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FIVE BEST
The Artistic Temperament
The five novels that best capture it.

BY ERIC GIBSON
Saturday, April 29, 2006 12:01 a.m.

1. "The Unknown Masterpiece" by Honoré de Balzac (1831).

Artists generally fare poorly in fiction, too often caricatured as drunken libertines who only occasionally pick up a brush. By contrast, Balzac's novella (like the other books I list here) gives us the artist as a flesh-and-blood figure, deepening our appreciation of the way artists really think and act. In "The Unknown Masterpiece," a revered 17th-century master named Frenhofer believes that he has invented a new style of painting with a work that also redefines female beauty. But when he shows the painting to two friends, they see only "colors daubed one on top of the other and contained by a mass of strange lines forming a wall of paint." Devastated, Frenhofer burns his entire output and dies of grief. Modern readers have interpreted this story as a parable about the visionary artist and his uncomprehending public.

2. "The Masterpiece" by Emile Zola (1886).

Claude Lantier, a modern painter in the mold of Manet and Monet, goes from putative leader of the Paris avant-garde to nonentity, a has-been who never was. Determined to bring off a career-making Big Picture, Lantier finds himself repeatedly blocked, whereupon he destroys his efforts in a rage. When he does manage to finish something and show it, the public laughs. Zola's harrowing tale of one man's self-destruction is also an unsparing portrait of what it can cost to be an artist. The author helps us to understand what Matisse's and Giacometti's lives would later confirm--that an artist in pursuit of his vision is in the grip of a force more powerful than himself.

3. "The Horse's Mouth" by Joyce Cary (Harper, 1944).

Cary's hilarious comic novel gives us one of the most engaging characters in all fiction: Gulley Jimson, true-believer artist and endearing scoundrel. Set in London in the 1930s and written as Jimson's memoir, the novel traces his attempts to recover, by fair means and foul, a trove of work he believes he was swindled out of by his ex-wife and a collector. Jimson is both a hard-headed realist and a starry-eyed idealist. He harbors no illusions about the place of artists in society ("They ought to be rolled down Primrose Hill in a barrel full of broken bottles once a week"). Yet he freely proclaims his genius, believing that if he can only get his hands on enough brushes and paint, all will be well. Beyond its wit and whimsy, the book vividly conveys the way that artists see the world in strictly aesthetic terms. To Jimson, the luminous white flesh of a woman's bare arm is "marble in the moon."

4. "The Midas Consequence" by Michael Ayrton (Doubleday, 1976).

Ayrton (1921-75) was a minor British artist but a gifted writer about art. In this novel, Capisco (a near-anagram of "Picasso") is an aging, surpassingly wealthy and famous artist living in the South of France. "Capo" is also a man unmoored by his success. Only sex has retained its pull. "He's had the rest of it for so long, the fame, the money, the admiration and they don't do anything for him anymore," Capo's latest wife blithely explains to one of his conquests. First published in Britain in 1974, "The Midas Consequence" was written as a roman ŕ clef about Picasso, who had just died. But in the decades since, as riches and celebrity have rained down on even young talent, the book has acquired wider relevance, as a cautionary tale.

5. "The Agony and the Ecstasy" by Irving Stone (Doubleday, 1961).

It has long been fashionable to dismiss this biographical novel about Michelangelo as so much commercial kitsch. Certainly the overwrought title doesn't help. Nor do the intermittently hokey passages of dialogue, such as when the adolescent Michelangelo, impatient to begin his life in sculpture, muses: "Just let them put a hammer and subbia in my hands and they will see the chips fly!" But how many potboilers explain an obscure subject like Neoplatonism, one of the philosophical underpinnings of the Renaissance worldview? Stone immersed himself in Michelangelo, even learning marble carving. Far from being hackwork, his book is a superb primer, through the medium of fiction, on an artist, a period and the creative process.

Mr. Gibson is the Journal's Leisure & Arts features editor.

Copyright © 2006 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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