Angelica Kauffman was a legendary Neoclassical painter who made an astonishingly successful career at a time when women artists were barely allowed to do so. The daughter of a poor Swiss painter, she became one of the founders of the Royal Academy of Art in Great Britain and one of the most commercially successful artists of her time. She balanced her creative spirit with wise self-promotion, leaving a great legacy behind. Read on to learn seven facts about Angelica Kauffman and her work.

1. Angelica Kauffman Was a Child Prodigy

Angelica Kauffman, the legend of 18th-century painting, was born in Switzerland in 1741. Although her family was relatively poor, the environment was still perfect for her developing creative spirit. Her father was a provincial painter who recognized his daughter’s talent already in her early childhood. He took the girl to his studio, teaching her how to draw and paint. By the age of thirteen, Angelica Kauffman already created astonishing painted works, the level of which corresponded more closely with the works of mature artists. At the same time, she demonstrated great interest in music and was torn between the two possible careers. According to a legend, she consulted a local priest who warned her that a career as a performer could harm the reputation and morals of the young Catholic lady.

Kauffman’s father was eager to develop his daughter’s talent and took her to Italy to observe and copy the works of the Old Masters. She worked in Rome, Naples, Florence, and Bologna, attracting significant attention everywhere since women, let alone young girls, rarely had opportunities to learn in such a manner. In Italy, she started to earn her first painting commissions while still a teenager.

2. She Painted Innovative Self-Portraits

In the mid-1760s, the fame of the young and gifted woman artist traveled from the continent to Great Britain. Invited by the British ambassador to Venice, Kauffman soon moved there and established a studio. She quickly gained prominence and made important friends. One of her closest confidantes was the famous portrait painter Joshua Reynolds. Rumors spread about their possible romantic affair, but historians have no reasons to suspect anything other than a close friendship.

From the start of her career, she created a lot of self-portraits that depicted the development of her artistic skill and self-perception as an artist. She often painted herself with a portfolio and a brush or crayon in her hands. Such pose was often used to depict amateur women painters, but Kauffman had no intention to diminish her importance as an artist. Instead, she refused to distance herself from those women who were less lucky and did not manage to secure a full-time career due to restrictions and responsibilities. In her allegorical works, she often painted female characters as writers or artists at a time when such occupations were rarely available to them.

3. She Worked With Various Forms and Genres

Unlike many other artists who specialized in one particular painting genre, Angelica Kauffman was a flexible painter, confident in her abilities. Although she was best known as a portraitist, she worked with allegories and mythological scenes. However, the boldest of her accomplishments was history painting—the most prestigious genre, reserved exclusively for men. Kauffman’s training in Antique and Classical art provided her with the perfect background to paint battle scenes and events of the past.

From a commercial point of view, she was also good at promoting her work. Kauffman worked closely with several printmakers and art dealers, creating wall decor, textile designs, and ceramics. She did not limit herself to her personal artistic ambition; she carefully studied the market and was ready to produce works corresponding to popular demand. Kauffman’s papers and receipts were kept in order first by her father, who worked as her manager, and then by her second husband, an older decorative painter who was eager to promote Kauffman’s career.

4. She Got Married Twice

Kauffman’s personal life became the subject of many myths and rumors. Some art historians believe that the nature of her relationships and marriages was the reason for her status as a prominent artist. Many other aspiring women artists became trapped in the duties of household and motherhood.

Angelica Kauffman got married for the first time in 1767 when she was 26 and recently moved to London. The marriage was a disaster that quickly turned into a scandal: her husband, Swedish Count Frederick de Horn, was not a count but an imposter, married to another woman in Germany. His main motivation for marrying Kauffman was to secure legal reasons to remain in Britain.

Months after the marriage, the fake Count revealed his scheme to his new wife. Eager to get rid of the scammer, Kauffman’s father paid him to leave his daughter as soon as possible, and the marriage was soon annulled. The scandal of the illegal marriage allowed Kauffman to remain single for the following decade, focused on her career. Rumors of her affairs still lingered: some said she had a short-term relationship with the French revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat, and others speculated that her longtime friend Reynolds proposed to her but was rejected. In 1781, she married an Italian painter called Antonio Zucchi, who helped her manage her career.

5. She Was a Founder of the Royal Academy of Arts

One of the most significant accomplishments of Angelica Kauffman was her role in establishing the Royal Academy of Arts. As an artist in high demand, Kauffman kept close ties with the Royal family—this connection for sure helped her maintain her social status after her messy and scandalous divorce. In 1768, she approached King George III with the idea of establishing an institution that would oversee artistic training and production to develop British art. In December of the same year, the King officially established the Royal Academy of Arts, with Kauffman and still-life painter Mary Moser being the only two women out of 34 founding members.

Joshua Reynolds was appointed the Academy’s president. Other founding members included Thomas Gainsborough (who would soon refuse to exhibit there after a scandal), Nathaniel Hone, Thomas Sandby, and others. Generally, the Academy was supportive and respectful towards Kauffman and Moser, yet glimpses of inequality and disrespect still occasionally sparked. The 1772 painting by Johan Zoffany featured 32 Academy founders in one room, surrounded by Antique sculptures and nude models. The two remaining founders, Mary Moser and Angelica Kauffman, were present only in the form of portraits hung on the wall, acknowledged but not allowed to be present.

