How I Came to Write this Chronicle of Artistic Failure
Posted by: admin in Motives explained, My own artistic failure, Artistic failure in AmericaTHE CHRONICLE OF ARTISTIC FAILURE IS THE STORY OF THE DECLINE OF ART IN AMERICA. It’s a tale of the failure of the entire support structure for artists and arts viewing. The narrative encompasses the life work of artists and arts workers from a variety of backgrounds and places around the country, but it is a story that touches all of us in America, whether or not we think much of art or the plight of artists in our time.
How I came to write this chronicle is difficult to explain. Part of it, I suppose, is self-pity. Part of it too is a reaction to the timbre of the times, with how difficult it is for creative voices—those people who truly have something new and inspired to offer the world—to be heard above the cultural din. But the biggest part of all has to do simply with concern for the future of art.
I know I probably would be better served if I could redirected my creative mind’s chain of reactions and impulses to more productive and career-advancing work than focusing on failure. When I wrote my first critical review of art for the Atlanta-based art magazine Art Papers shortly after I moved to Minnesota in 1997, I did not intend to end up where I’ve ended up. But considering the life-long stresses that artists and other arts community members face—economically, socially, culturally, mentally—in their struggle to continue making or supporting their creativity, I suppose it was inevitable. This is the curse of the creative person: One often has little control of the leaps the mind will make, no matter how ill-advised or dark, and of the strange and potentially offensive forms of expression it will take on in its pursuit of creativity. The self-destructiveness of human creativity is age-old. This has been clear ever since the modern art market first emerged in the early 19th century, a century that is littered with stories of artists who were doomed to miserable failure caused by the artist’s own creative practice. Many artists on this dubious honor roll are rather highly regarded today.
In 1824, for example, French painter Theodore Gericault, creator of one of the most famous paintings in the history of art—“the Raft of the Medusa”—died of consumption at the age of 33. That the painter, whose work is widely considered groundbreaking today, was relatively forgotten at his death caused Jules Michelet to write: “He wanted to die. Nature listened, and death, death slow and cruel, gave him time to savor all the pains of a great unfinished destiny.”
In 1827, the English poet, painter, engraver, and printer William Blake died and was buried in an unmarked grave at the public cemetery of Bunhill Fields. Though Blake is widely admired today, he never shook off poverty and passed his last years in obscurity—and, according at least to William Wordsworth, in madness—even quarreling with some of the small circle of friends who supported him and his work.
In 1887, American painter Louis Michel Eilshemius showed two of his early paintings at the National Academy, considered a remarkable achievement for a young artist of the time. Afterward, however, he suffered through a long dry spell of public indifference until he finally gave up painting altogether after forty years of effort. He died in 1941, unknown and in a state of dire poverty, feeling he never received the recognition he deserved and writing bitterly at one point: “The mediocre are jealous of the superior. That is partly the case that my life has been a continuous struggle against irrecognition.”
Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh’s life was marked by poverty, drinking, poor nutrition, smoking, and obsessive work habits—all of which took a toll on his health. In his later years, bouts of productivity were interspersed with hospital and asylum stays, and in early 1890 Vincent’s attacks became more frequent and left him ever more incapacitated. On July 27 of 1890, van Gogh set out into a field with his easel and painting materials, where he took out a revolver and shot himself in the chest. He later died of the wound. Meanwhile, the painter Paul Gauguin, an estranged companion of Van Gogh’s, was deeply depressed toward the end of his life. In 1891, he at last abandoned his family and moved more or less for good to Tahiti, where he became ill, possibly of syphilis, and developed a drug addiction. Around 1892 he tried to commit suicide with poison but failed. He died of a heart attack in 1903.
Late nineteenth-century American painter Ralph Albert Blakelock’s early work was celebrated alongside Albert Pinkham Ryder’s work as essentially American. In midlife, though, Blakelock’s work stopped selling, and he suffered horribly in his attempt to support his family. In 1899, Blacklock was institutionalized, most likely due to schizophrenia compounded by the disappointments of his life, and he died there a few years later. French sculptor Camille Claudel was considered remarkably talented as a young sculptor, but she spent most of her adult life as a recluse. In 1913, Claudel was committed to a mental asylum, where she remained until her death thirty years later.
While these artists came from various places, background, and situations, and they each found their own unique way to ruin their lives, what connects them is the very fact that it is their creativity that causes their life frustration and ultimate failure and doom. All of these artists, more or less, could not help themselves from following their own idea of art; they pursued their own eccentrically creative approach to art-making or delved into subject matter considered taboo by most people. Their creative minds gave them no choice but to explore art in each their own way, and in the end they paid the price for this.
Camille Claudel, for example, was prone to portraying the human form in overtly sensual way that was deemed inappropriate at the time by state and press. The resulting censorship and isolation may have contributed to the decline of her mental state and to her institutionalization. Van Gogh and Gauguin, meanwhile, lived lives well outside societal norms, full of Bohemian excess and shameful decisions—one lived with a prostitute, the other took a Tahitian island girl as a wife even while he still had a wife back home. Further, their painting styles challenged the norms of the time, causing much bewilderment among the public, and, at best, ambivalence when it came to buying. Blake’s work too was wildly eccentric for the time—in fact, that’s what makes him such an enduring artist today. However, his unique artistic choices led, as with Van Gogh and Gaugin, directly to his economic dissolution.
Perhaps the greatest, most archetypal failed artist, Theodore Gericault, was a creative maverick whose great historical painting, which took him nearly a year to complete, was deemed at its unveiling, despite its technical mastery, an embarrassment to the reigning powers of the time. Though it was customary then for great historical paintings to be bought French government, “The Raft of the Medusa” remained unsold and stored in a basement of the Louvre for more than forty years until its rediscovery. This ultimately forced Gericault to work and exhibit in England, where he spent his final years, angry and alone and supporting himself by painting genre pictures of horses. The state of frustration engendered by his own creative choices is evident in his writing: “I search vainly for support; nothing is solid, everything escapes me, everything deceives me. Our hopes and our desires are truly only vain chimeras, and our successes, only phantoms… If there is to be one certain thing that we can be sure of on this world, it is our pain. Suffering is real; pleasures are only imaginary.”
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