9781599621135

For centuries, great artists have been drawn together in friendship and in love. In Artist Couples, curator and writer Veronica Kavass delves into the passionate and creative underpinnings of the art world's most provocative romances. From Picasso and Francoise Gilot to John Currin and Rachel Feinstein, Kavass' graceful and daring text provides a generous glimpse into the inspiring and sometimes tempestuous relationships between celebrated artists throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. From poetic beginnings to shocking endings (and vice-versa), the various dimensions of the artist couple archetypes are ceaselessly explored. Some are enduring and collaborative, yielding astonishing parallel bodies of work, as with Robert and Sonia Deleanay and Christo and Jeanne-Claude. Others are adoring and explosive, such as Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera and Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. Essays revealing what compelled these dynamic artists to partner, how their pairing influenced their work, and why their love may have faltered, are accompanied by lush illustrations of their art and documentary photographs of the couple. The first visual book to explore this subject in such epic scope, Artist Couplesis a revelatory and riveting journey into the hearts and minds of artists in love. Artists featured include: Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera Lee Miller and Man Ray Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner Gilbert Proesch and George Passmore (aka Gilbert & George) Robert and Sonia Delaunay Salvadore Dali and Gala Dali Marina Abramovic and Ulay Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O'Keeffe Camille Claudel and Auguste Rodin Wassily Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter Christo and Jeanne-Claude Elaine de Kooning and Willem de Kooning Pablo Piasso and Francoise Gilot/Dora Maar Ai Weiwei and Lu Qing and many more.

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Introduction byVeronica Kavass

It was diff icult for me to describe this book during its making. First, I always hesitated to use the loaded word love. Although when I did (because I always had to), I enjoyed watching the reaction on the listener’s face. Often it was a smile of some sort—a smile that revealed a positive association with the idea of love or, more often, one that relishes in the darkness that love stories sometimes reveal. Other times, I was met by a searching look, as if they were trying to understand correctly what the hell I meant by “love.” On two occasions, people asked if I was an advice columnist. A local art academic told me that he thought the biographical draw in art history was problematic, that it celebrates the individual, thus distracting from the greater historical narrative. To that, I smiled, because I think highlighting the potential “problematic” zone within an exhaustively researched, highly intellectualized subject only brings it more to life. And that is essentially the purpose this book serves: to revitalize these artists and their works, to present the way they, as partners, collaborated, influenced one another, or guarded their art from a lover’s influence, or how they used muse-manipulation to come into their own, or sacrificed their art for the other’s. This compilation of portraits and their accompanying artworks map trajectories that each of the artists took and how love for or from another visual artist played a crucial navigational role.

Would we have seen Max Ernst’s deserts, his full spectrum of settings, without Tanning by his side, enthusiastic to live and paint out in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by skulls? It seems fairly certain that Abramović would have eventually killed herself through her early brutal performances, thus not living long enough to become the “grandmother of performance art,” if she hadn’t started working with Ulay. Of course, Krasner lured Pollock into the barn and on the wagon (for a spell), during which time they both created their most iconic works. McGough pulled McDermott out of the past—at least enough to become a celebrated artist in the present. Without Doyle’s invitation to join him on a residency in Germany, would Hesse have taken the pivotal trip back to her homeland, to the setting that inspired her to transition into sculpture? Apply the “what-if” treatment to any one of the couples in this book and tell me the biographical tangents are mere distractions from the greater narrative.

This brings me to my starting point with this project. Are you curious to know which artist led me into this web? I did not start at the chronological beginning, with Kandinsky and Münter. It really had to be the right person, my own white rabbit: Lee Miller. A seductive, ghostly beauty who holds the keys to strange rooms (including Hitler’s apartment, oddly). The type of person you want to follow but not fall in love with. I remember thinking that when I saw her retrospective of photographs at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2007. It felt appropriate, also, to enter the subject of artists in love through the heart of erotic surrealists in Paris. From there, I traveled to Mexico (not literally, but through books and art) to Frida Kahlo: a frenetic story about a fragile woman who was designed to withstand all forces of misfortune—and still laugh. In working on this project Kahlo became a role model for me. I never would have expected that. When I saw the monumental exhibition of her work at SF MOMA in 2008, one of the most personally challenging years of my life, her paintings only irritated my own psychological wounds. Two years later, after I had healed, I realized through reading her letters and studying her art that she was one of the funniest people on earth. Each of the vignettes in this book reveals some odd discovery I made while researching and writing it, although no aspect of my own autobiography is overtly included. That which is, is coded, written over, like a Rauschenberg painting.

