ARTISTIC
INDIVIDUALITY
A Study of Selected Artist Novels, ca. 1910-2010
Artistic Individuality explores recurring themes in artist novels – childlikeness, sensuality, and receptivity, the urge for self-expression, kinship with nature, and creative work – as influences on individuality. These are exemplified by literary representations of artists, including Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark, John Updike’s Seek My Face, Somerset Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence, M. Allen Cunningham’s Lost Son, and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.
ln Part 2, the book considers the individual aesthetics of the artists represented in the fiction, for example, integrity, radiance, integration of surface and depth, or vibrant stasis.
Excerpts
– In John Updike’s Seek My Face, a fictional portrait of the visual artist Jackson Pollock, Zack McCoy has the nature of a child beneath the strong, muscular build and graceful movement seen in photos of his performance art.
The urge for self-expression, an instinctive drive or need, stimulated by talent, motivates the identity of a painter, writer, poet, or singer.
Like a child, Zack insisted on immediate gratification of his needs and impulses, whether to punch someone at a party or build sand castles on the beach with his nieces and nephews…. However, Tack was most childlike and most sensual in the process of painting.