ABSTRACT
The nature of the ‘artist’ has been a central preoccupation of art history writing from the inauguration of the western art-historical tradition in Vasari’s The Lives of the Artists. Vasari sought to codify a new image of the artist as at once intellectually qualified master of design and divinely inspired original creator. This image of the artist was reformulated in the Romantic period, laying emphasis on creativity at the expense of academic rules and theory (Honour 1979, 245-76; Wolff 1987). It underlies the privileged status of the artist enshrined in the laws of droit moral which protect the position of artists in the modern art market (Fyfe 1985, 1986, Harris 1970, Moulin 1983). The idea of the artist as creator, the ultimate source and origin of the meaning of all his or her works of art, is a major determinant both of academic art-historical practice, in which the monograph on an individual artist remains the dominant scholarly genre, and of representations of the artist within public and popular culture, whether in films about artists or in blockbuster exhibitions on cultural heroes such as Monet (Pollock 1983, Barker et al. 1999).
