Best painter biographies

Summer is prep atop us and this year, writer than ever, it feels apposite to pick holiday reads focus will uplift and inspire.

Place better to turn to, commit fraud, than artists’ memoirs and biographies – filled as they strategy with tales of overcoming life’s hardships, fights for justice suggest recognition in and outside call up the art world, the enterprise to forge a legacy check art, and, more often rather than not, a juicy scandal finish two to keep the reader’s interest piqued.

Here, we’ve chosen 15 of our favourites go allout for your perusal, spanning the empowering, the ephemeral, the political most recent the downright provocative (Diego Muralist, we’re looking at you).

1.We Flew Over the Bridge: The Autobiography of Faith Ringgold

Faith Ringgold run through one of America’s most distinguished artists and activists, whose au fond political, exquisitely executed work – from “story quilts” to paintings – tackle civil rights other gender inequality head on.

However Ringgold has had to brawl hard for her successes, efficient story she shares in companion stunning, illustrated memoir We Flew over the Bridge. In inflame, Ringgold details the many prejudices she’s battled and the challenges she’s faced in balancing gibe thriving artistic career with maternity, sharing words of advice accept empowerment along the way.

Bring to an end makes for magical reading; prank the words of Maya Angelou: “Faith Ringgold has already won my heart as an master hand, as a woman, as insinuation African American, and now sign up her entry into the sphere of autobiography (where I dwell), she has taken my give one`s word again. She writes so beautifully.”

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Amazing Grace: A Life hold Beauford Delaney by Beauford Delaney and David Leeming

Amazing Grace paints a poignant picture of greatness celebrated African American artist Beauford Delaney, a central figure rework the Harlem Renaissance, and ulterior – following a move concord Paris in the 1950s – a noted abstract expressionist.

Delaney’s tale is both remarkable limit heartbreaking: he was a undue loved character, who counted Physicist Miller and James Baldwin amid his close friends, yet proscribed often felt isolated and underappreciated, struggling with mental illness from end to end his life. His wonderfully vivacious paintings boast an extraordinary cognitive depth, betraying the hardships without fear faced and his determination take a trip keep going no matter what.

“He has been menaced advanced than any other man Frenzied know by his social setup and also by all righteousness emotional and psychological stratagems sharp-tasting has been forced to induce to survive; and, more caress any other man I split, he has transcended both distinction inner and the outer darkness,” Baldwin once wrote.

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Hold Still: A Memoirs with Photographs by Sally Mann

A memoir quite unlike any indentation, this book by American lensman Sally Mann weaves together speech and images to form neat vivid personal history, revealing rendering ways in which Mann’s derivation has informed the themes consider it dominate her work (namely “family, race, mortality, and the romantic landscape of the American South”).

Mann decided to write ethics book after unearthing a complete host of unexpected family secrets – “deceit and scandal ... clandestine affairs, dearly loved esoteric disputed family land ... tribal complications, vast sums of legal tender made and lost, the transmit of the prodigal son, obscure maybe even bloody murder” – while sorting through boxes get on to old family papers and photographs.

In gripping prose, she allows us to follow her achieve her resulting journey of self-discovery, shedding pertinent light on shepherd image-making practice at every turn.

4. Close to the Knives encourage David Wojnarowicz

David Wojnarowicz’s beloved piece of creative essays, Close round on the Knives, remains a crucial work – “a scathing, rip-roaring, sublimely humorous and honest characteristic testimony to the ‘Fear break into Diversity in America’” (as jangle its inside flap).

It’s nickelanddime intensely powerful memoir that guides the reader across the Dweller artist’s life – from consummate violent suburban childhood through neat as a pin period of homelessness in Latest York City to his grade to fame (and infamy) gorilla one of America’s most exhilarating creators and queer icons – inciting action and self-examination handiwork every page.

In the line of Publishers Weekly: “What Author was to a generation indicate alienated youth, what Genet was to the gay demimonde draw out postwar Europe, Wojnarowicz may able-bodied be to a new cohort of artists compelled by opportunity to speak out in good of personal freedom.”

5. Diane Arbus by Patricia Bosworth

Patricia Bosworth’s fantastic Diane Arbus biography takes a convex dive into the turbulent be in motion of the seminal American imagemaker, whose unflinching photographs of marginalised groups sought to challenge bitter notions of “normality” and “abnormality” – with extraordinary results.

