The best books starring tortured artists

This is not the origin of the haunted painting trope, but it’s certainly the best. Beautiful Dorian Gray is a stunning subject for painter Basil Hallward, and the painting reflects the young man’s natural allure. However, Gray laments the inevitable loss of his beauty and wishes the painting would age instead of him. When it does, he sets off on a hedonistic path that ultimately ravages the painting and the man.  

Part antiquated pontifications about beauty, part horror novel, and doused in homoerotic innuendo, this book hits hard on several fronts. While I loved this book when I read it in junior high, it became better with each reread.

In trademark Vonnegut fashion, Bluebeard uses humor to juxtapose the horror and violence of World War II. In this way, it is similar to Slaughterhouse-Five. 

However, Vonnegut skewers the art movement born out of the war’s aftermath: abstract expressionism. Bluebeard is the story of Rabo Karabekian (who first appeared in Breakfast of Champions), a war veteran and failed illustrator who accidentally found success as a contemporary of Rothko and Pollock. At the end of his life, he’s ready to unveil one final secret locked away in a damp potato barn.

This posthumously published novel is the last offering from the punk rocker, poet, and writer Jim Carrol. Carrol was a friend of Patti Smith and Andy Warhol and a product of the New York City art scene in the 1970s and 1980s.

The central character is Billy, a successful painter with such deep artistic sensitivities that navigating small things like relationships, his health, and earning money is crushingly difficult. The book reads like an allegory as much novel as moving characters through action seems a secondary aim. In this way, it reminds me of Franz Kafka’s A Hunger Artist.

This fictionalized biography of Madame Tussaud is a wild blend of fact and fiction. Orphan Marie (Madame Tussaud) works as an apprentice to a physician, making wax models of body parts and organs. This progresses to full-body models and even a grisly hall of famous murderers displayed for ticket-paying patrons. As Marie’s skill grows, so does her renown. Soon, she becomes an art instructor to the princess on the eve of the French Revolution.

What makes this book great is that while it’s based on fact, it reads like a surreal fairy tale. The inclusion of Carey’s illustrations throughout is an added bonus in this art-centric story.

At the beginning of this book, I recognized the ingredients that make up popular erotic novels. The main character, Edie, a Black woman and struggling artist, is beginning a relationship with an older, wealthy, successful white man in an open marriage. There’s a power imbalance. To a certain extent, this excites Edie, and in this way, the book fits neatly into the parameters of the genre.

However, the relationship becomes messy, and Edie’s life, both with and away from Eric, is fraught with bad decisions. Race, wealth, and gender intersect with sex in a complex and uncomfortable milieu. Through all of this, and with the guidance of Eric’s wife, Edie begins to make progressive, less destructive choices, and as she does, her art progresses.