The Link Between Creativity and Mental Illness

What makes great artists great?

The eminent art critic Clement Greenberg jotted down his theory in a 1961 diary:

The best American artists + writers of my time = alcoholics or on the verge of alcoholism; or megalomaniacs; or hysterics. Pollock, Faulkner, F. Lloyd Wright, Still, Newman, de Kooning, Rothko. On the other hand, the manic-depressives: Cal [Robert] Lowell, Delmore Schwarz . . . . David Smith a hysteric? Ken Noland a manic-depressive like me.

Greenberg’s suggestion that exceptionally artistic people tend toward mental disorder is deeply embedded in our culture, traceable to the ancient Greeks and Romans and lent credence over the centuries by creative geniuses as different as Robert Schumann, Vincent van Gogh, Sylvia Plath, and Robin Williams. “Madness,” according to Socrates, “is the channel by which we receive the greatest blessings.”

The notion of the “mad genius” is, however, as controversial as it is persistent.

In the curatorial world many people shy away from it, leery of reducing great art to the sum of a creator’s neurosis or psychosis. Yet in the scientific world, the possibility of a link between mental illness and creativity has inspired researchers for at least 70 years.

Some experts, such as Johns Hopkins University psychiatry professor Kay Redfield Jamison, find strong evidence that mood disorders, such as depression and bipolarism, are more prevalent among artists and writers than in the general population.

The “mad genius” trope has endured, Jamison said in an interview, “possibly because there’s a real element of truth in it.”

That view is echoed by USC neuroscientist Antonio Damasio. “The experience of suffering that is a hallmark of mood disorders may well stimulate creative endeavors, especially in the arts,” says Damasio, who is known for his work on the role of feelings and emotions in decision-making.

But, as he notes, these disorders represent only one major category of mental illness. Research into madness and creativity ranges across a broad spectrum of complex psychopathologies and creative pursuits, making comparisons difficult and consensus beyond reach.

“I believe one thing is certain,” Damasio says. “Major forms of psychopathology are rarely compatible with major creativity.”

The Big Cs

In a 2019 study, researchers at UCLA investigated the idea that psychopathology is more common in “Big-C creatives,” artists and scientists whose rare talents have earned international renown. “We found more of the opposite in some ways,” says Kendra S. Knudsen, the study’s lead author. “We found that individuals without a lifetime history of a psychiatric disorder scored higher on a test of creative thinking relative to those who had at least one lifetime diagnosis.”

The study also found, though, that the visual artists had a higher incidence of “schizotypal” personality traits—behavior that is often described as odd or eccentric, such as nonconformism and receptivity to unusual ideas and experiences, but which does not amount to full-blown mental illness.

The study emerged from the Big C Project, which is using neuroimaging and other methods to investigate how the brains and behavior of ultra-creative people may make them outliers compared to the rest of us. Robert M. Bilder, the Michael E. Tennenbaum Family Chair in Creativity Research at UCLA and Big C Project director, puts it another way. “What we see is that the people who are most identified as being creative achievers may have certain traits that overlap with those of people with certain kinds of mental disorders, but they usually do not have mental illnesses as we define them today.”

Bilder suggests that asking whether genius is associated with mental illness is the wrong question. “I guess the right question is, what is the nature of the relationship between creativity and emotional and psychological adjustment and well-being? Because I think it’s important to understand that both of these things occur on a spectrum.”

The Tortured Artists

Looking back through history, it is impossible to separate some of the world’s greatest artworks from the tortured psyches of their creators. A sublime example is Van Gogh, the beloved Dutch artist whose 1889 painting Irises is one of the Getty Museum’s greatest treasures.

The painting depicts in thick, swirling brushstrokes of violet, green, yellow, orange, and blue a tightly cropped view of irises in bloom. Scholars and critics have praised its exquisite composition, while Getty visitors have found Irises mesmerizing for a variety of other reasons, seeing joyful exuberance in its intimate view of nature or sadness in the solitary white blossom the artist placed amid a swath of purplish ones.

