During a psychotic episode, the artist picks up his knife and cuts off his ear, the blood spills on to the canvas and blooms into a bunch of beautiful sunflowers. As Plato said, “All of the good poets are not in their right mind when they make their beautiful songs.” They are mere receptacles through which suffering flows and translates itself into art. This is, of course, absurd. The image of the tortured artist has evolved and become increasingly entrenched, romanticised in order to paint a neat picture of the link between suffering and art.
The truth is far more complex. Very often artists make great work in spite of their suffering. Many others are unable to work at all. Imagine a gallery full of the great works of art made if we could have prevented the hardships that were insurmountable obstacles to so many. Grayson Perry suggested the economic impacts of Covid could be a good thing, clearing out the “dead wood”. The neoliberal lie of the individual, the creative genius able to flourish however awful the conditions.
In my new book, Wreck: Géricault’s Raft and the Art of Being Lost at Sea, I explore various forms of suffering. Géricault’s, survivors of the raft, my friend Ali’s experiences of blindness and war, and my own buried traumas. I wanted to pull back the curtain, to get inside the complex network of processes that see suffering translated into art. But also to move beyond the spectacle of it all, to think how art might help, might offer a light in darkness – as these books do.
1. The Iceberg by Marion Coutts
Coutts is a celebrated visual artist, and her husband, Tom Lubbock, was a renowned art critic. The Iceberg meticulously charts the journey from his diagnosis with a terminal brain tumour, through to his death. As Lubbock’s words are stolen, their child learns to speak. The surgical precision with which Coutts uses language to recall this is a deeply affecting counterpoint. Always searching for and finding the right words, because in that search, through all the pain, it is a portrait of, and hymn to, love.
