It's probably fair to say that not all artists are paragons of virtue. Still, you'd hope
most of them would try to keep out of any serious trouble… but that can't be said
for these people. These are the respected artists who turned out to be awful human beings.
Richard Prince sits at the very top of the art pyramid — so much so that, in 2015,
Artnet named him one of the 10 most expensive living American artists. But that might come
as a surprise to the people who actually created the work that Prince sells. Yes, for most
of his career, this fabulously wealthy artist has made his fortune by stealing other people's
images.
In 2014, Prince held an exhibition of photos he'd stolen off Instagram, selling them for
$100,000 each without telling the original photographers. When one of them made the perfectly
reasonable point that, since Prince was selling their work, they deserve a little money, the
artist replied with a derogatory tweet that read:
"Phony fraud photographers keep mooching me. Why? I changed the game."
Tech culture journalist Xeni Jardin may have best summed up Prince's Instagram scandal,
however, when she told MSNBC:
"It's okay to be a jerk on the internet, or in the art world, but it is a cardinal sin
to be a boring jerk, and in my opinion that's kind of what Richard Prince is here."
But even that pales in comparison with Prince's treatment of Patrick Cariou, the French photographer
who spent time photographing Jamaican men for his book, Yes Rasta, only to see Prince
snatch around 30 of his images, draw electric guitars on them, and sell them for millions
of dollars. After a lawsuit ruled in Cariou's favor, Prince appealed — and the ruling
was overturned in 2013. The two finally settled out of court in 2014.
You've probably never heard of the street artist Cartrain, but he's the kid who pulled
off the costliest art heist in British history — according to Damien Hirst, at least. In
2009, the mega wealthy art superstar spent an entire year pursuing a vendetta against
the 16-year-old, having the boy arrested and banned from every gallery in London.
The origin of this feud was a collage that Cartrain had tried to sell. Supposedly a portrait
of Hirst, it depicted the artist with his own diamond-encrusted skull artwork for a
head. It was clearly a teenager's slightly lame attempt at being edgy, but Hirst apparently
thinks he has a monopoly on lame attempts at edginess. He sued Cartrain for £195 and
demanded all copies of his work be destroyed.
In retaliation, Cartrain snuck into a Hirst exhibition in London and stole a box of pencils
from Hirst's sculpture, "Pharmacy." So Hirst did the totally rational thing and reported
Cartrain to the police. Oh, and he valued the pencils at £500,000, since they were
part of one of his artworks, meaning Cartrain could have been charged with the biggest art
theft in United Kingdom history. Cartrain was subsequently banned from every gallery
in London — because although Hirst may be able to take a pickled shark and turn it into
art, he apparently can't take a good joke.
It says something about a man's talent when he can literally get away with murder. An
Italian artist in the post-Renaissance period, Caravaggio created a number of fabulous oil
paintings, demonstrating an eye for shadow that has arguably never been equaled. In his
spare time, however, he got himself into all kinds of trouble.
Indeed, Caravaggio's favorite hobby wasn't painting sublime images of awe-inspiring beauty,
but getting tanked in a bar and violently assaulting anyone who disagreed with him on
literally any subject. But that's not all: because British art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon
even claims Caravaggio was a pimp.
Incredibly, his life of brawling and pimping still wasn't the worst thing about Caravaggio.
In fact, his worst trait of all was his habit of murdering people. As a teenager, it's thought
he may have killed someone in his hometown. Then, as an adult, he killed a prominent gangster
in a duel — the exact circumstances aren't certain, but some contemporary sources suggest
they may have come to blows over a game of tennis.
Caravaggio skipped town after being placed under a bando capitale — which was a fancy
way of saying anyone in the Papal States could legally kill him. While no one knows for sure
what happened next, one theory is that he was killed by the Knights of Malta, in the
post-Renaissance equivalent of a gangland shooting.
Calling himself "Australia's first great composer." Percy Grainger spent the first half of the
20th century writing his own, relatively well-received works — and more importantly, preserving
English and Irish folk songs that would have otherwise been lost forever. Although he was
an icon in his time, he's significantly less well known today… but that's probably for
the best, because Grainger had views that might generously be called "abhorrent." In
fact, his entire life's work was dedicated to preserving the superiority of the Nordic
race, while proving the inferiority of Jewish people.
Grainger didn't preserve British folk songs out of any love for the genre. He did it because
he worried that history would otherwise lose evidence of the so-called "creative genius"
of the white race. He loudly complained about intermarriage and criticized composers who
performed non-Nordic music, all the while enthusiastically talking up the work of Nazi
Party favorites like Houston Stewart Chamberlain, otherwise known as "Hitler's John the Baptist."
And then, when World War II broke out, he made a point of turning down any opportunities
to help Jews fleeing Germany. So yeah — not a great guy.
Bob Kane's greatest claim to fame was being the artist who invented Batman… or so he
claimed. That's because Bill Finger's greatest claim to fame was being the artist who actually
invented Batman, only to watch as his more influential friend took all the credit, belittled
Finger's own claims, and left him to die in obscurity. Yep, arguably the greatest superhero
America has ever known came from a broken home with two warring dads. But while Bat-dad
Kane would make money off the Caped Crusader from day one, Bat-dad Finger wouldn't get
his creator credit until 2015.
