What does the künstlerroman look like today? Flat Earth by Anika Jade Levy, Minor Black Figures by Brandon Taylor, and Lonely Crowds by Stephanie Wambugu are three recent novels that all seek to depict a version of the artist’s life. Today’s künstlerromane touch on all of the neuroses, desires and individualistic tendencies of the genre’s Romantic origins. Their whistle-stop tours through the artistic elite via young-and-hungry protagonists might initially remind one of the novels of Edith Wharton or Whit Stillman’s ‘Doomed Bourgeois in Love’ trilogy (Metropolitan’s tagline: “Finally… a film about the downwardly mobile”). But Levy, Taylor and Wambugu’s novels speak to a different readership – the kind that have assumed social mobility is long gone – and a different kind of nostalgic premise – that the artist’s life, and with it Romance (in any sense of the word), remains possible.
In Lonely Crowds, introspective painter Ruth follows her best friend, Maria, from Rhode Island to Bard College to the heart of the 90s New York art scene. She struggles with her complex feelings for Maria, her muddy path to developing her art, and an early tendency of sidelining herself in her own life. Flat Earth’s Avery is a writer who also harbours complicated feelings – not the heart-wrenching love Wambugu writes about, but moreso an envious, incestuous kind – towards her rich best friend, who finds success with an “experimental documentary about rural isolation and rightwing conspiracy theories”. Wyeth in Minor Black Figures struggles quietly on his art alongside his narcissistic studio peers, until an encounter with a white priest, Keating, illuminates his approach to painting. All three protagonists are, at some point in their respective novels, seen being lonely at an exhibition opening. Indeed, all spend their time in the contemporary, or near-contemporary New York art world, a definitively Museless place.
Once, the writer-artist deferred to modesty. In the hopes of imbuing a sense of authority in his Great Work, he began it with an invocation. The Muse is invoked in the Odyssey, translated in variance as “Sing in me”, “sing to me”, “Muse, tell me”. The Muse is invoked in Paradise Lost, doubly given the side-hustle of being the Holy Spirit: “Sing Heav’nly Muse, that on the secret top / Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire / That Shepherd, who first taught the chosen Seed […] I thence / Invoke thy aid to my adventrous Song”. Milton frames his narrator, his self, as a conduit for a divine message, encoding the poem’s revolutionary politics as poetic licence with a religious mandate.
By the nineteenth century, the artist-protagonist had more obstacles in the way of his once-holy conduit status. The need for a new literary vehicle to address social concerns around growing mercantilism and vanity brought about the novel. The self was deemed interesting and worth mining, the Muse now abandoned in favour of the artist’s psyche: a higher power now found inwards, one that could be interacted with beyond fealty or submission, could be wrestled with. In her introduction to Auto-poetica: Representations of the Creative Process in Nineteenth-century British and American Fiction, Darby Lewes argues that self-conscious writing around the role and work of an artist has always existed, but could only really come into mass popularity with the advent of the novel. These novels detailing the artist’s life came to be known as Künstlerromane, emerging in Germany with the likes of Goethe and Novalis. British and American artist-protagonists, Lewes wrote, differed from their German counterparts: while also “often at odds with their social milieu […] they interact with it nonetheless, if only because they hunger for an audience, or for recognition, or for dinner.”
These concerns are still pertinent in, if not the apex of, modern depictions of the artist’s life. The twentieth century sees Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, or Woolf’s Lily Briscoe of To The Lighthouse, emerge as prima examples of the fictional artist. Joyce and Woolf both depicted the singularity of the artist’s perspective, as though the artist possesses an entirely different way of seeing the world to most people, a uniquely sensorial approach to visuality. Early on in To The Lighthouse, Briscoe experiences the lifting of a real-life observation to a painterly image while looking at the Ramsays: “suddenly the meaning which, for no reason at all, as perhaps they are stepping out of the Tube or ringing a door-bell, descends on people, making them symbolical, making them representative, came upon them, and made them in the dusk standing, looking, the symbols of marriage, husband and wife”. It is this especially sensory perspective, this individualised affinity to beauty, that so much of the institutions in the young Dedalus’ life, particularly the church, attempt to suppress in A Portrait of the Artist. Dedalus’ strong conviction in articulating his aesthetic perspective, leading eventually to his self-imposed exile, paved the path for the audacious, if self-conscious, artist-protagonists of the twenty-first century.
In a 2022 essay for Gawker entitled ‘Kunstlermania’, Erin Somers analysed Ngram data illustrating the usage of ‘künstlerroman’ online, noting that it began “climbing again in 2012 […] dovetailing nicely with the rise of autofiction”. One standout of the early 2010s revival is Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station. Its protagonist, Adam, is clearly indebted to the gentlemen abroad that came before him, if of the more irreverent kind. He lies about being bad at Spanish, about being good at Spanish, about his mother dying, about his commitment to his fellowship project of writing a “research-driven poem” about the Spanish civil war. For all the ways it is traditional, Lerner’s debut moves closer to the more subversive artist’s novel we expect today, with its lack of a neat transformation – if at all – and its expansion of the ways one can project their self-consciousness. The anxiety of the artist not only concerns the quality or reception of his art, nor the purity of the approach, but how he appears to engage with the vocation externally, with the identity of ‘artist’ beyond the studio. His struggle is, in part, that which comes by immodest performance.
