solve problems. This can help us become better thinkers. It can also help us become more creative and imaginative. These are important skills in life.

250 Words Essay on Art Is Life

What is art.

Art is a way of expressing feelings, thoughts, and ideas. It can be anything from painting and sculpture to music and dance. Art is not just about creating; it’s also about appreciating. When we look at a piece of art, we feel something. That feeling is a part of life.

Art and Life

Art is like life because it is full of emotions. Just like life, art can be happy, sad, exciting, or calm. When you make art, you put a piece of yourself into it. It shows who you are and what you feel. That’s why every piece of art is unique, just like every person is unique.

Art Teaches Us

Art teaches us about the world and about ourselves. It helps us to see things in a new way. For example, a painting of a sunset might make us appreciate the beauty of nature. A song about friendship might make us think about our friends and how much they mean to us. Art can make us feel more connected to the world around us.

Art is Everywhere

Art is not just in museums or galleries. It’s everywhere! From the design of your favorite book cover to the pattern on your clothes, art is all around us. Even the way you arrange your room can be a form of art.

In conclusion, art is a vital part of life. It allows us to express ourselves, to learn, and to connect with the world. So, let’s celebrate art, because art is life!

500 Words Essay on Art Is Life

Introduction.

Art is a beautiful way to express feelings and ideas. It is not just a hobby or a job for some people; it is a way of life. Art is everywhere around us, from the colors of a sunset to the rhythm of rain. It is a part of our everyday lives, and it brings joy and meaning to our world.

Art in Our Everyday Lives

Art is not only in museums or galleries. It is in the clothes we wear, the houses we live in, and the books we read. When we cook a meal, arrange flowers, or decorate our rooms, we are creating art. Even the words we speak and write are a form of art. They can paint pictures in our minds or make us feel happy, sad, or inspired.

Art as a Way to Express Feelings

Art is a powerful way to express feelings. When words are not enough, we can use art to show our happiness, sadness, love, or anger. Through painting, music, dance, or theater, we can share our inner world with others. We can also use art to understand our feelings better and to find peace in difficult times.

Art as a Way to Understand the World

Art can help us understand the world around us. It can show us different cultures, histories, and ideas. Through art, we can travel to faraway places, meet people from long ago, or explore new ideas. Art can also help us see things from different points of view. It can make us think, question, and learn.

Art as a Way to Connect with Others

Art can bring people together. It can create a sense of community and belonging. When we create or enjoy art with others, we share a special bond. We can understand each other better and feel less alone. Art can also inspire us to make a difference in the world. It can motivate us to be kinder, braver, or more creative.

Art is not just about colors, shapes, or sounds. It is about life itself. It is about expressing and understanding, connecting and inspiring. Art is a way to celebrate the beauty of our world and the depth of our hearts. So, let’s embrace art in all its forms and colors. Let’s make art a part of our everyday lives. Because, truly, art is life.

This essay is a reminder of how art is intertwined with our lives. It is not separate or distant from us; it is a part of us. It is a reflection of who we are and what we feel, think, and dream. Art is not just life; it is the soul of life. It is the color, the rhythm, the melody, the story of life. It is the mirror that reflects our world and the window that opens to new worlds. It is the bridge that connects us with others and the path that leads us to ourselves. Art is life, and life is art.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

If you’re looking for more, here are essays on other interesting topics:

• Essay on Art Involves Experience
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Home — Essay Samples — Arts & Culture — Artwork — Exploring How Art Impacts Our Lives

Exploring How Art Impacts Our Lives

• Categories: Art History Artwork Heritage

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Published: Aug 31, 2023

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How Do Artists Do It? Parsing Their Life Stories

By Jackson Arn

Jackson Arn

We have the Catholic social scene to thank, or blame. It was the year of our Lord 1543, and Cardinal Alessandro Farnese was entertaining guests at his palazzo in Rome. One of them, a physician and historian named Paolo Giovio, told the cardinal he wanted to write a series of biographies of the great modern artists: Leonardo, Michelangelo, et al. The cardinal introduced Giovio to another guest, Giorgio Vasari , a struggling painter and architect who claimed to have studied with Michelangelo, and suggested that Vasari could be of some help. Vasari provided Giovio with heaps of helpful information about Michelangelo and his peers—so much that Giovio started to question his own qualifications and suggested that maybe Vasari should take the project instead. Vasari, who was badly in debt, accepted, and the modern artist biography was born.

