Artists aren’t always what we think they are

Over the last year or so I’ve come to realize how different our perception of artists is from reality. The film Frida, about the life of painter Frida Kahlo, sparked this revelation. I remember the first time I saw a Kahlo painting, in a poetry writing class during college. I was put off at the time, to say the least, even as an art student in a public university. Had I at the time been given some background information on the artist, her paintings would have made sense. Their visceral nature would have been tempered with the knowledge that she suffered physically in many of the ways she depicted on the canvas.

A week or so ago I wrote briefly about Makoto Fujimura’s recent blog post dealing with Vincent van Gogh. Normally, van Gogh is regarded as a modern artistic genius, afflicted with stereotypical artist-slash-genius afflictions; in other words, he was kinda crazy. And then there’s that bit about him cutting off his ear.

What we don’t know — even me with an art degree — is that he came from a very religious family. He wanted to be a priest, but was denied the priesthood by the Dutch church for being too uneducated (he only knew five languages). He was sent as a missionary to a mining community in Belgium. He likely suffered from some unidentified mental illness, which explains the mood swings that caused people to think of him as crazy. And his style, his application of paint to the canvas, was a reflection of his appreciation for Japanese wood cuts.

I took five art history classes as an undergrad: Art Historty Survey I and II, History of Photography, Roman Art and Archeology and History of Architecture. I never learned details like this, details that significantly influence how a person looks at a work of art. Yes, a painting or sculpture possesses merit in and of itself. We don’t need to know the personal history of the artist in order to say “That’s a good painting.” While such knowledge may not necessarily lend additional meaning to his individual pieces, such details do make a work of art infinitely more interesting.