 Donate
Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson
Based on thousands of pages from Leonardo da Vinci’s astonishing notebooks and new discoveries about his life and work, Walter Isaacson shows how Leonardo’s genius was based on skills we can improve in ourselves, such as passionate curiosity, careful observation, and an imagination so playful that it flirted with fantasy. With a passion that sometimes became obsessive, he pursued innovative studies of anatomy, fossils, birds, the heart, flying machines, botany, geology, and weaponry. He explored the math of optics, showed how light rays strike the cornea, and produced illusions of changing perspectives in The Last Supper . His ability to stand at the crossroads of the humanities and the sciences, made iconic by his drawing of Vitruvian Man , made him history’s most creative genius. Isaacson describes how Leonardo’s delight at combining diverse passions remains the ultimate recipe for creativity. So, too, does his ease at being a bit of a misfit: illegitimate, gay, vegetarian, left-handed, easily distracted, and at times heretical. His life should remind us of the importance to be imaginative and, like talented rebels in any era, to think different.
Art is a Tyrant: The Unconventional Life of Rosa Bonheur by Catherine Hewitt
Rosa Bonheur was the very antithesis of the feminine ideal of 19th-century society. She was educated, she shunned traditional ‘womanly’ pursuits, she rejected marriage – and she wore trousers. But the society whose rules she spurned accepted her as one of their own, because of her genius for painting animals. She shared an intimate relationship with the eccentric, self-styled inventor Nathalie Micas, who nurtured the artist like a wife. Together Rosa, Nathalie and Nathalie’s mother bought a chateau and with Rosa’s menagerie of animals the trio became one of the most extraordinary households of the day. Catherine Hewitt’s compelling new biography is an inspiring evocation of a life lived against the rules.
Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art by Phoebe Hoban
The tragic story of the talented painter Jean-Michel Basquiat details his turbulent childhood, explosive dealings with the elite art world, relationships with such figures as Andy Warhol and Madonna, and rise to fame, which led to his death from a drug overdose at the age of twenty-seven.
The Grand Affair: John Singer Sargent in His World by Paul Fisher
A great American artist, John Singer Sargent is also an abiding enigma. While dressing like a businessman and crafting a highly respectable persona, he scandalized viewers on both sides of the Atlantic with the frankness and sensuality of his work. He charmed the nouveaux riches as well as the old money, but he reserved his greatest sympathies for Bedouins, Spanish dancers, and the gondoliers of Venice. At the height of his renown in Britain and America, he quit his lucrative portrait-painting career to concentrate on allegorical murals with religious themes–and on nude drawings of male models that he kept to himself. Sargent’s nervy, edgy portraits exposed illicit or dark feelings in himself and his sitters–feelings that high society on both sides of the Atlantic found fascinating and off-putting. Fisher traces Singer’s life from his wandering trans-European childhood to the salons of Paris, and the scandals and enthusiasms he caused, and on to London and beyond.
Frida in America: The Creative Awakening of a Great Artist by Celia Stahr
Frida Kahlo adored adventure. In November, 1930, she was thrilled to realize her dream of traveling to the United States to live in San Francisco, Detroit, and New York. Only twenty-three and newly married to the already world-famous forty-three-year-old Diego Rivera, she was at a crossroads in her life and this new place, one filled with magnificent beauty, horrific poverty, racial tension, anti-Semitism, ethnic diversity, bland Midwestern food, and a thriving music scene, pushed Frida in unexpected directions. Shifts in her style of painting began to appear, cracks in her marriage widened, and tragedy struck, twice while she was living in Detroit. Frida in America is the first in-depth biography of these formative years spent in Gringolandia, a place Frida couldn’t always understand. But it’s precisely her feelings of being a stranger in a strange land that fueled her creative passions and an even stronger sense of Mexican identity.
Andrew Wyeth: A Secret Life by Richard Meryman
Based on 30 years of research, frequent visits and countless conversations with the artist, his family, friends, admirers and critics, this book is a portrait of obsession — how single-mindedness has affected Wyeth’s relationships and transformed his world into a realm of secrecy and fervid imagination. Readers will never look at Wyeth’s work as they did before. It reveals the artist’s dark depths, as well as the ruthless, angry, child/man fantasist who paints the basic brutalities of existence — death and madness –that vibrate eerily beneath his pictures’ calm surfaces. Richard Meryman’s narrative is almost novelistic, with its larger-than-life characters and subplots: the tragedy of C.C. Wyeth; Betsy Wyeth’s campaign for independence and individuality; the byzantine 15-year-long drama of the Helga paintings; the eccentric and creative Wyeth clan; and the idiosyncratic land and people of Maine and Pennsylvania.
