Being and Making

Several things that I've seen/read lately have been leading me to ask myself the question: how much does the artist's personality bring to their work? Is it unfair to take an artists' personality and biography into account in the judgment of a work? It's also a question I'd like to ask you guys because I am of two minds about this.

On one hand I feel that all that matters is the work itself and the work has a right to be examined along fair, relatively objective standards that don't involve the artists' biography. Because after all, why would a given artist's life even be significant to you, were it not for the work they were producing, anyway? I tend to believe, sometime against my more rational judgment, in the role of the personal in shaping artists' work because what a person does in their life, how they carry themselves in the world has a great influence on the kind of art that people produce.

Two vastly different people come to mind as example of the role the personal plays out in art. The first person that comes to mind is the painter Mark Rothko. Rothko was, by all accounts, a bitter alcoholic locked in his studio for most of his life, but in the presence of his paintings, I think it's possible to feel closer to the sublime. Would the at once vast and claustrophobic color blocks of Rothko's paintings be possible had he lead a more sociable, well-adjusted life?

The second example is the short story writer and poet Grace Paley comes to mind for me in this internal debate with myself. Besides being a writer, Paley was a passionate anti-war and civil rights activist since the 1960's, teacher, founder of the Teachers and Writers Collaborative (which is by the way, one of the few teaching resources companies that publishes intelligent, thoughtful, and relevant books about teaching creative writing–believe me, the rest is pretty much crap) as well as a dedicated mother of two. It's difficult to read her work, so inflected with empathy and a deep understanding of the daily struggles of life, and not think about Grace Paley, the person.

Incidentally, Paley was not such a prolific writer, though the work that she did produce was stunning. When I think of her small literary output I don't think of it as a short coming, I think, "Grace Paley was probably very busy being in the world and had she not been, perhaps, her stories wouldn't have been so excellent."

Is this too narrow a way of looking at an artist's work?