The Vanitas & Other Tales of Art and Obsession
In settings ranging from the Rome of Caravaggio to the 19th-century Netherlands to near-modern London, this collection of short stories (plus the novella of the title) is dedicated ‘to all the suffering artists.’
But in these tales, it is not so much the artists who suffer, with the exception of the protagonist of ‘The Vanitas’, as those in their orbit, be it the young boy who takes Monet out in his fishing boat so that the artist can observe the sunrise, the gallery attendant who has an all-consuming but ultimately exploitative love affair with a (fictitious) winner of the Turner Prize, or Markus, corralled in a Vienna flat with paintings his father jealously guards, knowing they are the confiscated property of Austrian Jews.
Each story has its own distinctive voice, reflecting time and place. The story of two survivors of the Raft of the Medusa is particularly convincing in this regard: a young Géricault calls on them to help build a replica of the raft in a specially designed studio, but gradually the artist’s idea of truth diverges from the stark, squalid, humiliating squalor of what really happened off the coast of what was then French West Africa.
Appropriately, most of the stories in this collection are headed by illustrations by two credited artists, inspired by, but not versions of, the works of art on which the stories are centred. Kendall has a perceptive, wide-ranging and original eye, not only as a writer but in his observations of art itself and those who make it.
