When it comes to art, opinion is divided – some people don’t understand it at all and have no idea why anyone would pay so much for it, while others really see what the artist is trying to transmit. Art, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. However, when it comes to the artists themselves, opinion isn’t very divided at all. It’s pretty much universally acknowledged that artists are eccentrics, and the more bizarre the individual, the better the art. So meet the people behind the art with our Top 10 Most Eccentric Artists.
10. Tracey Emin
A modern artist to start with, and one that shot to prominence in 1997 by presenting a tent with the names of her lovers on the side of it, entitled ” Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995″ (she was born in 1960, so the first few are, you’d hope, a platonic kind of sleeping). Two years later, her unmade bed, complete with soiled underwear, was exhibited in the Tate and Emin was nominated for the Turner Prize. Emin is unlikely to dispute claims that she’s a bit eccentric in life as well as art – her biography was called “Strangeland” and has the line “Here I am, a….crazy, anorexic-alcoholic-childless, beautiful woman”. Anyone who’s seen one of her drunken, swearing TV appearances would probably agree that she’s a little crazy. Still, she’s made a career out of being eccentric and is now Professor of Drawing at the Royal Academy in London.
9. Pablo Picasso
From used underpants to a pioneer in modern art. Picasso has an instantly recognizable style and was one of the founding fathers of cubism. He also had a tempestuous personal life, with multiple affairs during his two marriages, some of them with women 40 years his junior. He was also an outspoken communist, receiving the Stalin Peace Prize and painting a portrait of the Russian leader himself, to the discomfort of Leon Trotsky – a friend of Picasso’s and exiled by Stalin. Picasso was unafraid to push boundaries both artistically and socially and seemed unafraid of anyone, even answering back to the Gestapo in occupied Paris. Wonder how today’s artists would cope with being questioned by the Nazis?
8. Banksy
Of all the personalities on the list, there is only one about which we know almost nothing. Banksy is the street-name of a graffiti artist whose works now fetch thousands of pounds for the lucky business owners whose walls have been painted on by the rogue artist. But he has no public identity and only the sketchiest details are known about the man behind the art. He’s said to come from Bristol and have been a trainee butcher in his youth but even that is speculation. In 2010 he was nominated for an Oscar for his film “Exit Through the Gift Shop” and, in a rare public statement, said “This is a big surprise… I don’t agree with the concept of award ceremonies, but I’m prepared to make an exception for the ones I’m nominated for. The last time there was a naked man covered in gold paint in my house, it was me”. An artist so obtuse he hasn’t even come forward to claim the glory….that’s truly eccentric.
7. Marcel Duchamp
Now for a more traditional kind of eccentricity – making art out of toilet bowls. French artist Marcel Duchamp specialized in a kind of “found art”, exhibiting a bicycle wheel, a snow shovel, a bottle-drying rack and most famously a urinal. He called these his “readymades” and described his theory: “My idea was to choose an object that wouldn’t attract me, either by its beauty or by its ugliness. To find a point of indifference in my looking at it, you see”. So, mediocre and unmade items – if you look around your house you might find that you too own several “readymades”! Duchamp was also dismissive of his fellow artists, describing their work as “retinal art” – art only intended to please the eye at a superficial level. Unlike a urinal, which pleases the eye at no level at all…
6. Damien Hirst
Talking about things that are aesthetically unpleasing, here’s Damien Hirst, creator of a cow sliced in two and pickled. “Mother and Child Divided” featured a cow and calf split down the middle and bathed in formaldehyde and it first went on display in 1993. Dead animals and preserving fluid are a running theme in Hirst’s work, covering works such as a whole tiger shark in a case and a rotting cow’s head surrounded by flies (which was banned for fear of making people vomit). He may seem like a morbid and depressed character, but in the 90s he still found time to be an ironic misogynist, directing Blur’s “Country House” video, which mainly consisted of big-breasted women running around in short skirts. And the less said about his own musical career in Fat Les, the better…
5. Vincent van Gogh
Some of the most influential and talented artists were also internally tormented. Van Gogh was a post-impressionist whose works are now regarded as classics, but he was largely unappreciated in his time and suffered frequently with bouts of mental illness. Shortly before his apparent suicide, he went into a fit of depression that only lifted when he painted, and then he went into an ecstasy-like state. The peaks and troughs of depression had pushed him to extreme action before – after a row with fellow artist Paul Gauguin 1888, he had cut off parts of his ear and was sent to hospital in a critical state. Gauguin visited van Gogh and said “His state is worse, he wants to sleep with the patients, chase the nurses, and washes himself in the coal bucket.” Two years later, he was dead, leaving a body of over 2000 works behind him.
4. Gilbert & George
Actually two artists, who together form one artist collective. Gilbert Proesch and George Passmore met at St Martin’s School of Art in 1967 and it was “love at first sight” (they later married, according to some reports). They are conservative in both dress sense and political views and have expressed their love of Margaret Thatcher before, all of which goes against the traditional artists’ politics of socialism and anti-establishment sentiment. It also clashes with their fairly base choice of subject matter, with bodily fluids making a regular appearance and racial words printed onto pictures of the Asian people who live in the East End of London, along with the pair. Somehow, this has garnered them a clutch of awards and honorary doctorates from leading universities. Racism and poo will do that, apparently.
3. Andy Warhol
Every so often, art will come together with the rest of pop culture to create something remarkable. That’s what happened in the 1960s, when Andy Warhol’s Factory collective combined art and music in a cultural explosion that produced not just Warhol’s famed pop-art paintings of soup cans but also bands like Velvet underground and around 75 films, most of which were too rude for general release. At the center of it all was Warhol, an artistic genius and controller of all those around him. He was a mass of contradictions – a Catholic virgin, who produced works of homosexual erotica too explicit to be shown in galleries. He was a complex person and although many were with him, few got close to him. He died in 1987 but the legend lives on.
2. Michaelangelo
Another artist who may have had frustrated gay leanings, Michaelangelo embodies the temperamental artist. He slept with his shoes on, rarely ate or drank until he had to and wasn’t overly interested in personal hygiene. For him, the art was everything. He lived incredibly frugally, saying “However rich I may have been, I have always lived like a poor man” and paid his apprentices meager wages too. Still, the devotion to is art paid off, with his Sistene Chapel ceiling considered among the greatest works of art of all time, along with his sculpture of David. He just doesn’t sound like the easiest person to get on with.
1. Salvador Dali
Lastly, the master of surrealism who, like Warhol, was also a mass of contradictions. A devout Catholic, he proclaimed himself agnostic. He was a communist but sided with fascist leader Franco in the Spanish Civil War, drawing portraits of his granddaughter and sending him letters of support. He traveled everywhere with his pet ocelot, even on board ship, and once gave Mia Farrow a gift of a dead mouse in a bottle. He is said to have paid restaurant tabs by drawing pictures on the receipts and kept fans’ pens whenever he signed autographs. His melting clocks and lobster telephones made have made his name as an artist, but it is his eccentricity outside his work that ensures he is remembered forever. And he would be quite pleased with that – after all, this is the man that said “every morning upon awakening, I experience a supreme pleasure: that of being Salvador DalÔ Modest? No. Inspirational? Yes. Genius? Maybe. Unforgettable? Certainly.