Illustration by Michael Klein

Issue: Summer 2003

Portrait of the Artist

Everyone knows how Van Gogh made a love-offering of his left ear, but art history is rife with less infamous but no less tantalizing tales of artistic excess. See if you can recognize these portraits taken from life.

1. This Bohemian chronicler of the Belle Époque was an aristocrat, heir to a thousand-year-old name. Deformed and stunted by childhood injuries, instead of living in splendid seclusion he amused himself drinking, carousing and sketching in the cabarets and brothels of Montmartre, where he made archetypes of the dancing girls, drunks and flâneurs now synonymous with fin-de-siècle Paris.

2. Ruskin called him not so much an artist as “an inspired saint.” This Dominican monk combined the austerity of Gothicism with the spontaneity and brightness of the Renaissance. His sublime altarpieces and frescoes earned him the nickname beato – blessed. The Vatican waited 500 years to make it official, with his 1984 beatification.

3. Having failed as a stockbroker, husband, father and artist, this Postimpressionist master of primitivism embarked on a voyage to Papeete, determined to escape “everything that is artificial and conventional.” For two blissful years he lived carefree with his 13-year-old vahine in a hut, producing 66 splendid canvases and a dozen wood sculptures. Still Paris was unimpressed. Destitute and plagued by illness, he took arsenic after completing his masterpiece – a monumental allegorical tableau on the human condition – but failed even at suicide. He died six years later, alone, in the Marquesas.

4. With his waxed, up-turned mustachio, this Surrealist is best known for the melting clocks and hellish dreamscapes that Freud himself called “fantastic.” But his artistic impulses found expressions beyond paint and canvas: he created sets for opera, theater and ballet. He wrote poetry and fiction. He even made films, including a collaboration with Hitchcock on the startling dream sequence for a classic thriller.

5. Rodin called this American ex-pat “the Van Dyck of our time.” Having established himself as the premier portraitist of the day (his 1903 presidential commission hangs in the White House), he took to painting Impressionist-influenced landscapes and allegorical murals. Late in life he turned to scathing political commentary with this famous 20-foot tableau protesting the use of mustard gas in World War I. It now hangs in London’s Imperial War Museum.

6. She not only married a famous artist but became one in her own right. The protégée of Surrealists André Breton and Marcel Duchamps, she was fascinated by her own face (the epitome of jolie-laid). “I paint self-portraits,” she once wrote, “because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best.” Like her spouse, she was notorious for her amours: her lovers included Leon Trotsky and Georgia O’Keeffe.

7. This middle-class artist never sought controversy, yet that’s what he got with two 1863 paintings that sparked fiery debate on realism: one, an odalisque whose bored face is scandalously that of a well-born Parisienne; another, an al fresco repast that projects not pastoral innocence but bourgeois decadence. These outrages made the artist a reluctant standard-bearer for the rebellious Impressionists, though he never gave up his ambition of achieving fame in the conservative Salon of the Royal Academy.

8. “The Robespierre of the brush” they called this Neoclassical master whose career, like the proverbial cat with nine lives, survived coup after bloody coup. A darling of the Royal Academy, he metamorphosed into France’s art-czar during the Reign of Terror. As a deputy in the National Convention, he voted for Louis XVI’s execution and consigned 300 others to the guillotine. His chef d’oeuvre, completed in 1793, has been called the “pietà of the Revolution.” With the fall of the Republic, the Jacobin artist transformed himself yet again, into court portraitist to Napoleon, producing a series of monumental tableaus on imperial themes. Exiled after Waterloo, the 77-year-old master died peacefully in Brussels in 1825.

Answers:
1: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
2: Fra Angelico, a.k.a. Guido di Pietro and Fra Giovanni da Fiesole
3: Paul Gauguin, "Where Do We Come From?" - "Where Are We?" - "Where Are We Going?"
4: Salvador Dali, Spellbound
5: John Singer Sargent, "President Theodore Roosevelt," - "Gassed"
6: Frida Kahlo
7: Edouard Manet, "Olympia," - "Dejeuner sur l'Herbe"
8: Jacques-Louis David, "Death of Marat"