Another conversation I found myself in when describing this book took on the form of a correction: “No, it isn’t a book about art and love. It is a book about artists who were in love, who made art about other things. Well, sometimes about love, yes, but not exclusively.” When considering art that is about love, The Kiss comes to mind. Rodin’s version of The Kiss, especially. I made the decision not to include the story of Rodin and Claudel because I wanted to begin with modernism. Rodin was certainly a progenitor of modern art, but never possessed the pioneering spirit that, for example, Picasso did.

You will notice the chronological order of the stories is based on the year the couples joined forces, so to speak. If it were based on the year one of the two artists first became a hit, the book would have started with Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (his 1907 painting depicting five nude female figures in a brothel). Picasso’s archive of women could have taken up half the book by itself, therefore I chose only one—Gilot. Of all of his first-string loves, she certainly provided the best account of their relationship in her memoir, Life with Picasso. With Gilot as his partner, Picasso is situated in a later era of his life, falling after de Kooning’s Woman I and Pollack’s drips, two rival abstract expressionists who hailed Picasso as their king influence.

I certainly experienced heartbreaks in piecing this book together. There are losses, ones that resulted in me taking long angry walks in the woods. Most noticeably, Carl Andre and Ana Mendieta. It was no surprise Andre denied us the right to use his work. But I never cast him in an evil light—just as a brilliant man-child who presented one half of a heavily toxic relationship that ended in the tragic and mysterious death of his wife. He never read the story. Just graced us with a firm refusal. We decided to run the story regardless, with the work we had chosen for Mendieta, seeing that her estate had granted us permission. But when they were informed of Andre’s decision, they revoked their approval. Which goes to say, for all of the people who relish in the darkest of love stories, this book cannot present you with that particular one. Though if you are looking for something in that vein, allow me to point you in the direction of Yves Tanguy and Kay Sage.

Towards the end of the project, when nearly all the stories had fallen into place, there was a final tremor in Saul Steinberg and Hedda Sterne’s inclusion. From one moment to the next, with as much forewarning that an earthquake can offer, this tremor grew into something seismic, something that ripped Sterne’s art right out of the layout. Granted, the process of obtaining image permissions for artworks is very tricky. Any estate, for whatever reason, can withhold exposure. When Sterne’s estate pulled the plug, we were left with a blank space where her work should rightly be. This is the only case where an artist’s work is not represented. Consider this absence—which disturbed the development of the book—as one of my biggest woes. When deliberating what to do about this loss, I remembered that I was open to maintaining the Andre and Mendieta story despite Andre’s absence. Ultimately, I really wanted this story to be included in this compilation. I apologize for the incompleteness of it.

Artists in Loveends with the Kabakovs’ Ship of Tolerance. The Kabakovs designed “total installations” that recalled what life was like under the oppressive reign of the Soviet Union. Though Ilya Kabakov had been making art that addressed the subject for decades prior to marrying Emilia, it was fitting to punctuate the book with a couple who became a single unit the year the Berlin Wall fell. The Ship of Tolerance embraced a global mentality, an artwork born out of love that positioned itself to exist in a non-fixed location, unanchored and free to sail to seas unknown. In my eyes, there is something reassuring about the mystery of that ending with regards to both art and love. The overarching arc could have ended on the note that love ultimately sabotages art. But that would have been depressing and, more importantly, untrue. And it would have been painfully contrived if it ended with a story that made the proclamation that art and love will continue to triumph hand-inhand forever and ever, happily ever after, amen. Instead, the conclusion to this love story is as open to interpretation as every great work of art ever made. It allows you, the reader, the lover of art, the lover of love, possibly the lover of artists in love, to sort out the meaning of it all for yourself.— Veronica Kavass , June, 2012

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Artists in Love

Artists in Love

1599621134

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