The creative personality tends to be restless, always craving and searching for new experiences to enrich the soul and thus deepen one's art. In The Love Lives of the Artists, Daniel Bullen examines the intersection of art and amorous love in the affairs of five artistic couples who had "open relationships" at a time when the sanctity of marriage, as an institution, adhered to more conventional expectations.
Artistic and erotic freedom is at the core of this complex, philosophically insightful book. Bullen has chosen partners who were both creative artists: Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Lou Andreas-Salomé and Rainer Marie Rilke, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, and Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O'Keeffe. Their narratives chronicle often contradictory commitments, fidelities and infidelities as partners in each couple took and/or tolerated lovers (not always of the opposite sex) and justified their actions as necessary requirements to inspire and augment creativity and intellect. Bullen also examines the artists' personal histories, focusing on circumstances that may have led to such liaisons.
These pairings shattered the limitations of traditional romantic partnerships. They also influenced individual artistic development and often led to personal fulfillment. There was a price to be paid, however, and carefully chosen letters and journal excerpts document how Bullen's subjects were forced to grapple with issues of fear, rage, jealousy, cruelty, self-loathing, loneliness and, in some instances, destruction. In the end, their experiences of liberation and despair ultimately forged emotional turmoil into self-awareness and great art. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines