Stories about art and art-making are inherently metatextual. The anxieties of the art maker – the writer – come through in anxieties about painting, or photography, or sculpture, or dance. But the best art novels transcend this self-consciousness, offer up new ways of seeing, and in turn, give shape and form to what can feel a shapeless, formless world.
Often, they use art not as a means in itself but as a medium to explore sociology, history, philosophy. In my novel, The Nude, which follows an art historian seeking to acquire a rare sculpture of a female figure and her budding fascination with a young artist, I wanted to explore the limitations of one woman’s desire and power in a patriarchal world. Here are five other novels about art – and also about so much more.
Second Place follows a writer’s obsession with a Delphian artist known as L, whom she invites to stay at her guest house – the titular second place – on the marshlands of the English coast. When L arrives, bringing along a female friend – the young and blunt Brett – the narrator begins to unravel. Though loosely based on Mabel Dodge Luhan’s 1932 memoir Lorenzo in Taos, the style is all Cusk’s own: exacting prose and cool-toned observations, resulting in a pared-down psychodrama about the knotty relationship between discourse, identity, and art-making.
Luster by Raven Leilani
Luster revolves around Edie, a 23-year-old Black woman navigating adulthood, racism at her dead-end corporate job, and a new relationship with a white man named Eric. When she meets Eric, Edie becomes unwittingly enmeshed in the complicated dynamics of his quasi-open marriage and relationship with his adopted Black daughter, Akila. All the while, her ambitions as a painter loom. Artfully rendered and featuring humorous, incisive prose, Luster is a call to arms on a Black woman’s right to pleasure and belonging, and a searing indictment of what it means to be creative in the treacherous world of American capitalism.
This compassionate debut by art historian Ashby centers on Eve, a young waitress suppressing traumas large and small, including the death of her best friend, Grace. When Eve decides to take up life modelling, posing nude for a group of students, her anxieties and aspirations sharpen into focus. Eve is both acutely observed and acutely observant; the novel takes its time with her, meticulously tracking one woman’s desperate longing for selfhood, self-possession and, ultimately, resilience.
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After meeting at a party in San Francisco, two Korean American women – Jin, a photographer, and Lidjia, an injured ballerina on hiatus – form an immediate bond built on equal parts pain and pleasure. Hypnotically stylised, Exhibit traverses themes of art and ambition, kink and queerness as a generational curse lingers over the story. Sensory details suffuse every interaction between these characters, every second guess and cursory glance, as Kwon untangles what happens when a woman gets what she most desires.
Kunzru’s third instalment in his three-colours trilogy tells the story of Jay, a middle-aged grocery delivery driver who was once a promising performance artist. Now, undocumented and suffering from long Covid, he’s barely getting by. That is until he runs into Alice, a woman from his art school days and, to complicate matters, an old paramour. Alice offers Jay a place to stay, the property in which she’s been quarantining with two others from the art world: her husband, a painter; and a gallerist. Both meditative and precise, this is the portrait of the artist as a gig worker, and an unsparing look at art as both a consumer product and means of survival.