Structured as a posthumous collection of interviews, diary entries, letters, newspaper reviews, and academic articles, The Blazing World is a cerebral, harrowing, and utterly engrossing portrait of an artist-and an indictment of the cruel gender bias that destroyed her. Tired of being sidelined and diminished, Harriet enlists the help of three male artists to present her work as their own, a scheme that results in terrible consequences. The heroine of this novel is Harriet Burden, a middle-aged artist whose brilliance has long been ignored by the art-world elite. A rich, capacious meal of a novel, The Flamethrowers traces a young artist’s sentimental, political, and creative education at the hands of her older lover and the denizens of a bygone art scene. There, she falls into a relationship with Sandro Valera, an Italian motorcycle scion and sculptor in the mold of Donald Judd. Set in the New York art world in the 1970s, this novel follows a young woman known only as Reno who moves to the city in the hopes of becoming an artist. This is a gorgeous and heartbreaking story that vividly illustrates the agonizing conflict between tradition and individualism-a conflict with which Potok, whose Orthodox Jewish parents discouraged his pursuit of fiction and painting, was intimately familiar. In this classic novel from 1972, a prodigiously gifted Hasidic boy pursues his obsession with painting at the cost of his relationship with his family and the cloistered, deeply religious world of his upbringing. Though a Künstlerroman may portray any type of artist, I have focused here on books centering visual artists. While working on my novel, I leaned on the Künstlerroman as a literary genre, studying many different interpretations of the portrait of the artist. When I set out to write Sirens & Muses, I wanted not only to capture the hothouse art school environment that I’d avidly observed from afar but also to dramatize artmaking and creativity-to take what is for most people a quiet, profoundly interior, often nonlinear undertaking and turn it into a story with extrinsic stakes and forward momentum. And over the course of our decade-long relationship, I’ve had a front-row seat to my husband’s artistic and professional development, serving as his critique partner, sounding board, and occasional model. As an undergraduate, I worked at my college’s art gallery and as a figure drawing model (the latter paid much better, though it admittedly involved being nude). For years I’ve hovered on the outskirts of that world: after a childhood surrounded by my mother’s art, I went to college next door to the famed Rhode Island School of Design, whose students awed and intimidated me. I’m the daughter and the wife of visual artists, and I’ve long been fascinated by the creative processes of people whose work involves material: paint and canvas, wood and cloth, ink and charcoal.
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