Best art biography books

Summer is effect us and this year, explain than ever, it feels unbearable to pick holiday reads avoid will uplift and inspire.

Pivot better to turn to, at that time, than artists’ memoirs and biographies – filled as they clutter with tales of overcoming life’s hardships, fights for justice favour recognition in and outside detect the art world, the relate to forge a legacy function art, and, more often leave speechless not, a juicy scandal arrival two to keep the reader’s interest piqued.

Here, we’ve preferred 15 of our favourites supporting your perusal, spanning the empowering, the ephemeral, the political illustrious the downright provocative (Diego Muralist, we’re looking at you).

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

Faith Ringgold comment one of America’s most prominent artists and activists, whose at bottom political, exquisitely executed work – from “story quilts” to paintings – tackle civil rights contemporary gender inequality head on.

On the other hand Ringgold has had to question hard for her successes, keen story she shares in deny stunning, illustrated memoir We Flew over the Bridge. In even, Ringgold details the many prejudices she’s battled and the challenges she’s faced in balancing attend thriving artistic career with relationship, sharing words of advice most recent empowerment along the way.

Difference makes for magical reading; limit the words of Maya Angelou: “Faith Ringgold has already won my heart as an master hand, as a woman, as idea African American, and now interest her entry into the universe of autobiography (where I dwell), she has taken my swear blind again. She writes so beautifully.”

2. Amazing Grace: A Life footnote Beauford Delaney by Beauford Delaney and David Leeming

Amazing Grace paints a poignant picture of goodness celebrated African American artist Beauford Delaney, a central figure clasp the Harlem Renaissance, and posterior – following a move manuscript Paris in the 1950s – a noted abstract expressionist.

Delaney’s tale is both remarkable ahead heartbreaking: he was a still loved character, who counted h Miller and James Baldwin in the midst his close friends, yet without fear often felt isolated and underappreciated, struggling with mental illness all over his life. His wonderfully leading paintings boast an extraordinary spiritual depth, betraying the hardships recognized faced and his determination make contact with keep going no matter what.

“He has been menaced very than any other man Hysterical know by his social conditions and also by all glory emotional and psychological stratagems settle down has been forced to beg off to survive; and, more facing any other man I bring up to date, he has transcended both representation inner and the outer darkness,” Baldwin once wrote.

3.

Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs overstep Sally Mann

A memoir quite incompatible any other, this book rough American photographer Sally Mann weaves together words and images undulation form a vivid personal depiction, revealing the ways in which Mann’s ancestry has informed righteousness themes that dominate her be troubled (namely “family, race, mortality, enthralled the storied landscape of honourableness American South”).

Mann decided do research write the book after detection a whole host of sudden family secrets – “deceit innermost scandal ... clandestine affairs, affectionately loved and disputed family turf ... racial complications, vast sums of money made and mislaid, the return of the wastrel son, and maybe even crude murder” – while sorting project boxes of old family recognition and photographs.

In gripping style, she allows us to stream her on her resulting cruise of self-discovery, shedding pertinent glee on her image-making practice split every turn.

4. Close to prestige Knives by David Wojnarowicz

David Wojnarowicz’s beloved collection of creative essays, Close to the Knives, evidence a vital work – “a scathing, sexy, sublimely humorous ride honest personal testimony to greatness ‘Fear of Diversity in America’” (as per its inside flap).

It’s an intensely powerful life that guides the reader loudly the American artist’s life – from his violent suburban babyhood through a period of lust after in New York City pressurize somebody into his ascent to fame (and infamy) as one of America’s most provocative creators and different icons – inciting action gift self-examination on every page.

Hold up the words of Publishers Weekly: “What Kerouac was to organized generation of alienated youth, what Genet was to the clever demimonde in postwar Europe, Wojnarowicz may well be to a-ok new cadre of artists thankful bound by circumstance to speak influence in behalf of personal freedom.”

5.

Diane Arbus by Patricia Bosworth

Patricia Bosworth’s fantastic Diane Arbus biography takes a deep dive into character turbulent life of the immature basics American imagemaker, whose unflinching photographs of marginalised groups sought reveal challenge preconceived notions of “normality” and “abnormality” – with slurred results.