The contemporary artist-protagonist makes their art against a backdrop of political unrest and economic instability. In the tradition of the künstlerroman, Levy, Taylor and Wambugu’s protagonists all face varying degrees of outsiderdom and questions about how they fit into the art world. For one, all three authors are refreshingly transparent about conceiving their characters as working artists. More than adding a dramatic or moralist dimension to the artist’s ‘struggle’, this is a realist choice; depicting artistic desperation seems a bare necessity for the genre, forcing characters to confront head-on the transactional world which they are trying so very hard to ‘break in’ to. Ruth watches her family struggle with money throughout her childhood in Lonely Crowds and has a panic-inducing episode at university when the earnings of her miracle Christmas job ($700) are stolen, most likely by her wealthy British boyfriend. Early on into Minor Black Figures, Taylor writes that Wyeth once lived in the guesthouse of one of his art school instructors’ acquaintances “by virtue of labour exchange”, in an arrangement that “occasionally rhymed with slavery on the level of optics”. Flat Earth, a satire and perhaps the most forthcoming of the three about its potential superficiality, begins with Avery funding her college tuition fees through sex work before taking on a position at a right-wing dating app called Patriarchy.
Self-expression, or a tawdry attempt at real-life mimesis, is the easiest way for a broke, young artist to actualise their ideas. Flat Earth doesn’t really let Avery get past this – the trappings of modern artistic superficiality have an ambient presence throughout. Her art is interchangeable with how she lives her life, her writing coming into dizzying conflict with recollections of conspiracies and retellings of her own sexual conquests. In this way, Levy’s depiction of a scene embittered by its own transactionality, its own whiteness, its own ouroboric approach to representing empty lives, is a successful addition to the satirical strain of the artist-novel.
In Minor Black Figures, Wyeth experiences a revelation in his painting that reinforces the ‘transformation’ structure of a typical künstlerroman. Throughout the novel, Wyeth ruminates on the shallow identity politics running the scene – a humorous subplot details the rise of Southeast Asian diaspora art collective MangoWave, named after the fruit and its “colonial energy” – while conscious about misreadings of his own work. Taylor spends paragraphs detailing how Wyeth thinks about gaze and observation, whether in his own studies of stills from French movies, or in liberal misreadings of his own work. While looking at Keating, Wyeth is inspired to revisit John Singer Sargent’s studies of Thomas McKeller, a black lift operator who modelled for his murals of classical gods at Harvard’s Widener Library. Wyeth marvels at Sargent’s ability to retain the “personal architecture” of McKeller even when painting a white figure over him. He works on a painting of Keating that he titles, ‘Black Painting of a White Man’. Taylor’s take on the artist-novel is traditional, steeped in the romance of the self, in its positing of Wyeth against the political mires of the setting, and in its argument for the prevailing of the personal.
I think back to Dedalus exiling himself from Ireland in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, yet still resolving to “forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race”. The artist-protagonists of Flat Earth, Minor Black Figures and Lonely Crowds all attempt a kind of escape, all face obstacles articulating what that might mean and entail, how it works for or against their personal desires.
In Lonely Crowds, escape, obstacle, and desire conflate to the same thing for Ruth: her best friend, Maria. Ruth and Maria’s relationship lies in the ambiguous space between friendship and romance, with Ruth taking to Maria from the first time she sees her, cast out of a school uniform shop. She is mystified by her alien charisma and her physical sameness. She draws Maria incessantly, until she tells her that she doesn’t “want those pictures of me in the world” while they’re packing for university. She watches Maria fly through sexual encounters, a successful artistic career, and at-times toxic relationship with a wealthy Bard girl. When Ruth is given the opportunity to embark on her own success, she continues, always, to have Maria at the back of her mind. Something of the artist-muse relationship has trickled down. In her depiction of Ruth, Wambugu depicts best the stubborn fixity of the artist, the pathological potential of their obsessions. At the same time, she writes tenderly about how it might be, or at least might feel, necessary for an artist to fall in love with their subject, to allow their presence to colour their life. Out of the three novels, Lonely Crowds is, in my opinion, the most cogent example of the artist’s life as a life of endless, encircling pursuit.
Today’s artist-protagonists struggle with the performative valence of calling themselves artists, with the purity of their art-making. Their concerns reflect wider anxieties that social posturing has atomised artistic communities and emboldened tendencies toward isolation. It’s no wonder that authors have returned to depicting protagonists wrestling with artistic escape. Still, it’s pertinent to mention that performativity has always been a concern of the artist-novel and of the life of any working artist. It originates in the friction of art-as-vocation and art-as-work. Somewhere in the emergence of self-consciousness around this subject, we began to mire ourselves into panic around how to keep art art, how to remain artists. Maybe this is why we focus on the artist’s youth, or beginning (what with the künstlerroman being an offshoot of the bildungsroman, or coming-of-age) and why so many artist-novels leave it all open: so that we may remember how we came to identify with the compulsion to create, and how we came to elevate this feeling to a vocation. The issue (and more interesting question) that anyone writing about artists today must consider is how we continue to do so. In times like these, I’m reminded of a quote from Ben Lerner: “I certainly share this experience of the gap between what art sets out to do and what it does, and I’ve come to think that the gulf between potentiality and actuality is constitutive of the arts, not a reason to give up on them.”
