“Art comes first; one can’t focus on art if one has a family,” said the painter Édouard Vuillard. Those gifted with overwhelming artistic talent — be it painting, composing, or writing — are dutybound to their work because, as artists, they’re duty-bound to society. The advancement of human culture subjugates familial obligations, and so the family must be sacrificed. What may appear selfish to spouses and children is, viewed through the hyperopic lens of high culture, as selfless as martyrdom.

As detailed in Marianne Wiggins’s “The Shadow Catcher” (Simon & Schuster, 336 pages, $25), and Emily Mitchell’s debut novel, “The Last Summer of the World” (Norton, 352 pages, $24.95), both Edward Curtis, the famed Native American iconographer, and Edward Steichen, an early director of the Museum of Modern Art’s photography department, left trails of spousal and filial detritus as they and their photographs climbed to international renown. These novels attempt to humanize their subjects, removing their pictures from gallery walls, scrutinizing the dust on their frames, and unveiling the spots of mold beneath.

Edward Curtis (1868 – 1952) was known to his subjects, who included members of every Indian tribe west of the Mississippi River, as “the shadow catcher,” and he, in turn, called them “the vanishing race.” He produced the photographs in his monumental 20-volume work, “The Native American Indian,” after the tribes had been relegated to reservations, and it is the acute despondency of these men and women that unnerves us. But what concerns Ms. Wiggins is Curtis’s negligence and deliberate artificiality. Not only would Curtis, in search of the next photograph, abandon his family for months on end, but, as the narrator notes, “If there was any totem of modernity — a car, a clock, a zipper or a waistcoat, Curtis would do everything he could to guarantee it was erased.” And so the pictures are “beautiful to look at. But they’re lies. They’re propaganda.”

Ms. Wiggins’s clear-eyed assessment sets a refreshing tone, and her intoxicating opening scene (“I fly, in my imagination, over the abandoned Plains, the Rockies, and the ghost Mojave — toward myself, toward home.”) proves, yet again, that she is a creative juggernaut. But rather than tell the linear narrative of Curtis’s life, Ms. Wiggins interweaves the tale of Curtis and his disconsolate wife, Clara Phillips, with that of “Marianne Wiggins,” the story’s narrator and a Los Angeles-based writer who aims to sell a screenplay based on her novel about Edward Curtis. It is the kind of meta-novel that Jonathan Safran Foer might write, and Charlie Kaufman might adapt, and it makes you want to defenestrate the book. Ms. Wiggins has said that she was interested in “the experience of searching for the heart of Edward S. Curtis.” That, unfortunately, is what she delivered — not Curtis’s heart, but a maudlin, narcissistic account of her own search for it.

“The Shadow Catcher” counters the natural with the man-made, of what our country was with where it is going — as when a traffic jam propels Marianne’s thoughts 240 billion years back, to California’s geological roots. But Ms. Wiggins is also interested in the juxtaposition of words and pictures, and her book reproduces nearly three dozen photographs, most by Curtis, some by her own family members. Unlike the photos in the works of W.G. Sebald, these infantilize rather than texturize the story. When describing Curtis’s grave, we get a picture of his tombstone; upon recounting the meeting of Curtis and Clara, we receive — surprise — a portrait of the future Mrs. Curtis.

Ms. Wiggins is known for taking stylistic risks, many of which paid off in her epic “Evidence of Things Unseen” (2003). And while Curtis is ably sketched as a complicated virtuoso and an execrable paterfamilias, this story contains too many crude coincidences. In Las Vegas, Marianne just happens to meet “Lester Owns His Shadow.” The name is the most unwieldy of the book’s many cringe-inducing metaphors, and its appearance marks one of several episodes when the book’s artifice interferes with its art.

Coeval with Curtis was Edward Steichen (1879 – 1973), the subject of Emily Mitchell’s penetrating “The Last Summer of the World.” Like Curtis, Steichen proved an artistic prodigy, but a regrettable husband and father. An integral member of a social circle that included Henri Matisse, Gertrude Stein, and Auguste Rodin, Steichen is best known for “The Family of Man,” his 1955 MOMA exhibit, which, in 503 photographs, brooked disparate cultures through shared emotion.

Ms. Mitchell focuses on the summer of 1918, when the 39-year-old Steichen was serving in France as an aerial reconnaissance photographer. Her story, written with grace and precision, doesn’t want for scope, and Ms. Mitchell’s shrewd restraint lends her work a concentrated power that Ms. Wiggins’s panoramic over-reaching lacks. Steichen, allegedly a chronic adulterer, has been forsaken by his wife and two daughters and sued for “alienation of affection.” He is left to spend his days photographing enemy territory from among the clouds (“strangely intelligent patterns in the air”) and ruminating about his marital missteps.

Ms. Mitchell employs the sanguinary images of combat to echo the battles, past and present, between Steichen and his wife. Interlaced with Steichen’s daily flights is the story of the couple’s courtship and their subsequent conjugal atrophy. Ms. Mitchell inserts the titles of Steichen’s photographs whenever shifting from the front lines of the Great War to Steichens’s domestic strife — a technique reminiscent of Ms. Wiggins’s photographic inserts, though far more elegant, if at times abrupt.

Ms. Mitchell does occasionally indulge in the platitudes and reductions of love, war, and art. After a crash sends Steichen to a hospital, he is reminded to “cherish your friends, whenever you find them.” Discussing the new art of photography, Rodin informs him, “It is the artist, not the photographer, who tells the truth.”

But this quibble does not diminish the tragic ineluctability of “The Last Summer of the World”:

The events of that year were only the last part of something that had begun long before; perhaps before they’d even known each other, as though this end was already marked on them, indelible but unseen, like a latent image on a glass plate before the developer makes it visible to the eye.

It is a fitting image for the life of an artist: the demands of the craft shattering the bonds of commitment.

Mr. Peed is on the editorial staff of the New Yorker.