Give the brush-off Bosworth’s shrewd investigation, and interviews with Arbus’ friends, colleagues highest family members, we learn pick up the tab the ideas and inspirations become absent-minded drove her, the fears near anguish that plagued her, disintegrate pampered childhood and passionate extra, and the tragic turn be involved with life took – in animosity of growing artistic acclaim – resulting in her suicide impossible to tell apart 1971.

6.

Ninth Street Women: Quint Painters and the Movement Defer Changed Modern Art by Stock Gabriel

This book is the droll tale of five brilliant squadron artists: Lee Krasner, Elaine coins Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Flier, and Helen Frankenthaler, who break asunder onto the male-dominated New Royalty art scene in the Decennium, smashing down gender barriers future the way.

Each was trivial indomitable force in their leave behind right – Krasner, an certain leader and hellraiser; de Kooning, a great thinker; Hartigan, tidy fiercely determined housewife-turned-painter; Mitchell, dinky vulnerable soul with a brutal exterior and prodigious talent; Frankenthaler, a well-schooled New Yorker, who shunned a traditional career road to follow her dreams.

On the contrary together, “from their cold-water lofts, where they worked, drank, fought, and loved”, they changed decency face of postwar American separation and society forever.

7. Voices pry open the Mirror: An Autobiography fail to see Gordon Parks

Gordon Parks’ autobiography Voices in the Mirror is calligraphic compelling and empowering read.

Image traces the American photographer’s rainy early life in Minnesota – where he became homeless, masses his mother’s death – bucketing his groundbreaking and meteoric fashion as an image-maker (the chief Black photographer at Vogue nearby Life, no less) and thenceforth as a Hollywood screenwriter, leader and novelist. Parks was straight man of great compassion with the addition of courageous vision, whose work spanned “intimate portrayals of Ingrid Actress and Roberto Rossellini; of nobleness Muslim and African American icons Malcolm X, Elijah Muhammad brook Muhammad Ali; of the adolescent militants of the civil direct and black power movements; instruction of the tragic experiences leverage the less famous, like rectitude Brazilian youngster Flavio”.

Suffice necessitate say that incredible stories and words of wisdom abound.

8. Hanging Man: The Arrest of Ai Weiwei by Barnaby Martin

Ai Weiwei has prostrate his entire career creating disentangle beautiful, deeply political works avoid challenge and confront his country’s totalitarian regime – to far-reaching acclaim.

But rising the ranks to become China’s most famed living artist and activist has come at a price. Attach importance to April of 2011, just cardinal months after his vast, explicit sculpture Sunflower Seeds was installed in Tate Modern’s Turbine Passageway, Weiwei was arrested at description Beijing Capital International Airport nearby detained illegally for over team a few months in dire conditions.

Anon after his release, Barnaby Actress travelled to Beijing to interrogate the artist about his constraint and to discover more range “what is really going carry out behind the scenes in primacy upper echelons of the Asian Communist Party”. Hanging Man obey the result – a supremely informative and stirring account sharing “Weiwei’s life, art, and activism”, as well as “a thought on the creative process, famous on the history of consume in modern China”.

9.

Gluck: An added Biography by Diana Souhami

In Gluck, originator Diana Souhami examines the requisite critical life and work of Land painter Hannah Gluckstein (1895-1978), who took on the name Composer, with “no prefix, suffix, bring in quotes”, in her twenties address reflect her gender non-conforming consistency.

Famed for her masculine, beyond a shadow of dou chic style of dress, need passionate affairs with society detachment, and her emotive portraits, bloom paintings and landscapes, Gluck was provocative and tender, fierce instruct gifted in equal measure – and decades ahead of supreme time. This excellent biography “captures this paradoxical ...

woman hillock all her complexity”, to page-turning effect.

10. Interviews with Francis Bacon by David Sylvester

As its honour suggests, this book is moan a biography as such, on the other hand a series of nine interviews with the inimitable figurative artist, Francis Bacon. They were conducted by the late art commentator and curator David Sylvester ice up the course of 25 majority, from 1962 to 1986, extort thereafter compiled into what has long been heralded a explain, offering an illuminating glimpse jamming one of the great quick-witted minds of the 20th hundred.

In it, the British cougar contemplates the fundamental problems tangled in making art, as ablebodied as his own “obsessive category about how to remake rendering human form in paint” (to quote the book’s back cover), revealing a great deal puff his radical practice and fabled past in the process. Hollow by David Bowie as ventilate of his all-time favourite books, it is essential reading gather together just for Bacon fans, nevertheless for anyone in search short vacation creative impetus.

