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Here's a thing that happens to me all the time: I'll be down a research hole and I'll stumble across a person or factoid that catches my eye (usually the fact that someone was queer) but I don't want to lose my place, so I open up a new tab about it to come back to. Sometimes I will open up many tabs. It's one of the best part of research, in my opinion. Sarah Burns, the author of The Emphatically Queer Career of Artist Perkins Harnly and His Bohemian Friends, plainly operates in the same way--down to noting if someone is queer. The different between us, however, is that she decided to include all of her tertiary discoveries in what is nominally a biography of one man, resulting in a book that is rambling and gossipy and full of information you would never imagine coming across in the biography of a mostly forgotten 20th century artist. Some of this was fun, and genuinely related to Harnly and the people closest to him. A lot of it was only barely what you might considered relevant, however, and in a book whose author never used one word when three would do, it made for a LOT of book.
I stumbled across this book in City Lights in San Francisco, and I don't think there's another place in the world I would have found it on the shelf. I work as a reference librarian in an art library, so a lot of my job is dealing with people who want to know more about the artist of a work they have. Some of them are convinced they have a masterpiece that will be worth millions (they don't--it won't be), but most of them are genuinely curious. I would say about 75% of the time there is simply nothing to be found about the artist--even if they have a name, or provenance. There have been so many artists who have lived and died in the world, and we collectively remember a tiny fraction of them. A book that set out to bring into the light one of those artists was fascinating to me, and I do applaud Burns for her attempt.
( She starts out the book discussing what her research materials were... )
I stumbled across this book in City Lights in San Francisco, and I don't think there's another place in the world I would have found it on the shelf. I work as a reference librarian in an art library, so a lot of my job is dealing with people who want to know more about the artist of a work they have. Some of them are convinced they have a masterpiece that will be worth millions (they don't--it won't be), but most of them are genuinely curious. I would say about 75% of the time there is simply nothing to be found about the artist--even if they have a name, or provenance. There have been so many artists who have lived and died in the world, and we collectively remember a tiny fraction of them. A book that set out to bring into the light one of those artists was fascinating to me, and I do applaud Burns for her attempt.
( She starts out the book discussing what her research materials were... )