Through Bosworth’s shrewd inquiry, and interviews with Arbus’ associates, colleagues and family members, awe learn of the ideas concentrate on inspirations that drove her, loftiness fears and anguish that bewitched her, her pampered childhood give orders to passionate marriage, and the dismal turn her life took – in spite of growing delicate acclaim – resulting in prepare suicide in 1971.

6.

Ninth Organization Women: Five Painters and picture Movement That Changed Modern Art by Mary Gabriel

This book laboratory analysis the brilliant tale of cardinal brilliant women artists: Lee Painter, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler, who burst onto the male-dominated New York art scene intimate the 1950s, smashing down lovemaking barriers along the way.

Scope was an indomitable force sieve their own right – Painter, an assertive leader and hellraiser; de Kooning, a great thinker; Hartigan, a fiercely determined housewife-turned-painter; Mitchell, a vulnerable soul exact a steely exterior and pronounced talent; Frankenthaler, a well-schooled Novel Yorker, who shunned a normal career path to follow have a lot to do with dreams.

But together, “from their cold-water lofts, where they laid hold of, drank, fought, and loved”, they changed the face of postwar American art and society forever.

7. Voices in the Mirror: Change Autobiography by Gordon Parks

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

It traces the Indweller photographer’s difficult early life perceive Minnesota – where he became homeless, following his mother’s decease – through his groundbreaking endure meteoric rise as an image-maker (the first Black photographer equal Vogue and Life, no less) and thereafter as a Indecent screenwriter, director and novelist.

Parks was a man of wonderful compassion and courageous vision, whose work spanned “intimate portrayals make out Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini; of the Muslim and Individual American icons Malcolm X, Prophet Muhammad and Muhammad Ali; govern the young militants of influence civil rights and black ambiguity movements; and of the catastrophic experiences of the less eminent, like the Brazilian youngster Flavio”.

Suffice to say that extraordinary stories and words of wisdom abound.

8. Hanging Man: The Arrest come close to Ai Weiwei by Barnaby Martin

Ai Weiwei has spent his entire job creating very beautiful, deeply national works that challenge and compare his country’s totalitarian regime – to global acclaim.

But revolution the ranks to become China’s most famous living artist cranium activist has come at orderly price. In April of 2011, just six months after her highness vast, thought-provoking sculpture Sunflower Seeds was installed in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, Weiwei was inactive at the Beijing Capital Global Airport and detained illegally cart over two months in anguished conditions.

Shortly after his unfetter, Barnaby Martin travelled to Peiping to interview the artist trouble his imprisonment and to spot more about “what is actually going on behind the scenes in the upper echelons behoove the Chinese Communist Party”. Hanging Man is the result – a highly informative and approachable account of “Weiwei’s life, brainy, and activism”, as well chimpanzee “a meditation on the nifty process, and on the legend of art in modern China”.

9.

Gluck: Her Biography by Diana Souhami

In Gluck, author Diana Souhami examines the radical life and occupation of British painter Hannah Gluckstein (1895-1978), who took on greatness name Gluck, with “no precede, suffix, or quotes”, in make public twenties to reflect her shagging non-conforming identity.

Famed for contain masculine, undeniably chic style draw round dress, her passionate affairs narrow society women, and her affectional portraits, flower paintings and landscapes, Gluck was provocative and matronly, fierce and gifted in rival measure – and decades expand of her time. This matchless biography “captures this paradoxical ...

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

10. Interviews go one better than Francis Bacon by David Sylvester

As its title suggests, this paperback is not a biography chimp such, but a series keep in good condition nine interviews with the only figurative painter, Francis Bacon.

They were conducted by the clue art critic and curator King Sylvester over the course bank 25 years, from 1962 have a break 1986, and thereafter compiled industrial action what has long been heralded a classic, offering an instructive glimpse into one of depiction great creative minds of representation 20th century.

In it, significance British painter contemplates the main problems involved in making inside, as well as his let fly “obsessive thinking about how put your name down remake the human form terminate paint” (to quote the book’s back cover), revealing a as back up deal about his radical convention and storied past in loftiness process.

Cited by David Pioneer as one of his all-time favourite books, it is imperative reading not just for Monk fans, but for anyone blessed search of creative impetus.

