The spaces in which artists live and work have helped build the myths that surround them, while also informing creative labour practices
‘Ab Olympo’ is the mysterious motto inscribed above a doorway in Andrea Mantegna’s house in Mantua, the first auto‑monument to be built by a western artist. ‘From Olympus’: is it an expression of gratitude to the gods for their hand in the artist’s success? His relationship with the local ruler, Francesco II Gonzaga, was certainly lucrative; it was he who had donated the land on which the house was built. Or is it a less humble assertion that the artist’s gifts are divine? The perfect plan of the building, a circle inscribed within a square, represents the harmonious order of the Universe, with which it communicates via the oculus. From Heaven down to Earth: it is, in other words, a temple.
Already in 1476, when Mantegna’s house was begun, the artist was at the zenith of the trajectory from the workshop to the social heights that characterised the Renaissance. This dwelling is not just a palace but a home for a divinity – or at least a demiurge. We may seem far removed from this notion of divine inspiration today, but the artist’s house has continued its mythologising work into the present. A 2019 article in Architectural Digest invites us to ‘Step Inside Louise Bourgeois’s Beautifully Sacred Realm’, to mark the publication of a book of photographs showing the artist in her charmingly dilapidated New York townhouse – her workspace was initially confined to the basement but, after her husband’s death, she turned the entire building into her studio. The article reveals that Bourgeois had warned the photographer on their first meeting that she would destroy his images if she did not approve of them, but in the end he returned regularly for 12 years. This long collaborative venture is itself a monument, in published form, to the myth of the artist. Despite Bourgeois’s own deconstruction of such identifications in her Femme Maison series, it centres on the dwelling.
The myths surrounding artists were first critically examined by the art historians Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz, in their 1934 book Legend Myth and Magic in the Image of the Artist. The authors compiled stories about the miraculous childhoods and talents of artists dating back to antiquity, and argued that ‘the flotsam of ancient conceptions of the artist [is] carried forward on biographical waves’: in other words, the early heroising narrative of artists’ lives has been maintained in modern accounts, despite their claims to historiographic objectivity. Kris, who was also a psychoanalyst, later reflected on the psychological meaning of these myths. ‘The biography sets up models,’ he says, identification with which can ‘supply late contributions to the formation of the superego’. However, he does not tell us much about the myths’ social function, which has changed significantly over time. We could perhaps see them as having a superego‑forming role for society as a whole: in other words, they serve an ideological purpose. Nor does Kris note the significance of the artist’s dwelling in the construction of these myths, but the home has an important place in this process.
The creative process is difficult to contain; in Francis Bacon’s home at 7 Reece Mews, London, the studio seemingly irrupts into other living spaces (left). Taken in 1998, the photograph documents Bacon’s studio in situ, just before it was painstakingly preserved and moved to Dublin’s Hugh Lane Gallery
Credit:© The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2023. Photo: Perry Ogden
Louise Bourgeois’s studio and apartment in New York City, now also open to the public, is home to an organised clutter of sketches, photographs and books
Credit:Nicholas Alcott
As the cases of Mantegna and Bourgeois show, artists themselves have often taken an active role in this myth‑making. Their auto‑enshrinement is no idle narcissism – on the contrary, it has a very real material purpose. If, as seems likely, Mantegna’s workshop was incorporated into his temple‑house, its aura would have been extended to the manual labour of the artist, too, and not just to his intellectual labour as a freshly minted humanist scholar. This was an attempt – a precarious one since, when he ran out of money, the house reverted to his patron – to raise the previously denigrated status of artistic labour. As such, it had implications for labour as a whole that are still unfurling today.
The spiritual nobility embodied in – and constructed by – Mantegna’s house would eventually lead to real aristocracy. Peter Paul Rubens, who was comfortable conversing with princes in his second job as a diplomat, was knighted by both the Spanish and the British crowns. He added a new studio wing to his house in Antwerp between 1616 and 1621 and, while from the street the ensemble appears relatively sober, once through the modest gate, a magnificent courtyard is revealed, complete with a triumphal arch. Behind the richly ornamented facade of the new wing, the double‑height studio was tall enough to fit the enormous canvases his workshop produced for his international clientele. The factory has become a palace.
