Artists' Biographies
Last updated: September 12, 2024
Maria Loh, Professor of the History of Art at CUNY Hunter College, chooses her best books on the lives of famous artists. Her choice is varied, including works on portraiture in the renaissance, as well as On Photography by Susan Sontag and Just Kids by Patti Smith. Meanwhile, Adam Eaker, assistant curator in the department of European paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, chooses his best books on the Dutch masters.
Martin Kemp, Emeritus Professor of the History of Art at Oxford University, one of the world’s leading authorities on the work of Leonardo da Vinci, chooses his best books on one of the most famous of all artists.
Edvard Munch: Behind The Scream
by Sue Prideaux
🏆 Winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in Biography
“As I read it, at first Monet is not an attractive character. You think, ‘This is absolutely why, as a woman, you should not live with an artist.’ It’s full of scrounging letters, and the suffering of these women who are, of course, immortalised in beautiful portraits by him, but following him around or being abandoned by him…She explains quite how it is that he comes to revolutionise art and to create these ravishing works that are just luminous. She writes very beautifully about it. As life goes on, instead of being improvident, he becomes very wealthy. Finally, you see him at Giverny employing six gardeners, one of whom has to dust off the water lilies! There’s great pathos. You’re won over to him, as his life goes on, and see how he, too, has suffered for his art. It’s a rich and moving account.” Read more...
The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2024 Duff Cooper Prize
Susan Brigden, Historian
“Heiligman’s book is a multi-layered work of cultural history. It is a tightly wound story of two brothers, one of whom goes on to become one of the most famous impressionist painters and the other a seller of paintings. Both Van Gogh brothers played a central role in the history of late 19th-century art and ended up dying tragically, within months of one another. t gives the reader a feel for Western Europe in the 1870s and 1880s, for the countryside and vibrant art scene that inspired the brothers. It builds into a full biography of Van Gogh and his cohort. History is not at the center of the book; it’s the wings for the story.” Read more...
The Best Nonfiction Books for Teens
Marc Favreau, Publisher
“I chose this book because Simon Schama is such a wonderful writer. He has guts…He goes all the way, with all the senses engaged. Reading Schama is like stepping into a time machine. You can smell the paint, the poor quality of the air above Amsterdam’s canals, centuries ago…Rembrandt’s Eyes reads almost like a novel. He goes very far with some of his speculations, but I find it marvellous that Schama can do this about a foreign country—one that he didn’t even grow up in. It’s a real accomplishment of cultural empathy, and of course of bringing another time alive. He writes a book at once about a Dutch hero (and Rembrandt’s competition with Rubens, the Flemish master) and about Dutch history with the authority of a native…You have to remember: the only way to write about history or about a fabulous figure like Rembrandt is by being a storyteller. You have to use words, images, metaphors to kiss the past alive—and that is exactly what Schama does. I admire him for it. And since we’re talking about art, so much comes down to interpretation. Adopting an interpretive technique I think is fitting for the subject matter. What he does is to create a richer picture for the reader.” Read more...
Onno Blom, Art Historians, Critics & Curator
“With Vasari, we begin thinking that artistic biography might matter. As much as we may want to resist the notion that biography is central to understanding art, it seems as though it is just inevitable – the life of the artist is an inevitable element in considering the art itself, as Vasari realised early on.” Read more...
Blake Gopnik, Art Historians, Critics & Curator
“Isaacson has really captured the complex brilliance of one of the most extraordinary humans in the world. It’s a favourite of mine.” Read more...
The best books on High Performance Psychology
Michael Gervais, Psychologist
The Lives of Lucian Freud: Youth 1922 - 1968
by William Feaver
***Shortlisted for the 2019 Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction***
This book is the first volume in William Feaver's biography of Lucian Freud and the book to read on one of the 20th century's greatest painters. Feaver was a journalist and artist who became a friend of Freud's and they'd speak on the phone most weeks. As they put together material for this book—a process that took many years—they agreed that it wouldn't be published until after Freud died. The second volume of the biography, which covers the years till Freud's death in 2011, has also been longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize.
The Lives of Lucian Freud: Fame 1968 - 2011
by William Feaver
***Longlisted for the 2020 Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction***
This is volume two in William Feaver's two-part biography. Volume one covers the years 1992-1968 and was shortlisted for the 2019 Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction.
“Through the accounts of his contemporaries, de Kooning emerges not only as a great artist, but as sympathetic figure for whom we are rooting from the first pages” Read more...
The best books on Goya and the art of biography
Janis Tomlinson, Art Historians, Critics & Curator
“Gowing adopts what you might describe as a formalist aesthetic approach to characterising the power of these paintings” Read more...
