Welcome back to Book Break!
And if you're wondering where this absolutely beautiful place is that I am, this is the
Little Paris Store.
Probably the most Instagrammable shop in the whole of North London.
This is a French antiques shop, and it's just absolutely filled with so much gorgeous art
and furniture and accessories.
I'm completely in love.
And I was inspired to come here because in this video, I'm going to be talking about
some artists that I've been learning about, who inspired novels.
And I didn't deliberately set out to pick artists who had all worked in France, but
once I picked my favourite of the four stories, they all had working in Paris in common at
some stage in their stories.
So it really does seem like Paris just inspires the most incredible art.
So the first artist that I'm going to talk about is the photographer Lee Miller, because
I have just finished reading this beautiful book The Age of Light by Whitney Scharer.
And I didn't know that much about Lee Miller before I read this, and this was a really
great place to start.
Because we meet Lee Miller throughout three main stages of her life.
So the beginning and the end of the book, we meet her as a married woman in the 60s
living in a country home in England.
Then throughout the book, we have these flashbacks to her working as a photojournalist during
WW2.
And those bits were just sensational to read about, so scary and dramatic and exciting.
And it includes the scene where Lee Miller takes that iconic photograph of herself, which
really does exist, of her taking a bath in Hitler's house after the end of the war.
But the main focus of the story is in Paris in 1929.
And that's when Lee Miller meets the artist Man Ray, and becomes, yes his muse and his
apprentice, but also begins to work with him.
And together the two create this really fantastic art.
And I really loved reading this story.
And I felt like it really subverted the idea of the muse, which was so great.
This is a protagonist who is completely in charge of herself.
And even when she does model for Man Ray, it's with her own ideas that she brings to
the table, and so it's to further her own creativity as well as his.
And today, she has left an amazing legacy.
Even now, her photographs are seen as particularly shocking and human.
And I actually had the chance last week to go to the Camera Museum and look at the type
of camera that Lee Miller herself would actually have used.
So this is the amazing Camera Museum in London.
It is absolutely fascinating.
It's free entry, so I really recommend you come and visit if you come and visit if you've
got any interest in cameras at all, I will link to their website below.
They have got an amazing collection of cameras from present day, the cameras that I actually
recognise, all the way back to some from the late 1800s, which are absolutely amazing.
I can barely even recognise them as cameras, let alone know how to use them.
So we've got the ones up here, which looks like the cameras that I recognise.
I think I even see my first camera on the wall there.
Then there are these 80s, 90s cameras that I definitely recognise my parents pointing
at me on family holidays.
And I am obsessed with these 70s cameras!
I have never seen anything quite like this before.
And we just go further and further back, with these cameras just looking more and more alien,
and beautiful, and complex, until we go over there, we've actually got the same type of
camera that Lee Miller herself would have used.
So this is a Rolleiflex camera.
The one with the two lenses is the type that Lee Miller was most famous for using herself.
And when I was reading The Age of Light, one of my favourite sections is where you see
Lee Miller together with Man Ray, developing this revolutionary new photography style called
solarisation, which they were both very well known for.
And that's basically where you expose a partially developed photograph to light, for a brief
time, and then go back to processing it normally.
And it ends up with this outline round the subject, this kind of halo effect.
It's really really unique, and I will link below to Lee Miller's website so you can see
some of the solarised pictures yourself, because they really are amazing.
And it's just fascinating to think that this is the type of camera that they were using
to take those pictures.
I would not have the first idea of where to even start taking a picture with this.
So another artist that I have loved learning about is Camille Claudel, the French artist
who inspired the novel Rodin's Lover by Heather Webb.
So Claudel was a sculptor working in the late 19th century, who just like Lee Miller, had
an amazing working relationship with the man whose muse and lover she is often just relegated
to being seen as.
And in Claudel's case, it was the sculptor Auguste Rodin, whose workshop she worked in
for eight years.
And as Claudel's sculptures were quite sexual, which was seen as being very inappropriate
for a woman, she often struggled to get funding for them, so she had to rely either on Rodin
helping her, or collaborate with him, but then he would end up getting all of the credit.
And after Claudel accused Rodin of stealing her ideas, her family had her committed to
a psychiatric hospital, despite doctors telling them that she didn't need to be there.
And she stayed there for 30 years up until her death.
Claudel's style was highly unusual for the very conservative tastes of the time, and
so the artist died in relative obscurity.
But today she has become much more celebrated for her work, and the writer Gael Le Cornec
actually believed that she 'changed the history of art'.
Now a Polish artist who worked for many years in Paris is Tamara de Lempicka, who inspired
the book The Last Nude by Ellis Avery.
And the book imagines the story behind Lempicka's famous painting La Belle Raffaella, imagining
a love story between the painter and the muse in the build up to WW2.
And it's unknown if this love story between Lempicka and Raffaella is true, but Lempicka
did certainly have many love affairs, with both men and women, that were considered very
scandalous at the time.
And she was close friends with many lesbian and bisexual women like Vita Sackville-West,
Violet Trefusis, and Colette.
And she even has some major celebrity fans today.
Jack Nicholson, Barbra Streisand and Madonna are all devoted collectors of Lempicka's work.
And finally, an artist who came to live and work in Paris because of criticism back in
her homeland China: Pan Yuliang, the artist who inspired the book The Painter from Shanghai
by Jennifer Cody Epstein.
So Pan had a terrible start to life.
She was orphaned at the age of 14, and sold by her uncle into a brothel, until she attracted
the attention of a rich customs officer, who married her as his second wife, and then funded
her education at the Shanghai Art School.
And from there, her talent just continued to grow.
So she won the prestigious Rome Scholarship to go and study in Italy.
She won the 1926 Gold Prize in the Roman International Art Exhibition.
And she eventually returned to Shanghai as a professor.
But despite being honoured by many in the art world, she was severely criticised by
some Chinese government officials, because her work included nude painting.
And so, she moved to Paris, and that is where she lived and worked for the next 40 years
until her death.
And today, she is renowned as the first female Chinese artist to paint using Western techniques,
managing to subvert both Chinese and European styles.
So those are four particularly incredible women that I've been reading about, but I
do have two more bonus recommendations today if you like books about art and artists.
So the first one is The Muse by Jessie Burton.
And The Muse is about a woman named Odelle, working in 1960s London, and she's working
at an art gallery when a mysterious painting is delivered.
And while they're looking into the history of this painting, we also flash back to 1930s
Spain, where we meet a young girl named Olive, who was the daughter of a renowned art dealer,
but also a very talented artist herself.
So there's this great mystery in how these two timelines are going to end up coming together,
and all of that is so much fun, but the book itself is also just this amazing love story
to art and artists, and the paintings just feel so vivid while you're reading it.
And my second recommendation is The Clockmaker's Daughter by Kate Morton.
Now I already absolutely love books that are split between two timelines.
This one is split between loads of timelines, so it is brilliant.
So in the present day, we have an archivist named Elodie, who finds a satchel containing
a mysterious photograph of an unknown beautiful woman, and a sketch book containing a drawing
of a house, that Elodie is sure she recognises from stories her mother used to tell her as
a child.
And that house is Birchwood Manor.
And throughout the book, we flash backwards and forwards, meeting all kinds of people,
different generations of people who lived at the house, stayed at the house, or visited
the house over the years.
And we do actually have a whole video about this book which I will link to, where I actually
went and visited one of the manor houses in England that served as the inspiration for
Birchwood Manor.
But do leave me a comment with some of your favourite books about artists.
It's such a fascinating topic, and I've been just loving learning about some of these real,
incredible artists.
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the best popular science books.
See you next time.