Shadow Tag

I haven't read a single thing by Louise Erdrich that I haven't loved.  All of her books are so inviting and absorbing, even if they're deeply sad and heartbreaking.  Shadow Tag is terribly sad - about a couple who can't get away from each other.  They bring out the best and worst in each other.  She is his muse, literally and figuratively - he's an artist who has painted her throughout his career.  His paintings range from objectifyingly perfect to humiliating images they don't want their children to see.  I really love fiction about art - and in this book, with the slightest details, you're able to imagine a body of work from this man and woman.  It reminded me of a few other novels that have grappled with real and fictional art like Zadie Smith's On Beauty or Dara Horn's In the Image.  Interestingly enough, both Smith and Erdrich refer to Rembrandt's paintings of his partner, Hendrickje Stoffels, with great affection and generosity toward the sitter.

The wife, Irene, is has an unfinished PhD thesis on the (real life) American Artist, George Catlin, who painting Native Americans in the early 19th Century.  One painting in particular that Erdrich refers to in Shadow Tag is "Mi-néek-ee-súnk-te-ka, Mink, a Beautiful Girl" or, "The Mink".  Irene teases an imaginary history (as far as I know) around the creation of this painting and its meaning to Mink's tribe (the Mandan), and then revisits and  corrects it, exemplifying the way native people's history is sometimes fictionalized for the sake of mere entertainment, obfuscating or hiding the real story for various reasons (well, generally to make white people look better). It frustrates Gil, the husband, that George Catlin, a white man, was able to make a lucrative career painting Native American people, while he, as a Native American himself, would limit his career with such a subject. 

Don't paint Indians. The subject wins. A Native painter himself had said this. You'll never be an artist. You'll be an American Indian artist. There will be a cap on your career. You'll only go so far. You'll set up expectations. Attract only one set of collectors. Look at Rauschenberg. He was Cherokee. Did he paint Indians? No.

These, of course, are Gil's thoughts, or perhaps intrusive stereotypes that have been impressed upon him in his life as a (successful) artist.  Erdrich goes on to write of Gil:

His technical mastery had pushed his paintings past the west and Southwest, into Los Angeles and Chicago, Phildelphia, Washington, and then at last into New York, but he had not made the big leap. He was still classified as an American Indian artist, or a tribal artist, or a Cree artist or a mixed-blood artist or a Metis or Chippewa artist or sometimes and artist of the American West, even though he lived in Minneapolis. 

Gil is actually "unrecognized" by any tribe, although his heritage is partly Native American.  By the way, isn't it amazing how Erdrich brings so much humor to this situation, despite these painful, repeated attacks on his ancestry/identity?  And speaking of Minneapolis, Gil often drives to the museum in the morning to sit in front of Rembrandt's Lucretia.  [Side Note: 1. Sitting with art for extended periods of time is a wonderful privilege and if you have access to a museum or location where you can visit great art the breadth of understanding you'll gain from the work and the impact it can have on your life is invaluable. 2. This painting of Lucretia involves the incredible portrayal of a person who is quickly expiring!  See also Judith Beheading Holofernes by Artemisia Gentileschi and a Caravaggio painting of the same subject, for example.] Without putting too much of a giant bullseye on it, after having finished the book, Gil's fascination of an image of a woman who sacrifices herself for her husband is not surprising.  

The book is actually not that much about these images, but Erdrich obviously has a really strong background or understanding of art and art history/theory to make it one of the many themes that resound in Shadow Tag.  I find it so exciting when my loves/interests collide so it certainly stood out for me.