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Reviewed by:
  • Transnational Perspectives on Artists' Lives ed. by Marleen Rensen and Christopher Wiley
  • Julie Codell (bio)
Transnational Perspectives on Artists' Lives Marleen Rensen and Christopher Wiley, editors Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, xv + 276 pp. ISBN 9783030451998, $119.99 hardcover. Palgrave Studies in Life Writing.

In Transnational Perspectives on Artists' Lives, part of the Palgrave Studies in Life Writing series, contributors explore various perspectives on transnational artists' lives to reconsider how artists have been identified with nations and to examine international influences across cultural differences. In particular, the contributions focus on transnational identities in artists' careers and life writings, biographers' treatment of their subjects' transnationality, and transnational artists' lives as represented in fiction. This wide-ranging approach is useful in offering scholars paths to follow, including not only how to resurrect artists of the past but also how to reimagine their lives in experimental ways through biofiction, which the editors define as "a hybrid genre, merging biography and fiction" (5). However, biofiction often contains less biographical fact than one might expect, as recent studies of biopics have shown (Epstein and Palmer; Brown and Vidal). Genre convention and format invariably overtake the history, making the editors' claims for merging biography and fiction rather dubious—and it brings to mind the "based on a true story" phrase that appears in so many films these days.

Both biographies and biofictions are popular with readers, and several definitions of transnational arise out of the juxtaposition of these contributors' perspectives. One definition applies to artists (and the contributors embrace all the arts here) who move across borders, writing their own lives or becoming the subject of biographies. Another meaning embraces a transnationalism that extends across [End Page 412] time: for instance, writing in the twenty-first century from the US about an artist who lived in fifteenth-century Italy through a kind of time traveling. A third meaning refers to an entirely fictional artist, such as Virginia Woolf's Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse. Another meaning is the international reputations of artists that often develop out of commissions and the artists' own contacts with patrons.

In their introduction, Rensen and Wiley raise other issues as well: the poststructuralist view of authorship; increasing attention to social and historical conditions of art production; the varied and growing field of life writing, which embraces narratives from and about a wide range of individuals, especially marginalized groups and individuals whose lives have not been represented previously; theories of feminism and postcolonial studies; and the global turn in humanities disciplines, with its current focus on mobility, travel, and cross-cultural exchanges, rather than on treating individual lives as representative of national identities. All of these topics intersect and have bearing on the book's themes.

The contributors tackle the very issue of writing biographies by asking how authors write about a subject's otherness, an artist's cultural encounters, and the study of the circulations of art (extended now by digitization). The editors describe two goals of the book: first, to explore practices in writing and studying transnational biographies and artists' transnational lives, and second, to study fictional representations of artists' transnational lives derived from artists' global reputations, time traveling between writer and biofictional artist subject, and the constructions of "cultural, social, racial, gender or artistic identity" (13). The collection contributors come from a variety of disciplines—lifewriting studies, history, literature, music, and visual art—to consider biographical subjects from around the globe.

In Part I, contributors explore biographical methods and practices regarding transnational subjects who exist "between nations and cultures" (13): Maryam Thirriard on Harold Nicolson's The Development of English Biography (1927); Suzanne Bode on the relationship between early twentieth-century Expressionist Gabriele Münter, othered by her husband's biography of her, and Wassily Kandinsky; Samantha Niederman's study of New Zealand expatriate artist Frances Hodgkins (1869–1947), who lived in Britain but was not included in British modernist art histories and was denigrated in her homeland; and Marc Röntsch's study of composer Christopher James (1952–2008), who identified with several nationalities—British, Rhodesian (modern Zimbabwean), and South African. All of these subjects fell through national identity cracks, not fitting into one national identity, but...

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