THE PAINTER RICHARD SCHMID once said, “Painting and booze don’t mix.” Amen to that, Brother! It’s long been different with creative writers, of course. The late-great writing instructor John Gardner, author of The Art of Fiction, shared how, when creatively stuck, he’d sip vodka to revive his inventiveness. Hemingway was so far gone at the end of his career that his New York editors had to rewrite his prose.
Modern painters, however, have not always been as abstemious as Schmid has counseled. Take Paris when modern art was born. Manet balanced things, but not Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who died of over-intoxication, as did Gustave Courbet, who drank himself to death in exile in Switzerland. Perhaps exile justifies the slide.
Meanwhile in Paris, absinthe, hashish, and opium were the diversions of choice. Opium, for one, was widely available for a century and more. Take the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834). His lyricism lofted on an opium buzz and haze, then his addiction led to demise.
When the young Picasso was first in-and-out of Paris, 1900-1904, he fell in with such a group of avid drug users, including the poet Max Jacob, an opium addict. In Paris, Picasso was frequently high on hashish. His circle of twenty-somethings held their “opium nights.” Then he returned to Spain, where he spun out his Blue and Rose periods. Next, he was back in Paris to produce his iconic gaunt subjects, street urchins and harlequins.
One wonders whether Picasso’s sometimes addled brain was shaping that period of remarkable, haunting paintings of mood-laden subjects. (He later went so straight that he didn’t even drank). After all, the poets of the period were advocating a “derangement of all the senses.”
Other Parisians in the art scene celebrated one kind of intoxication or another.
Amedeo Modigliani, who died at age 36, suffered tuberculosis, which may partly explain his artistic addiction to opium, but only partly. The surrealist theorist Andre Breton advocated losing one’s mind in order to escape the dreariness and banality of life (and, eventually, the horrors of the First World War). His semi-compatriot, the filmmaker and art-kingmaker Jean Cocteau, was addicted to opium, then heroin.
Then we move on to the New York School of Abstract Expressionist painters. A manly bunch, they were hard drinkers at their watering hole, the Cedar Tavern. The “all over” abstract painter Jackson Pollack was all over the bottle much of the time. In the end, he fatally crashed his car, along with his girlfriend, into a giant tree.
So, have the next generation of painters escaped these tendencies? Not according to Rebels in Paradise (2011), an inside look at the LA art scene in the 1960s and seventies. There, amphetamines took their toll. Of course, “speed” is a stimulant, not a depressant, like the aforementioned substances. Who would not be a better painter with the ability to focus for hours, stay up night after night, excelling in a competitive market where productivity has a leg up?
Andy Warhol’s famous Manhattan hangout, The Factory, was nothing if not a place to go and take drugs, hook up for sex, and of course, make long boring films. The writers should not be forgotten, meanwhile. Poet Ginsberg ended up on heroin. Jack Kerouac churned out his novel On the Road by sniffing Benzedrine. Novelist Stephen King, in his autobiography, says he snorted cocaine till his nose bled during the wildly successful peak of his early career.
With the over-medication of modern society, the reach of stimulants has gone quietly mainstream. More young people are being “diagnosed” with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). The prescribed solution is amphetamines, strong and weak, given out under names such as Adderall. One documentary film argued that while the “opioid epidemic” gets headlines, the abuse of ADHD drugs may be more prevalent.
Many young art students pursue the art career because, according to research, they may have had difficulty in reading, writing, and arithmetic. They are strong in their visual orientation and their wandering attention spans. When I spent a year at an art college, to write a book about art higher education, I was surprised at how common ADHD drugs had become. Young artists with the prescription shared it with others: there's nothing like the buzz of Adderall to help you stay up all night for an artwork assignment.
For artists, young and old, this goes to the perennial question of finding the energy to produce art. In the best of all worlds, the energy should arise naturally. Good health, exercise, and other benign habits provide physical vim and vigor.
Still, what about inspiration and creativity? Does it take a chemical enhancement? Artists obviously differ on the subject. To modify Schmid’s wise counsel, we might say, “Good painting arises from natural energy and creativity.” When those are not found, it’s unfortunate that the artist’s Muse spoken of in poetry—the Muse as magical source of creative power—is only a wonderful myth. And so, artists often turn to drugs.