It may surprise some museumgoers to learn that Irises was one of the first works Van Gogh produced at a psychiatric hospital in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in southern France, where he voluntarily confined himself for a year following an act of selfmutilation. How could someone so ill as to slice off his left ear (and subsequently present the chunk of flesh to a brothel maid) produce such a masterpiece of form and color? Irises was far from an exception: Van Gogh completed more than 150 paintings at that hospital, an astonishing output that included his most famous work, The Starry Night.

Jamison wrote in Touched with Fire, her 1993 book on manic-depressive disease and the artistic mind, that Van Gogh’s paintings from that period “reflect lucidity of the highest order,” which is not to say he didn’t have problems. Such clarity of mind “is not incompatible with occasional bouts of madness,” she wrote, “just as extended periods of normal physical health are not incompatible with occasional bouts of hypertension, diabetic crisis,” or other kinds of metabolic disease.

It may be that many creative geniuses thrive on the border between mental order and disorder, “the edge of chaos,” where novel ideas are born, Bilder says. “The balance of stability on the one hand and flexibility on the other hand is critically important to be able to do anything.”

The nature of Van Gogh’s illness has long been a matter of debate, with diagnoses having included absinthe poisoning, schizophrenia, syphilis, and borderline personality disorder. Today, it is generally believed that he had bipolar disorder, which is characterized by extreme fluctuations in mood, energy, activity levels, and concentration. The symptoms often emerge in step with the seasons.

“Irises is a good example of when his mood swings were under some control,” says psychiatrist and author Peter C. Whybrow, who was director of the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute in the late 1990s when he first delved into Van Gogh’s career and medical history.

Van Gogh worked frenetically in late summer—“in spasmodic fury,” as an art student once described his process, Whybrow notes. But his mania tended to recede in the winter, when depression set in, leaving him barely able to lift brush to canvas.

Mental illness “embellished his creativity and gave it tones, to use a painterly metaphor,” Whybrow surmises. “But it is not correct to say that his art was driven by it. Mental illness shaped some of the work but doesn’t explain his brilliance as an artist.”

Another example is the 18th-century German sculptor Franz Xaver Messerschmidt. He is best known for a series of more than 60 busts, called Character Heads, which are admired by scholars for their stunning realism and modernity and fascinating to viewers because of their sheer weirdness.

Far from models of gentility, the heads have, variously, wild eyes, jutting necks, comically arched brows, and mouths agape as if in a scream. One particularly riveting piece is The Vexed Man, on view at the Getty Center. It shows a middle-aged man with a face screwed up in a deep grimace. Beholders of these sculptures may disagree on the emotions portrayed, but it’s hard not to regard them as deeply unsettling.

In an account left by Christoph Friedrich Nicolai, a bookseller who visited Messerschmidt at his studio in 1781, the sculptor confided that he was tormented at night by ghosts. To exorcise them, he pinched himself in various parts of his body and repeatedly modeled the resulting facial expressions in front of a mirror until he could capture them in metal or stone.

Some experts postulated that Messerschmidt had Crohn’s disease or lead poisoning, both of which can cause severe pain. But one of the most-cited posthumous diagnoses came from psychoanalyst and art historian Ernst Kris, who concluded in 1932 that Messerschmidt had paranoid schizophrenia.

The death of his patron and whispers of his “confusion in the head” apparently led Messerschmidt to break from his life in Vienna, where he had been a sculptor to the royal family, to spend his last years as a recluse. He produced the final bust in the series the year he died, 1783.

Art Reflects Life

Glenn Phillips, senior curator and head of modern and contemporary collections at the Getty Research Institute (GRI), thinks it can be valuable to understand the psychological dimensions of an artist’s life.

“Sometimes you really need to know the artist’s story to understand why they’re making the things they are, because it comes so profoundly out of their lived experience,” he says. “It’s kind of a first way into the work.”

The art world has recognized the contributions of people with mental illness. Swiss curator Harald Szeemann, who is often described as the 20th century’s most influential exhibition maker, “had a whole group of artists with mental illness that he worked with at various points in his career,” says Phillips, who organized Harald Szeemann: Museum of Obsessions at the GRI in 2018.