In the late 1930s, Kane came up with the concept for a character called Bat-Man. He would wear
a red suit, have wavy blonde hair, and fly around using a pair of bat wings. Kane conscripted
his friend to flesh out the character, and Finger was savvy enough to realize Kane's
concept… pretty much sucked.
So Finger created the Batman costume known today, removed the character's superpowers,
made him a detective, and created Catwoman, Robin, and the Joker to boot. Kane subsequently
took total credit for Finger's work and even secured a contract with DC that forbade them
from even mentioning his friend.
"We're all born with a natural creative potential, every man has it and every woman. The idea
is to find out what that is."
Still, at least when Kane died in 1998, his gravestone finally acknowledged that Batman
had a co-creator: God.
You probably know this already, but it bears repeating anyway: Joseph Stalin really liked
to have people killed. Some historians estimate he deliberately starved well over 3 million
people to death during the Holodomor, killed another million in the Great Terror, and murdered
at least another million in the pre-World War II Gulag. Although Stalin would go right
on killing until his death in 1953, the earlier instances are more important here, because
that was when Bertolt Brecht took it upon himself to become a one-man Soviet propaganda
machine. In 1935, after the Holodomor and after knowledge of the Gulags had leaked to
the public, the legendary playwright was still gleefully insisting that Stalins' victims
deserved death, even if they were innocent.
In this instance, Brecht's words were reported by a horrified American philosopher named
Sidney Hook — but it turned out that this wasn't an isolated comment. Brecht was actually
well-known for his pro-Soviet, pro-Stalin views, and while he is said to have criticized
the Soviets in private, in public he couldn't give up his devotion to Stalin's killing machine.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Brecht moved to East Berlin after the end of the war. He received
the Stalin Peace Prize in 1954.
In 1894, France convicted the Jewish army captain Alfred Dreyfus of selling military
secrets to Germany. While it later emerged that Dreyfus was framed, this aspect apparently
slipped the attention of Edgar Degas. One of the greatest of all the Impressionists,
Degas was a painter who revolutionized the way in which movement could be depicted on
a canvas. In the wake of the Dreyfus Affair, however, he established himself as an rabid
and outspoken anti-Semite. Convinced that the captain's conviction showed Jews couldn't
be trusted, Degas became so racist he made Richard Wagner look like a bleeding heart
liberal.
The Dreyfus Affair brought all of Degas' sordid beliefs to the surface. After the scandal
became public, he cut off contact with all the Jewish people in his life, including at
least one friend who had previously been like a family member to him. He also began viciously
attacking the works of Camille Pissarro, the only Jewish Impressionist. When friends gently
reminded him that he used to rave about Pissarro's work, Degas declared:
"That was before Dreyfus."
At times, the painter's anti-Semitism became more unhinged than anybody could have possibly
expected. He once suffered a screaming meltdown in front of a model, chasing her out of his
studio for being Jewish, even though she was actually Protestant. Unsurprisingly, by the
time of his death in 1917, Degas's friends had long deserted him, having quickly become
fed up with his racist beliefs.
If you're an art historian studying in the 21st century, you probably know Benvenuto
Cellini as a seriously talented Mannerist goldsmith and sculptor. If you were one of
his 16th-century neighbors, however, you'd probably know him as a dangerous psychopath
who might straight-up kill you over the smallest perceived slight. Obviously, it's not unheard
of for other bygone artists to be notorious for fighting or bedding people, but it bears
repeating here: Cellini really had a thing for killing people.
Cellini's story reads like a rejected film treatment for a 16th-century slasher franchise.
As a teenager, he frequently brawled with others, eventually being forced to flee his
hometown as a result. As an artist's apprentice, he often fought with his rivals, once using
a knife to do so. But it wasn't until the Sack of Rome in 1527 that the 20-something
Cellini got his first taste of blood. During the battle, he slayed at least two of the
invading soldiers — and evidently, he liked it.
After that, Cellini quickly stepped up his rampage. When one of his brothers was killed
by the city watch for a murder he had committed, Cellini retaliated by dispatching one of the
watch's corporals. One witness who saw Cellini beat a man half to death was in turn knifed
dead by the artist before he could testify. When Cellini became the subject of a lawsuit
while visiting France, he crippled the plaintiff's legs in revenge. Maybe it wasn't the most
mature way to deal with problems, but it certainly worked — and Cellini himself lived to the
ripe old age of 70.
Francis Bacon's twisted, terrifying portraits and paintings have inspired no small number
of imitators over the course of the late 20th century. Less well-known, however, is the
fact that he was also a drunk, who was known to his best friends as a sadist who simply
saw the awfulness inside himself and decided to paint it in excruciating detail. But even
these descriptions don't do justice to Bacon's temperament, because he was also an emotionally
abusive lover who drove his boyfriends to despair — and even suicide.
Throughout his whole life, Bacon seemed to see sexuality as something that involved predator
and prey. Sometimes he was the prey, but most times he delighted in being the predator — and
his love affair with George Dyer was particularly twisted. While Dyer supplied the physical
abuse, Bacon provided the emotional side, often acting cold or dismissive toward his
boyfriend. During a trip to Paris, Bacon ghosted the mentally unstable Dyer so badly that the
poor man took his own life.
Even Bacon himself seemed to fully understand his own cruelty. He constantly spoke about
what an awful person he was, and often claimed he was utterly irredeemable.
If you or anyone you know is having suicidal thoughts, please call the National Suicide
Prevention Lifeline​ at​ 1-800-273-TALK (8255)​.