Paula Mota’s Reviews > The Art of the Affair: An Illustrated History of Love, Sex, and Artistic Influence > Status Update

Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe lived together in Brooklyn in their 20s. Robert told his conservative parents he had married Patti in a strawberry field in California so they would accept the living situation. When the pair met Andy Warhol, he dismissed them as “horrible” and “dirty.” Robert looked up to Andy,but Patti didn’t understand the appeal. “I felt little for the can and didn’t like the soup,” she said.

Scott Fitzgerald met Zelda while he was working on his first novel, 'This Side of Paradise', and quickly rewrote the romantic interest to resemble her, even adding verbatim extracts of her journal.(...) Though he made his career writing about their marriage and Zelda’s mental issues, Scott persuaded her to cut autobiographical details from her own novel, 'Save Me the Waltz', and to never write anything else.

During a summer vacation in Brittany, Colette, forty-seven and married to Henry de Jouvenel, began an affair with her sixteen-year-old stepson, Bertrand de Jouvenel, a writer himself. She had already published Chéri, a novel about an affair between an older woman and a young man. Colette later confessed all to Henry, who was having an affair of his own with a Romanian princess. The marriage did not survive.

One artist’s muse had an art and muse of her own, or was married to a composer who fell in love with a writer who was married to another writer, until those writers divorced, each marrying surrealist painters, then putting it all in a novel. This was far more than a history of love—it was a carnage of affairs, the inspiration behind countless works of art.