Artists are not always the best people. Caravaggio went to prison for assault, Gauguin had
a relationship with a 13-year-old Tahitian girl. And Pablo Picasso abused his partners,
proclaiming there were only two kinds of women, “goddesses and doormats.”
Like…no. Just…no.
Despite that, an artist’s work may still feel important or personal to us.
Maybe it makes us feel seen or heard in a way nothing else has.
So, what do we do with those feelings when the artist turns out to be kind of a monster?
Hi!
I'm Sarah Urist Green, and this is Crash Course Art History.
[THEME MUSIC]
These days, it’s fairly common to consider an artist’s life alongside their work.
The Me Too movement, for example,
has shed light on harassment and abuse in the arts and entertainment industries,
inspiring calls to withdraw support and funding from offending artists.
But it hasn’t always been this way. For much of human history,
in much of the world, art was made either collectively or anonymously.
So it wasn’t possible to separate the art from the artist — they were already separate to begin with.
But flash forward to Renaissance Europe, around the 15th century, and a new way
of thinking about artists had emerged. They weren’t mere mortals like you and I–oh
no–artists were now geniuses, born with a gift. Strangely, however, they almost all happened
to be male. And white.
Hmm. Peculiar.
In the last episode, we began to unravel this concept of the “Great
Artist”— questioning whether they were divinely-inspired— somehow more than
human — or whether they were… just people in the right place, at the right time.
But that emotional distance between the artist and the mere mortals viewing their
work began to change during the Romantic period, around the late 18th century.
It was then that art began to explore the inner self.
And it turns out that artists, being human, are full of big emotions.
But instead of writing about their feelings in their diary where no one would ever see them,
Romantic artists embraced their feelings and shared them with the world.
Especially through self-portraits.
Romantic self-portraits weren’t about showcasing your riches, or status, or popularity.
Like Francisco Goya, who used short brushstrokes to express inner turmoil,
and different color combinations to highlight his melancholy.
If that sounds like the Romantics were ye olde emos, you’d be right.
During this period, Great Artists wanted their work to feel real,
earning a broody, and tortured reputation—a stereotype you might still recognize today.
I’m looking at you, Timmy Chalamet.
The Romantics wanted viewers not only to observe emotion but to actually feel it
themselves, so they created art meant to stir awe,
even terror, and pushed audiences to contemplate infinity, mortality.
The intense feeling the work generated became known as the sublime.
By the mid-19th century, the idea of the avant-garde was beginning to emerge.
It was all about pushing boundaries to create new forms and subject matter for artwork.
Translating to the “advanced guard”– or the first charging into battle – these
artists focused not on copying some old master, but on breaking with tradition.
For painters like Frida Kahlo,
that meant reimagining what self-portraits could look like and what they could express.
In “Las dos Fridas,” or “The Two Fridas,” Kahlo upped the ante on personal
introspection by painting herself…twice. The Frida on the right is dressed in
Mexican indigenous clothing, a nod to her mother’s heritage.
The Frida on the left is wearing white European dress, representing her father’s background.
But this Frida is also spattered with her own blood,
revealing her emotional turmoil in the aftermath of her divorce.
In “Las dos Fridas,” we see Kahlo exploring her fractured identity,
and heartbreak, as well as her resilience. Realistic imagery is combined with unexpected
elements, like the exposed hearts and artery that connects the two selves.
This mashup of real life images with imaginative, dreamlike ones, is a hallmark of surrealism,
a movement Kahlo later became associated with. But she never considered herself a Surrealist,
saying: “I never paint dreams or nightmares, I paint my own reality.”
It’s the open-hearted vulnerability of this work that sets it apart from what “Great Artists” used
to want their self-portraits to reflect: class status and intellectual superiority.
This new level of depth and intimacy signaled a break with that past,
and an opening up of possibilities for the future.
As Frida showed us, self-portraits can allow artists the chance to
explore their thoughts and feelings. But by focusing so much on the individual,
they also tend to reinforce the idea that Great Artists always work alone.
In reality, artists collaborate all the time.
For better or worse. Let’s go to the drawing board…
In 1888, Vincent Van Gogh moved to the South of France in search of warmer
weather and better light for his paintings. He had big dreams for a studio where painters
could live together and create art — starting with his pal, the French painter Paul Gauguin.