‘The artist myth has played the ideological and economic role of acculturating workers to precarious, self‑reliant labour’
The 19th century bristled with Malerfürsten, painter‑princes; these were ripples produced by the sinking of the feudal elite, who needed mythmakers just as much as the latter needed their patronage. In 1860, for instance, Rosa Bonheur bought a chateau at Fontainebleau, where she was given the légion d’honneur by Napoleon III – the first female artist to receive the honour. In Munich, the Wittelsbach family were inveterate ennoblers of artists, among them Franz von Lenbach and Franz von Stuck. Lenbach’s ornament‑filled palazzo, completed in 1890, occupies a site just behind the Propylaea and the Glyptothek, positing the home of the artist as integral to the state’s neoclassical scenography. In 1898, the younger Stuck completed his own, widely celebrated villa, a classicising cube that maintained the propriety of the Bavarian capital – but the interiors veered quite wildly from this script. Stuck’s scheme matched stark simplicity of form with rich and gloomy colours, so that the studio no longer resembled a warehouse for the junk of history but rather a temple. In his studio he erected an altar, but to what? Topped by his own painting titled Sin, the structure concealed a changing room for his models. This domestic unconventionality was matched by Stuck’s co‑founding of the Munich Secession, which broke away from the official networks of patronage (dominated by Lenbach) to seek new customers for this new art.
At Rubenshuis in Antwerp, the ancillary, public‑facing functions of the museum – café, reading room, archive and visitor centre – will soon dwarf the house in which Peter Paul Rubens lived, as seen in Robbrecht en Daem Architecten’s forthcoming plans
Credit:Robbrecht en Daem architecten
Customers are not the only audiences being addressed here, however. Artists have long used their homes to cultivate various publics, whether by inviting in the cameras, opening their doors to tourists (a long‑standing tradition), or hosting receptions. The painter Hans Makart was famous for the parties he threw in his vast Viennese atelier, where he also had his home. In 1872, a prince gave him a former foundry – possibly the first industrial building to be adopted by an artist – which Makart crammed to the rafters with tapestries, artworks, ferns, suits of armour and heavy furniture. These were props for his paintings and also for his public persona. The artist also held regular open hours and Makartstil seeped out along the Ringstraße, not just via the spectacular events he directed there but also into the parlours of the enraptured bourgeoisie, who imitated his decor.
Here we encounter a more recent function of the artist myth, one that grew out of the desire to persuade noble clients of their exalted status. The resulting nimbus attracted broader interest in artists and their houses, the endurance of which can be confirmed by picking up magazines such as World of Interiors, where such dwellings are a mainstay. This public appeal derives from their being seen as exemplary figures: artists embody the acme of individuation and so their homes must – like their works – realise that cherished and elusive goal, the authentic expression of the fully formed personality. This is no misconception: thanks to the economic status of the artist, it was a more or less explicit programme. The artist became a sole author, whose name guaranteed the plenitude of spirit that had been poured into the work – and, of course, its value. The house also bears this signature: as a visitor to Lenbach’s villa remarked, ‘It is no everyday space. No everyday person inhabits it.’
It can be speculated that the artist myth, of which the house is an integral part, ‘sets up models’ (as Kris put it) for the modern notion of the individual. Jacob Burckhardt stated in his famous 1860 work on the Renaissance that the period had given birth to the individual; this claim has been rejected but, while Burckhardt was looking for the origin of a type that he takes to be ontologically existent, the idea that a certain concept of individuality developed in the Renaissance – and certainly in Burckhardt’s 1860 account of it – remains persuasive. Artists have been important models for this notion, which has taken on a new significance in recent decades. Their self‑realisation and creative, self‑directed labour – however much this autonomy is in itself a fiction – has proven congruent, salutary, possibly even formational for the neoliberal model of subjectivity, and more specifically for a particular segment of contemporary society. Here I refer to the growth of the ‘creative class’, as it is often known, which has been so critical to the development of post‑industrial cities.
The artist’s house has often played a public role in western art history. In his lavishly decorated home and studio, Austrian painter Hans Makart entertained prospective clients andhosted salons
Credit:© NPL ‑ DeA Picture Library / Bridgeman
Artists’ homes havelong been revered asrepresentations of individuals’ creative processes. At Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner’s house in East Hampton, NY, the paint‑splattered studio floor is a palimpsest of action paintings past
Credit:© Jeff Heatley
The part that the artist and the artist’s house has played in this development is now long established. In her 1982 book on Loft Living, Sharon Zukin states that this phenomenon ‘gave the coup de grâce to the old manufacturing base of cities like New York and brought on the final stage of their transformation into service‑sector capitals’. Martha Rosler made a direct analogy between this process and activity in the atelier: ‘When abstract expressionists explored the terrain of the canvas and Pollock created something of a disorientation map by putting his unstretched canvases on the floor, few observers and doubtless fewer painters would have acknowledged a relationship between their concerns and real estate.’
