Like the boot room at Anfield, or the unremarkable Detroit house that became Motown Records’ hit factory, the artist’s studio is where the magic happens. But the strange alchemy that turns mark-making into a spellbinding work of art is only the half of it. Sometimes, there is sex in the studio, too. The Dutch golden age painter Gerard de Lairesse hired two sisters as models in his home town of Liège, but did a runner in 1664 after locals discovered that he’d been having an affair with not one but both of them. And when there wasn’t sex, the studio might witness the crazed infatuation of an artist like the Austrian expressionist Oskar Kokoschka. He commissioned a lifesize doll modelled on his ex, Anna Mahler, and made more than 80 paintings, drawings and photographs of it in his workroom.
There could also be violence and death in the studio. The sculptor Bernini swung a crowbar at his brother Luigi in their workplace at St Peter’s, Rome, cracking several ribs, after discovering that Luigi was sleeping with his mistress. The early art historian Vasari wrote of Michelangelo, “He was constantly flaying dead bodies, in order to study the secrets of anatomy.” He got through at least 30 cadavers.
In art historian James Hall’s account, some artists would stand in baskets of wood shavings to keep their feet warm. They must ignore “odours of varnish and oils that make painters’ workrooms smell like a communal latrine”, as one 18th-century chronicler put it. Touching up his canvases at night, the Spanish master Goya stumbled around his gloomy studio with guttering candles attached to a rigid top hat, a risk to himself and the entire household. No, the artist in smock and beret who is serenely channelling his vision at the easel is untypical.
One of the few who could pull this off was the suave Peter Paul Rubens, a diplomat as well as the outstanding figure of the Flemish baroque. He multitasked beyond the dreams of any management how-to guide. In 1621, the physician to the king of Denmark happened to call in at the great man’s studio in Antwerp and found “the master was working on a canvas while listening to a reading of Tacitus and simultaneously dictating a letter”.
The studio wasn’t always a safe place for a female artist. The pioneering Artemisia Gentileschi grew up in Rome the daughter of a painter, and the family home served as her father’s workshop, with a steady traffic of models, colleagues and buyers. It was the scene of her rape by a fellow artist in 1611 when she was 17. In one of her most celebrated works, a dynamic and assertive self-portrait as the allegory of painting, “her studio is cell-like and windowless but, Caesar-style, she is crossing a cultural Rubicon”, says Hall.
For my money, the greatest studios in British art belonged to Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud. As well as their friendship, one thing the pair had in common was a spell at an English boarding school, which probably explains a lot. Black-and-white footage shows Bacon pottering about his midden of a studio like a hoarder being talked out from behind a stockade of junk. At one time, his nanny shared this space, sleeping on a table after a hard day’s shoplifting with her fully grown charge, as if in a riotous reimagining of the Jacob Rees-Mogg story. Freud’s atelier in Notting Hill, with its rolling bare boards, clots of paint on the walls and piles of soiled white rags, looks like the deck of a ship converted into a makeshift field hospital.
The Artist’s Studio describes how a noisome cockpit of lust, crime and virtuosity produced innovations in how art gets made, and by whom. To you, me and the estate agent, a studio is the most pinched accommodation going, but in Hall’s wide-ranging and drily entertaining survey, it has many mansions.
• The Artist’s Studio by James Hall is published by Thames & Hudson (£30). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