Vasari got the job because of his superior grasp of the facts, but today nobody really thinks of his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550) as factual. He may have fibbed about studying with Michelangelo, and it shows: each life in the Lives gets a short stack of pages—75 for Michelangelo in the Oxford Classics edition, 15 for Leonardo, 17 for Ghiberti—but it’s a rare page that’s totally error-free. Surveying hundreds of Italian artists, Vasari gets almost as many dates wrong as right. He says engraving was invented in Florence (it wasn’t). He says Andrea del Castagno murdered a rival painter (he didn’t).

Other inaccuracies are more like myths than mistakes. Vasari’s artists are preternaturally good at what they do almost from the moment they emerge from the womb, much like the Christian saints whose hagiographies served as models for Vasari’s biographies. The adolescent Giotto’s talent is “miraculous,” a product of “God’s grace,” and a version of divine creation in its own right: God creates life, and little Giotto paints such a lifelike fly that his master tries to swat it away. There’s plenty of juicy artist gossip in the Lives too (Leonardo and Michelangelo hated each other, Piero di Cosimo ate nothing but hard-boiled eggs), which throws the miracle of the artists’ work into starker relief.

It’s odd to imagine a book on Renaissance art that devotes more space to Ghiberti than to Leonardo, but the broad strokes of the story haven’t aged at all. Nearly 500 years later, writers still talk their way into plum gigs by going to the right parties. Accuracy is still important but relative. Artist biographies still sell well because people think the art is interesting and assume the artist must be too.

The parts that make up the basic formula for an artist biography have stayed the same as well: human interest plus elements of creative genius that can be analyzed but never fully explained. The main difference is that today’s artist biographies tend to be hundreds of pages long, not dozens. The juicy gossip and creative genius have to be spread over a greater word count, until the juice is almost dry, and genius starts to look like nothing special.

Biographers of artists deserve our respect and our sympathy. Many of the people they write about, to give Oscar Wilde a nod, haven’t got the remotest knowledge of how to live, nor the smallest instinct about when to die. Art is the reason we care about artists’ lives, but usually their lives are neither directly connected to their art’s cultural value nor strikingly, amusingly detached from it.

Some artists do great work in their twenties and spend the next fifty years at dinner parties and awards luncheons; others work anonymously for decades before they gain enough attention to prompt a too-little-too-late life history. Even Jesus had years of obscurity, but most artist biographers keep continuous watch over their subjects from cradle to grave, no matter how little happened in between. And God forbid the artist’s life is really interesting, in which case a suitably thorough biography will take decades to finish, assuming it doesn’t finish the biographer first.

One way to avoid both longueurs and overkill is to stick to the extra-interesting portions of the artist’s life and forget the rest. Alexander Nemerov’s Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York (2021), one of the most breezily entertaining artist biographies of recent years, devotes 217 pages to a single decade of the painter’s career and 10 pages to everything else. It’s not the definitive life of Frankenthaler, and it’s clearly not trying to be.

Other biographies start out aiming for definitiveness, fall short for unforeseeable reasons, and are the better for it. By beginning Magritte : A Life (2020) with the announcement that Magritte is “the single most significant purveyor of images to the modern world,” Alex Danchev promises to stick with his subject to the bitter end (anything less would be an affront to the modern world).

Danchev died of a heart attack in 2016, leaving the last twenty years of Magritte’s biography unwritten; a chapter covering this period was added by art historian Sarah Whitfield, who modestly admitted her contribution was a thinner version of the work Danchev, with his French fluency and his years of research, would have turned in. But when you’re dealing with a painter who ended up recycling a lot of his own ideas, thinner isn’t such a bad way to go.

Even setting aside money, masochism, and glory, there are plenty of excellent reasons to write a book-length artist biography. Some artists make great art and still find the time to live a fun life, after all. Even if they’re too busy for that, they can still serve as smart observers of their times, so that their biographies are more like biographies of an entire era—notice the subtitle of Nemerov’s Frankenthaler book. Writing a biography also allows the author to make a full-throated case for a neglected artist’s importance, though if this is the goal, the writer will probably need to shoot for whole-life definitiveness, with no Nemerovian shortcuts along the way.

One might object that there are better ways to make this case—a critical study of Magritte’s paintings, for example, instead of hundreds of pages on Magritte’s schooldays and sex life with descriptions of the paintings mixed in. This might be true. But an artist’s full-length biography is a badge of honor few critical studies can rival. It’s not just that biographies sell better; a critical study argues that an artist is important, but a biography makes the same case simply by existing. Biographers prove their devotion to their subjects by straining their eyes in archives, much as certain birds expend valuable energy building little structures out of twigs in order to signal devotion to potential mates. How much does Magritte matter? Enough for somebody to spend years researching hot air balloon crashes in his childhood town.

