From Caravaggio to Rolf Harris: can we admire the art but not the artist?
- Maggie Hall
- Mar 31
- 8 min read
By Maggie Hall
Maggie is a retired teacher of speech and drama, a former Chair of Brighton Humanists, a member of the Humanists UK Dialogue Network and a Humanists UK School Speaker. Here she muses on whether we can still admire the artistic output of creatives, even if their private lives are less than admirable.
A friend of mine is currently involved in a dispute with her partner over a work of art, a limited edition print by a well-known artist, which is displayed on one of the walls in their house. He wishes her to take it down because of who the artist is. She is reluctant to do so because a) she likes the picture and b) she has discovered that it’s worth rather a lot of money. But why does her partner want rid of the picture? Well, you see, the artist in question is Rolf Harris, who, in 2014, was jailed for five years and nine months for 12 indecent assaults against four girls – including one aged just seven or eight.
This raises the perennial question of whether it is possible to admire the artistic output of creatives whilst setting aside any unsavoury moral or ethical aspects of their private lives. Rolf Harris may be the most recent, but certainly not the first, artist known to have had less than a completely respectable character, and yet their works are still displayed in galleries, repeatedly printed in books and often sold for eye-watering amounts of money.
Problem painters
Paul Gauguin is a case in point. Having abandoned his wife and five children in Paris, he set off to various parts of the world before ending up, in 1891, in the South Pacific islands of Tahiti and Hiva Oa, where he set himself up in a hut, which he called La Maison du Jouir (“The House of Orgasm”), having taken three “brides”, one aged 13 and two aged 14, who feature prominently in his paintings in innocent-looking poses. But these adolescent girls were treated not just as models but also as sex slaves – victims numbering one fewer than those of Rolf Harris, although it is believed that there were countless other girls, all of whom Gauguin infected with syphilis. Nevertheless, in spite of these disagreeable facts, his work is still lauded by his fans. In September 2010, writing on a forthcoming retrospective at Tate Modern, Alastair Smart, Arts Editor of the Daily Telegraph, called Gauguin “both a syphilitic paedophile and an artist more important than Van Gogh”. He also praised his “sumptuous colouring” and “his patches of strong, undiluted colour”, clearly able to separate in his mind the character of the artist from the artistic merit of his work.
Gauguin’s disciple, Picasso, presents similar problems. He had relationships with numerous women, many of them considerably younger than himself. Some of the best known are Dora Maar, Françoise Gilot, and Marie-Thérèse Walter, all of them subject to his objectification, emotional manipulation and cruelty. His attitude to women can be seen as nothing other than misogynistic, which is apparent in his well-known declaration that “There are only two kinds of women; goddesses and doormats.” He saw women not as fully-realised human beings but objects to be either deified or degraded. In his paintings they are often depicted as angular, fragmented, almost tortured figures, often fused with images of inanimate objects, making them, in some cases, quite literally part of the furniture as, for instance, in his Nude Woman in a Red Armchair painted in 1932, depicting Marie-Thérèse Walter. Unfortunately, Picasso’s works are still in copyright, so not able to be reproduced here, where we only use royalty-free images, but an internet search will soon bring up a legitimately published image. Picasso’s work is still very much admired, some of it shown at an exhibition at the British Museum in November 2024 and a current one at L'Atelier des Lumières in Paris. There are two permanent Picasso Museums in France and three in Spain.
In 2023, Tate Britain was at last persuaded to exhibit the 23 paintings of L.S. Lowry that they owned but of which only one had ever been exhibited. Lowry made his living as a rent collector, but he managed to keep that quiet during his life as he didn’t want to be seen as a “Sunday painter” (an amateur). He even told Tate director Sir John Rothenstein that he had never had to work for his living because his mother had left him a big inheritance. Even close friends were unaware that he worked.
Lowry has often been perceived as some sort of social reformer, due to his many depictions of working people. In fact, he was a lifelong Tory and certainly not a champion of the rights of the working-class tenants from whom he collected rents for the property company which employed him. The figures in his crowded paintings are largely faceless and show little emotional connection on behalf of the artist, who himself admitted that he painted his 1949 work The Cripples because he thought disabled people were comic and grotesque. After his father’s death in 1932, Lowry looked after his invalid mother until she died in 1939.
At the end of his life Lowry said that he had never slept with a woman. After his death, several drawings of girls were found which seemed to indicate certain fetishistic fantasies, involving themes of bondage and torture, quite uncharacteristic of his other work. Much of the controversy surrounding L.S. Lowry centres on the artistic merit or otherwise of his work, rather than what might have been a less than wholesome aspect of his character. In spite of the many accolades, honorary degrees and the honours which he turned down (two OBEs, a knighthood and an appointment to the Order of the Companions of Honour), to me he strikes a rather pathetic figure, never having got over the death of his beloved mother and never having married or even had a relationship with a woman.
