One of the most intriguing questions in the art world is whether creativity has some connection with mental illness. The “mad artist” trope is a recurring theme in books and movies. Today, one finds several social media posts on the melancholy of Sylvia Plath or the obsession with Vincent van Gogh’s life. Looking at the rising cases of anxiety, we may think that relating to these celebrated artists can help us feel less alone in our battles. Still, there is a difference between attempting to make sense of their art and idealising their emotional crises. It is pertinent to understand why we are so addicted to the idea that only our sufferings make our art valid.
Time and again, scientists have tried to understand whether there is any link between the two. In 2001, American psychologist James C. Kaufman introduced the Sylvia Plath Effect to argue that female poets are more susceptible to depression than men. In 2013, Karolinska Institutet conducted a study and found that people in creative professions were more likely to suffer from bipolar disorder. Another study conducted in 2017 by International Center for Studies in Creativity at Buffalo State University concluded that a small but positive correlation exists between creativity and psychoticism. However, one’s creative talent would depend on the severity of the disease because an acute illness could reduce the creativity level. Clinical psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison argues that temporary manic-depressive episodes could boost creativity. But these are usually followed by worsening mental health.
Many other women in creative writing, apart from Sylvia Plath, suffered from mental illness. A household name in feminist writing, Virginia Woolf’s childhood was riddled with manic episodes. She suffered from depression following her mother’s death. Psychiatrists have characterised her illness as bipolar disorder. During her lifetime, she was treated by different physicians and briefly institutionalised after her father’s death in 1904. Her brother Thoby’s death in 1906 further degraded her mental state as she started hearing voices. Woolf attempted to project her illness as a necessary condition for her art.
In her novel Mrs. Dalloway, the character Septimus Warren Smith suffers post-traumatic stress disorder after serving in the First World War. When forced to seek treatment at a psychiatric hospital, Smith commits suicide by jumping out of the window. This reveals a disillusionment of psychiatric treatment that Woolf shared with the general British public at the time. Her journals prove how she felt divided between considering her illness a hindrance to her art or a prerequisite for her work. Later, Woolf identified writing as a coping strategy for her illness which was more effective than psychiatry. She said, “The only way I keep afloat is by working . . . Directly I stop working I feel that I am sinking down, down.”
A popular artwork that reflects agony is The Scream, painted by Norwegian artist Edvard Munch in 1893. Munch captures a scene inspired by one of his walks along a fjord in Ekebergasen during sunset. According to Munch, he was out with two friends when, leaning on the fence, he witnessed the sky turn blood red and “sensed an endless scream passing through nature.” In The Scream, the sky is painted orange and red, and the three figures are shaded black. The prime subject appears in a state of anxiety, mouth agape as his hands cover his ears. The painting captures intense emotional distress. How much we find the artist in this work is debatable. Born in 1863, Munch was raised in a strict Christian household. Munch said that he “inherited the seeds of madness” from his father, who was a religious fanatic. Munch was continuously gnawed by the fear of death and hell. During his lifetime, he lost his mother, beloved sister, and later his father; these losses haunted him and found expression in his works. It is evident that his personal life had a deep impact on his works. However, Munch’s troubled state of mind should not be glorified. He was eventually electrified in a psychiatric institution. By 1909, he recovered, as is reflected in his use of vibrant colours. His later works had optimistic themes like landscapes and scenes of people at work. Thus, good mental health intensified his creative genius.
One painting that captures the innermost suffering of a troubled artist is Le Désespéré (The Desperate Man), a self-portrait by the French painter Gustave Courbet. Dressed in a white shirt with hands in his unkempt hair, the artist in the painting looks tense. He stares wide-eyed as if in a state of utter helplessness. The subject captures the artist’s struggle to gain recognition. Courbet was born in Ornans. In 1839, he moved to Paris to pursue a degree in law. But Courbet found himself driven by the passion to copy the Old Masters and learnt to cultivate his style at the studio of Steuben and Hesse. In the 1840s, he made a series of self-portraits, and of these, Le Désespéré stands as the most dramatic. Before Courbet became one of the pioneers of Realism, his artworks were repeatedly rejected by Parisian salons. What Le Désespéré symbolises is a kind of suffering that stems more from his inability to receive patronage rather than mental illness.
Creating art could be a painstaking process. Sometimes it takes months, even years, to perfect a work of art. Christoph Niemann’s Creative Process (2013) depicts a writer with a blank paper in front of him, his nails raking at the table in anguish. A dejected figure with two bunches of folded paper–Neimann represents how difficult it is to communicate through one’s art. Great art could indeed be born of suffering, but it is not the only element that contributes to an artist’s inspiration. It takes skill and an enormous amount of practice to find an artistic approach distinct to the individual.
It is one thing to be inspired by these artists and quite another to romanticize their anxieties. What can be learnt from these lived experiences is that it is possible to see art as therapy, a medium through which one can channel their struggle. A poem or a painting embodies a part of ourselves, a part with which we wish the world to be familiar. The major takeaway is that mental illness should not be left untreated just to fit into the absurd, unrealistic criteria of the “tortured artist.” While addressing today’s tortured artists, curator Sarah Urist Green says, “We want to know about the dark places you have been, we want to see what helps you get out of them, and we want you to stay healthy enough to do that.” To be able to create art, despite all obstacles, is a triumph in itself, a celebration of our endurance and hope toward better days.
References
“The Myth of the Tortured Artist”, YouTube, uploaded by The Art Assignment, 5 October 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rv5-O-jP2i8&list=PLca9Dgr4lYRjy_KiuOx1iKsfNM1xosTUz&index=26
“The Truth of the Tortured Artist”, YouTube, uploaded by The Art Assignment, 1 February 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IpTxQ_DWy0&list=PLca9Dgr4lYRjy_KiuOx1iKsfNM1xosTUz&index=13
“Edvard Munch.” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edvard_Munch. Accessed 22 January 2023.
Fiore, Julia. “Gustave Courbet’s “The Desperate Man” Is the Ultimate Self-Portrait of the Artist as Mad Genius.” Artsy, 20 November 2018, https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-probing-gustave-courbets-inner-thoughts-the-desperate-man. Accessed 22 January 2023.
Moore, Madison. “The tortured artist — Antithesis Journal.” Antithesis Journal, 24 April 2020, https://www.antithesisjournal.com.au/blog/2020/4/24/the-tortured-artist. Accessed 22 January 2023.
“Virginia Woolf.” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Woolf. Accessed 22 January 2023.
“The Scream, 1893 by Edvard Munch.” Edvard Munch, https://www.edvardmunch.org/the-scream.jsp. Accessed 22 January 2023.
pictures – amazon.in, en.wikipedia.org, https://postscriptmagazine.org/
Bipasha Mahanta
Bipasha identifies as an avid reader. If you don’t find her hoarding books (which she’ll probably not read anytime soon), she could be found poring over Constable’s paintings with a second cup of coffee. Her research interests include Romanticism, Realism, Art History, Cultural History, History of Modern Europe and History of Assam.
