The Artist
The Artist
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Lucy Steeds on The Artist
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
The art history she couldn’t write academicallyThe academic argument that great artists are permitted to be cruel to the people around them had been circulating in Steeds’s professional world for years. What she noticed was that the debate always ran in one direction, accounting only for what those artists produced, never for what their suppressed collaborators might have made.
I found that I wasn’t so interested in the argument of ‘think of all the art we’ve gained from these monsters’, but in ‘think of all the art we’ve lost’. I wanted to peer underneath these enormous figures and see who was hidden in their shadows.
Steeds had been reading about Vladimir Nabokov’s wife Véra, who handled much of the domestic and secretarial labor that freed her husband to write. The anecdote about her folding his umbrella and licking his stamps landed differently for Steeds than it does in most retellings of literary genius.
And my thoughts when I read that weren’t ‘Thank god, we have Lolita’. It was about what Véra Nabokov could have created had she not been folding umbrellas.
A second, more contemporary figure made the same point with a visual rather than literary example. Celia Paul had exhibited a substantial body of work before and after her relationship with Lucian Freud, yet Steeds recognized how completely one association had overwritten the other in public memory.
I thought of Celia Paul, a brilliant painter but whom we remember most for being the girlfriend of Lucian Freud, who treated her terribly.
The novel carries both of these real cases inside it without naming them: they supplied the engine, and the fiction let Steeds go further than a historical account could.
The most granular version of the invisible-labor argument sits inside the apparently simple image of a still life, the kind of painting that hangs in any major European museum with a single name on the plaque. Steeds asked what that plaque leaves out.
Who went to the market and bought the oranges? Who washed them? Who arranged them in the bowl? Who set the bowl on the table? Who cleaned the painter’s brushes?... All of that is uncredited, invisible labor. [paraphrased from audio]
How she wrote it
One year, twenty-seven drafts, and a third elementSteeds left her academic post, moved to Amsterdam, and set herself a fixed deadline. The time limit was not comfortable, but it was the only thing that stopped her turning her perfectionism into paralysis.
I am an inveterate polisher of commas, and could have tinkered with every metaphor and detail of my book forever. But having a deadline meant I had to propel myself onwards.
The practical method she developed in Amsterdam involved sitting in front of single paintings in the city’s museums for up to an hour and writing continuously, refusing to edit or look back. The aim was to bypass the analytical habits she had built up over years of writing about art for academic audiences.
The secret was to enter a painting through the senses, rather than analysing it with my brain.
The structural problem that stalled the novel longest was one of narration. Ettie, the book’s central figure and secret-keeper, could not tell the story alone without collapsing the mystery that drives it. The solution reorganized everything else.
The moment The Artist really gained momentum was when I realised I had to tell the story from two different perspectives. The novel alternates between Joseph and Ettie’s points of view, and this unlocked the story for me, because suddenly I had a third element: the gap between what each of them sees.
Every painting in the novel is invented, which meant Steeds was working without any visual anchor she could return to when a description grew vague. She also made a firm decision about vocabulary, drawing on her art-history training to know exactly which words to ban.
I very deliberately never used academic language in this book... I was very conscious, for example, to never use words like Surrealist, Cubist or Post-Impressionist to describe a painting, because if a reader doesn’t know what a Cubist painting looks like, it is a wasted word. I never wanted anyone to have to put the book down and Google something.
The prologue, set in the National Gallery in 1957, was an architectural decision, not an atmospheric one. Steeds drew on Alfred Hitchcock’s distinction between surprise (a bomb going off without warning) and suspense (knowing the bomb is already under the table) to explain what she needed readers to carry into the rest of the book.
I never wanted the question to be ‘what.’ I never wanted it to just be ‘what happens next?’ I wanted the question to be ‘how.’ ‘How do we get to this place at the beginning?’ [paraphrased from audio]
The twenty-seven distinct versions she worked through were largely experiments in sequencing: different orderings of the same material to test which arrangement made the suspense, rather than the surprise, dominant.
What she wants us to sit with
Who controls what we seeThe novel’s epigraph from John Berger, ‘We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice,’ is not decorative. Steeds chose it as a statement of the book’s structural logic: two characters observe the same situation and register entirely different things, and the reader is made to feel that gap rather than simply understand it.
As a reader, you only see what you look at, but I control what you’re looking at all the time. [paraphrased from audio]
The central question the novel poses is one Steeds arrived at through her years in archives and institutions, where attribution decisions determined whose name survived and whose work was absorbed into someone else’s legacy.
The book asks questions about who can create art, about what counts as creating art... Who is really the artist behind a work of art? And that is really a central question of ‘L’Artiste’. It is who is the artist? [paraphrased from audio]
For all its intellectual architecture, Steeds was firm that the novel had to work first as reading pleasure. The serious questions it carries are unreachable unless a reader stays in the pages long enough to encounter them.
Art in The Artist is never an intellectual pursuit; it’s an emotional one.