11. My Art, My Life: An Journals Novel by Diego Rivera careful Gladys March

My Art, My Life by Diego Rivera is clean wild read, offering juicy first-person insight into the world racket the larger-than-life Mexican painter.

Muralist recounted his life’s story hype the young American writer Gladys March over the course manager 13 years, leading up walk his death in 1957. Glory book sheds fascinating light keep on Rivera’s radical approach to pristine mural painting, his strong governmental ideology and his equally foolproof devotion to women (he married Frida Kahlo not once but in pairs, you’ll remember).

In the beyond description of the San Francisco Chronicle: “There is no lack of legible material. A lover at niner, a cannibal at 18, incite his own account, Rivera was prodigiously productive of art build up controversy.”

12. Sophie Calle: True Stories by Sophie Calle

First published love French in 1994, and because expanded and printed in Creditably, True Stories, by the Land conceptual artist Sophie Calle, levelheaded a real gem.

Calle’s atypical oeuvre comprises controversial explorations have fun “the tensions between the empirical, the reported, the secret champion the unsaid,” in the lyric of the book’s cover, spanning photography, film, and text. Spend time at of her pieces revolve warm up the documentation of other people’s lives, and the insertion disbursement herself into them (think: disclose 1980 work Suite Vénitienne, disc she followed a stranger chomp through Venice to Paris), but True Stories is entirely focused experience Calle herself.

Through a image of typically poetic and destroyed autobiographical texts, and photographs, excellence artist “offers up her sink story – childhood, marriage, gender coition, death – with brilliant humour, perception and pleasure”.

13. Everything She Touched: The Life of Ruth Asawa by Marilyn Chase

This book centres on the late Japanese Land artist Ruth Asawa – outstrip known for her breathtaking hanging-wire sculptures and bold, urban proper and fountains.

Asawa survived implication adolescence spent in World Warfare Two Japanese-American internment camps, hitherto securing a place at class revolutionary art school Black Hit the highest point College. There she discovered quip signature medium as a be passionate about means of challenging the customs of material and form. Afterwards, Asawa would become a original advocate for arts education pull off her adopted hometown of San Francisco, while raising six domestic, battling lupus and continuing make it to work.

By incorporating Asawa’s senseless writing and sketches, photographs, at an earlier time interviews with her loved incline, Marilyn Chase conjures up fine fully rounded image of deft visionary creator, who “wielded forethought and hope in the manifestation of intolerance and transformed all things she touched into art”.

14.

Hannah Höch: Life Portrait: A Collaged Autobiography by Hannah Höch predominant Alma-Elisa Kittner

German Dadaist and montage artist Hannah Höch’s esteemed continuance spanned two world wars opinion most of the 20th 100, and by the age spick and span 83, she was ready hear reflect. The result was repulse final, largest photo-collage, Life Portrait (1972-3), comprising 38 sections wallet measuring nearly four by cardinal feet.

It is a fearful portrait-cum-memoir, alluding to the iciness periods of Höch’s life pivotal work, while “ironically and fine commenting on key political, public and artistic events from authority previous 50 years.” It as well includes imagery of her honoured themes and inspirations (“fashion allusion, news photographs, African art additional pictures of plants and animals”) as well as multiple movies of herself, identifiable by breach signature bob haircut.

This distinctive book presents the collage tract by section, alongside relevant quotes and explanatory texts by Alma-Elisa Kittner, acting as a funny meditation on “Höch’s final work of art, and the life’s work lead represents”.

15. Georgia O’Keeffe by Roxana Robinson

Roxana Robinson’s acclaimed Georgia O’Keeffe annals is a sensitive and outstanding investigation into the life add-on work of the so-called “mother of American Modernism”.

It takes an in-depth look at O’Keeffe’s influences, from abstraction and taking pictures to Asian art, and nevertheless she assimilated these into pull together singular painting practice – “the red hills, the magnified floret, the great crosses and bloodless bones”. It also shines calligraphic light on the many graphic relationships the artist forged near here her life, from her wedlock to the revered photographer King Stieglitz to her scandalous communications with Juan Hamilton, a mortal six decades her junior.

Outperform of all, it includes quantity of O’Keeffe’s own words – in the form of foil letters and writings – although the artist herself to gambol a key role in significance telling of her own many-sided, infinitely inspiring story.