Jonathan

Santlofer’s Novel More Graphic Than Most – USA Today

By Carol Memmott, USA TODAY Self-portraits aren’t unusual — unless the artist is using himself as the model for a corpse. In Anatomy of Fear (William Morrow, $24.95), author and artist Jonathan Santlofer does just that. “It is a little creepy,” concedes Santlofer, whose genre-defying, sketch-filled work of fiction, subtitled A Novel of Visual Suspense, will be published Tuesday. “But I do my best work when I’m looking at my subject. I have this very big mirror in my studio. I’d lie on the floor with my pencil, get into position, and start to draw.” His 20-year-old daughter, Doria, was the model for the portrait of a murdered young woman in the novel, he says, but she took the assignment in stride. She spent much of her modeling time sprawled on the floor “talking on her cellphone.” Santlofer says he considers Anatomy of Fear “a bridge” between a traditional novel and a graphic novel. The … Read more

A Writing Life Imitates Art – Publishers Weekly

By Karen Holt Jonathan Santlofer writes his heroes tall. “I’m 5’7″ so I like to compensate,” he says. And he writes them brave, something else he insists he’s not. “I’m a big baby. If I see a knife on the table, I think it’s going to jump up and stab me.” But Santlofer and his characters do have one thing, a big one, in common—a preoccupation with art. In his mysteries, art fuels everything that matters. Killers conflate violence with artistic expression, while the good guys look to visual art for clues to catch the villains. As for Santlofer, he was a successful painter for decades before he became an author. He has been pursuing both careers since publishing his first mystery, The Death Artist, in 2002. With his fourth book, Anatomy of Fear (Morrow, Apr.) he combines his two talents, in what the publisher is calling “a novel of visual suspense.” A police sketch … Read more

Mask of the Critic – Guernica – Interview with Peter Schjeldahl and Jonathan Santlofer

Peter Schjeldahl and Jonathan Santlofer have been fixtures in the art world for decades, yet before Guernica brought them together for the “impromptu” conversation that follows, they’d never met. The art critic for The New Yorker, Peter Schjeldahl was born in Fargo, North Dakota, settled in New York in the mid-60s and began writing criticism for Art News. Before joining The New Yorker in 1998, he was the regular art critic for The Sunday New York Times, The Village Voice and 7 Days. Between 1967 and 1981, he published six books of poetry. His five books of criticism include The Hydrogen Jukebox: Selected Writings (University of California Press, 1991). Of Schjeldahl’s work, The Times Literary Supplement writes, “[Schjeldahl] has a masterly personal voice, flamboyant, witty, lyrical yet often precise; more important, he has an open-hearted attentiveness to the subjects of his criticism and the imaginative spaces around them.” Jonathan Santlofer was first known as an … Read more

An Artistic Mystery – New York City Daily News

by Deidre Stein Greben Breezing down the LIE with no traffic may sound like the stuff of fiction, and in Jonathan Santlofer’s new thriller, “The Killing Art,” it is. The road trip in question, from Manhattan to the tony hamlets of the East End, occurs a little past daybreak in the dead of winter. It is one of several taken by the novel’s protagonist, Kate McKinnon, a Queens cop turned art historian, to visit the Springs studio of the fictional artist Phillip Zander, the last surviving member of the New York School’s “Ab-Ex Big Boys.” Long Island topography is a prominent motif in “clue paintings” created specifically for the new book by author and artist Santlofer, 58, whose works are in collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago. Painting hints The black-and-white illustrations serve up hints for McKinnon (and Santlofer’s readers) to decipher about a series of murders and … Read more

A Painter Writes of Murder Among the Abstract Expressionists – The New York Times

By Carol Kino Can artists control the way history records them? How do some manipulate their legends – and what fate befalls those who can’t, or who loathe the very idea? Such questions, fodder for much contemporary art gossip and art historical research, fuel “The Killing Art,” by Jonathan Santlofer, a New York painter who has increased his own fame and fortune recently by writing murder mysteries set in the New York art world. Unlike his previous two books, however, Mr. Santlofer’s new tale is rooted in a real-life art historical episode: a gathering of Abstract Expressionist artists in April 1950. There, the unpleasant reality unfolded that by the end some artists would be in and some out. And the anointed were depicted a few months later in an iconic photograph in Life magazine. That meeting has been documented, most recently in “De Kooning: An American Master,” a 2004 biography by Mark Stevens and Annalyn … Read more

Brush With Death – Slate Magazine

by Carol Kino There’s a terrific art world novel out this season, and it isn’t Updike’s. American art novels tend to come in two varieties—commercial and literary. The commercial kind tends to focus on chic-but-sleazy openings and socializing, which are undoubtedly the most vapid, least interesting aspect of the scene. The literary kind usually gives this cliché-ridden territory a twist by interpolating the life story of another cliché—some saintly personage who seeks bliss far from the madding crowd, in plain old traditional painting. It goes without saying that both kinds are usually penned by people who seem to have little insight into the world they attempt to conjure. John Updike’s Seek My Face, this fall’s leading entry into the art novel sweepstakes, falls straightinto the same traps as so many other literary art novels. It’s a roman à clef that uses a semi-invented artist character to re-imagine the story of postwar American art. Happily, though, … Read more

The Way We Live Now: Questions for Jonathan Santlofer – The New York Times Magazine

By Marcelle Clements Q: You’ve been an artist for more than 20 years. This fall you have two shows, plus a novel about a serial killer in the art world, ”The Death Artist,” that has just come out. What inspired you to write the book? Let me just say that the death artist may have killed five or six people in my book, but he happened to have saved my life, truly. I had lost several years of work in a fire. I had an exhibition in Chicago, which I had actually postponed twice because I didn’t want to have it. It opened on a Friday, and it burned down on Saturday. I came back to my studio and there was nothing, just ghosts on the wall where the outline of the paintings had been. What did you do? I hadn’t smoked in 15 years. Within a week I was smoking a pack and a … Read more

To Assisi and back, real life and not so real world…

My Assisi visit has already come and gone. I taught drawing for the 2nd year in a row at the amazing Art Workshop International with its headquarters at Assisi’s Hotel Giotto, a short walk from the basilica and those beautiful Giotto frescoes that never fail to break my heart. This year it was the cathedral’s Cimabue that captured me. I always recognized it was a great painting but this year I was struck by the pathos in the Madonna’s face and the equally emotive faces of the attending angels, not to mention sweet St. Francis standing by looking appropriately simple.             The art workshop is always great, attracting the best students in visual art and writing and this year seemed better than ever – and that goes for the Hotel Giotto’s food too: though I every night I swore to skip at least 1 of the 4 courses I ate every … Read more