Isolation: a unique form of artistic liberation

Isabel Raper (IH L6)

Over the last year, much of the world has ground to a halt. We have all drifted between national lockdowns, enduring periodic episodes of self-isolation, forever two metres apart from everyone but those we live with. We connected with one another whilst either shielded by a mask or the screen of a laptop. For a species in which social interaction is woven into the very fabric of our existence, the last year has been an extraordinary test of the limitations of the human psyche when separated from its counterparts. We learnt to live as solitary creatures, not by choice or habit, but by force.

Everyone has had it hard, but our creative industries thrive on the interaction between creators and audience, and Covid-19 posed a completely unforeseen threat to that relationship. Theatres and art galleries were among the first to close back in March last year, and the arts have taken hit after hit since then. It’s been hard to watch as exhibitions have been cancelled, galleries boarded up and theatres have gone dark. Until we emerge from some form of final national lockdown, it will be hard to truly gauge the long-term damage that Covid-19 has caused to the arts.

For millions of creatives, the onus was on them to adapt their creative process to working in a way that they had never had to before. Of course, alongside the technical difficulties of trying to create in their homes, the true struggle was finding creative stimulus. We all understand too well how monotonous lockdown life can be, and so trying to find sources of inspiration is an ongoing battle.

However, perhaps there is room for optimism. I wanted to explore whether any artists had also worked through periods of isolation in the past, to see if perhaps there was anything to take away from their experiences to give us some hope.

The process of isolation is one that most of us encounter, to varying degrees, at some point in our lives – maybe it’s about how we react. Van Gogh was put into isolation in the asylum of Saint-Paule-de-Mausole in 1889 for just under a year after mutilating his ear. In his younger years, Van Gogh spent much time travelling between France, London and Amsterdam. While confronted by the disapproval of his career choice from his parents, Van Gogh remained a liberated spirit, roaming around Europe seeking inspiration as well as exploring his faith. Living in vibrant cities, he was inspired by the work of his impressionist contemporaries. After a number of years, he moved back to the south of France and spent time with fellow artist, Gauguin.

However, Van Gogh was plagued by a range of psychiatric illnesses throughout his life: whilst the diagnosis is unknown it is thought he suffered from bipolar disorder. The true deterioration of his mental health began after he cut off his own ear following a heated row with Gauguin. Having been voluntarily hospitalised after multiple manic episodes, Van Gogh spent a year in a psychiatric unit. Entirely disconnected from the outside artistic community, it was thought the artist’s health began to improve as he spent much time outdoors painting. He did, however, begin to grow tired of his isolation, his health too began to worsen and he became increasingly unstable. And yet, this period of solitude at Saint-Paule-de-Mausole facilitated an extraordinary growth in Van Gogh as a painter. Separated from the frantic art circles of Paris, he turned into himself, exploring new styles of painting. In a letter to his sister he wrote (of his isolation), ‘sometimes was hard to bear as exile’ but it was crucial ‘if we want to work.’

It is thought that while in isolation, Van Gogh painted around 150 paintings, and it is here we begin to see that style of painting so unique to Van Gogh emerge. His use of colour, his idiosyncratic bold and unconventional mark-making. By being freed from the confines of the artistic groups he used to circulate between, Van Gogh produced some of his most notable pieces: A Starry Night, The Olive Trees and Hospital in Saint-Remy. Confined to the garden of the hospital, he became entranced by nature and through often long periods of undisturbed painting, the Van Gogh the world grew to love began to reveal himself.

Nonetheless, while this period of isolation was transformative for Van Gogh as a painter, the same cannot be said of him as a person. A few days ahead of his departure from Saint-Paule- de-Mausole, he wrote in a letter to his brother, ‘To sacrifice one’s freedom, to stand outside society and to have only one’s work, without distraction… it’s beginning to weigh too heavily upon me here’. This was a forewarning, it would appear, of what would be Van Gogh’s tragic end only a few weeks later when he took his own life. Perhaps the true tragedy of Van Gogh is the critical acclaim his work received posthumously. He spent his last years in anguish - his work unrecognised and forgotten, or so he thought. It would be naïve to say that Van Gogh found peace in his solitude which led him to create such extraordinary art, but there is no doubt that the time he spent in isolation was instrumental in forming his identity as one of the most celebrated artists in history.

