Significant Others: Creativity and Intimate Partnership

Biographies of artists and writers have traditionally described creativity as an extraordinary individual's lone struggle for self-expression. Now, thirteen of today's leading critics and historians challenge and redefine conventional assumptions in a highly original and revealing series of essays that focus on artist and writer couples who have shared both sexual and artistic bonds, combining biography with evaluation of each partner's work in the context of their relationship.
Significant Others features such celebrated duos as Camille Claudel and Auguste Rodin, Sonia and Robert Delaunay, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Anais Nin and Henry Miller, and Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. The contributors explore the nature of artistic companionships, with their corresponding limitations and innovations; the tangled questions of identity; the roles of gender and sexuality; and the stereotypes imposed by society. Many of the essays are particularly concerned with the way women and men have been evaluated in relation to their partners in traditional biographies, art history and literary criticism. We are encouraged to think in new ways about inspirational interaction, and to reassess both women's and men's contributions to culture and the importance of their art.
These creative unions offer arresting instances of sexual and artistic collision, collusion and mutual stimulation. Significant Others presents thirteen dramas, with imaginative and courageous players who chose fruitful, colorful and often difficult solutions to the dilemmas of social constraint and competing genius.

Essentially gossip--in spite of the trendy title--in these 13 essays by various authors on the influence that sexually paired writers or artists have on each other. Chadwick also examined the issue of gender and creativity in Women, Art, and Society (1990) with the same superficial and fragmented results. How to reconcile the solitude that creativity requires with the love that artists crave? In these pieces, creativity becomes incidental. Instead, there are tales of monumental disorder, power struggles, madness and suicide, emotional chaos, and intense and often deviant political and sexual lives--all giving the clear message that creative people inflict immense damage on those who dare to love them. Marriage is rare, and adultery and sexual experimentation commonplace. Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant (Lisa Tickner), Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West (Louise de Salvo), and Ana‹s Nin and Henry Miller (Noel Riley Fitch) are the most familiar couples. Chadwick offers one successful pairing in Sonia Delaunay and her husband, Robert, a painter whose theory of simultaneity Sonia translated into fashion design. And there's a mutually enriching collaboration in the secret pairing of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg (Jonathan Katz). Most pairings, however, display predictable inequities: Camille Claudel driven mad by Rodin (Anne Higonnet); Clara Malraux silenced by Andr‚ (de Courtivron); and the literal possession of Jackson Pollock's life by his wife, Lee Krasner (Anne Wagner), the major informant for his biographers. And however romanticized and sanitized, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera (Hayden Herrera) and Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett (Bernard Benstock) still appear savage, disturbed, self- destructive, and power-hungry. A collection that raises questions not so much about pairing or even creativity, but rather about how people living such chaotic lives function at all--and about why those who enjoy their art should care about their sexual logistics. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.