Across all art types - music, painting, sculpture, etc.
I think the OP Title speaks for itself: what is the biggest gap between how a later generation feels about an artist that was “discovered and elevated” after their death vs. how that artist was viewed while alive?
I don’t think Van Gogh would be a great example - he had a tragic life, but other artists were working on what came to be referred to as Post-Impressionist approaches at the time.
Philip K. Dick might be a better example - he was on the fringe of writing and considered troubled in his day, but now his psycho/dystopian themes are ever-present. If you told the most respected writers of the day that PKD would loom large in the future, I suspect they’d shake their heads.
I suppose we could point to minority works - e.g., by women or non-“mainstream” groups - who weren’t “allowed in” to the main art circles at the time.
Or genres of art, e.g., Pulp Fiction or Comic Books or even Japanese Woodblock Prints, where the genre was considered lowbrow or trashy, but was elevated by later generations.
I suspect that going back hundreds and thousands of years, there are many examples.
**Johann Sebastian Bach **springs immediately to mind - he was known as a talented organist in his day but his works were out of fashion long before he died and his sons’ reputations as composers (well, Johann Christian and CPE - we’ll ignore WF for now) far outshadowed his for nearly a century (von Swieten notwithstanding).
Exactly! And his works like the Well-Tempered Clavier were thought of more as a lesson book for scales to show how a well-tempered organ could be used, right? It wasn’t the OMG Amazing Music - it was a set of tutorials.
Darren Garrison - I would say, in general, that “primitive” or “outsider” artists generally fall in this category, sure.
ETA: regarding Dickinson, yes, of course she wasn’t famous until after her death, but were her poems challenging to her contemporaries? If she had chosen / been able to publish while alive, would her word have been understood and appreciated?
In the OP you didn’t say anything about being challenging to their contemporaries–just that people who knew them when they were alive would have been surprised by them having fame after their death.
Cool. Yeah, if they thought she was a mouseburger then her poetry would be surprising. I was talking more about the works themselves - were they before their time, like, seemingly, Philip K. Dick’s stories were?
Yeah, that Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and Captain America would be worth billions of dollars in 2017 would be pretty surprising back in the 1940s.
But the creators of these characters, while not secret, are not household names today, not even on the level of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.
Gustav Mahler was probably known more as a conductor than a composer in his day. Then in the 1960s Leonard Bernstein and a fanbase that teails only Richard Wagner’s fans in devotion made him more mainstream.
The Three Stooges. I think actors circa 1940 would be shocked that several movies have been made about them.
His peers knew he was a great talent, but his records didn’t sell. At all. Wasn’t until at least a decade after his death that his reputation started to grow and people finally started buying his albums.
The early reception for Moby Dick wasn’t as bad as is often implied:
Philip K. Dick certainly wasn’t unknown at the time of his death. He was moderately popular. He’d already won a Hugo for best novel. A major movie made from another novel was about to come out. And, for what it’s worth, I remember how excited I was in 1975 to discover that a fellow grad student of mine was an ex-stepdaughter of Dick. His popularity has grown since his death, but he certainly wasn’t obscure during his life.