The best books on The Dutch Masters
Adam Eaker, Art Historians, Critics & Curator
“You might say that Freud and Constable were literally close.” Read more...
The best books on Lucian Freud
William Feaver, Artists & Art Critic
“He came back to London wanting to create things that were reflecting the latest aesthetic and ideological thinking in art and design that he’d seen on the continent.” Read more...
The best books on Bohemian Living
Darren Coffield, Art Historians, Critics & Curator
Warhol
by Blake Gopnik
"One of the major points in my book is that he’s not at all the kind of holy fool or idiot savant that he still stands as in the popular imagination...He was a deeply sophisticated thinker about art, as much so as other high calibre thinkers like Donald Judd or Pablo Picasso." —Blake Gopnik
Our interview with Blake Gopnik on the Best Andy Warhol Books was published on March 5th, 2020
“Ninth Street Women is about the women who were part of that collection of artists in post-war New York, who had really been written out of art history. When we think of Abstract Expressionism, we think of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Mark Rothko. It’s almost like a string quartet. But this book shines a spotlight on the period and shows that there’s a full orchestra playing, not just those four men. I really loved it, because it wasn’t preachy. It didn’t say, ‘they’ve been overlooked.’ It just told the story of Abstract Expressionism from a really, impeccably well-researched position.” Read more...
Charlotte Mullins, Art Historians, Critics & Curator
“It’s a beautiful book. And Leonardo has been fortunate in some of the writers who have tackled him……The book as a whole conveys wonderful shape to Leonardo’s art and life. And Clark is more right about aspects of his science and engineering than he has any right to be. He kept clear of the science, he didn’t really tackle it head on, yet via the art and via the drawings, he gets an enormous amount right about Leonardo’s scientific opus. “ Read more...
The best books on Leonardo da Vinci
Martin Kemp, Art Historians, Critics & Curator
“I was completely charmed by the scurrilous, sardonic, sarcastic and farcical account of the life of this very eccentric, miserly, unhappily married person who made portrait busts of eminent people such as the bibulous politician Charles James Fox. It’s a splendid book, with none of the pieties of standard art biographies. What makes these so irritating to my mind, and to my eyes, is that they often see more intellectual substance and indeed more cunning in painting than is actually there. Painting is a fundamentally straightforward practice. If you’re making portrait busts like Nollekens did, it’s practically a nine-to-five occupation and not something to be larded in mysticism.” Read more...
The best books on Lucian Freud
William Feaver, Artists & Art Critic
“We assume that Andy knew that they might be published, and he may have wanted them to be published – and so would have controlled and manipulated their content. He didn’t scribble these entries down in a notebook, for his own eyes only. So you never know if he’s speaking to posterity in order to falsify the record – or at least to construct a record – or whether the Diaries are actually giving you a genuine insight into the man himself, not only into his psyche but also into his actions and behaviours. There are incidents mentioned in the Diaries that his friends say are absolutely and simply untrue.” Read more...
Blake Gopnik, Art Historians, Critics & Curator
“The only autobiography by a major Italian Renaissance artist. We don’t have Leonardo’s, or Michelangelo’s, or anybody else’s memoirs. But we do have Cellini’s, and they are absolutely astonishing. It’s a completely thrilling book, and anybody who loves Italy and Italian art has to read it. I more often than not take it with me when I’m in Florence or Rome, to read passages of it. If a few hundred readers discover this book then we will have done something very, very worthwhile. We’ll have enriched their lives.” Read more...
Five of the Best European Classics
David Campbell, Publisher
Tiepolo Pink
by Roberto Calasso
In a way, Calasso makes a case for Tiepolo as not the last of the Old Masters, but one of the first of the Moderns.
“Rather than talk about sources for drawings in the notebook, or identities of named individuals, I invite people to look at this book as an intimate document of Goya’s life.” Read more...
The best books on Goya and the art of biography
Janis Tomlinson, Art Historians, Critics & Curator
“Charles Esdaile’s book, The Peninsular War is required reading for anyone seeking to understand the tragedy that inspired Goya’s ‘Disasters of War’.” Read more...
The best books on Goya and the art of biography
Janis Tomlinson, Art Historians, Critics & Curator
“Tremlett reveals Catherine through her role in events and relationships with people significant not only in her life, but in the course of European history: royal births, weddings, and deaths; alliances and intrigues of leaders jockeying for power; and the ever fascinating, ever despicable, Henry VIII.” Read more...
The best books on Goya and the art of biography
Janis Tomlinson, Art Historians, Critics & Curator
“The letters from the 1780s are crucial to understanding Goya’s career, as he reports his progress in impressing influential people and commissions received.” Read more...