Taking a very big step back in time, one of the most disreputable characters in art history is Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571 – 1610). With their characteristic dramatic lighting, his paintings are very difficult not to admire. In his own time, his works were both controversial and popular, and he very quickly became a celebrity in Rome under the patronage of Cardinal Francesco del Monte. However, he had a violent temper and was arrested on various occasions for violent behaviour, getting into fights which often culminated in serious wounds for his victims. One contemporary biographer, Floris Claes van Dijk, wrote “after a fortnight’s work he will swagger about for a month or two with a sword at his side and a servant following him, from one ball-court to the next, ever ready to engage in a fight or an argument, so that it is most awkward to get along with him.” The sword would have been illegal without a licence to carry arms.
In 1606, his violent temper caused the death of a man called Ranuccio Tomassoni and he was sentenced to death in absentia, having swiftly fled Rome for Malta, confident that he would soon be able to obtain a pardon. In Malta he joined a religious order called The Knights of St. John but, characteristically, soon got into a fight and injured a high ranking member of the order, necessitating another quick flight, this time to Naples. However, it was not long before he was attacked in a tavern by a group of men, possibly led by the man he had injured in Malta, and he sustained a deep facial wound. Just as he received the anticipated pardon, Caravaggio died. Recent scientific research on his exhumed remains suggests that his death, which followed soon after the attack, was caused by sepsis. The scientists also found evidence of high levels of lead, no doubt as a result of using lead-based paints. Lead poisoning is known to cause aggressive behaviour, poor impulse control and ADHD. Perhaps, after all, Caravaggio is one artist whose bad behaviour can be excused.
Literary sinners
It is not only in the field of visual arts that we find well-known and well-loved names with dubious aspects to their lives. Writers, too, are sometimes found to have had their unsavoury sides. George Orwell, justifiably fêted for his writing, is known to have behaved badly to his wife, treating her as little more than a domestic servant.
Charles Dickens was even more unkind to his wife, who had borne him ten children. At one point, he even attempted to have her committed to a lunatic asylum – a tactic not uncommon among Victorian husbands seeking to dispose of their wives in order to pursue illicit relationships. In Dickens’s case, his affections were directed toward the young actress Ellen Ternan. However, the affair was never known to his public.
Roald Dahl, the well-known children’s author, is said to have had antisemitic tendencies, having once said “There is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity... even a stinker like Hitler didn't just pick on them for no reason.”
In 2009, it was revealed that William Golding, author of the best-selling Lord of the Flies, had recorded in his private papers that when he was an 18-year-old college student, he'd tried to rape a 15-year-old girl named Dora.
Musical Monsters
The world of music is also not without its controversies. Beethoven may have been a musical genius, but he must have been absolute hell to live near. His lodgings were in a permanent state of squalor, and stunk to high heaven from piled up trays of uneaten food, all mixed up with his manuscript paper. Unsurprisingly, he wasn’t very popular with his landlord. There were complaints about his keeping antisocial hours and yelling loudly at his servants, whom he repeatedly accused of stealing from him. His lively piano piece Rondo à Capriccio in G major gained the nickname “Rage Over A Lost Penny” because it was written on the night Beethoven insisted that a maid had stolen his gold penny and he turned his entire apartment over to look for it.
The Finnish composer Jean Sibelius was a notorious drinker. He founded a drinking club called Symposium. The club met at the Hotel Kämp in Helsinki, and members spent days on end drinking Benedictine and having discussions on art, life and everything. On one occasion when he was due to conduct a concert, Sibelius was nowhere to be found until, eventually, he was discovered feasting on oysters and champagne, and had to be dragged away to fulfil the engagement in an inebriated state. His long-suffering wife, Aino, often had to trawl the taverns of Helsinki to set him back to work when a deadline for a composition was looming.
Henry Purcell’s wife, Frances, was less tolerant. Fed up with Purcell coming home drunk she locked him out one cold night, possibly triggering the bout of pneumonia which killed him.
Gabriel Fauré often didn’t bother to go home at all. He was known to stay out drinking all night and then turn up for morning service at the church in Rennes, where he was organist in the 1860s, still wearing his evening suit. He was also inclined to leave the organ loft for a quick cigarette during the sermon, which did not endear him to the clergy.
In the 1860s, Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky belonged to a social set which
considered it de rigeur to drink heavily as a sort of anti-establishment attitude. One contemporary notes, “an intense worship of Bacchus was considered to be almost obligatory for a writer of that period. It was a showing off, a pose, for the best people of the 1860s.”
Conclusion
Despite their many shortcomings, some of which we would today find quite unforgivable, the artistic output of all these men stands in the imagination of the public as testimony to their talent. So is my friend’s partner right to want to see the back of the Rolf Harris print? You can tell us what you think in the comments below.
Thanks for your comment David. I hadn't heard of the book you mention, but it looks very interesting. I shall have to seek out a copy.
Hi Maggie
I found this to be a thought-provoking read. It seems almost universal that we struggle to accept that a "bad person" can do good things. Yet, we rarely have the same difficulty when a "good person" does something bad. Perhaps this is because we each like to believe we are good at heart, even as we recognize that we sometimes falter and make morally questionable choices.
This tendency extends beyond individuals to social causes and movements. When we oppose a cause, we often perceive it as ethically flawed, making it difficult to acknowledge the good deeds of its advocates—as though their actions are inherently tainted by their association with a "bad" cause. Conversely, we view the supporters of…