Written by New York based About Art contributor Gracie Newman
There are many good novels about visual art, and one is Siri Hustvedt’s What I Loved (2003). The book takes place in New York in the 1970s and is centered around an art historian and an unknown artist who strike up a friendship. As the two men become enmeshed in the city’s vibrant, competitive art world, their family lives also become entangled. The novel is a page-turner, but it is also an adept exploration of love, grief, and art. The book deftly navigates the age-old duality of study and craft, interrogating the relationship between the intellectual and the creative.
Hustvedt has also written many compelling essays about visual art. Her collection A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women(2016) pulls on artists from Picasso to Kiefer to Bourgeois in order to explore questions of consciousness, gender, and epistemology. Both of these books are worth a read, and Hustvedt’s use of different genres to pose similar questions once again blurs the distinction between the creation of art and the analysis of it. Both her fiction and nonfiction ask us to reconsider how we see art and the world at large. What interpretations are we attached to? What might we be missing? And why?
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