I’ve gone through life as an artist believing that there is a higher purpose to Art – something over and above mere existence. I’m not talking about religious revelation, metaphysics or existentialism but that intangible, immeasurable quality where paint or any other material is cabable of encapsulating emotion and ideas through its very plasticity. At odds with this though are the motivations of artists as seen through their biographies. Perhaps it is the artists I’ve chosen to read about recently, and not a general pattern, but I can’t help but feel disappointed that sex and oedipal failure are at the base of so much art.  As I read about first Noguchi and then Bourgeois over the last week I couldn’t help but say to myself ‘not another one’.

In a much-quoted quote, Renoir stated that he painted with his penis – at least he was open about his motivations. Picasso of course had a string of wives and mistresses about whom he made art endlessly while attending bullfights to bolster his machismo. Noguchi spent his life chasing women, marrying, and carrying on endless affairs on several continents while fashioning marble and other materials into curvaceous forms. De Kooning generally stayed put but was no different as he explored his failures with Elaine though the offices of every female visitor to his studio. Bacon went his own way but the erotic element in his work was everywhere. Bourgeois had her own problems with the dominance of her father and spent her life in therapy while her work centered on sex to the extent that it was condemned by elements of the critical voice in France and lauded by American critics who delighted in aligning her oeuvre with the writings of Freud. The Mapplethorpe photograph of her holding an enormous phallus and testicles is both pseudo erotic and seemingly self-deprecating.

No doubt the pre-modern artists were no different.  Grander themes such as God and power are no longer considered as prime creative material but the artists themselves were far from artistic saints if the literature is to be believed. Of course if you are looking for the erotic it’s not hard to find with celebrations of the female form in Rubens and ritualised rape in both two and three dimensional form from a variety of practitioners. The great Michelangelo had problems of his own according to the pundits with his women looking like men or at least, adolescent boys, while he himself sought higher spiritual ground.

Can I generalise in this way? The emotional austerity of a Mondrian or a Judd or a David Smith might suggest otherwise but Dali, Koons and the Chapman brothers would seem to epitomise the less than subtle undertones of adolescent uncertainty writ large.

The erotic is one thing but emotion seemingly something else. There is certainly no shortage of emotion in both the women and men of abstract expressionism or indeed in the work of any contemporary female artist. Few women paint men with some sort of longing or desire and those that portray themselves often do so with an unflinching eye. Jenny Watson and Tracey Emin come to mind. The recent exhibition by Adelaide artist Margaret Ambridge is no less unflinching as she records in great detail the bodies of older women who no longer attract the male and are rendered invisible but she is a rarity these days with the majority of artists both male and female avoiding the naked human form.

You’d think that depictions of sex and genitalia would have lost their appeal by now. In a sexually repressed nineteenth century Courbet’s Origin of the World was a revelation amongst his ardent followers but 120 years of not just erotic but pornographic images flooding all forms of media doesn’t seem to have dampened artistic ardour. I have lost count of how many films on Netflix begin with people having sex or devote five minutes to it somewhere near the middle as a prelude to violent acts of revenge. It is no longer a filmic novelty. Given the number of over and under the counter magazines and porn sites available I have to ask whether we as a species have progressed no further than endless depictions of basic reproduction? Threats of existential forces acting with impunity or nature getting its own back may well lead to notions of impending mortality but Art was never meant to be about the worst of humankind even with examples from Goya, Breughel, Picasso or even Hirst with his embalmed livestock, or is my view of art simply wishful thinking?

If it isn’t sex, reproduction, and mortality then the other area that crops up in artists’ biographies are problems of adolescence and father figures. Bacon’s father spent much time in blood sports hence the violent images in Bacon’s paintings. Bourgeois’ father delighted in sadistic domination and replaced her mother with a live-in mistress leading to the sexual content in all of her work. The fathers of Cezanne, Manet, Gauguin and countless others all disapproved of their offspring’s chosen profession and insisted on legal or monetary careers or the like which manifested in open rebellion and founded modern art. No doubt therapy would have emptied artistic pockets if it had been available.  Certainly, in the case of Bourgeois the sale of her art helped in this regard.

So, should we even be reading artist biographies with their accompanying narrative of gender and paternalistic problems as opposed to looking at the art itself? The current trend in art education is to insist upon a credible narrative to accompany creative work – students are required to pour out their souls in journals. One of the inevitable questions on exam papers involved discussion on the ‘ideas’ of the artist which inevitably mean trotting out the well-worn stories and myths generated by art writers. Understanding of the art matters less than much-quoted myths. The ones I always recall with distaste are that Frank Lloyd Wright was introduced to Frobel blocks in the cradle by his mother which accounts for the rectangular buildings he designed and Greek sculptures could be rolled down a hill without the arms breaking off although why anyone would want to roll them down a hill in the first place was irrelevant The Impressionists, according to myth, decided to venture en-plain-air due to the invention of trains and poor old van gogh couldn’t do anything without resorting to self-amputation.

Choice of an artist to study was often left to the student at senior level but artists with a sexual or violent bent to their work were discouraged as sources of study excluding Salvador Dali whose work was all about dreams apparently and beyond rational interpretation but then again, the golden lobster walked down a city street and endless moustache-twirling on film were fair game. The man could not be separated from his idiosyncratic art.

The art biography and indeed the catalogue essay are props to understanding with their quiz program titbits and often convoluted text. The question remains as to their worth in coming to terms with the art. As Picasso was said to have stated [mythologically] ‘if I could write it in words I wouldn’t need to paint it’ or words to that effect but then again Picasso was modern art and beyond comprehension. Both eyes on one side of the head – ‘what was that all about?’ Blame Cezanne, ‘the father of us all’ who died in a field and was returned home in a hand cart.