There Are 7 Bright Novels That Can Help In Your Art Career

Today's artistic uncertainty offers us new ways of perceiving art through intermediaries: through screens, of course, but also through words. Reading about art today is one of the most direct ways to become familiar with it. Unlike online exhibitions or databases of digital collections, writing about art is usually not about reproducing or copying art objects, but about describing them from a perspective that complicates or enhances the visual experience. For now, I think writing about art is a welcome way to look at works of art from the side, a way to see them in a not-too-virtual way.

Each work of art tells a story. Make a cup of coffee, sit down, and take in the five best novels inspired by art and artists, chosen by us.

Lust for Life, Irving Stone

Irving Stone, a master of extremely well-researched historical biographies, has written A Desire to Live, a semi-fictional account of Vincent van Gogh's life as he struggled with poverty and mental turmoil. Drawing on more than 700 of Van Gogh's letters to his brother Theo, Stone tells the poetic and raw story of the famous artist's hard life, fictionalizing some small details that seamlessly intertwine with real ones to create a fantastic biography.

The Agony and the Ecstasy, Irving Stone

Another historical biography of Irving Stone, Agony and Ecstasy, is a must-read for any art lover. In this novel, Stone brings Michelangelo to life and creates the most compelling portrait of one of the greatest artists who ever lived. Using the same method as in Lust for Life, Stone worked with Michelangelo's letters and writings and based his portrait on hard facts. To make his work more authentic, Stone moved to Italy for several years while he researched and wrote the novel. The story begins with Michelangelo as a young student and ends with his death, highlighting the artist's ethics, perseverance, and genius.

 

The Man in the Red Coat, Julian Barnes

At the RA, John Singer Sargent painted a portrait of Samuel Pozzi, the pioneer of gynecology, in a red robe and elaborate purple curtains. Dr. Pozzi at Home was his first work exhibited at the RA in 1882. This painting recently inspired Francophile writer Julian Barnes' latest novel, The Man in the Red Coat.

Barnes brings to life the charming and laid-back Pozzi, nicknamed "Love Doctor" or even "Doctor God" by his lovers and clients, in the opulence and scandals of Belle Époque Paris and London. The doctor was surrounded by a circle of aesthetes and aristocrats, including Count Robert de Montesquieu, the Prince de Polignac, Sarah Bernhardt, Oscar Wilde, Henry James, and Sargent himself.

 

The Folding Star by Alan Hullinghorst

Edward Manners, the protagonist of the novel Falling Star, is a disillusioned foreign language teacher who ends up teaching English in Flanders. His obsession with beauty disguised as romantic love is that of the painter Edgar Oost (halfway between Fernand Khnopff and James Ensor). But their desire is accompanied by loss, and the repeated disappearance of their loved ones leads them back to the sea and beaches of the Belgian town of Ostend.

Hollinghurst's article on Leon Spilliaert, which he contributed to RA, describes the melancholic beaches of Ostend. This Belgian artist also had an exhibition at the Royal Academy, where his symbolist paintings were ignored.

 

How to Be Both by Ali Smith

George asked his mother to play the familiar family game and tried to explain the art in his own words. Up to that point, his mother had usually answered him this way: "The play is about making something happen where there is nothing." Now, however, the women refused to agree. This time it's because the murals she sees amaze her and energize her in a way she hasn't done in years.

The Folding Star, Alan Hollinghurst

Edward Manners is thirty-three, and his youth seems to be coming to an end. He moves from England to a small Belgian town where he teaches two students and falls in love with a 17-year-old student, Lukas. It's a mad crush: voyeuristic, all-consuming, unstable. Meanwhile, he becomes increasingly interested in the work of the fictional symbolist artist Edgar Orst and helps the curator of the local museum prepare the long-awaited catalogue of Orst's works. She discovers that Orst was also obsessed with impossible love.

 

The Gift Barbara Browning

In Barbara Browning's the Gift (2017), Barbara Andersen sends emails to friends and strangers with covers of pop songs she plays on the ukulele. She corresponds with a man called Mel, who runs a weight-loss clinic in Winnetka, Illinois, and who may have mistakenly written to her instead of to another Barbara Andersen. She is working with a dancer she knows, whose technical and intricate performances she has seen and pondered.