Making Art and Making a Living: Adventures in Funding a Creative Life

Currey (the Daily Rituals books) provides a diverting overview of how some of history’s most celebrated artists and authors supported themselves. He profiles entrepreneurs like Virginia and Leonard Woolf, who worked as journalists and operated their own printing press, and lucky beneficiaries of family money, among them French poet and critic Charles Baudelaire, whose profligate spending habits caused his mother to put his inheritance in a trust from which he received installments mostly upon guilt-tripping her. Some artists got by on odd jobs, like painter Grace Hartigan, who used a temp agency to find “work just enough to get through the next month.” Others embarked on careers that shaped their art; William Carlos Williams, a physician, gained a fuller understanding of the human condition from his interactions with patients, and writer Kathy Acker’s work in the sex industry influenced her transgressive writing. Currey enriches this look at how making art is inextricable from the messy practicalities of the real world with colorful details (American avant-garde composer John Cage originally foraged for mushrooms to supplement his meager diet, became an amateur mycologist, and taught a course on mushroom identification for cash), even if the profile-by-profile structure becomes repetitive. Still, it’s an intriguing accounting of the varied realities behind the starving artist myth. (Mar.)