A few days ago, I received my long-awaited copy of the excellent quartet of themed books on the work of Louise Nevelson, the much-maligned American sculptor. She was criticised for being a woman who dared to live her life via an outrageous persona, for being a woman artist, for being Jewish and ignoring the rules about graven images, for calling herself a sculptor when what she was doing was nailing together found wood and painting it black,  for not being abstract enough for Greenberg in that there were recognisable unmodified objects in her installations, for using the ideas of a former generation in Schwitters and Malevich who were male artists, and repeating herself endlessly. When schoolchildren were encouraged to ‘do a Nevelson’, that was the last straw as she passed from ‘high art’ to ‘low art’ in the eyes of a generation of critics. The same could be said of Calder and his mobiles and Pollock and his action painting but they had legend status.

The question in Nevelson’s case though revolves around the separation between the life of the artist and the work of the artist? As an outrageous and outgoing personality, she attracted plenty of attention and was photographed endlessly. In many ways she was her own work of art with her homemade jewellery and mix and match costumery but the wall-sized constructions bear little resemblance to her appearance even if conceptual links of facades seem obvious to at least one critic. Pollock for his part resembled his paintings with paint-spattered boots and clothes even if explanations of his work defeated critics who settled on their superficial resemblance to certain mid-west landscapes but even when Nevelson pained her sculptures gold the separation between life and art remained.

Biographers of artists endlessly seek links between the life and the work – that’s their business – and bouts of depression, anxiety, alcoholism and checkered upbringings are stock in trade hooks. But what happens if your persona isn’t startling enough to separate you from the crowd and depression, anxiety and alcoholism are not part of your lifestyle? Does that mean that biographically speaking you are condemned to oblivion?

Dali ensured that he would never succumb to that fate and similar to Nevelson he invented a marketable persona. He lived a lifetime of self-promotion. Walking a gold-painted lobster down a New York street certainly stuck in the public memory and it helped that a Life magazine photographer was conveniently on site for the event. It all made for good copy. He was the Surrealist for most people who knew little or nothing about art or Surrealism even though the Surrealist society threw him out in embarrassment at the attention he garnered for what they considered as subversion of Surrealist ideals. It was all grist to the mill. Nevelson on the other hand produced work that was just about unphotographable and indecipherable although many tried to align the boxes with maternal instincts of housekeeping, recycling scrap wood with social comment and blackness with both racial commentary and negativity. It was far easier to reproduce her face and comment upon her caked-on makeup. At least that made sense.

I recall reading a biography of Da Vinci which traced his roots back to the small mountain village after which he is named. As someone who spent his life designing fortified dwellings and war machines for the aristocracy, he was at odds with the artist who painted the Mona Lisa, a woman whose identity still remains a question, and carrying the painting with him for decades. The actual life is quietly forgotten and the romanticised one of the great artist who incidentally painted only a handful of works, is promoted endlessly. Another Leonardo, Leonardo Drew, grew up next to a scrap yard in Brooklyn which accounts for his love of the detritus of a city while Phyllida Barlow, remembering the destruction of war time London, produced chaotic gallery-consuming installations while leading a quiet and uneventful life as a mother and teacher. Biographical hooks often become the justification and raison d’etre of a lifetime of work and yet say little or nothing about the person. In Nevelson’s case it was almost the opposite as critics and writers tried to assimilate her public face with the resolute blackness and seriality of her sculptures and failed. Endless criticism of her appearance and ridicule of her work was the result. She didn’t fit any mould and critics and the public love to pigeonhole artists.

So as the artist do you consciously try to help out potential writers of biographies or monographs to avoid being either pigeonholed and explained away or reduced to a public persona that not only sticks in the public memory but becomes the be-all-and-end-all.

One way might be to write down everything as self-justification including your own epitaph and leave the potential biographer to sort out the bias. Or you could write revealing letters [emails] to friends and family in the hope that they keep them.  A friend of mine donated all of his written materials to a library in the hope that some erstwhile researcher might discover them in the future and attempt to reconstruct his life. Then there is social media. Writing daily posts will certainly accumulate the words and may well reveal the inner workings of your conscious and sub conscious but as a totality might lead to the conclusion of rabid self-importance.

Of course, I couldn’t help thinking about, should the occasion ever arise, what a biographer might write about me.  My uncolourful life would hardly make for riveting reading.  Even tracing the origins of my ideas and artistic development might prove difficult in that I’m the last person to ask to be objective and few if any know me well enough to comment. Perhaps I should align myself with a social cause, be filmed protesting outside Parliament and get myself arrested as did the likes of Ai Wei Wei and the Guerilla girls on numerous occasions – but then again, maybe not.