The best books on Goya and the art of biography
Janis Tomlinson, Art Historians, Critics & Curator
“Sickert was Austrian-Danish-British, a great European figure. He was a follower-student of Degas, knew Whistler very well, and they were almost competitors for a time. He wore very loud suits, was a great dresser-up and loved being a kind of artist rascal, always against the establishment, as he saw it. The London establishment was peculiarly stuffy in his day, roughly from the 1890s to the 1930s. And he wrote brilliantly…His book A Free House is a selection of his writings. He calls the bluff on Roger Fry for example, who in the early 1900s was forever earnestly proselytizing for Cézanne, while Sickert came out fighting, questioning everything including Cezanne.” Read more...
The best books on Lucian Freud
William Feaver, Artists & Art Critic
“Emil has this vivid atmosphere of growing up in late 1920s Berlin, in which the protagonist and his young accomplices, rough-and-tumble working class boys, set out to catch a mysterious man in a hat who had pinched money from Emil when he fell asleep on a train.” Read more...
The best books on Lucian Freud
William Feaver, Artists & Art Critic
“There are a couple things that are special about this book. One is that sense of immediacy, of a snapshot aesthetic, which was to become a hallmark of Shore’s work as one of our great photographers.” Read more...
Blake Gopnik, Art Historians, Critics & Curator
“One of the wonderful things about this book is that we know Andy Warhol actually read it. His copy of this textbook still exists in the Warhol archive. This is one of the things that is surprising about Andy and that I think is extremely important to understand: Lots of people who knew him well said he was smart in a fairly traditional sense.” Read more...
Blake Gopnik, Art Historians, Critics & Curator
” There’s this beautiful balance in these Gay Guides between an excitement about the possibilities of this particular subculture in American life, and the very real risks involved in pursuing those possibilities.” Read more...
Blake Gopnik, Art Historians, Critics & Curator
“Gombrich was kind of mentor of mine.” Read more...
The best books on Leonardo da Vinci
Martin Kemp, Art Historians, Critics & Curator
“I always emphasise primary sources.” Read more...
The best books on Leonardo da Vinci
Martin Kemp, Art Historians, Critics & Curator
“He details all the military things he can do. He can build bridges for crossing moats and he can dig tunnels.” Read more...
The best books on Leonardo da Vinci
Martin Kemp, Art Historians, Critics & Curator
“Stoichita pushes us to think about painting as a site of self-awareness, where painting becomes almost a form of and forum for visual philosophy.” Read more...
The best books on The Lives of Artists
Maria Loh, Art Historians, Critics & Curator
Just Kids
by Patti Smith
Is there any reason not to listen to Patti Smith’s memoir, Just Kids, as an audiobook when it’s narrated by the artist herself?
Narrator: Patti Smith
Length: 9 hours and 50 minutes
“I have to confess that Camera Lucida is perhaps my favourite book ever about art.” Read more...
The best books on The Lives of Artists
Maria Loh, Art Historians, Critics & Curator
“This is a seminal text in art history because it refers not only to Dürer specifically, but to the evolution of the idea of the artist.” Read more...
The best books on Albrecht Dürer
Ulinka Rublack, Art Historians, Critics & Curator
“That sort of cross-media artistic inspiration across centuries is very fascinating to me.” Read more...
The best books on The Dutch Masters
Adam Eaker, Art Historians, Critics & Curator
“Alpers is the dominant figure in American art history working on Dutch art in recent years” Read more...
The best books on The Dutch Masters
Adam Eaker, Art Historians, Critics & Curator
“There’s a big debate within the study of Dutch art about whether these works are pure transcriptions of reality, documents of a historical moment, or whether they are really symbolic texts that we should be interpreting on a figurative level. I think the debate comes down to this: is the best explanation of these images a thorough knowledge of Dutch history and culture at the time, such as Schama presents? Or is there something irreducible in the greatest Dutch art that you can’t boil down to historical context?” Read more...
The best books on The Dutch Masters
Adam Eaker, Art Historians, Critics & Curator
“He’s very right, that is what still life painting is about: the investment that humans make in things.” Read more...
The best books on The Dutch Masters
Adam Eaker, Art Historians, Critics & Curator
“It’s a poem that comes out of conflict in Florence in various ways. In a most literal sense it comes out of Dante’s exile – he was exiled in 1302 as a result of the conflicts between several political factions and he remained exiled, in various parts of Italy, for the remainder of his life (he died in 1321). The Commedia reflects that acute sense of the loss of one’s homeland and the resentment of that – Florence gets attacked quite viciously by characters in the Inferno. And then there’s the epigraph for the Inferno: ‘A Florentine by birth but not by disposition.'” Read more...
