Who'd marry an artist? The women painted out of the picture
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Version 0 of 1. British painter Sheila Girling, who died on 14 February, was married for 63 years to sculptor Anthony Caro. They supported one another’s work – two artists happily living and working side by side for more than six decades. How rare is this? Are there other notable art couples, or is the usual pattern more one-sided and exploitative, or otherwise troubled? Artists, after all, are often driven, egotistical characters. Living easily with others is not always a great artist’s best skill. Van Gogh alienated the women he pursued, and his attempt to share space with Gaugin, the Yellow House, in Arles, ended in violent self-harm. As for female artists who get involved with men, feminist art history has made the hazards well known. Sculptor Camille Claudel accused her former lover Rodin of stealing her ideas. Photographer Dora Maar was a talented artist in her own right, but her relationship with Pablo Picasso ensured she would mostly be remembered as the woman who weeps in his paintings of the 1930s. Picasso’s postwar lover Françoise Gilot was a painter, who left him partly because of his lack of interest in her art. Lee Krasner was a more intellectually advanced painter than Jackson Pollock when they first met, but saw him as a natural genius and, as his wife, put his career before hers. Krasner has a good presence in museums and her paintings are powerful examples of abstract expressionism – though I don’t think she would agree with fans who suggest she was better than Pollock. More fruitful relationships included the marriage of Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe. The pioneering modernist photographer took many pictures of his lover, including nude images. Yet no one thinks Stieglitz exploited O’Keeffe. She is clearly a collaborator in these portrayals, which today look like shared performance art. Her triumphant subsequent career makes these pictures as much part of her oeuvre as his. Then there was the furious and passionate on-and-off partnership of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. Theirs was neither a happy marriage nor or an easy collaboration, and yet her love for the Marxist muralist is clearly an important part of the tapestry of pain and desire that makes Kahlo’s art so intense and real and personal. Perhaps she proves that a tumultuous relationship with another artist can provide ample kindling for a fiery artistic output – but only if your special subject is suffering. |