I’m reading a biography of Dorothy Parker, and we’re now ticking down the deaths of the members of the Algonquin Round Table. Most died relatively young, and most had substance abuse problems, or marital problems, or financial problems, or all of the above. This biography has also made the comment that some of Mrs. Parker’s later troubles stem from her troubled childhood, but her troubled childhood (at least as explicated by this biographer) really wasn’t so troubled. But there’s no question that Mrs. Parker herself had issues, what with her suicide attempts, drinking, failed relationships, etc. (The biographer also argues that during the happiest times of Mrs. Parker’s life, when she was first married to Alan Campbell and before she miscarried, Dorothy couldn’t write poetry anymore, just Hollywood screenplays. In other words, in her happiness, she was creatively bereft.)
So this is a two part question. First, name a great artist – literary or otherwise – who lead an untroubled life: no substance abuse problems, stable home life, just a regular joe. Second, do you think that, because we think that so many great artists were troubled, we look for that as an explanation for their talent?
It’s chicken & egging - The reason some artists have unique perspectives is because of their unique personalities, and there is no doubt that adversity produces more interestingdramatic art. My best poetry (IMO) came when I was under emotional stress.
As to all type of representational art the picture is more mixed. There are certainly numerous authors who have led relatively comfortable material lives and have produced great works of history and scholarship. On the painting side I don’t think Michaleangelo or Leonardo missed too many meals or starved as kids. Many great composers were well fed and housed by their patrons and were not originally poor.
Many of the great painters lived quite well. I think Whistler was comfortably upper-middle class in background. Thomas Hart Benton came form comfortable circumstances.
Peter Paul Reubens seems to have been a well-off, sucessful, contented man as well as a very talented artist. I’m sure there were others. J.S. Bach was not a tortured soul, from what I’ve read of him.
My take on this modern belief in the artist’s brilliance or talent coming from some mental condition like autism or schitzophrenia is a rationalization for laziness. Developing an artistic talent is hard work. It takes vast amounts of time and a lot of self-disipline, but a lot of people these days simply do not want to believe that. Considering artistic genius a product of a mental condition excuses them from the results of their lack of will. “I will never be a great painter because I am too well-adjusted,” is a lot easier for them to live with than “I will never be a great painter because I don’t want to put in the effort.”
JS Bach always comes to mind. He came from a good family, was financially successful, and his sustained musical output was pathologically high. His was the era were musicians, composers, and even writers were considered [icraftsmen, barely higher in social status than wheelwrights or blacksmiths. They were expected to lead reasonably upright artisan’s lives.
I believe this began to change in the 18th century with the advent of patronship. Beethoven, for example, was given a generous stipend and his own place to live by a wealthy patron in exchange for any flight of fancy he wished to set down on paper. This was markedly different than the regular output and teaching burden that was required of Bach in Leipzig. Bach had a day job that he simply had to discharge.
This was the first stage in the transition from artist as laborer to artist as personality. Bach was a staid family man. Berlioz, in a jealous rage, dressed as a maid an attempted to kill his former lover, Marie Moke, along with her mother and her new fiance. He abandoned the plan halfway between Rome and Paris.
Furthermore, the middle of the 19th century endured extraordinary political turmoil. Many of its leading artists were taking part in the great revolutions of Europe, which further estranged their experiences from the ordinary and mundane.
Returning to the modern world, many artists and musicians cannot count on the unconditional backing of a wealthy patron. They take university appointments, work on government and private sector projects, and often produce their own work. As such, there are strong incentives for them to behave more as Bach than as Berlioz.
I don’t believe Pablo Picasso was a tortured soul. He was an upper-level genius who could be difficult to be around, but he never developed substance abuse problems that I’m aware of, he was financially sound most of his life, and he led an active life both socially and romantically. (He was a ballsy little guy, too: during the German occupation of Paris, a German officer, upon seeing Guernica [depicting the horrors of the German bombing of the Spanish town of Guernica] for the first time, asked Picasso: “Did you do this?”; Picasso replied, “No, you did!”)
As far as why people seem to have more interest or regard for art coming from a tortured soul, I would imagine that it’s just because people find conflict more interesting. It may also help them to feel more comfortable with accepting the greatness or importance of artwork they otherwise feel they don’t understand or appreciate fully.
Looking no further than the Algonquin Round Table, what about Harpo Marx? By all accounts I’ve seen, he was a very stable, generous and kind man. Although he married relatively late in life, he only married once (unlike his brothers). He stayed with Susan Fleming for the remainder of his life, almost 30 years, and they adopted four children together.
Oh, and to answer the OP’s other question- I’ve always personally traced the tortured artist thing back to Lord Byron, but it probably goes much farther back. Perhaps we liked to believe that people who create works that produce feelings within us have to be going through much more intense emotions in order to make that artwork come to life.
I believe Wallace Stevens had, given his education and background, a very ordinary life apart from his poetry-writing. He was a New York lawyer by training and eventually vice president of an insurance company in Hartford.
As for the second part, I think the point is that artists can depict their inner torments. Though they are a small minority of all those who are troubled, the artists are the ones who can put explain it well, from a personal point of view.Since they can do this, we get a picture of poets being more tortured than, say, insurance executives.
Darius Milhaud (a French composer) titled his autobiography Ma vie heureuse (My Happy Life). One of his students at Mills College once asked him why he said he had a happy life, since she had always thought that artists needed to be tortured to be good. I don’t have the book in front of me, so I’m not sure exactly what he said to her, but a Google search gives me this, his response to a fan letter regarding Wagner’s theory that art comes from “suffering, unhappiness, and frustration.”
ErinPuff, that’s the perfect answer. I’ll plagiarize it when I develop some kind of talent, become famous, and get asked about my non-tortured life.
Marley23, I don’t know anything about Harpo Marx. I remember he was mentioned in the biography, but more time is spent on Woolcott, Benchley, Sherwood, etc., who I think were more of Dorothy’s intimates. If my 1930s/1940s itch continues, maybe I’ll look for something about him. (Although given his lack of tortured-ness, how interesting could it be? )
Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie were a couple of pretty darned jolly geniuses.
Clifford Brown was famous for NOT being hooked on heroin during the 1950s, when nearly everyone else in the jazz world was (makes y’play more like Bird, y’see). Unfortunately he got killed in a car wreck on the Pennsylvania Turnpike in 1956, at the age of 25.
I’ve been meaning to get his autobiography, Harpo Speaks. Supposedly it’s a really fun read. I’ve read one of Groucho’s books. I wouldn’t call Groucho tortured either, but he was a difficult guy for sure.
The ultimate disproof: William Shakespeare. Grew up in comfortable circumstances and was successful quite early. It didn’t hurt his talent in the slightest.
The starving, misunderstood artist with a substance-abuse problem living in his gramma’s garrett is largely a conceptual product of the early 19th-c, with a few exceptions before that which were understood as exceptional (Hugo van der Goes, Fra Filippo Lippi, del Sarto, Caravaggio, Rembrandt perhaps). I’d say Goya was one of the last true innocently-tragic figures, and everyone since has been hamming it up. You mostly have absolutely bourgeois, happy, successful artists with wives and kids and nice houses like Hans Memling and Raphael and Rubens and Van Dyck and Josh Reynolds etc etc.
)