Art through suffering

Posted by admin on Sep 23, 2008 in Arts & Culture | 0 comments

Here’s a little known fact: life is hard on everyone. Writers, philosophers and painters experience some dismal failures and hardships too. In fact, critics can feel participation in these hardships—even relate their own—by reading a book or studying a painting. Below is a list of artists who have created new genres and molded new mediums with their suffering. After I finished this list, I wondered where an artist’s drive comes from in tough situations. Does great art stem from the artists’ own suffering? Is human suffering the cause of great art? Regardless, consider this a collection of the more unknown parts of these artists’ lives.

Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890) “I put my heart and my soul into my work, and have lost my mind in the process.”
Painter
Famous Works: The Potato Eaters, The Red Vineyard
At age 11 Van Gogh lives as a missionary for a year in Borinage, Belgium, sleeping in huts and often working in coalmines. By March of the following year, his father demands his return, strictly suggesting that the boy be placed in an asylum for his disobedience. In 1882, while in Arles, Van Gogh meets with his artist friend Gauguin, and becomes a frequent copier of Gauguin’s style methods. Gauguin distances himself, what Van Gogh describes as “extensive tension.” Experiencing episodes of paranoia, one December night Van Gogh follows Gauguin through a park and knifes off his own ear before his friend.

Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906) “But a prayer that he sends from his heart’s deep core.”
Poet
Famous Works: Lyrics of Lowly Life, “Frederick Douglass”
Paul Laurence Dunbar was first inspired to write poetry by his mother’s enthusiasm for literature. Dunbar’s writing career starts in university, when he becomes editor-in-chief of his school newspaper, and later writes for Dayton community newspapers. To pay publishing fees for his first book of poetry, Oak and Ivy (1892), Dunbar works as an elevator operator and sells his poetry for a dollar to anyone in the elevator. Dunbar experiences divorce with Alice Ruth Moore, tuberculosis, and remains the first African-American Poet to gain critical international acclaim.

Leonard Cohen (1934- ) “Deprivation is the mother of poetry.”
Novelist, Poet, Singer
Famous works: The Favorite Game, Beautiful Losers
Born in Montreal, after suffering the death of his father at age ten, Cohen buries the first thing he writes. Tearing off the bowtie he wore to his father’s funeral, he inscribes a note into it and buries the bowtie in the snow. Cohen originally began writing poetry to get attention from women. “When it didn’t work with women,” he says, “I appealed to God.”

Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) “I never painted dreams, I painted my own reality.”
Painter
Mexican painter Frida Kahlo has one leg bigger than the other from a brush with polio at age six. Having one-third of her work self-portraits, Kahlo paints the physical and psychological wounds she sees in herself. As a painter, Kahlo’s life is overshadowed by her husband, Diego Rivera. She receives little attention until the 1980s when her work reemerges in feminist and neo-mexicanoist thought. Bisexual, Kahlo suffers a psychologically distant marriage from Diego, and briefly divorces after a series of affairs (Kahlo sleeping with Diego’s friend, Diego once sleeping with Kahlo’s younger sister Cristina), but quickly remarries.

Charles Bukowski (1920-1994) “You never know you’re a writer: you only think you’re one.”
Poet, Novelist
Famous works: Ham on Rye, Post Office
Charles Bukowski has bad acne, is “outcast” because of it in high school and in his later adolescence. Bukowski’s first sexual experience occurs at age 26 with a drunken, overweight prostitute nearly twice his age. In Los Angeles, California, he grows up with a physically and verbally abusive father. A near death experience in his thirties shifts his genre from prose to poetry. Bukowski is an alcoholic, a womanizer and a subtly brilliant American writer.

Anna May Wong (1905-1961) “Every time your picture is taken, you lose a part of your soul.”
Actress
Famous works: The Toll of the Sea (1922), Lady from Chungking (1942)
Anna May Wong is the first Chinese-American to become a Hollywood star. In film, May Wong endures the stereotypes Hollywood stamps on the Chinese, starring in movies like Daughter of the Dragon (1931), Shanghai Express (1932) and Daughter of Shanghai (1937). Frustrated with her career in Hollywood, she moves to England and returns to Hollywood after a visit to China, and the death of her father. During World War II, May Wong tours the United States rallying against the cultural prejudice between east and west.

Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) “A poet is an unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret sufferings.”
Philosopher
Famous works: Fear and Trembling, Either Or
Everybody knows what rejection feels like. Consider Nov. 11, 1840: Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard is engaged to Regine Olsen, the “Sovereign of [his] heart,” but for fear of marriage Kierkegaard convinces her to leave him. Later regretting his decision, he writes her for forgiveness. Regine burns every letter and marries her former instructor Johan Frederik Schlegel. Kierkegaard dies seven years later without a single word from Regine.