Art, authorship, and possession drive a new wave of summer fiction
A cluster of new novels arriving this summer turns to art not as backdrop, but as engine. Among the most closely watched are Alex Hyde’s Exhibition and Rebecca Birrell’s Venus, Vanishing, two books that use artists, museums, and the afterlife of images to shape their narratives.
Hyde’s Exhibition unfolds in 1990s London during the era of the Young British Artists, following Rabble Stone, a photographer, and a figurative painter as their lives become entangled in questions of loss and ownership. Hyde has said she spent time with Tracey Emin’s early monoprints in the prints and drawings room at Tate Britain in London while writing the novel, returning repeatedly to the works as she developed the book’s emotional register. She also looked to artists including Sarah Lucas, George Shaw, Cindy Sherman, Nan Goldin, and Sally Mann, and read Susan Sontag as part of the process.
Birrell’s Venus, Vanishing moves to 1930s Berlin and centers on a young Jewish painter. The novel grows out of Birrell’s research into Jewish women artists of the 1920s and 1930s, including Charlotte Salomon and Lotte Laserstein, whose work and biographies have often survived only in fragments. Birrell, an art historian and curator, has described the project as a way to move beyond the limits of non-fiction and give fuller voice to a woman artist figure shaped by historical absence.
The two books sit within a long lineage of fiction shaped by visual art. In the 19th century, French novelists such as Honoré de Balzac, Émile Zola, and Marcel Proust drew on art to animate their fiction. More recent examples include Tracy Chevalier’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red, and work by Ali Smith, who has used art as both subject and structure.
That tradition remains durable because art offers novelists something fiction often seeks on its own: a way to think about looking, desire, memory, and control. In these new books, the canvas is not merely decorative. It becomes a site where characters negotiate who gets to speak, who gets to be seen, and who gets to claim ownership of a life or image.