Beyond revaluing previously degraded inner‑city real estate, the artist myth has played the ideological and economic role of acculturating workers to the post‑Fordist condition of ‘creative’ labour: precarious, self‑reliant, atomised, ‘freed’ from the constraints (and benefits) of contractual employment. Within this framework, the image of the artist’s studio‑house re‑enchants the home office as creative laboratory – this cramped situation, for which we must assume total personal responsibility (including costs), is not a return to some proto‑industrial putting‑out system, we are assured, but rather a magical atelier gilded by the light of inspiration. This process was accelerated by the ‘gig economy’, the concomitant boom in co‑working spaces and, finally, the pandemic. While these trends have recently met with a degree of reaction, reflecting competing interests within capital (real estate versus venture capital, for instance), it seems unlikely that they have been arrested.
‘The artist myth, of which the house is an integral part, sets up models for the modern notion of the individual’
The place of the artist’s house within this transition can be illustrated by Mary Beth Edelson’s loft in Manhattan’s SoHo. Edelson, an until recently neglected pioneer of feminist art, first moved to the former industrial neighbourhood in 1975. Her studio was a focal point for a nascent movement: in 1979 she threw a party welcoming Ana Mendieta to New York, at which the guests came dressed as their favourite artists – Mendieta wore a Frida Kahlo costume, Louise Bourgeois came as herself – thereby inserting themselves into a female canon then under construction. When Edelson moved out in 2018, the loft was sold, SoHo having become prime real estate in the interim, but before it was dismantled her workspace was documented by Google. It can now be explored virtually on a page headed by the artist’s words: ‘If you want to get anything done, form a group.’ The recording of this space by the internet behemoth, and its simultaneous transformation from a site of vital communal activity to an image ‘traversable’ from the privacy of our own homes, seems an apt parallel to the fate of SoHo itself, now thoroughly commercialised and a centre of the ‘creative industries’.
Few artists have the chance to commission an architect to design their house and studio, let alone design a building for themselves. In 2000, Polish artist Paweł Althamer made his apartment block in the Bródno neighbourhood of Warsaw a communal canvas, creating Bródno 2000, a half‑hour installation involving the participation of around 200 neighbours
Credit:Courtesy Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw
Ironically, Edelson’s loft had been part of an artist co‑operative set up to protect the neighbourhood from destruction. In 1966, Fluxus founder George Maciunas, who was also a qualified architect, began using grant money to buy up disused industrial buildings, converting them into artist’s lofts and setting up the Fluxhouse Cooperatives to manage them. He thereby joined the ranks of activists working to prevent Robert Moses’s planned Lower Manhattan Expressway, which would have demolished many of the area’s historic cast‑iron buildings. This story is well known, with Jane Jacobs rightly taking a starring role, but Maciunas’s weaponisation of the artist’s studio‑dwelling struck the decisive blow. This weaponisation was literal: constantly under threat of arrest due to various building code violations, Maciunas turned his own loft into what he called a ‘Flux‑fortress … for keeping away the marshals and police: various unbreakable doors with giant cutting blades facing out, reinforced with steel pipe, braces, camouflaged doors, dummy and trick doors and ceiling hatches, filled or backed with white powder, liquids, smelly extracts’. However, these measures were not enough. In 1975, Maciunas was brutally attacked in his loft, which resulted in the loss of sight in one eye (Edelson, who was living next door, intervened, possibly saving his life); he left New York shortly afterwards. SoHo was saved from redevelopment only to be hollowed out by gentrification.
Despite its unintended consequences, and however temporary it was, the space that Maciunas carved out of the city with Fluxhouse was nevertheless of real material benefit to the artists who lived and worked there. Furthermore, in its collective nature it gives the lie to the ideology of individuality attached to and produced by the myth of the artist, reminding us that works emerge out of complex networks, whether co‑operatively or antagonistically. Indeed, artists have frequently come together as communities, such as in Montparnasse, where the sculptor Alfred Boucher cobbled together a block of studios using a structure built by Eiffel for the 1900 exposition. Known as La Ruche, ‘the beehive’, because of its cylindrical form and tiny cells, it was intended to support the impecunious younger generation. It was probably the most successful venture of its type in history: among the many famous artists who worked and illegally lived there can be counted Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger, Jean Arp and André Masson. A more recent example can be furnished by the communal spaces of the House for Artists designed by architects Apparata at Barking (AR September 2023). But, even when it is not part of a physical community, as the examples discussed here show, the artist’s house is a curious, semi‑public space. The salons artists host, the parties, the constant visits, even the appeal to broader publics via the media, all highlight the fact that however much we identify the house with the sole genius, art is made collectively by the groups in which the artist moves, by the students in the atelier, and by the person sweeping the shavings off the floor at the end of the day.
Althamer’s childhood in Bródno continues to inspire, informing his scenography for filmmaker Jacek Taszakowski’s animated film Mezalia
Credit:© Pawel Althamer and Jacek Taszakowsk. Courtesy the artist, neugerriemschneider, Berlin and Foskal Gallery, Warsaw