PLEDGE WEEK

Former Secretary of State Henry Stimson famously said that "Gentlemen don't read each others mail." 

What has proven patently false in diplomacy is something of a gray area in art history.

How useful is an artist's personal, biographical narrative in the decoding of their aesthetic and conceptual intent? Does knowing that Degas was a bigoted anti-Dreyfusard inform us at all about his ballerinas and race horses? Is Léger's communism important to his reading of synthetic cubism? Must we scavenge through the diaries and letters of Micah Carpentier in order to reach a clearer understanding of his cryptic paper bag drawings?

Micah Carpentier, 1968

As I write the definitive biography of the American expatriate artist Faun Roberts I struggle with these frustrating questions.

Of course I want to include every deviant detail of this famously nymphomaniac woman. How else would I be able to appeal to the general reader? But would I be betraying my subject and trivializing my work by doing so?

 My publisher assures me that I am well within the acceptable precincts of scholarly practice. What else would she say? She's already negotiating with a few production companies on a cinematic adaptation of my still unwritten book.

Letting the work speak for itself can be a costly wager. The pleasures and rewards of beautiful painting are increasingly inaccessible to the contemporary eye.

Le Sommeil dans le Chagrin, Oil on linen, Faun Roberts, 1928

Without the help of a neat little wall label, a clever paraphrase and or pop cultural reference point, visual art, in its static complexities is beyond the comprehension of the average college-educated NPR listener.

And so, paraphrasing T. S. Eliot, I'm inclined to leave a few scraps of meat to quiet the family dog. When I tell my story I'll be sure to include plenty of humid yet irrelevant details about the indefatigable appetites of Faun Roberts.

Who knows - I might get to appear on the Today Show.