Van Gogh would be the Bert to Gauguin’s Ernie, the Shaggy to his Scooby, the Phineas to his Ferb.
At first the cohabitation collaboration was super productive for both artists, who learned from
each other and created tons of new work. And some of Van Gogh’s most interesting
pieces were these paintings of chairs… which are understood to be portraits of himself and Gauguin.
I… don’t see it. Ohhh, there he is.
But the devil–or in this case, the foreshadowing–is in the details.
While Van Gogh’s chair is bright and hopeful, Gauguin’s is darker and more foreboding.
Based on reality-show-style letters from this period, Van Gogh’s insecurity
clashed with Gauguin’s arrogance. Two months after moving in together,
the painters had a catastrophic falling out that ended with Van Gogh cutting off his own ear.
Of the numerous theories, some speculate that Gauguin was the one who lopped it off after Van
Gogh attacked him. The drama.
Anyway, art has been, and continues to be, a collaborative process.
And this has been true for centuries, all around the world.
Take the Akbarnama, an illustrated book commissioned in 16th century
India by Emperor Akbar the Great. It chronicled his reign through
writings and was illustrated by a crew of around 50 artists trained
in a wide range of traditions including, indigenous Indian, Persian, and European.
And even super-recognizable artists, like Andy Warhol, didn’t work alone.
His collaborative studio, called The Factory, was a busy space,
full of artists, filmmakers, and more.
Warhol and his team used screen printing to create multiple copies of images in record time.
His series “Flowers,” for example, consisted of large flower paintings done by Warhol himself,
as well as an estimated nine hundred separate smaller prints,
with assistants helping him to produce up to eighty prints a day.
One of Warhol’s most famous screen prints is the “Marilyn Diptych,” which
blurs the lines between religious and celebrity iconography, exploring who we worship and why.
We know now that artists don’t have to be divinely inspired,
naturally talented geniuses to make great art.
With access, opportunity, and training lots of people can make great art!
And making great art doesn’t make you a perfect person, either.
But what do we do when a great artist ends up being an awful person?
Some believe we should let art speak for itself — separate the art from the artist and continue
appreciating the art on its own. Others believe artists should be
held accountable for their behavior, no matter how important their work is.
But it’s not always an either-or situation; some find ways to operate in the gray.
For example, let’s return to our old frenemy Gauguin.
Gauguin’s pioneering paintings garnered him a sparkling professional reputation.
But his personal reputation wasn’t great: today, he’s frequently criticized for having
abandoned his wife and children to move to Tahiti, where he had relationships
with several underaged girls, many of whom are depicted, nude, in his famous portraits.
Gauguin’s work (especially his Tahiti paintings) has been widely criticized for representing
Tahitian life as “primitive” and “Othered.” In their 2019 Gauguin exhibition,
which coincided with the second anniversary of the #MeToo movement,
the National Gallery in London brought both Gauguin’s works and wrongdoings to the table.
In an exhibition catalog, wall labels, and a public debate between scholars and writers,
they offered viewers all the information,
so they could interpret Gauguin’s art themselves and reach their own conclusions.
In thoughtful processes like these, the myth of the Great Artist continues to break apart,
showing artists as the deeply flawed people they sometimes are.
So, while there’s no easy answer to whether, or how much, we should separate art from the
artist, art historians can approach controversial art with thoughtfulness.
We can use an artist’s biography to help us understand how their experiences inform
and impact the art they create. That way, an artist’s biography,
when added to social and historical contexts, helps us understand how their
work fits into art history and helps determine its place in society today.
Unraveling the myth of the Great Artist doesn’t mean we completely ignore the artist.
After all, art is the result of an individual artist’s physical, intellectual,
and emotional labor. It’s informed by
their perspectives and experiences. And sometimes they do and say bad things.
And we have to figure out what to do with that — to preserve and illuminate history
as it actually happened, while working toward a better and more just world today.
Next time, we’ll talk about all the different ways we can assess
the value of art. I’ll see you there.
Thanks for watching this episode of Crash Course Art History which was filmed at the
Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields and was made with the help of all these flawed,
but still deeply talented people. If you want to help keep Crash
Course free for everyone, forever, you can join our community on Patreon.