The Lives of the Muses: Nine Women & the Artists They Inspired

Well, reading this showed me that I like Francine Prose's...prose...her wit, her insight, and her attitude. So that's good. But the subject matter just made me uncomfortable most of the time. I find I don't want to know about the often icky relationships between artists and their "muses"...usually male artists and female muses who seem more servants than inspiration, at least in this collection. The exceptions, women who struck out on their own (photojournalist Lee Miller is the most notable example) or were actual collaborators in the artistic process (ballerina Suzanne Farrell, who worked so closely with George Balanchine that neither could have produced their masterpieces without the other) are truly interesting. In several show more instances, however, I found knowing what was going on behind the scenes absolutely spoiled my appreciation for some of the resulting creations. Most of these pairings were temporary, based on questionable sexual dynamics and doomed to failure, serving neither artist, muse, nor Art in the long run. I confess to skimming or abandoning at least 3 of the sections, and to finishing a couple more only because the writing is that good.
May 2020 show less

Francine Prose covers the lives of nine muses; the women who inspired creativity and passion in their artists. Prose's introduction sums up the impetus behind the book saying, "The desire to explore the mystery of inspiration, to determine who or what is the "moving cause" of art, resembles the impulse to find out a magician's secrets" (page 2). Prose begins Lives of the Muses with Hester Thrale. Despite being a married woman, her influence on Dr. Samuel Johnson was profound. Prose then moves on to such well known muses as Alice Liddell, Gala Dali, Lee Miller and of course, Yoko Ono. She also includes lesser known muses (to me, at least) such as Elizabeth Siddal, Lou Andreas Salome and Suzanne Farrell. The residual appreciation I show more gleaned from reading Lives of the Muses was an education in Rossetti and Miller's art. I couldn't read another word without looking up such pieces as Awakening Conscience, Found, Remington Silent and Night and Day, respectively. Attaching the visual to the imagination was a bonus, especially when it came to Dali's over-the-top creativity and strangeness. The only aspect of Lives of the Muses I found detracting was the myriad of speculative opinions Prose insisted on voicing. show less

Francine Prose has done a very good job of joining together the lives of a disperate group of women who all have in common that they have inspired artists (of different mediums) throughout the years. More than just a biography of these fascinating women, Prose does an excellent job of analysing the place of the muse, never getting too heavy or dipping into psychobabble, yet sill giving depth to an often overlooked part of many artistic processes.
What is most striking about most of these women is how their own accomplishments - sometimes quite substantial, as in Lee Miller's case - were forever relegated to second place behind being a muse for a 'great man'.

This examination of the effects nine women had on the creative men in their lives does not portray the women as some sort of idealized goddesses that their men worshipped and created for. The women all had their own individual talent and Prose shows how each woman's particular strength influened the artist(s) around her. I found myself pursuing additional biographies and printed works about or by the women in question.

Hester Thrale and Samuel Johnson, Alice Liddell and Lewis Carroll, Elizabeth Siddal and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Andreas-Salome and Nietzsche, Rilke and Freud, Gala Dali and Salvador Dali, Lee Miller and Man Ray, Charis Weston and Edward Weston, Suzanne Farrell and Balanchine, Yoko Ono and John Lennon: some of these arrangements were really strange, but they all worked to the benefit of art and intellect. Even though a little bit repetitive in places, this book had enough bite to be interesting.

This books serves as a fine introduction to the artist/muse concept, but Prose sacrifices a lot of page space to repetition, even though the ideas she explores would benefit from further investigation. Each section recycles ideas from earlier chapters, which would be helpful if she had taken her theories deeper each time, but instead she simply repeats herself... I feel like a strict editor could have been very helpful.

In the book, Francine Prose has chosen to write about nine muses throughout the late 19th and 20th century’s. Women such as Gala Dali, Suzanne Farrell, Yoko Ono and Lou Andreas-Salome are presented in a haphazard examination of the years they spent with the artists who found them to be inspirational. In some cases the reader is plopped into a muses life at the time of meeting her artist then suddenly taken back to her childhood, back to her artist, only to time travel to her death or divorce and finally back to her life with the artist. This style proved to be very uneven and perplexing. Thus, I rarely felt any connection to either the artist or his muse and their attributes were often one dimensional.
This collection does, however, show more supply some interesting information on Charles Dodgson and Salvadore Dali, information which was new to me but maybe known to others.
After, finally, completing The Lives of the Muses I realized why I began this book so many years ago and put it aside. For one, the writing is as dry as my skin in January. Secondly, in some cases, I simply can’t understand why these pairs were chosen when so little was accomplished by the artist during their moment with their muse. Either their best work was behind them or to come, in which case the muse was sometimes given credit. show less