Made-up tales about artists and their works

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LIFE STUDIES

By Susan Vreeland

Viking, $24.95, 304 pages

REVIEWED BY KELLY JANE TORRANCE

"Artist fiction" has become immensely popular the last few years. With Americans hungry for reality in other forms of entertainment, authors have been quick to provide it in fiction, too. Books like Tracy Chevalier's "Girl with a Pearl Earring" (made into a film) and Susan Vreeland's "Girl in Hyacinth Blue," both about the 17th-century Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer, easily became bestsellers.

Men also got in on the action -- Will Davenport's "The Painter" imagined Rembrandt's "lost" year. By now, it seems a tired, overworked genre. Which makes Susan Vreeland's new short story collection all the more surprising. Ms. Vreeland is certainly no stranger to the field. Besides "Girl in Hyacinth Blue," she has found success with "The Passion of Artemisia," about post-Renaissance painter Artemisia Gentileschi, and "The Forest Lover," about Canadian artist Emily Carr.

The first eight stories "Life Studies" involve 19th-century artists, mostly Impressionists, and are based on her research into their lives and loves -- many of the words coming out of those artists' mouths they actually said, although not always in the contexts Ms. Vreeland places them. The other 10 stories are almost all set in the present day, and take for their subject the effect that art can have on our lives.

In this collection, Ms. Vreeland moves beyond her previous work of tales centered on the artists themselves to give us a fuller picture of art's power to make us love, hate, comprehend, and break out of our often small lives. In an Afterword, Ms. Vreeland even gives citations for many of her quotations and situations. And on just the first page, there are so many references that one thinks she did not want to waste any of her library time.

But she quickly gains confidence, shedding the need to show off her knowledge, immersing herself -- and us -- in another world. It is a world almost familiar. For Ms. Vreeland, at her best moments, has the uncanny ability to bring a painting to life. It is unfortunate that none of the paintings that form the basis of many of these stories are reproduced in the book. You will not always get the intended effect without them at hand.