Significant Others: Creativity and Intimate Partnership

Biographies of artists and writers have traditionally described creativity as an extraordinary individual's lone struggle for self-expression. Now, thirteen of today's leading critics and historians challenge and redefine conventional assumptions in a highly original and revealing series of essays that focus on artist and writer couples who have shared both sexual and artistic bonds, combining biography with evaluation of each partner's work in the context of their relationship.
Significant Others features such celebrated duos as Camille Claudel and Auguste Rodin, Sonia and Robert Delaunay, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Anais Nin and Henry Miller, and Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. The contributors explore the nature of artistic companionships, with their corresponding limitations and innovations; the tangled questions of identity; the roles of gender and sexuality; and the stereotypes imposed by society. Many of the essays are particularly concerned with the way women and men have been evaluated in relation to their partners in traditional biographies, art history and literary criticism. We are encouraged to think in new ways about inspirational interaction, and to reassess both women's and men's contributions to culture and the importance of their art.
These creative unions offer arresting instances of sexual and artistic collision, collusion and mutual stimulation. Significant Others presents thirteen dramas, with imaginative and courageous players who chose fruitful, colorful and often difficult solutions to the dilemmas of social constraint and competing genius.