Artists in Love

First-year students in Jenny Anger’s tutorial Artists in Love will explore personal relationships and the creative production of (mostly) 20th-century artistic couples.

“In Freudian theory,” Anger says, “’object-choice’ is the person or thing into which one invests psychic energy. Does your choice of romantic partner, an ‘object’ in this sense, affect the sort of art object you create?”

Students will explore how artist’s personal relationships did — or did not — affect the art they created, individually or together. Students will choose couples to investigate like Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, Wassily Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter, or Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.