All artist biographies, definitive or not, implicitly ask, “How did they do it?” In the sixteenth century, Vasari had the luxury of answering “God,” but our disenchanted age won’t tolerate such simplicity: we know that artists get their inspiration (the word’s trivialization reflects the disenchantment) from college courses, beloved siblings, dead parents, lovers, pets, broken bones, opium, TV, ads, jokes, mentors, whiskey, disillusioning meetings with idols, and STDs.

The process by which these things become art is still basically unknowable, but where Vasari’s Renaissance heroes breathed in the spirit of the divine, more recent biographical subjects are obliged to snort up the air of the everyday and still somehow exhale masterpieces. In the absence of certainty about which stuff inspired which artworks, biographers tend to favor more over less, which explains some of their page counts. The big question—how the artist did it—is broken down into fifty thousand little questions: What movie did she watch? Which book did he read on vacation? Who was at the party? What was the cat’s name?

Maybe a hot air balloon crash does hold the secret to Magritte’s art or, as Danchev suggests, part of it. Who am I to disagree? I can name episodes of “The Simpsons” that had a bigger impact on me than certain members of my family; maybe Magritte had a similar thing with balloons, and if so, it’s only right for his biographer to discuss them.

This brings up one reason for the popularity of the twenty-first-century artist biography: in detailing the minutiae of everyday life, it makes the artist just like us (weren’t you into balloons as a kid?). This, in turn, is a major advantage of the biography over the critical study: it’s harder to get away with oversimplifications, since minutiae don’t readily change or go away.

Reading a good artist biography makes you realize how much of art history is oversimplification. Florine Stettheimer is presumed to have been an idle epicure; Barbara Bloemink’s biography amends the stereotype without banishing it completely. Alexander Calder is described as boyishly apolitical; Jed Perl devotes some of the most thoughtful pages of his excellent Calder biography to the artist’s philosophy of freedom and free speech. Picasso claimed he could draw like Raphael when he was eight; in his four-volume biography, John Richardson shows how very un-Raphael-esque Picasso’s juvenilia actually was.

These aren’t just corrections of the art historical record; they’re calls to look closer, to wipe away smudges like “apolitical” and “epicurean” and “Raphael-esque” and see art and artists for what they really are. But Rosalind Krauss considered the facile connection of artist and art to be the real problem, and the real oversimplification. Writing for October in 1980, more than a decade before the first volume of Richardson’s Picasso biography appeared, Krauss mocked Richardson f or a New York Review of Books article in which he suggested that Picasso’s style could be analyzed in terms of his love life, friends, etc.

Such autobiographical approaches to Picasso, Krauss contended, were ruining his paintings by reducing their rich ambiguities to pat, one-to-one reflections of life. The fact, for example, that Picasso’s Blue Period triumph La Vie (Life), 1903, contains a portrait of his friend Carles Casagemas, who’d killed himself two years before, encourages art historians, as Krauss writes, to “use ‘Casagemas’ to explain the picture—to provide the work’s ultimate meaning or sense. When we have named Casagemas, we have (or so we think) cracked the code of the painting and it has no more secrets to withhold.” Krauss, incidentally, would later write a book analyzing Picasso’s abandonment of Cubism in terms of Freudian reaction formation. Everyone, even renowned art critics, should be able to change their minds, but that’s like arguing that biochemistry doesn’t fully explain the miracle of life and then explaining it with alchemy.

Krauss overstated her case, of course—show me an art historian of any stripe who thinks there’s nothing about La Vie worth finding out once you know who Casagemas was. But there’s a serious point buried under the caricature. Contemporary artist biographies do oversimplify, even when they’re four volumes long and full of myth-busting complexities; they oversimplify by overemphasizing external facts at the expense of the artists’ inner lives. “Biography,” critic Craig Brown wrote this past September in the Times Literary Supplement , “is at the mercy of information, and information is seldom there when you want it.”

True, but there’s bound to be more information about external facts than inner life. It doesn’t matter what your opinions on psychology or human nature happen to be—you can’t know what was going on in the artist’s head with the same confidence that you know what day this war broke out or that cousin got married. You can guess, of course, but because the conventions of contemporary biography place such emphasis on the facts, your guesses, no matter how educated, will lack the facts’ explanatory power.

