Do Artists Suffer?

I study the data

Artists suffer. It’s part of the job description.

Or so we’re told.

You want to be President? Go to Harvard. But if you want to paint a masterpiece, cut off your ear.

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But the evidence tells a more interesting story. 

The earliest studies linking suffering with achievement actually focused on politicians. A dozen US presidents were orphans or raised with missing parents—by comparison only 8 got undergraduate degrees at Harvard. Another study conducted by Berrington in 1977 found a similar correlation in British prime ministers since 1800.

This indicates that suffering fuels ambition, not creativity.

Swiss doctor Pierre Rentchnick undertook an even more expansive study the following year—aiming to encompass all nations and epochs. He concluded that “great leaders throughout history, both political and religious [were]…orphans, born out of wedlock, abandoned children, or those who were otherwise rejected as children by their parents.”

He cast a wide net. Rentchnick notes that “ten of the twelve Caesars discussed by Suetonius lost their fathers during childhood.” But he also cites everyone from Eva Perón to Napoleon to support his theory.

He believed this same correlation could be demonstrated in the arts and sciences. Pursuing this lead, his colleague Marvin Eisenstadt went through the entire encyclopedia—and made a list of every individual who got more than a half-page entry. This gave him a database of 699 famous people, from Homer to JFK.

He reached the conclusion that loss and mourning “stimulate creativity”—and not just for politicians. Losing a parent, however, gets perhaps too much focus, but for an understandable reason. It’s the one sign of loss that can be quantified, and measured statistically.

But the correlation is striking, nonetheless. Here is one of the tables compiled by Eisenstadt and Rentchnick:

The researchers provide additional lists of artists who lost only a father, or only a mother—and they go on for pages.