Crazy Art or Crazy Artists?

Is it a myth that Artists are CraZy?  

Yes, it is a myth. Creative people may not be mainstream but that doesn't mean they are crazy.
Picasso painted images that might have looked crazy but he had a strong grip on reality.  Picasso had a tumultuous love life and he seemed to think that his lovers were crazy as this painting suggests:

Picasso's lover

Yet, in spite of most artists being sane, there are artists who seem to have had genuine mental issues:

Vincent Van Gogh killed himself at the age of 37 and suffered from some unknown ailment throughout his life.  He may have been bipolar or an addict but in reality, we do not know. This self portrait was created after Vincent chopped off his ear.

Van Gogh's ear

Edvard Munch suffered from a variety of emotional issues, depression and hallucinations. Mental illness ran in his family. He credited his mental illness for the creation of his most famous work, "The Scream".

Munch's famous painting

Francisco Goya at the age of 46 came down with a mysterious mental illness that affected his painting style.  This painting came after his breakdown.

Goya Painting

Georgia O'Keefe was hospitalized for depression and anxiety at the age of 46.  However, I'm not sure she was crazy.  This was a time when Georgia was living with a bossy, old man (Alfred Stieglitz) who also cheated on her.  After he died and she moved to New Mexico, she thrived and her art blossomed. Stieglitz who was a photographer, he created a beautiful series of photos of O'Keefe though the years of their relationship.   

Georgia O'Keefe

Alice Neel, like Georgia O'Keefe, went through a rough patch.  After an early marriage, Neel lost a young child to diphtheria.  Shortly after she had another child and her husband who was Cuban left Alice and took their daughter to live with his family in Cuba.  Alice was unable to get her daughter back and her relationship with both husband and child ended.  After that, she was admitted to a psychiatric hospital for a nervous breakdown. Her life was filled with more relationship drama.  She went on to have two sons by different fathers and managed to support them as a single mother on welfare and painter in the government program, WPA which employed artists during the depression. Bohemian? Yes. Crazy? Probably not.  In the 1960's her years of success and fame began.

Alice Neel

Drawing, Painting and Alice Neel

My baby

My baby

Last night I fixed a big bowl of popcorn and watched the documentary on the life of Alice Neel created by her grandson, Andrew Neel. In a nutshell she lived a classic artist's life. She had several tumultuous relationships, four children and spent her life in poverty. In her 70's she became famous.

 

My son

Alice Neel is called a portrait painter. Technically she is but I've never thought of her that way. I think of Alice Neel as a painter who liked to paint people. She painted other things as well as people but it was the heart and soul of another that she liked to capture. My definition of a portrait painter is an artist who paints people on commission. That was not Alice Neel even though, she may have done this at the end of her life.

She painted people the way Picasso did, to capture their spirit.  Her paintings are psychologically probing, not the sort of painting that flatters the individual sitter.  To me this isn't portrait painting.

My husband

Crazy Relationships and Art

In her early years it seems that Alice Neel was ruled by romantic love.  She seemed to fall head over heals in love and then later suffer the consequences, like many of us!  Art comes along for the ride to document and our art often bails us out, emotionally.

One of her children died and she lost a little girl in her marriage split-up. Her husband's family raised the child in Cuba. As a result, she spent time in a mental institution.

In her mid to late 30's she had two boys. Each of them was a result of a different love affair, one with a younger Latino man and one with a documentary filmmaker. In these years of struggle, she rarely sold a painting and lived on welfare. She raised her boys on the dole and yet, they both managed to go to college and become financially successful.

Still life drawing

Alice Neel lived in the same apartment in a poor neighborhood in New York for most of her life. She moved to Spanish Harlem from Greenwich Village early on and stayed for most of her remaining years. Like Picasso she filled her living space with stacks of paintings. It's interesting to see the progression in her art and glimpses of her shabby apartment in NYC in the documentary.  Suffer for Art?  Alice Neel did but late in life she reinvented herself as a famous artist.  Amazing!

Alice Neel did the impossible. She did not live on her art but she lived for her art. She did not get a job, make a living or stay with a man. She managed to keep painting in spite of hardships and deep poverty. 
 

What of the many artists who have sacrificed for their art but did not, in the end, become well-known?  Or what of the artists who only became famous after they died in poverty, obscurity and misery?  Such is the creative life!  We live for the journey.

Drawings by Charlotte Rossmann

Inspirational woman artist: Georgia O'Keefe

Watercolor painting of western scenery.

More contemporary, western scenery on my website: www.charlotterossmann.com

For many women artists, Georgia O'Keefe has been the most inspirational artist. When I was in college as a young student I didn't know of many famous women artists. O'Keefe and Cassett were it. When I went back to college in the 1990's I took a few classes in art history specifically about women artists. I learned that there were, indeed, a lot of women artists and very good women artists throughout history but they had been ignored.  As good as they were, they were not famous.

Georgia O'Keefe was a rarity in her time. As the story goes the reason she was not ignored as an artist was that she had a powerful mentor, Alfred Stieglitz. He was a photographer and also active in the art community in New York City. There was a great age difference and he as the older, experienced, knowledgeable photographer was able to guide her career.

When O'Keefe was in college, before Stieglitz came into her life another student (male) asked her to pose for him. She declined and his reply was that she would end up teaching in a girl's school somewhere and he would go on to be a famous artist. She relented and posed for a portrait.

We all know the impetuousness of youth! Of course, this is one of those cocky comments a college student might make but needless to say the this artist did not go on to be famous. The most famous work he did was the portrait of Georgia O'Keefe. In fact, I would venture the opinion that the most famous photographs that Alfred Stieglitz did were the many portraits of Georgia O'Keefe.

Her work is wonderful but her life is also a work of art. She was adventurous. She was opinionated. She was outspoken. She lived her life in a way that most women did not in those days.  Rough, rugged and independent she lived alone in New Mexico after Stieglitz died.

Her life was long.  She died at the age of 98 but Stieglitz was her only husband.  She did not have children.  I read that she wanted to have a child but Stieglitz said no. He said it would ruin her as an artist. In those days people believed in some of the Freudian nonsense about women. If she didn't have a child, she was more like a man. If she had a child, she would lose her creative edge.

Fortunately, today women can have children and paintings as well. Alice Neel managed to do both. Suzanne Valadon was an excellent painter and mother to the artist Maurice Utrillo. I know that Frida Kahlo was pregnant but she did not deliver a healthy child.

If you can think of another truly famous female artist who was also a mother, please comment.