'Starving Artists' Part Two by Dave Jaffe

              Starving Artists: Part Two


    The life of D.H. Lawrence mentioned in part one of this blog was an extreme life. Few novelists, painters, or poets have aroused so much anger from the powerful as Lawrence did. Lawrence  attacked in his novels the prudishness of Victorian England and paid a terrible price for doing so.
     Yet the poverty that Lawrence sometimes endured was also a burden to many other creative people, especially visual artists.
     Alberto Giacometti was born in Switzerland in the early part of the 20th century. One of his  sculptures was recently sold for nearly $120 million (U.S.). Yet Giacometti spent half of his adult life living in poverty in two tiny rooms in a house in Paris. His brother Diego lived down the hall in a space as cramped as his brother's living quarters.
    "Giacometti was a most extreme artist," wrote John Berger. "He based all his mature work on the proposition that no reality could ever be shared." Giacometti's sculptures are black in colour or grey. His figures are also very thin and look nearly anorectic. Giacometti became famous in the late 1940's. many people back then thought he was copying pictures of starving people who had just survived the recently closed Nazi death camps.
    Giacometti was soon flush with cash. By now he was in his mid-forties. He died 20 years later in 1966 from pneumonia. His smoking surely speeded up his death. Yet the 20 years of his adult life, living as a poor man, didn't help extend his life either.
     Giacometti wasn't the only one of the early 20th century's famous artists who spent a large part of his life in poverty. Piet Mondrian was another. Mondrian became one of the most famous abstract artists who's ever lived. Born in Holland, Mondrian was nearly 40 when he discovered cubist paintings in Paris.
     Mondrian then joined the Dutch art movement called 'de Stilj' or 'The Style'. Mondrian stopped painting the somewhat moody paintings of his youth and early middle age. He switched to abstraction. His paintings focused on the square, vertical and horizontal lines, and the colours black, white, red, yellow and blue.
     "We come to see that the principal problems in plastic art," Mondrian wrote," is not to avoid representation of objects, but to be as objective as possible." Mondrian died in New York City in the mid-1940's, having fled war torn Europe. His paintings like 'New York Boogie Woogie' and the unfinished 'Victory Boogie Woogie' are reproduced in most art history books and to-day are worth tens of millions of dollars.
      Yet in his lifetime he lived for the most part as a poor artist. So did others.