People often say “the artist commits suicide easily” or “artist can live longer so that they can relieve stress by creating works and creating works can be anti-aging” I just want to know what’s the fact about it.
Today I have lots of time because I have day off, so looked over it.
Artists and late age, cause of death
Picasso, 82, pulmonary edema
Hundertwasser, 72, heart attack
Caravaggio, 38, illness
Andy Warhol, 58, heart attack after gallbladder surgery
Van Gogh, 37, suicide
Taro Okamoto, 84, Parkinson’s disease
Mark Rothko, 66, suicide
Leonardo da Vinci, 67, illness?
Shiko Munakata, 72, liver cancer
Gauguin, 55, heart attack? Hepatitis? Syphilis?
Jean-Francois Millet, 60, illness
Claude Monet, 86, pulmonary sclerosis
Taikan Yokoyama, 90, pneumonia
Egon Schiele, 28, Spanish flu
Basquiat, 27, drug addiction
Nam June Paik ,73, illness
Rubens, 62, gout
Edvard Munch, 80, pneumonia
Gustav Klimt, 55, Cerebral infarction and pneumonia
Frida Kahlo, 47, pulmonary embolism
Jean Cocteau, 74, heart attack
Hokusai Katsushika, 90, senility
Michelangelo, 89, senility
Joseph Beuys, 65, illness
Salvador Dali, 84, heart toll
Keith Haring, 31, AIDS
Francis Bacon, 82, senility
Georgia O’Keeffe, 98, senility?
Wassily Kandinsky, 77, Unknown
Jackson Pollock, 44, car accident
A result of taking the data of 30 people became normal result － 65.77-years old. Though, for more accurate result we need more data.
Because the artist’s selection is done by my arbitrary decision, the result became “Average life span of my favorite artist”.
Actually, only two people (Gogh and Rothko) committed suicide, I can not say “The artist commits suicides easily”. However, where is the impression “The artist commits suicide easily” come from ? Does everybody knows some artist who commit suicide by painful life as an artist ?
Do to become an artist, committing suicide bofore being famouse is the worst thing to do. I want to add one sentence to my list of ‘How to be an artist’, “Do not commit suicide before you become famous ! “.
Additionally, I care for that artists tend to have sicknesses related to lungs and heart attacks. So don’t shut yourself up in the room for making artworks, let’s do exercise to strongthen your lungs and heart !
Even Egon Schiele, Gogh, Basquiat and Keith Haring died early, they left a lot of artworks. I really admire it. However they died early or later, they might be sick or healthy, these real artists were desprate to make artworks and seriously continued making artworks until die.
People including tend to extend the things that you should do now or give up something by saying excuse. But now I really noticed that we need to do “things we should do NOW, or we want to do Now” sincerely.
Also, some kind of parson continue to say “I’ll start doing this tomorrow”, such a person never starts doing it and is not good at doing anything in his/her life. So it’s very important to try to do something you need/want to do quickly at young time, (it is difficult to change the habit after growing old).
The interesting novels I’ve read which wrote about the attitude of dying artists are “Bluebeard” by Kurt Vonnegut and “Moon and six pence” by Somerset Maugham (It is said that Gauguin is a model). They are very impressive novels and you can get creative impulse by reading.
