It is rare that a biographer of artists becomes the subject of a biography. You don’t think of biographers as romantic figures or swashbuckling types, and their lives are not generally momentous.

Unlike artists, who are almost professionally obliged to spread their emotions dazzlingly wide, biographers need to be organized and neat. They go around collecting the scraps left behind — letters, diary notes, apartment leases — while lamenting the inevitable gaps in the documentation surrounding most any life.