Van Gogh wasn’t the only artist to produce some of his most notable art while in a psychiatric facility. In fact, this seems to be a somewhat recurring theme. Yayoi Kusama is a Japanese artist born in Matsumoto. She lived a lonely childhood, frequently troubled by her parent’s heated arguments. From an early age, she suffered from psychological disorders including obsessive compulsive disorder and hallucinations. From her solitary childhood, Kusama developed a kind of affinity to isolation, or maybe rather a phobia of social interaction. Either way, Kusama felt displaced in society, and the romance of human connection didn’t have the same allure for her. Instead, to cope with her somewhat self-imposed loneliness, she turned to art. Kusama draws her artistic inspiration from an extraordinary variety of sources. From her exploration of the fusion of culture in 1950s New York where she had moved to, to the psychedelic hallucinations she had as a child, Kusama’s work was unlike any seen before in her time.

However, after much success through the 50s and 60s, in the 70s Kusama moved back home to Japan where in the space of two years she lost both her lover and her father. Her hallucinations and mania began to plague her again and eventually she voluntarily hospitalised herself in 1977. At the psychiatric facility, Kusama was able to take up art therapy courses and ever since her hospitalisation she has never looked back.

Nowadays she sleeps in her room at the facility and spends her days painting in her studio very near the hospital. She lives her life as a solitary figure, one might argue she has come full circle from childhood loneliness to a form of voluntary isolation in her later years. Kusama is able to fully focus on her art, she doesn’t have to worry about living arrangements or cooking, instead she can put everything into her painting.

Some might argue that the success of Kusama’s art is her unique style – and yet her style is a product of the extraordinary psychological challenges she has encountered throughout her life. Furthermore, her art emerged from her loneliness, her style emerging from spending long periods of her childhood alone. And so, perhaps it is unsurprising that years later she chose to immerse herself in solitude all over again, finding freedom in a habit that had confined her for so long.

Of course, there are artists who choose to work in isolation not because of psychiatric disorders but because they feel it simply encourages their work. Louise Bourgeois is an example.

Louise Bourgeois was an iconic American-French artist of the 20th century. Throughout her career Bourgeois has explored a vast array of media, from printmaking to painting to sculpting. Along with her choice of media, she also explored a variety of themes within her art. Fascinated by the relatively newly emerging field of psychoanalysis, much of Bourgeois’s art explored the human figure as well as looking more introspectively and studying the human psyche. Later in her career she became renowned for her huge (and rather terrifying) sculptures of spiders. She played with scale and abstraction and throughout her artistic life her art grew more and more provocative and unusual.

Perhaps like Yayoi Kusama, Bourgeois too had found that art was her release from the relentlessness of life. This is not to say that like Kusama, Bourgeois cast herself out of society, feeling no need for social interaction. Bourgeois was very social, her circle of friends made up of some of the most influential artists of the 20th century, including Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, all of whom shared ideas and experiences in those busy artistic communities.

Importantly, Bourgeois was not socially inept in perhaps the way that Kusama proclaims herself to be; Bourgeois had a large group of friends whom she greatly valued. However, she recognised the importance of spending time alone. Her periods of isolation weren’t nearly as dramatic as Kusama or Van Gogh’s; they weren’t prompted by psychiatric difficulties nor did they take place in any ‘facilities’.

These bursts of solitude were made entirely of her own accord. Bourgeois would often look to nature to find solitude, spending periods outdoors. She also found simple forms of solitude in her daily routine, seeking out spaces in her home where she could be alone, separated from her family and assistants. According to her studio assistant, Jerry Gorovoy, ‘Louise liked to work alone in silence, as if in a trance.’ She is said to have found a sense of calm in these moments alone, allowing her to paint, sculpt, draw without any external forces influencing her.

Interestingly, much like Van Gogh, Bourgeois realised the limitations of spending time alone, that isolation must be faced in appropriate proportions balanced with a fair amount of time surrounded by loved ones. In a diary entry written in 1950, she wrote, ‘Exile or alienation is a necessary (tho’ not sufficient) condition of work.’ This reflection on the how periods of isolation affect one’s art seem to be recurrent, emphasising that choosing to work alone should be a choice and that while often liberating, can be equally harmful. Perhaps it was these bouts of solitude that Bourgeois took periodically throughout her career that allowed her to produce such evocative and powerful art work.

While this pandemic has been uniquely challenging for all of us, we were not the first generation of creatives to live through periods of isolation. In the case of the artists I have examined, of course this solitude functioned on a personal level and the comparison between that level of isolation and that which artists in the pandemic have experienced is not a faultless one. However, it’s reassuring that for many artists throughout history, isolation became a tool for creativity not a constraint upon it. Crucially, the success these artists found in solitude was entirely self-made. I might be naïve in saying this, but spending time alone with their art allowed these artists not only to maintain a sense of perspective, but find their own way of working, their own style. They are a reminder that isolation is in and of itself a form of limitation and yet, in a rather extraordinary way, it also offers a rare form of liberation that can perhaps only be found when alone.