Freud wrote that the artist “desires to win honor, power, wealth, fame, and the love of women.” In this engrossing book, Jonathan Weinberg investigates how an artist’s ambition interacts with his or her art, how wealth and celebrity play a role in the artistic process. He shows that anxiety about the relationship of an artwork to identity and the corrupting influence of fame plague modern artists of all genders and sexual orientations.
Weinberg begins by discussing Whistler’s famous portrait of his mother in terms of maternal metaphors for painting. He then looks at the familial relationships forged by artists like Jackson Pollock and Sally Mann with their imagined tradition. He next focuses on the role of love in photographs by Alfred Stieglitz as well as Georgia O’Keeffe’s attempts to find autonomy from her partner Stieglitz. Weinberg also reveals that artistic fame is usually a matter of competition, and he examines the impulse of artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol to work together. The book concludes with a rumination on the NAMES Project Quilt and the problem of what becomes of those who die in obscurity.
- ISBN10 0300081871
- ISBN13 9780300081879
- Publish Date 11 May 2001
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 18 July 2023
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Yale University Press
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 328
- Language English
- URL http://wiley.com/remtitle.cgi?isbn=9780300081879