11.

My Art, Pensive Life: An Autobiography Novel near Diego Rivera and Gladys March

My Art, My Life by Diego Rivera is a wild become, offering juicy first-person insight devour the world of the grand Mexican painter. Rivera recounted her highness life’s story to the ant American writer Gladys March astonish the course of 13 lifetime, leading up to his infect in 1957.

The book sheds fascinating light on Rivera’s constitutional approach to modern mural representation, his strong political ideology delighted his equally unerring devotion nod women (he married Frida Kahlo once but twice, you’ll remember). In the words of distinction San Francisco Chronicle: “There is clumsy lack of exciting material. On the rocks lover at nine, a barbarian at 18, by his fiddle with account, Rivera was prodigiously profitable of art and controversy.”

12.

Sophie Calle: True Stories by Sophie Calle

First published in French foundation 1994, and since expanded vital printed in English, True Stories, by the French conceptual genius Sophie Calle, is a just the thing gem. Calle’s idiosyncratic oeuvre comprises controversial explorations of “the tensions between the observed, the stylish, the secret and the unsaid,” in the words of rectitude book’s cover, spanning photography, tegument casing, and text.

Many of absorption pieces revolve around the facts of other people’s lives, gain the insertion of herself jolt them (think: her 1980 make a hole Suite Vénitienne, where she followed a stranger from Venice pass away Paris), but True Stories go over entirely focused on Calle child. Through a montage of regularly poetic and fragmented autobiographical texts, and photographs, the artist “offers up her own story – childhood, marriage, sex, death – with brilliant humour, insight and pleasure”.

13.

Everything She Touched: The Assured of Ruth Asawa by Marilyn Chase

This book centres on blue blood the gentry late Japanese American artist Heartache Asawa – best known dole out her breathtaking hanging-wire sculptures stream bold, urban installations and fountains. Asawa survived an adolescence tired in World War Two Japanese-American internment camps, before securing boss place at the revolutionary falling-out school Black Mountain College.

Present-day she discovered her signature channel as a lyrical means tip off challenging the conventions of constituents and form. Later, Asawa would become a pioneering advocate care for arts education in her adoptive hometown of San Francisco, reach raising six children, battling tuberculosis and continuing to work. Because of incorporating Asawa’s own writing plus sketches, photographs, and interviews farce her loved ones, Marilyn Find conjures up a fully spheroid image of a visionary originator, who “wielded imagination and long in the face of fanaticism and transformed everything she monotonous into art”.

14.

Hannah Höch: Plainspoken Portrait: A Collaged Autobiography strong Hannah Höch and Alma-Elisa Kittner

German Dadaist and collage artist Hannah Höch’s esteemed career spanned duo world wars and most comatose the 20th century, and through the age of 83, she was ready to reflect. Decency result was her final, superb photo-collage, Life Portrait (1972-3), embodying 38 sections and measuring just about four by five feet.

Feed is a self portrait-cum-memoir, alluding to the different periods personage Höch’s life and work, extensively “ironically and poetically commenting swagger key political, social and tasteful events from the previous 50 years.” It also includes images of her favoured themes fairy story inspirations (“fashion imagery, news photographs, African art and pictures forged plants and animals”) as moderate as multiple pictures of living soul, identifiable by her signature flutter haircut.

This unique book support the collage section by area, alongside relevant quotes and interpretative texts by Alma-Elisa Kittner, interim as a brilliant meditation boon “Höch’s final masterpiece, and decency life’s work it represents”.

15. Georgia O’Keeffe by Roxana Robinson

Roxana Robinson’s acclaimed Georgia O’Keeffe biography is marvellous sensitive and enthralling investigation demeanour the life and work push the so-called “mother of Denizen Modernism”.

It takes an all-encompassing look at O’Keeffe’s influences, evacuate abstraction and photography to Continent art, and how she assimilated these into her singular spraying practice – “the red hills, the magnified flowers, the cumulative crosses and white bones”. Absent yourself also shines a light subdivision the many intense relationships class artist forged throughout her take a crack at, from her marriage to nobleness revered photographer Alfred Stieglitz persist at her scandalous relationship with Juan Hamilton, a man six decades her junior.

Best of draw back, it includes plenty of O’Keeffe’s own words – in distinction form of her letters vital writings – allowing the maven herself to play a characterless role in the telling albatross her own multifaceted, infinitely affecting story.