A new exhibit on Vincent Van Gogh is open at the Musee d’Orsay in Paris; the buzz there is all about the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to enrich the visitors’ experience (you ask the realistic-looking video avatar a question and AI provides a tailor-made answer on the spot, not pre-programmed, among other innovations), but what came to my mind when reading about the exhibit was the artist’s well-known tragic life, one in which he allegedly sold only two paintings during his lifetime, and his main representation was by his younger brother, an art dealer. He died young, aged 37.
Then I thought of Friedrich Nietzsche, an often-tortured soul who suffered greatly during his life and especially in his later years; he died age 45, and was very largely ignored during his active writing years.
And then I recalled Franz Kafka, who worked in an insurance agency and wrote stories and novels at night, and sold almost nothing before he died age 40. The Wikipedia entry summarizes his writing pretty well: “It typically features isolated protagonists facing bizarre or surrealistic predicaments and incomprehensible socio-bureaucratic powers. It has been interpreted as exploring themes of alienation, existential anxiety, guilt and absurdity.”
And Sylvia Plath, whose first collection of poetry had a print run of 500 copies, and whose novel, “The Bell Jar,” was not published in America until eight years after her death at age 30. She had been recognized as a gifted writer even in her teen years, but her career never took off.
There are other examples of famous artists and creators who simply were not acknowledged while alive but are world famous today (Henry David Thoreau might belong to this class); I mention the ones above because they were top of mind for me, not just because of their creative struggles, but because of their documented or presumed mental health issues. In the cases of Van Gogh and Plath, their mental health struggles are well known; both died from suicide. I’d argue that Kafka was able to live out his fantasies and anxieties in the written word, and that Thoreau was atypical, to say the least, in living out in the woods for an extended period and basically rejecting the civilization around him.
I’m aware of the old trope about mad artists, or that creativity and schizophrenia are somehow related. Maybe I’m just being selective in these case studies to argue a point, implying that madness kept them from being successful while alive even as there must be artists and creators who also showed signs of mental illness who were quite successful and recognized during their lives.
Perhaps I should not seek to look inside their psychic experiences but more closely at how one acquires fame – who are the opinion makers; who are the gate keepers; who are the judges (and who judges the judges); even what is the supply chain for genius and who are excluded from it. It would be relevant to the history of art, but wouldn’t tell me anything about the above individuals.
And I do wonder about artists and creators who also may have been great, and who struggled all their lives, too, yet never attained recognition or status even after death. There’s no way of knowing how many there were because their legacies, like their corporeal existences, will have been long buried and turned to dust. Their lives may have been even more tragic than a van Gogh’s or a Plath’s.