NOVELS ABOUT ARTISTS

Since I have the beginning of a novel about an artist (female) floating around, I’ve been interested in other people’s novels about artists. Two showed up on the Daedalus remainder list, so I ordered them. (As usual, the books cost less than the shipping.) I had not read anything by either author before and, so far as I know, these were the only novels they had written about artists, although Iain Pears has written a book of art history.

The first book I read was “Port Mungo,” by Patrick McGrath, billed as a sort of “Night of the Iguana,” and indeed it was. But the sensibility, the “conceits,” if you like, are Manhattan. “Gin” tells the story about her brother Jack, whom she considers an unreliable genius saddled with an alcoholic and entirely off-the-rails wife. Gin holds the purse strings to the family fortune and doles out to Jack just enough to keep him alive in a sordid, collapsing old warehouse built out over the water in Port Mungo. He manages to be with his wife Vera just enough to have a daughter, a wild child who meets a mysterious drowning death just as she matures, and then a second daughter, who is taken by the highly respectable brother of Gin and Jack to be raised in England.

The narrator is unreliable and her assumptions are challenged as the story progresses and she finds out more and more until the shocking murder mystery ending. The point of the story is not the painting, but the lifestyles of painters and their impact on the lives around them -- the huge preoccupation with genius. Jack finally is no longer able to survive in Port Mungo and comes to live on the top floor of Gin’s house, which is a studio. By this time he is a sort of madman in the attic. His paintings, which he called “tropicalism” and tried to relate to Gauguin, are beginning to lose their appeal and even Gin is now a bit dubious about their “brilliance.” Then Vera and the younger daughter arrive, and the truth begins to out.

The whole thing is melodramatic, cliche ridden and great fun. Much eating and drinking. Very little serious attention is paid to actual painting -- just enough to keep the atmosphere arty and mysterious. It all goes along as smoothly and schematically as a tricycle on a sidewalk.

“The Portrait” by Iain Pears is also first-person, a long soliloquy by the artist himself as he addresses the subject of the portrait he is painting. This artist is also in a retreat, this time an island off the coast of France that is hard to get to and populated by fishermen who know only their work. The subject is an old friend and critic from a time when both were part of a group of embryonic artists in Paris. One soon realizes that this is like the famous soliloquy poems of Robert Browning (like “My Last Duchess”) and to say that the narrator is unreliable is to greatly understate the force and malevolence of what develops.

The sensibility is more English this time and the story slips in more references to actual painters -- Gaugain again! But the emphasis is on the psychological interplay among the artists themselves, all told in a very high-toned philosophical way. In the end the shocking scene is the provocation -- long-simmering -- for another murder, but it will be enacted after the book ends and in all probability it will never be detected as a crime. The emphasis is not so much on the painting as the surging emotions of the painter.

So what did I learn? That even people who don’t know much about art feel qualified to write about it. That in most people’s minds it addresses either the “insane genius” aspect or the hardships of the struggle towards fame and fortune. Not much about the skills or the techniques, at least in these two books. “Girl in a Pearl Earring” spent much more time on theory and things like the preparation of pigments. “The Underpainter” was so subtle that I lost interest and it sits on the shelf partly read. I guess I’ll have to double back. Googling "Novels about artists" brought up a long list.

Painting -- art -- appears to be a hook on which one can hang many kinds of hat. These two books were diverting but, in the end, not significant.

PS: I tried to upload photos of the covers with no success.