Submit to these sentences

I don’t read a lot of biographies and I don’t read a lot of books about other books, which made this month’s pick a little unusual, since Positive Obsession is both. 

The reality, though, is that inevitably any book about people does include some element of their personal story, and any work about creative people inevitably incorporates a study of the things they made. So when I looked over my reading list I found that there were plenty of tales I’d read about creative people and their lives.

Here are a few biographical works about artists that I’ve enjoyed over the past few years. 

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The Slip: The New York City Street That Changed American Art Forever 
by Prudence Pfeiffer 

(Buy via Bookshop.org or Amazon) 

This isn’t the biography of a single artist, but a whole group—the pop and abstract painters and sculptors who lived in the warehouses of Manhattan’s Coenties Slip in the 1950s and 1960s. People like Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, James Rosenquist, Delphine Seyrig, Lenore Tawney, and Jack Youngerman all get a treatment, and all manner of other artists and filmmakers and performers sidle through as Pfeiffer tells the story.

But what I really enjoyed was the way it showed how a scene as a whole can be more powerful than any of its individual players: it really got across the concept of landscape and location playing as significant a role in the story as any of the people. A lot of books covering movements feel like they struggle to evoke the swelling moment that the scene created, but The Slip really showed how the convening of these artists was the force that shaped modern American art, more than any one artist.

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A Triumph of Genius: Edwin Land, Polaroid, and the Kodak Patent War 
by Ronald K. Fierstein

(Buy via Amazon)

Today, the story of Polaroid is one of artistic enablement paired with business failure—a radical technology company that changed the nature of photography, but in the end couldn’t keep up with the digital revolution and is now almost a punchline.

But this meticulous history recaptures some of its essence, by showing just how relentless and innovative the company was in its day, and how unusual and obsessive its founder, Edwin Land, was. Author Ronald Fierstein is a lawyer, not a prose stylist, but he did have an inside look as a young litigator on the team representing Polaroid in its pivotal court battle with Kodak… so expect lots of detail on courtroom antics in this heavy tome. But also, there’s something fiery, freeing about its tale of Land, who manages to be a creative, artistic scientist; a business man intersecting with mid-century corporate America and an almost liberatory, enabling figure for the artists he counters, including Ansel Adams and Andy Warhol.

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The Year of Magical Thinking 
by Joan Didion

(Buy via Bookshop or Amazon)

I’m going to say something that is a bit sacreligious these days: I’m not a huge fan of Joan Didion. She is absolutely masterful in some ways, able to evoke moments and describe culture in a way that is uniquely her. That voice, that certainty, was unusual for her time and it was (is) a powerful thing for a woman to totally own herself. As a result she has an absolute legion of fans who are drawn to her writing and to her cool, stylish, detached, ironic image.

To me, though, her politics often seem judgmental and reactionary and the Didion caricature has overtaken—or even inverted—the meaning of her words (Zadie Smith has an opinion on this that I agree with: “you don’t have to agree with her, but you have to submit to her sentences.” But in Magical Thinking, which she wrote after the death of her husband and during her daughter’s (eventually fatal) illness, Didion cannot be so detached as elsewhere. I think she still keeps herself contained, skirting around the self, but in doing so she still reveals more of who she is than anywhere else.

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We’re closing in on the end of the month! A chat with Positive Obsession author Susana Morris is coming soon (more on that later) and I’m preparing to announce August’s book of the month. Sign up now to our classic one-book-per-month monthly or annual subscriptions or our Eureka strand, and you will be able to get your hands on it soon.