This, for Brown, is the problem with biography in general, and it’s even more the problem with artist biographies in particular, since inner life is probably even more of a driving force for artists than it is for everybody else. It’s not that artist biographies treat art in overly autobiographical terms, as Krauss complains; it’s that artist biographies are too coherently autobiographical in their understanding. With a limited window into inner life and an almost as limited tool kit for representing it (little to no first-person narration, free indirect discourse, or stream of consciousness), biographers must confine themselves mostly to the clearest-cut, most easily measurable sources of creativity—a college course will almost always be made to explain more than a nightmare, even though nightmares have probably inspired more great paintings than all the college courses in the world put together. When a biographer does manage a great description of how artists make art, it’s like watching someone swim one-armed against the current.

Eleven years after Krauss sniped at him in October , Richardson gave a suitably snarky rebuttal. The portrait of Casagemas in La Vie , he announces in Volume I of his Picasso biography, was originally a self-portrait, painted over. “So much for the idea that La Vie was conceived as an apotheosis of Casagemas, or an allegory of his impotence and suicide,” he inveighs. “Nor does the substitution of Casagemas’s head for Picasso’s automatically turn it into one. That is far too limited a reading.” For the rest of the chapter, Richardson unpacks the “ambivalent or antithetical meanings” in La Vie with all the subtle expertise Krauss thought Picasso biographical specialists lacked: he discusses Casagemas’s suicide, but also Picasso’s study of El Greco and Gauguin, his uneasy relationship with his father, and his interest in tarot.

The artistic process that emerges from these pages is a fascinating mixture of rigid and flexible, careful and careless. Picasso had all but memorized Gauguin’s D’où venons-nous? Que sommes-nous? Où allons-nous? (Where Do We Come From, What Are We? Where Are We Going?), 1897-98, before he began La Vie , but he also based details of his painting on cards randomly drawn from a tarot deck. He painted figures, painted over them, and painted over them again.

Richardson cheerfully admits some of his ideas about La Vie are hypotheses. Resisting the all too common temptation to overexplain, he allows that some elements of the painting that seem juicily symbolic are just “coincidental.” He says the painting reminds him of T.S. Eliot’s poetry. He flits from certain to fanciful to likely to possible with an agility few biographers permit themselves, and in doing so, gives one of the frankest a ccounts of art-making I can think of, frank because it makes La Vie ’s existence seem far from inevitable—the work of a loud-mouthed 22-year-old from Málaga instead of a legend. It’s not a depiction of Picasso’s inner life, but it’s the next best thing: a collection of external facts so close to the source that they feel internal, a charcoal rubbing of inner life.

Richardson spent decades gathering “every crumb of information” about Picasso he could. Many of the crumbs were probably just crumbs, but others came together in this chapter, and for that I’m grateful. I’m amazed too, because it proves how much work is required to write a biography that makes art-making seem at all vivid, and how few biographers manage to convey this vividness. It is strange to think that creativity, the fundamental reason why artist biographies exist, is probably the thing they’re worst at deciphering.

It is even stranger to realize that we don’t have any better idea now of where creativity comes from than we did in 1543. Neurology keeps promising an answer and then kicking the can down the road. Malcolm Gladwell insists it has something to do with 10,000 hours, a magical figure that he reveres the way our ancestors revered 12 or 8 or 777. Others insist that the creative greatness Vasari praised doesn’t exist and never did. For Linda Nochlin, “greatness” is the artistic residue of masculinity; for culture critic Louis Menand, writing about figures like James Baldwin and Robert Rauschenberg in The Free World , it’s self-promotion, plus twenty-five years.

But despite these nonbelievers, despite disenchantment, the artist biography remains a religious genre hundreds of years after Cardinal Farnese’s fateful party. Biographers pledge themselves to the patient study of an artist’s life and sometimes end up giving their own lives: Richardson died in 2019, at the age of 95, having spent more than half his adulthood researching and writing about Picasso (and he still had the artist’s last thirty years to cover). There are only so many reasons a person would do something so devotional. You’re supposed to call it by a different name, but the glimmer of divinity Vasari recognized in Giotto is still around, and the feeling you’re chasing when you read the biography of an artist you love is a glimmer of that glimmer.

I’m not sure which form of religion the artist biography feels closest to—maybe Catholicism, even after all this time. Maybe animism, in which divinity is spread across the world and the artist’s duty is to soak up as much of it as possible. My best guess is mysticism, specifically apophatic mysticism, the one that claims nothing positive can be said about divinity—the best you can do is name the countless things divinity is not . I think this is the ritual the contemporary artist biography performs: a four- or five- or six-hundred-page stab at putting creativity into words, which can succeed in lots of ways but always falls short of this highest aspiration and, by falling short, makes creativity glimmer all the brighter.

A version of this article appears under the title “From God to 10,000 Hours” in the June/July issue , pp. 42-47.

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