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    The Art of the Affair: An Illustrated History of Love, Sex, and Artistic Influence
    The Art of the Affair: An Illustrated History of Love, Sex, and Artistic Influence
    The Art of the Affair: An Illustrated History of Love, Sex, and Artistic Influence
    Ebook131 pages51 minutes

    The Art of the Affair: An Illustrated History of Love, Sex, and Artistic Influence

    By Catherine Lacey and Forsyth Harmon

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    A surprisingly scandalous and vibrantly illustrated chain of entanglements (romantic and otherwise) between some of our best-loved writers and artists of the twentieth century.

    Poet Robert Lowell died of a heart attack, clutching a portrait of his lover, Caroline Blackwood, painted by her ex-husband, Lucian Freud. Lowell was on his way to see his own ex-wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, who was a longtime friend of Mary McCarthy. McCarthy left the father of her child to marry Edmund Wilson, who had encouraged her writing, and had also brought critical attention to the fiction of Anaïs Nin . . . whom he later bedded. And so it goes, the long chain of love, affections, and artistic influences among writers, musicians, and artists that weaves its way through the The Art of the Affair--from Frida Kahlo to Colette to Hemingway to Dali; from Coco Chanel to Stravinsky to Miles Davis to Orson Welles.

    Scrupulously researched but playfully prurient, cleverly designed and colorfully illustrated, it's the perfect gift for your literary lover--and the perfect read for any good-natured gossip-monger.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury USA
    Release dateJan 3, 2017
    ISBN9781632868633
    The Art of the Affair: An Illustrated History of Love, Sex, and Artistic Influence
    Author

    Catherine Lacey

    Catherine Lacey is the author of the novels Nobody Is Ever Missing and The Answers, and the short story collection Certain American States. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship. She was a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, and was named one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The New York Times, The Believer, and elsewhere. Born in Mississippi, she is based in Chicago.

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    • 3/5
      A unique book that allows us to voyeur into the past of the interconnected and sometimes tangled love lives of various artists. Some of these folks are pretty familiar others not so, well to me anyway. The author looks at individuals from various creative fields, music, art, literature.The layout is stylish and flows in an interesting way that skips the typical book format and becomes and art form in its own. The illustrator is quite talented and draws fairly striking likenesses to the many characters we see here. Altogether well done and entertaining.

    Book preview

    The Art of the Affair - Catherine Lacey

    Illustrator

    INTRODUCTION

    The relationships in an artist’s life—whether romantic, platonic, or collaborative—create an unseen scaffolding of their life’s work. A painter’s muse shapes her oeuvre. Friends inspire a novelist’s heroes; enemies become villains. A single heartbreak spawns decades of poems. Creative people are drawn to one another, as notorious for falling in love as they are for driving one another insane. Seen a certain way, the history of art and literature is a history of all this love.

    I started collecting these stories several years ago as a goal-oriented form of procrastination, though I was unsure of my actual goal. I kept a file titled AFFAIRS, filling it with photographs, letters, excerpts from biographies. Some I already knew (Igor Stravinsky and Coco Chanel, Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe) but there were plenty of surprises—that Madonna and Jean-Michel Basquiat were once disastrously entwined, that Frida Kahlo had an unrequited crush on Georgia O’Keeffe, that Simone de Beauvoir and Nelson Algren broke each other’s hearts. And though all these stories were fascinating, it was only when they began to link up, connecting artists from disparate fields, that I saw how it was more than just gossip, but also a chain of influence. One artist’s muse had an art and muse of her own, or was married to a composer who fell in love with a writer who was married to another writer, until those writers divorced, each marrying surrealist painters, then putting it all in a novel. This was far more than a history of love—it was a carnage of affairs, the inspiration behind countless works of art.

    Like a conspiracy theorist, I started mapping out this web on a large white-board and spent afternoons adding new names. What began as a passing curiosity became a minor obsession. But it never would have become a book if I hadn’t turned to a creative partner of my own, asking Forsyth Harmon to join me as an illustrator and curator.

    Together, we decided to take a slightly broader definition of affair—not just relationships of sex and deceit, but collaborations, friendships, mentorships, and rivalries. There were many unlikely alliances. Sartre and Miles Davis were pals. Marilyn Monroe used her fame to get Ella Fitzgerald gigs. Richard Wright cited Gertrude Stein as a major influence. Albert Camus was in love with Truman Capote (or so Truman said). And I am still not over the fact that there is a single degree between Salvador Dalí and Black Sabbath.

    Another joy of the research was discovering forgotten geniuses, those either overshadowed by their more famous friends or marginalized for their race, sex, or sexual identity. I fell in love with the work of three incredible painters—Romaine Brooks, Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita, and Beauford Delaney—saddened that this was the first I’d heard of them. Margery Latimer, a prolific young writer whose life was cut short giving birth to her and Jean Toomer’s child, was another example. Lil Hardin Armstrong, an accomplished jazz pianist who had a huge influence on her husband Louis’s career, was yet another. Many more are in these pages—and even more, sadly, are not.

    For some artists in the book, their marginalization may have helped them find each other. Since we mostly limited ourselves to artists at work in the twentieth century, many here who were either of color, queer, or both were practically obliged to go to Paris—the only place, it seems, that would just let them be. James Baldwin, Josephine Baker, Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein, Beauford Delaney, Langston Hughes, and Miles Davis are just a few examples. Though many had successful careers, the stories of the prejudice they faced are heartbreaking.

    There’s plenty of sadness—and scandal, as well. After Anaïs Nin broke the heart of a young Gore Vidal, he turned against her vengefully and publicly. Tallulah Bankhead’s sexual exhibitionism nearly got Billie Holiday fired from her gig at the Strand. Orson Welles held a torch for Dolores del Río decades after their love had cooled. But between the broken hearts and jealousies were plenty of more successful pairings. Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning had a long and loving marriage. Jean Cocteau and Jean Marais were in love until Cocteau’s death. There were a few couples—electronic music pioneers Louis and Bebe Barron, for example—who dissolved their romantic relationships but continued as fruitful collaborators. And we end the book on Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson, who met later in their careers but seemed to have had the sort of relationship we should all aspire to.

    What is so compelling about these connections, ultimately, is their unknow-ability. There were letters intentionally lost to protect others, or burned in an

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