Mental Illness is Not the Key To Artistic Genius
When I was in my first Sophomore semester of college, I was in an Art History class where we studied the Post-Impressionists, in particular, Vincent Van Gogh. Van Gogh is most famous for “Starry Night,” a beautiful swirling vision of the night sky painted from his view at an asylum in France during 1889. Van Gogh’s paintings were revolutionary, both for their rebellion against what was accepted at the Salons in Paris at the time and their striking, surreal beauty that entranced viewers. Van Gogh’s work is considered so beautiful that now it is nearly replicated everywhere and on everything — tapestries, teacups, notebooks, glasses case, murals, and the list goes on and on (ironic considering how outcasted and anti-commercial the post-impressionists were considered during their time). Van Gogh is my favorite painter, and “Starry Night” is my favorite painting.
Van Gogh was also famous for his severe mental health problems, which started in his early adulthood and continued until he tragically died by a self-inflicted gunshot wound in 1890. Van Gogh was at one point so distressed that he cut his own ear off, memorialized in his “Self Portrait with Bandaged Ear.” Van Gogh frequently suffered from hallucinations which caused him to lose his memory and injury himself, and his incident with his ear is one such occasion. However, Van Gogh’s art is so present, vulnerable, and genuine that it now has distorted the image of the person who originally painted it.
In my Art History class, one of our weekly discussion topics was on if mental illness had given Van Gogh his genius artistic abilities. I thought for sure this was a softball given by our Professor as a way to let us relax for the week—our discourse on mental illness and disabilities had surely progressed far enough that no reasonable adult would believe that being ill gave you some kind of talent that you wouldn’t otherwise have. Our own textbook and lessons had emphasized the fact that most of the acclaimed art that Van Gogh had produced was during the times when he was recovering and in better health. After all, how could someone focus on producing art in the first place if they couldn’t even do basic functions of living properly?
I leisurely and confidently typed out my response and sent it, then going to look at the other posts to reply. To my horror, I found that nearly all my other classmates except for one thought that without his mental illness, Van Gogh wouldn’t have been able to make art at all. I was shocked — did people really believe that being mentally ill was some kind of romantic, artistic perspective and not a soul crushing and disabling illness?
The answer to my question is obviously yes. I recently was the Teaching Assistant to an English course that actually explored the very notion of dangerous romanticism within creativity that has led to Van Gogh’s legacy being perverted. The idea of mental illness as the funnel for creative vision has long been common within each of the prominent art worlds. If it’s not Van Gogh, it’s Sylvia Plath sticking her head in her oven, Jim Morrison overdosing in a bathtub, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s despair and overdose, Ernest Hemingway’s alcoholism and suicide, or Kurt Cobain’s death in his Seattle home. These are some of the greatest musicians, writers, and painters that have ever lived, and yet we have decided their value was dependent upon their suffering.
It is true that for many of these artists, their work is a direct tracing of their experiences with mental illness. Edvard Munch, artist of the famous “The Scream” and contemporary of Van Gogh, stated that his paintings were a direct depiction of how he saw the world through his illness. However, I’m not arguing that these paintings weren’t such depictions, but rather, that the art is an expression of talent through individual’s perspective, not the expression of the mental illness. Van Gogh, Munch, Basquiat, Plath, Hemingway, Morrison, and Cobain had wildly brilliant artistic skills that were not trained into them by mental illness. These skills took years to build — it was extremely common in Van Gogh and Munch’s time for a person to focus their entire schooling in only one area before the advent of general grade schools. Famous writer Mary Shelley, who also suffered from severe depression throughout her life, was able to write a masterpiece at 18 because she had spent her entire life only studying the greatest literature on earth. Cobain began playing guitar at 13 in order to get to his apex of fame at 27 before he perished, and while Morrison got involved in singing and performing in his college years, he had been studying poetry and philosophy from a young age, this knowledge later enabling him to write lyrics. Mental illness did not create their talent, nor did it enhance it — rather, their talent was the only way to authentically express themselves.
Many of these artists lamented that their only outlet away from the pain was their art. Shelley and Van Gogh both reported to have improved only when they began expressing themselves through their art to alleviate the pain. However, many times, their illness was more of a hinderance to producing art than creating it. Basquiat in particular was an example of this, as his addiction meant that the more successful his work got, the more he needed the drugs to cope. Basquiat’s perils were so bad that, like Van Gogh, he began unintentionally injuring himself, leading to more time between pieces produced while he recovered. In perhaps one of the most telling quotes of all, when Basquiat finally died of an overdose, contemporary Keith Haring stated, “Greedily we wonder what masterpieces we might have been cheated out of by his death.” Haring’s quote contains an underlying truth to the nature of artistic talent, in that it would still be created by the person if they were mentally healthy.
It is a paradox: mental illness cannot be good for art while also killing the artist, rendering the destruction of any further work. Basquiat’s death, like the others here who overdosed or died by suicide, was directly caused by his illness. It seems that the equation of mentally ill artist with “good” art was originally a way for society to attempt to honor their pain. However, this romanticization has instead given rise to an expectation or requirement for artists to suffer for their work. Like much everything else in America, it seems as if the notion of working through the pain so that others may praise and consume what you have produced for themselves is now a dominant narrative within the art, writing, and music worlds. The ironic perversion of self-expression as a mode of harrowing capitalist consumption truly needs a reckoning within the art worlds. Young artists attempting to break into these spaces should not feel the need to torture themselves in order to achieve success.
As someone who suffers from depression and anxiety myself, there are times when the illness drives me to express everything I can on the paper, but most other times, it blocks me completely. Mental illness is not a reliable method of creative construction. As well, mentally healthy writers, musicians, and painters do exist. The difference in quality of work between artists who have mental illness and who don’t is like apples to oranges, entirely incomparable. Art is so entirely subjective that society continually fights about what is considered “good” art. In Van Gogh’s time, the Salon system deemed “Starry Night” not worthy of display. Now, it is one of the most famous paintings in the entire world. Van Gogh’s talent, like the talent of the many other artists here, deserves to be celebrated — not his mental illness.
