The Lonely City by Olivia Laing review – Warhol, Hopper, Garbo and the art of loneliness

Memoir and scholarship combine in an original exploration of New York artists ‘troubled by loneliness’

As its punning subtitle suggests, Olivia Laing’s new book is at once an investigation into works of art that arise out of the condition of loneliness, and the record of a more personal quest to master the difficult “art of being alone”. It belongs, in other words, to the fusion genre of scholarship-cum-memoir that has increasingly become the preferred way of doing cultural criticism.

The setting is (mostly) New York, where Laing recently experienced a spell of acute loneliness after the relationship that had brought her there from Britain abruptly ended. In her involuntary solitude she became “possessed with a desire to find correlates, physical evidence that other people had inhabited my state”, and began immersing herself in artists whose work seemed “troubled by loneliness”. The two sides of the resulting book – the curatorial and the curative – drive each other with neat economy, loneliness propelling Laing out into the archives and galleries of her chosen artists, whose work in turn informs (and transforms) her sense of her own isolation. Structurally speaking, it is an especially elegant demonstration of the advantages of this hybrid form.

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