Debunking the myth of the starving artist

Récolte du blé en Provence

Vincent Van Gogh, 1888

Israel Museum,  Jerusalem

Some days ago, my husband and I were having lunch at my mother-in-law place.

She's renting rooms to tourists and it was the birthday of one of her guests, a boy from Venezuela who came to Sardinia to celebrate his birthday with his girlfriend. 

They were both great and we found we had a lot in common so we had a very lively conversation during lunch (or instead of lunch, as my husband said.)

We talked about the necessity to learn how to keep a division between the time we spend working and our free time, a thing I had to learn after my job as a graphic designer and that he said he still struggled to do, besides the attempts of his girlfriend to convince him to set some boundaries. 

Anyway, we started talking about art, mostly about 1800 and early 1900 art and he came up with the phrase, “Many artists died in poverty, right?”

And I dropped the dessertspoon, leaving my slice of cheesecake forgotten.

Lions from the Ishtar Gate

569 BC

Pergamon Museum, Berlin

No.

It's not true, it's a literary invention by the writer Henri Murger, who would do a lot better to write about, I don't know, unicorns. 

Why it isn't true?

Let's start from the reason art started in human history. 

We hadn't constant artistic representation until agriculture was adopted.

During the ages of hunters and gatherers all the members of the tribes needed to collaborate in obtaining enough food for not starving and provide for the incapacitated members.

That left very little, if not not time, to art. Objects had to be functional, not beautiful. You don't need to paint that vase, Ulah.

Things changed with the Introduction of agriculture and farming.

Suddenly there was a surplus of food, so some members of the tribe could specialize in different fields, as artisans.

Now, some of them produced what today we call art, a way to decorate items of surfaces communicating concepts that others could understand.

I already realized that there is more than a myth to destroy here.

Art is a quite recent concept too, before there was no artist, but artisans, and an artisan is always compensated for their work.

Is no one's fault, it is in the common language and today's culture. 

We say, “The great artists from the past.”

We all know what that means, we immediately think of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raffaello.

The problem is that they weren't considered artists, they were masters artisans, and they weren't even too high in the hierarchy. 

Architects were really important, because they were those that shaped the cities. 

Leonardo was appreciated as an engineer, as such the King of France wanted him at his court. Then, sure, his pictorial production was appreciated, when he avoided to experiment with technique. The Florence government didn't appreciate the melted mess they received. Instead of the big celebrative big fresco, The Battle of Anghiari, they commissioned him.

And how happy were the friars in Milan when the Last Supper started peeling off the wall of their refectory?

But I'm digressing, as usual. 

The people of the time, seeing the new painting gifted from a wealthy banker to the city cathedral, would not think of the painter who did it, but of the patreon who paid for it.

Yes, the patron didn't keep at their court poets, musicians and artists for the love of the arts but to have their power celebrated.

The Virgin and Child with Two Angels 

Sandro Botticelli, dating to c. 1468–1469. 

Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, in Naples.

We have a contract between Sandro Botticelli and a commissioner for painting a Madonna.

In this contract are listed the prices of every pigment to be used, in the exact weight to the gram.

And then the compensation for Botticelli.

For that Madonna he gained less than the price of the lapis lazuli pigment, one of the more precious, that in that painting had to be used in profusion.

The patreon decided everything about the paint, the theme, the position of every character and their pose. The color of their vests and the shape of their surroundings.

The painter was just the executor of the patron's ideas.

All painters or sculptors worked in shops, and were paid for their work.

Some of them were from wealthy families, like Leonardo, who was the illegitimate son of a notar, or Michelangelo Buonarroti, who was son of a Florentine podesta.

To be a painter is expensive.

The poor people had to work the land to produce enough food for their families. 

So, those we today call artist were, usually, the children of wealthy family, entered to learn and work in the workshop of some famous painter and who then gained themselves the title of maester of 'art and opened their own workshops (fun fact, I graduated Master of Art in 1996.I was trained to be a pictorial decorator).

Le Déjeuner des canotiers

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 1882

The Phillips Collection,  Washington DC

Things changed in 1800, when factories started producing pigment already in emulsion and ready to use.

That's the time when, guess who? The sons and daughters of wealthy families start to paint as a hobby.

Still, the poor cannot afford art materials and meets art just during the Sunday celebrations in their churches filled in frescoes, stained glasses and wooden and painted statues, made by capable artisans, not by the artists from the elite, who passed their time in cafe or clubs, complaining because the academy didn't choose their last paint for the exposition national.

My grand-grand-grand father, at that time, was fighting to harvest some potatoes and corn from a soil full of rocks. Whatever children he had with my same predisposition for observation and good manuality didn't have the chance to become an artist. At 5 was tending the sheeps and, when a bit older, had to learn some manual work, like shoe maker or woodworker.

The potato eaters

Vincent Van Gogh  1885

The archetype of poor artists, in our imagination, is Vincent Van Gogh.

He came from a wealthy family of goldsmiths, even if his father decided for the career of Calvinist pastor.

The mother came from a very wealthy family of bookbinders.

He was the first born, therefore his father's heir, but I imagine that Theo was appointed his guardian and administrator because of his mental illness.

The only poverty he ever knew was the one he painted, starting from the potato eater from his homeland, since the harvesters of his more colorful period.

The amount of color he used in every one of his nearly 900 paintings doesn't tell about someone who had to live in restraints.

We know he regularly eats meat, we know he had access to a good clinic where he went more times to cure his mental health.

La Méridienne

Vincent Van Gogh, 1889

Musée d'Orsay

It's a famous fact that he sold only one paint and that was the reason he killed himself.

That's not true. He liked the gift of his paints to his friends, sometimes to return a favor, but he didn't need to sell them. We don't even know if he was interested in selling them.

He passed his days painting using an absurd amount of color on every paint.

A poor person couldn't afford that.

The poor people's children had dolls that were a chunk of wood dressed with a rag.

Their childhood was brief and they didn't have the time to have hobbies, except, some time, carving a piece of wood, shepherding the few family's goats.

Vincent Van Gogh didn't die in poverty, he had more than most of the people who lived around him.

Les semailles au coucher du soleil

Vincent Van Gogh, 1888

Kröller-Müller Museum

So, the story of the Starving Artist is a myth, if not a total lie.

We started to talk about artists in the same period the wealthy and spoiled kids discovered art, because they cannot be compared to the vulgar artisans who were still commissioned to paint the church walls and carving the statues of the saints.

Most of them, of the Artist, painted the world of the wealthy and bored, rarely the poor people appear in their paints and it is always in a romanticized way.

So, we are artisans, like the masters of the past, and l8ke them we deserve to be paid at least enough to live with dignity. 

Remember what I tell you today, the next time someone offers you to work two weeks of your life for 50 dollars.