Life and the Work: Art and Biography

It is often assumed that reading about the lives of artists enhances our understanding of their work—and that their work reveals something about them—but the relationship between biography and art is rarely straightforward. In The Life and the Work, art historians Thomas Crow, Charles Harrison, Rosalind Krauss, Debora Silverman, Paul Smith, and Robert Williams address this fundamental if convoluted relationship. Looking to such figures as Andy Warhol, Bob Dylan, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, Leonardo da Vinci, and the artists associated with the name Art & Language, the volume's authors have written a set of provocative essays that explore how an artist's life and art are intertwined.