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History Kept the Art and Buried the Bodies
The other day, my daughter and I were talking about Picasso, Van Gogh, and other geniuses like them whose cupboards are full of skeletons on display.
Their creations are unparalleled (unfortunately), but so are their crimes. And so we kept circling the same question: could they have been such geniuses if they hadn’t been such monsters? Or were they such devastating creators because they were?
It presented a disturbing possibility. Disturbing enough that I couldn’t leave it alone.
We weren’t trying to decide if we should cancel Wagner or burn our Picasso prints. That question has been asked, and answered, and asked again, and it will outlast us all.
What we were sitting with was something more unsettling: not whether the monster deserved recognition for his genius, but whether the genius could have been without the monstrosity to begin with.
Was it a deal with the devil?
With this distinction in mind, I started looking for something that might resemble an answer.
Caravaggio murdered a man and painted some of the most visceral images in art history. Was…
