In Search of Lost Space: The Letter and the Artist

This is the first chapter of Maria Tamboukou's book "Visual Lives, Carrington's Letters, Drawings and Paintings". In it she makes a critical overview of the field of artists’ biographies and discusses its constraints and limitations particularly in relation to the use of letters. She argues that epistolary narratives cannot represent lives or subjects, but are exceptionally useful tools for genealogical analyses of the constitution of the female self in art. The author shows how spatial practices and discourses have been dynamically intertwined in the process of the research and the writing of the book