Here’s a pretty sentence: “For many of the artists who took the bait dangled before them, the young and available women became prizes to be won in the game of cock and chicks.”
It’s a line from Lee Hall’s Elaine and Bill: Portrait of a Marriage, a biography of Willem and Elaine de Kooning, and it all too perfectly captures the spirit of the book: it’s petty, pernicious, and crude. Hall’s is one of a pair of artists’ lives to have been published this season, the other one—a much better book—being James E. B. Breslin’s Mark Rothko.
Hall’s book is forgettable, but it is not uninstructive, for when one compares it to Breslin’s, it brings into focus certain questions about the craft of biography, especially biographies of artists: What can or should we expect of them? What standards should we apply? Breslin’s and Hall’s books stand as examples, respectively, of how and how not to write the lives of artists.
Breslin’s is a straightforward study of his subject’s life. Hall’s book, as the subtitle implies, concentrates on the relationship between the de Koonings. Both books share, of course, Abstract Expressionist painters as their subjects, and each one tells a more or less tragic story. Breslin, who teaches English at the University of California, Berkeley, traces Rothko’s life from his family’s emigration from Russia to Portland, Oregon, when he was ten. He details Rothko’s education, his apprenticeship as an artist, his failed first marriage, his professional
