Sarah's Books - Used & Rare

As a follow-up to re-reading The Selected Writings of John Marin, here is a list of first-person narratives by painters and artists.  These books form the core of my art library, and the list below doesn't even include coffee table art books, of which I have many (and many of my favorites contain interviews with the artists, but I have to draw the line somewhere here, or writing this list will become a day-long project).  Some of these I re-read every few years.  Others not so much, but they still contain seeds of genius and solid information about work habits and process, which can often feel like a life preserver tossed to the floundering and even drowning, if you get my drift.  I am just going to list titles here, the publication information is readily available online or by searching this very blog, since I have written about many of these books here over the years (search my blog by using that little search box in the upper left hand corner of this page - type in the name of the artist, or the book title).  This list is roughly in chronological order.  I would have liked to have been assigned some of these books to read, as an art major in college, but I'm glad I had the wherewithal to seek them out on my own, so, you know, no hard feelings.  Water under the bridge and all that.
;O)

I've put an asterisk after the books that mean worlds to me.

Ancient history (so to speak):

On Painting - Leon Battista Alberti
The Lives of the Artists - Giorgio Vasari

Eighteenth-nineteenth century:

Sir Thomas Lawrence's Letter-Bag
Memoirs of Madame Vigée Le Brun
Memoirs of the Life of John Constable*
The Journal of Eugene Delacroix
Noa Noa - Paul Gaugin
The Letters of Vincent van Gogh*
An American Artist in the South Seas - John LaFarge
The Recollections of John Ferguson Weir 1869-1913
The Life and Letters of J. Alden Weir
The Digressions of V. - Elihu Vedder
Drawn from Memory - Ernest H. Shepard
Winslow Homer at Prout's Neck - Philip C. Beam
Letters - Paul Cezanne

Twentieth century:

John Sloan's New York Scene 1906-1913*
The Art Spirit - Robert Henri*
Hawthorne on Painting - Charles W. Hawthorne*
The Wyeths: The Letters of N.C. Wyeth 1901-1945*
Concerning the Spiritual in Art - Wassily Kandinski
Somehow a Past: The Autobiography of Marsden Hartley
Eight Poems and an Essay - Marsden Hartley
My Dear Stieglitz: Letters of Marsden Hartley and Alfred Stieglitz 1912-1915
My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz Volume One 1915-1933*
A Woman on Paper: Georgia O'Keeffe - Anita Pollitzer
The Selected Writings of John Marin*
My Life - Marc Chagall
Background with Figures - Cecilia Beaux
Hundreds and Thousands: The Journals of Emily Carr*
Frederick J. Waugh: American Marine Painter - George R. Havens
The Journals of Grace Hartigan 1951-1955
Material Witness: The Selected Letters of Fairfield Porter
Art in its Own Terms: Selected Criticism 1935-1975 - Fairfield Porter*
The Party's Over Now - John Gruen
Two Worlds of Andrew Wyeth: Kuerners and Olsons*
Dawns & Dusks - Louise Nevelson*
The Sound of Sleat: A Painter's Life - Jon Schueler
Art & Soul - Audrey Flack
The Philosophy of Andy Warhol*
The Andy Warhol Diaries*
What Did I Do?  The Unauthorized Autobiography of Larry Rivers
Joseph Cornell's Theater of the Mind: Selected Diaries, Letters, and Files
Daybook - Anne Truitt
Agnes Martin: Writings*
The Time of My Life - Emily Muir
Chuck Reducks: Drawing from the Fun Side of Life - Chuck Jones
Peanuts: A Golden Celebration - Charles M. Schulz

A few books in this list do not have much first-person writing by the artist in question, because there isn't much available, but what little there is, is here (for example, a few known letters from Winslow Homer, or brief sections of the book about marine painting that Frederick J. Waugh never published himself), and I have found even those little bits to be valuable, so I include them.  I didn't include books I know about but don't have, or have but haven't yet read.  Rockwell Kent, for example - I love many of his paintings but have not read his books.  And Marie Bashkirtseff, I have her Journal but there it sits on the shelf.  And Love Locked Out: The Memoirs of Anna Lea Merritt, ditto.  The Letters & Journals of Paula Modersohn-Becker, ditto ditto.  I did include Charles M. Schulz, because in this particular book he explains some of the real-life stuff behind specific story lines in his comic strips - and the same with Chuck Jones and his genius animation sequences.

One more book I must tell you about, since I've turned to it often over the years as a great browsing book:  Painters on Painting - selected and edited by Eric Protter and published by Dover.  A chronological list of samples of known historical documents written by painters in their own words, and in a few cases by friends or historians if no known documents exist, from Giotto, Fra Angelico, Ucello, Bottielli, Leonardo da Vinci (oh, I forgot to mention that I also have a huge reprint of his Diaries, but I haven't yet read a word), Titian, etc., up through history to some of the moderns of the twentieth century.  Short entries, this isn't a huge book, but I love its scope and interesting bits and pieces.  God bless Dover books, for this book in particular, and also for just being generally awesome. 

I would also like to mention, so I will, a great series of reprints of old art books, called The Library of American Art, published in the 1960s by Kennedy Galleries, Inc., in New York, and Da Capo Press.  I have four volumes so far and would like to find more.  All are reprints of scarce nineteenth-century art books about American painters.  I am about to start reading one of these - The Domestic and Artistic Life of John Singleton Copley by Martha Babcock Amory.  Originally published in Boston in 1882, the reprint I have is from 1969 and contains many of Copley's letters, along with letters from his family, during his education and travels to England and Italy as a student and then as a working painter.  I thought this would be a great follow-up to continue reading about colonial and federal America, after finishing the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin last week.  I'll let you know how it goes. 

A few more items of interest that I know about and want to read, sometime soon - the Keith Haring Journals, Gerhard Richter's Writings 1961-2007, and Nell Blaine's Diaries (her papers are at Harvard and I've heard that her diaries are wonderful, but will if they ever be published? I do not know, so if anyone else does, please tell me).  If anyone has titles to add to this list, especially published diaries of artists, please comment.  You know I am always starving for good books...

I see I haven't even mentioned biographies of artists, or art instruction books, besides the classics by Henri and Hawthorne above, or any the great art blogs out there at this very moment, and omg youtube videos, painters' diaries unfolding before our eyes.  Well, I'll have to save all  that for another day.