Splendid isolation: art in lockdown
“Conditions of enforced isolation” have often “conspired in the production” of great art, said Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times. Picasso produced some of his most striking work during the Nazi occupation of Paris. The Victorian artist – and murderer
– Richard Dadd created his “insanely detailed” fantasy scenes while locked up in Bedlam and Broadmoor. The best example of all, however, is van Gogh: in 1889, the artist entered an asylum in Provence, where he stayed for a full
12 months in a cell, with only one barred window to look through. Despite a few “setbacks” – at one point, “he tried to kill himself by eating his paints” – it proved to be the “single most productive year of his career”, giving us masterpieces including the fabled The Starry Night –a scene based on the view from his window.
“Is there something about being isolated that releases the best in artists,” asked Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. While Covid-19 has closed galleries around the world, and dealt a significant blow to the art market, artists of all stripes seem to be “rediscovering the solitary springs of creativity”. David Hockney has shared new paintings of “resurgent nature” – intense observations of daffodils and fruit trees in blossom in Normandy. Tracey Emin has shared her provocative video diary online. Banksy has recently decorated what he says is his own lavatory (right) with stencilled pictures of rats engaging in a “trompe l’oeil rodent rampage”, depicting vermin “swinging from the towel holder”, “balancing on a mirror frame” and perching on the toilet seat. What else is “a street artist to do when the streets are locked down”?
Antony Gormley is also documenting life in lockdown, said Ella Wills on BBC News. His sculpture Hold depicts a “solitary figure resting its head between tightly wound arms, clasping bent knees and shoulders”. He describes it as a “self-contained body, looking at itself, at the resource that one has within oneself”. Damien Hirst, meanwhile, has created a rainbow painting featuring coloured butterfly wings as a tribute to the NHS. But art superstars aren’t the only ones responding creatively to the crisis. Since the lockdown began, the Dorset-based illustrator Octavia Bromell, for instance, has earned a huge social media following with her “vibrant” drawings focusing on “the wonderful things people are doing in the face of such monumental adversity”.
Artists are having to “make the leap to digital”, said Charlotte Higgins in The Guardian. On Instagram, the #artistsupportpledge was created to help artists through hard times. They post their work to sell there for no more than £200. Whenever they make more than £1,000, they pledge to spend £200 themselves. It has raised more than £20m so far. Another digital project “born from confinement” is Viral Self
Portraits, an online exhibition at the Moderna Galerija, in Ljubljana, of powerful portraits made during lockdown.
Yet just as often as it inspires, solitude can stifle creativity, said Noah Charney in the New York Observer. “Isolation is good for getting large chunks of work done.” But when artists are alone for too long it “can lead to stale repetitions”. They need the space to literally get “away from the drawing board”, to solve problems and find fresh approaches. This was true even of van Gogh, the ultimate “isolated creator”. It was only when his friend and rival Paul Gauguin came to spend time with him in Arles that both artists “really made breakthroughs and flourished”.