VIVIAN MAIER
A Photographer’s Life and Afterlife
By Pamela Bannos
362 pp. University of Chicago. $35.
The art world needs more Vivian Maiers. Accomplished but utterly unknown as a photographer during her lifetime, Maier, who died in 2009, represents for aspiring artists the dream that their work will at last be celebrated after they are gone. Bannos’s biography tracks the life and legacy of this woman who came from a somewhat marginal but not entirely underprivileged background: The daughter of an illegitimate domestic worker, Maier spent most of her own life working as a servant or nanny, but she owned a camera as a young woman and could afford to buy film. Although she operated outside art schools, galleries and museums, she carved out a remarkable aesthetic that will likely be included in the canon of 20th-century street photography.
Bannos’s book traces three stories. One is Maier’s biography and how she grew up in a generally unremarkable family (her brother was institutionalized for mental illness) in France and New York and spent her last days in Chicago. Her creative practice was paradoxically hidden in plain sight. She rarely left the house without a Rolleiflex camera hung around her neck, but she didn’t exhibit her photographs. She told one employer she kept her images secret so that people couldn’t steal or misuse them.
The second story is Maier’s unlikely rise to fame. She fell into arrears on the storage space where she kept nearly four tons of photographic material, and a handful of aficionados and speculators swept in. Battles over the rights and profits ensued, and while some art lovers lament the way her estate has been handled, the purchase of her possessions and the promotion of her work has led to her posthumous acknowledgment as an artist.
The third story here — told in a rather clunky fashion — is the history of 20th-century photography and its ascent as a respectable art form. Yet this is the most important story, because it’s where Bannos makes a case for including Maier in the canon. Paul Strand, Cartier-Bresson, Eugène Atget, Garry Winogrand and particularly Lisette Model served as touchstones for Maier, if not direct influences.
RENOIR
An Intimate Biography
By Barbara Ehrlich White
432 pp. Thames & Hudson. $39.95.
How “intimate” can a biography be when the author never met her subject? White puts that question to rest immediately, describing how popular books like “Renoir, My Father” (1958), by the painter’s filmmaker son Jean, have left out important details like the artist’s relationship with his illegitimate daughter, Jeanne. By comparison, White’s scholarly biography is the result of “56 years of professional concentration on Renoir’s paintings, character and personality.”
Continue reading the main storyThe research is here, and it’s impressive. We learn about the Impressionists with whom Renoir traveled and the official Salon against which they sometimes rebelled. Manet, Monet, Cézanne and Pissarro all make appearances, as does the art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, who created a market for these painters.
Along the way, we also learn a great deal about 19th-century French society and mores. Renoir came from a poor background, which helped shape his work since he was paid to paint portraits. It also meant he had to give up the two children he had with his model Lise, since neither could afford to raise them (which, White speculates, may have resulted in the death of his firstborn).
The only problem with the meticulousness of White’s every-statement-backed-up-with-evidence-approach is that the prose can get very wooden, like a police report. Renoir the man is “a remarkable individual whose life story is heroic and inspiring,” but what about his work? Famous paintings are mentioned, but not explained or elaborated upon.
Contrary to White’s conclusion that Renoir’s “optimistic, joyful art brings happiness to people around the world,” a small anti-Renoir movement started with an Instagram account in 2015, with the handle “Renoir Sucks at Painting,” and included protests outside museums. However funny and (presumably) ironic, the insurgency gained traction as Renoir’s soft-focus, saccharine Impressionism came under fire. It would have been interesting to read a committed scholar and champion of Renoir’s work rebut the Instagram activists — and add a contemporary chapter to the tale.
A GENEROUS VISION
The Creative Life of Elaine de Kooning
By Cathy Curtis
304 pp. Oxford University. $34.95.
Elaine de Kooning was a big personality. A minister she once met while traveling told her, “Being married to you must be like being married to 20 women.” As a native Brooklynite who attended Erasmus Hall High School and was inspired by titanic women like the track Olympian Babe Didrikson, she painted, she wrote about art — and, although estranged from him for many years, was married to the famous gestural abstract painter Willem de Kooning.
Separating her life from this last fact is part of the work of Curtis’s biography: How to show the “creative life” of Elaine de Kooning, without making her a mere accessory to the company she kept? She was not as consistent a painter as some of her associates, but she possessed talent and boldness (some of it alcohol-fueled; she got sober in the 1970s with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous).
De Kooning’s greatest achievements as an artist are her figurative paintings, including the “faceless men” series from the 1950s and an official 1963 portrait of John F. Kennedy that was unveiled in 1965, a year and a half after he was assassinated. She was also a gifted writer, using expertise learned as a painter and personal knowledge of art and artists to analyze and explain the work of others.
Like many prominent women of her generation, de Kooning didn’t identify as a feminist, even pushing back against Linda Nochlin’s famous feminist essay from 1971, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” And yet de Kooning served as a role model for women by circulating within the elite New York art world and demanding access to institutions like the Club, the unofficial art school and salon.
Perhaps most important in examining a creative life and career like this one is seeing how art is made in communities, rather than by isolated artists in garrets (or studios on 10th Street in Greenwich Village). Biographies like Curtis’s offer a corrective to art history and the art market, which too often focus on mythical art stars and singular “geniuses.” Friends, lovers and associates can contribute equally to making, explaining and preserving artists’ work and their legacies.
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