Can Artists Teach Us How to Live in Our Homes Again?

I’ve ordered a few books about home over the past year, an effort to get lost in the lives of others and also to build out my coffee table’s coffee-table book collection. But none brought me more joy than a slim book that isn’t for the coffee table at all and had no actual photos of spaces, Artists in Residence, written by Melissa Wyse and illustrated by Kate Lewis

Lewis renders the homes of 17 artists, from Hassan Hajjaj to Georgia O’Keeffe, in bright watercolor, while Wyse describes their relationship to their spaces, especially when it comes to their work. Hajjaj played with the public and private, opening his tearoom in Morocco to visitors as if it were a museum. Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant redefined their shared domesticity with an effort to take interiors seriously, and painted murals or little motifs to highlight a place’s architecture. Clementine Hunter cocooned her home in patterned wallpaper, putting it not just on the walls but on the ceiling too, giving the area a sense of warmth and color mirrored in her work. 

Wyse and Lewis’s book was all set and delivered to the publisher prior to the pandemic, which is a blessing. It contains no hand-wringing over what it all means to be situated in place for a prolonged period of time, and it can live as a piece separate from the pandemic, yet enriched by it. 

So leave the hand-wringing to me. This time last year we were thinking, “Two weeks at home.” If everybody laid low for a mere two weeks, we could snuff the thing out. Just two weeks in our homes. One year later we can laugh to keep from crying at the naïveté.

It was also this week last year that somebody tweeted about Shakespeare writing King Lear, a sentiment meant to inspire that only depressed. Write King Lear? In all this [gestures wildly]? But one thing that myself and so many others were  able to do while not writing King Lear II was decorate to keep from despairing. “Decorating” is maybe too thin a word for what we’re actually doing when we’re moving furniture from here to there or upcycling some sidewalk find or delighting in a new set of shelves and all that lives on them. 

A hallmark of the last year has been relying on one’s home to serve all aspects of one’s life—social, familial, and work, if one was lucky. Gym, studio, and a place to rest one’s head, if one were very lucky. Maybe Artists in Residence was such an attractive read right now because it injects urgency and understanding into not just making one’s home livable, but making it serve one’s own creativity. The home was felt more starkly important this year than most, and the artists in the book treated it so throughout their lives. 

Pandemic-era home makeovers are a natural impulse for a populace staring at the same four walls every day—a practice in controlling one’s environment during a chaotic time. I’ve read about this effort to improve functionality, chase novelty, and to a lesser extent, grab at control to explain, say, the country’s wood shortage or why everyone is buying a used couch. 

But what if we could remember a time before, or look to a time after, a time when our home is allowed to be more than that? What if we finally were afforded some time to develop a perspective on the place we spend most of our lives?  

Lewis, who when we spoke was living with her family in a short-term rental while renovating her Tennessee home, was especially lucky to have done the mental exercise of the book prepandemic and pre-move. She looked especially to Henri Matisse, Louise Bourgeois, and O’Keeffe to conceptualize her new space as an integrated one. “Matisse didn’t, especially in his later life, separate his studio from his house, from his living space,” Lewis told me. “And the same with Louise Bourgeois. Her whole home was her studio. And what I am trying to do in our new home…is to make our whole home a space for creativity, to have, you know, little tabletops here and there where we can all explore, where the kids can bring in things from outside and make an arrangement that’s a work of art or play with things throughout the home, not just in my studio.”

Lewis was also struck by how Bourgeois removed her stove from her kitchen. “She didn’t need it, so she just got rid of it. So thinking about things in our homes that we have just because that’s the way it’s always been” and “not worrying about what other people think and what’s out there on Instagram that we think we need in our home, just doing it for ourselves and our families and for our visitors.” 

In the end, there is no one good way to make a home, but there are many ways to make a good home.

The pandemic has been a crisis of death and overwhelmed caregivers both inside the hospitals and out, but it’s also a crisis of home. Homelessness and housing insecurity were trenchant problems prior, and despite a ban on evictions, which President Joe Biden extended to the end of this month, put those already suffering in more precarious situations. There are places across the U.S. where evictions continued despite the ban, and regardless, eventually the bill for back rent and all the rest will come.

In some ways writing a slim book on how artists approached their life at home, and finding it rich and varied and secure and whole more often than not, is a testament in 17 acts to how foundational security is for making anything at all. I think especially of the house Diego Rivera built next door, but apart from his own, for Frida Kahlo, and forgetting—or ignoring—the need to design it with accessibility. “The arrangement better suited Rivera. Kahlo didn’t like the architectural remove it created between her and her husband” and “the house’s multiple staircases were painful for her to navigate. She never felt at home there.”  

Wyse acknowledged that living situations are in flux (as she knew intimately. When we spoke, she videoconferenced from a hotel down the road from her hospital, having just given birth to her first child.) “It is hard to make art when you don’t have means and when you’re struggling financially,” Wyse said. “It’s distracting and difficult. The myth of a starving artist, as if starvation is somehow helpful to art, is harmful. And I think we need to, as a culture, look at how we can more fully support people in doing this important work.” 

But the author also points toward moments where creation happens alongside fluctuating living environments, as with Vincent van Gogh, who spent time in an asylum, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, who essentially crashed with friends until he found success. Hunter, too, had a “relationship with her home that was very fraught. [Her house] was owned by her employer under very, very problematic circumstances of the Jim Crow South. And it wasn’t until she was in her 90s that she was able to buy her first house trailer and her first piece of property in which to park it.”

As a brand-new mother, she’s thinking especially about Matisse “as a father and as a grandfather and how deeply loving he was and how fully he included his children and his creative life…. They were all a part of his studio. They were all a part of his creative life.” 

I haven’t accomplished much during my first pandemic. I read a paltry number of books. I didn’t manage to paint or draw or write anything more than what’s required for my work.  Sorry to King Lear II, may it one day exist. I stayed healthy and pretty much inside, which feels like the most one should be asked to do, and while inside, I started to really make it mine. It doesn’t feed my creativity yet, I don’t think, but the work of fixing it up might have stood in for my creativity in the last year. When we begin to go elsewhere in earnest, and get a little distance from this place, mentally and physically, I hope it will become a little of what it was for Bell and Grant or Matisse or Bourgeois or Hajjaj for me and for those I invite into it. 

— Why Kensington Palace Just Can’t Let Go of Meghan Markle
— On With the Show! See the 2021 Hollywood Portfolio
— In Conversation: Roxane Gay and Monica Lewinsky on Trauma
— Reply All’s Implosion Reveals the Limits of One-Sided Internet Relationships
— Harry and Meghan Have “No Regrets” as Royal Exit Becomes Official
— Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen on Their Friendship’s Origins
— Proust Questionnaire: Watch Michael B. Jordan Answer Personality-Revealing Questions
— Can This Photographer Save Beirut’s Architectural Treasures?
— Seven Fashion Brands to Shop for a Fresh Start This Spring
— From the Archive: How Tobacco Heiress Doris Duke Got Away With Murder
— Not a subscriber? Join Vanity Fair to receive full access to VF.com and the complete online archive now.