Everything She Touched: The Life of Ruth Asawa by Marilyn Chase
Born in California in 1926, Ruth Asawa grew from a farmer’s daughter to a celebrated sculptor. She survived adolescence in the World War II Japanese-American internment camps and attended the groundbreaking art school at Black Mountain College. Asawa then went on to develop her signature hanging-wire sculptures, create iconic urban installations, revolutionize arts education in her adopted hometown of San Francisco, fight through lupus, and defy convention to nurture a multiracial family. Ruth Asawa forged an unconventional path in everything she did–whether raising a multiracial family of six children, founding a high school dedicated to the arts, or pursuing her own practice independent of the New York art market. Her beloved fountains are now San Francisco icons, and her signature hanging-wire sculptures grace the MoMA, de Young, Getty, Whitney, and many more museums and galleries across America.
If these are too daunting, consider a biography written for younger readers or in graphic format:
Vincent and Theo: The Van Gogh Brothers by Deborah Heiligman
The deep and enduring friendship between Vincent and Theo Van Gogh shaped both brothers’ lives. Confidant, champion, sympathizer, friend–Theo supported Vincent as he struggled to find his path in life. They shared everything, swapping stories of lovers and friends, successes and disappointments, dreams and ambitions. Meticulously researched, drawing on the 658 letters Vincent wrote to Theo during his lifetime, Deborah Heiligman weaves a tale of two lives intertwined and the extraordinary love of the Van Gogh brothers.
It’s My Whole Life: Charlotte Salomon: An Artist in Hiding During World War II by Susan Wilder
Charlotte Salomon was a German-Jewish artist born in Berlin. She is remembered for her autobiographical series of paintings, Life? or Theater?, which consists of 769 individual works painted between 1941 and 1943 while she was in hiding from the Nazis in the south of France, and which has been called a painted parallel to Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl and an early graphic novel. In 1943, she entrusted her collection of paintings to a friend. In October of that year, she was captured and deported to Auschwitz, where she and her unborn child were gassed to death upon arrival. It’s My Whole Life covers Charlotte’s remarkable life from her childhood and art school days to her time as a refugee in Nazi-occupied France, where she created the largest single work of art created by a Jew during the Holocaust. Compellingly written and accompanied by vivid color photographs of Salomon’s artwork, Susan Wider has crafted an illuminating portrait of an enigmatic and evanescent young artist.
Between Two Worlds: The Art and Life of Amrita Sher-Gil by Meera Sriram
Amrita Sher-Gil was always making art–as a little girl in Budapest, as a young woman in Northern India, and as an art student in Paris, she filled up notebooks with sketches and drawings–but what kind of artist would she grow up to be? Amrita was rebellious, brave, curious, and bold in her short life and in her paintings, and she became an important figure in the 20th century modern art movement.
I Know What I Am: The Life and Times of Artemisia Gentileschi by Gina Siciliano
In 17th century Rome, where women are expected to be chaste and yet are viewed as prey by powerful men, the extraordinary painter Artemisia Gentileschi fends off constant sexual advances as she works to become one of the greatest painters of her generation. Frustrated by the hypocritical social mores of her day, Gentileschi releases her anguish through her paintings and, against all odds, becomes a groundbreaking artist. Resonant in the #MeToo era, I Know What I Am highlights a fierce artist who stood up to a shameful social status quo.
Hokusai: A Graphic Biography by Giuseppe Latanza
Enter the world of Katsushika Hokusai – the enigmatic creator of Japanese art’s all-time most iconic image. This vivid graphic biography tells the story of Hokusai’s intriguing life and pioneering works, details the fascinating historical context of Edo-era Japan, and explains how Hokusai forged an image of his country that still resonates across the world today. Telling the story of both his eccentric (and incredibly productive) life – while simultaneously painting a fascination picture of his wider cultural legacy, this book is ideal for both those new to Hokusai’s work – and his biggest fans.