Nick Havely, Literary Scholar
“Sontag’s lesson is that being photographed gives us a sense of both being real and also of existing. The rise of the selfie is eloquent testimony to how people continue to see themselves and how personal histories are now constructed first and foremost through the authority of the image.” Read more...
The best books on The Lives of Artists
Maria Loh, Art Historians, Critics & Curator
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1
Catherine of Aragon: Henry's Spanish Queen
by Giles Tremlett -
2
de Kooning: An American Master
by Annalyn Swan & Mark Stevens -
3
El «Cuaderno italiano», 1770-1786: los orígenes del arte de Goya
by Jesús Urrea Fernández & Manuela B. Mena Marqués -
4
Cartas a Martín Zapater
by Mercedes Águeda & Xavier de Salas -
5
The Peninsular War: A New History
by Charles Esdaile
The best books on Goya and the art of biography, recommended by Janis Tomlinson
The best books on Goya and the art of biography, recommended by Janis Tomlinson
The art of Francisco de Goya reflects the social and political chaos of Spain in his day, leaving later generations to read into his prolific work—by turns formal and bizarre, official and fantastic—many often contradictory interpretations. Art historian Janis Tomlinson recommends books that disentangle Goya from the retroactive projections of later admirers and situates him in his own time. We also consider what makes for a compelling biography.
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1
Emil and the Detectives
by Eileen Hall (translator) & Erich Kästner -
2
Private View: The Lively World of British Art
by Antony Armstrong-Jones (Lord Snowdon), Bryan Robertson & John Russell -
3
A Free House!: Or, The Artist as Craftsman
by Walter Richard Sickert -
4
Memoirs of the Life of John Constable: Composed Chiefly of His Letters
by C.R. Leslie -
5
Nollekens and his Times: Comprehending A Life Of That Celebrated Sculptor, And Memoirs Of Several Contemporary Artists
The best books on Lucian Freud, recommended by William Feaver
The best books on Lucian Freud, recommended by William Feaver
Though ferociously private, Lucian Freud spoke about painting, the art world and his life and loves to his confidante and frequent collaborator, William Feaver, on the phone most weeks for many years. Feaver’s transcript forms the core of his definitive two-volume biography. He speaks with us about the best books for understanding the life and work of this renowned painter, and the very particular collaboration that led to this magisterial account of one of the finest painters of the last century.
The best books on Andy Warhol, recommended by Blake Gopnik
Andy Warhol’s ubiquitous soup cans – and his willingness to play the naïf – eclipse the leading Pop Art figure’s depth, as Blake Gopnik reveals in his magisterial new biography. Here, Gopnik discusses five key books that offer crucial insight into Warhol the man.
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1
The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso
by Dante Alighieri -
2
Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation
by E.H. Gombrich -
3
Leonardo da Vinci: i documenti e le testimonianze contemporanee
by Edoardo Villata -
4
The Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci
by Jean Paul Richter -
5
Leonardo da Vinci
by Kenneth Clark
The best books on Leonardo da Vinci, recommended by Martin Kemp
The best books on Leonardo da Vinci, recommended by Martin Kemp
Every generation has its own Leonardo, and for many he remains a man of mystery. Martin Kemp, Emeritus Professor in Art History at Oxford and the author of Mona Lisa: The People and the Painting, helps us identify the non-mythical Leonardo. What might Leonardo be doing were he alive today, in our own digital age?
The best books on The Lives of Artists, recommended by Maria Loh
We live in an age obsessed with self-image. Technology has made the ‘selfie’ a ubiquitous form of social currency. Renaissance means may have been very different, but celebrity artists in Medici Florence dealt with many of the issues relating to identity and authorship that we grapple with today. Maria Loh, author of Still Lives: Death, Desire, and the Portrait of the Old Master, talks to Five Books about the curated self.
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1
Still Life with Oysters and Lemon: On Objects and Intimacy
by Mark Doty -
2
The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age
by Simon Schama -
3
Vermeer
by Lawrence Gowing -
4
Rembrandt's Enterprise: The Studio and the Market
by Svetlana Alpers -
5
Art of the Everyday: Dutch Painting and the Realist Novel
by Ruth Bernard Yeazell
The best books on The Dutch Masters, recommended by Adam Eaker
The best books on The Dutch Masters, recommended by Adam Eaker
The past may be a foreign country, but the world portrayed in the art of the Dutch Masters is not so very far from our own, says Adam Eaker of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. For a society that struggles with materialism and consumption, there are a lot of lessons to be learnt from the 17th century Golden Age.
