If there is one television commercial that you won’t see on Father’s Day, it is a boy bursting into the studio of his painter father to present him with a new shaving kit and beret, after which the artist joyfully pulls the child to his side for a session of finger painting. Because if there is one enduring cliché about the domestic life of famous artists, it is the bad artist father: icy, hurtful, self-obsessed. Withdrawn into impenetrable creative isolation—so the stereotype goes—these parental monsters punish any attempted breach of their solitude by inflicting lifelong trauma on those closest to them.
It...