6. Her Rome Studio Became a Tourist Landmark

Kauffman’s popularity was astonishing not only for a woman painter but for any artist of her time. The only artist who was paid more than Kauffman was Joshua Reynolds, who also worked with portraits of the British elite. In the 1780s, she moved to Rome, hoping to attract more attention to her history paintings rather than portraiture.

During the 18th century, upper-class young men often went on the so-called Grand Tour to finish their education. The Grand Tour was a long trip through Europe that proved that the young man was sophisticated and knowledgeable enough to enter society. The trip itinerary varied slightly depending on the person, their financial means, and interests, but there was always the focus on Italy with its Roman ruins and Old Master paintings.

Kauffman’s studio in Rome became so famous and popular that it became one of the top Grand Tour destinations in the city. She still communicated with the Academy from Italy, sending works for their exhibitions. Known as an educated, smart, and charming woman, she led a busy social and cultural life, attending meetings at poets’ and artists’ societies. There, she befriended Johann Wolfgang Goethe and the famous architect Antonio Canova.

7. The Dark Side of Angelica Kauffman’s Fame

The artist passed away in 1807, and Canova directed her funeral and designed her tombstone. In the years following her death, Angelica Kauffman’s staggering popularity eventually became her downfall. After several years of universal appraisal of everything related to her, the mass obsession reached its peak and plummeted. The art market became oversaturated with cheap reproductions that did no justice to the original paintings.

After Kauffman became unable to fend for herself, her artistic accomplishments gradually diminished. Critics complained about the “feminine sentimentality” of her works and the lack of “masculine” assertiveness and a strong hand. While hardly anyone dared to question Kauffman’s abilities during her lifetime, she was dismissed as too gentle and amateur after her death. Her work was rediscovered in the 20th century, and Kauffman was finally appreciated as an innovative and talented artist once again.

Although Abstract Expressionism, with its capacious, splattered, and stained canvases and its heroic, larger-than-life artists wielding their brushes like their lives depended on it, was still the most famous art movement of the 1950s, and painting was certainly the most esteemed medium, a few artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns challenged its sway over the art world, offering subversive and oftentimes amusing works that refused to identify themselves as painting or sculpture. Neo-Dada artists also collaborated with dancers and composers, finding inspiration in the dialogue between the disciplines.

What Is Neo-Dada? A Primer

To understand what “neo-dada” means, it’s necessary to first understand “Dada.” Dada art was a style that originated in Europe during and just after the WWI years, flourishing in cities such as Zurich, Paris, and Berlin. (Although in German “da da” is translated to “there, there” and in French it means “hobbyhorse,” the term “dada” as used here is nonsense; it was simply intended to be as anti-art a name as possible.)

Hugo Ball, its founder, stated, “Revolted by the butchery of the 1914 World War, we in Zurich devoted ourselves to the arts. While the guns rumbled in the distance, we sang, painted, made collages and wrote poems with all our might.” Dada was flamboyant, irreverent, nonsensical, and piquant, offering critiques of its bellicose and soulless society through performance, sculpture, poetry, and text.

Neo-Dada, then, was the label given to the 1950s American artists who also eschewed traditional boundaries between the mediums of painting and sculpture and who refused to jettison real life from their works like the Abstract Expressionists endeavored to do. Rauschenberg claimed that he worked in the “gap between art and life,” and Johns, for example, included real beer cans and images of maps and flags, while Cy Twombly evoked the scrawls of graffiti in his pieces.

Neo-Dada artists found inspiration in the quotidian and the commonplace, the base and the banal. They were experimental, and their work was often challenging to the lay viewer, who struggled with symphonies of silence and paintings of pure white. Nevertheless, their works permeated the consciousness of the art world and facilitated important conversations about art’s telos.

Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008)

Rauschenberg is perhaps the most famous of the Neo-Dada artists. A prolific, dexterous, and endlessly inventive creator, his “combines” challenged the traditional separation of mediums. Critic Brian O’Doherty wrote of the combines in 1963, “For many years Mr. Rauschenberg has been pointed steadily towards an annihilation of conventions in a new freedom. His main characteristic is a conquest of common, everyday reality from a bridgehead of abstract expressionism. He is trying to materialize an ambiguous limbo between high art and low life.”

In these works, such as Monogram (1954-1959), he combined found objects in the mode of the “readymade”—Dada artist Marcel Duchamp’s term for the found object that became a work of art when activated by the artist and the exhibition space—painted surfaces, and collage. In Canyon (1959), he combined a taxidermied eagle his friend found in the trash, paintings, a photo, and other printed matter. In Bed (1955), he took an actual bed with a wooden frame, sheets, and a pillow, scribbled and splattered paint on it, and then hung it from the wall like a traditional painting.

Rauschenberg refused to be confined by any label or fall prey to the assumption advocated by the Abstract Expressionists that an artist must be cerebral, stoic, and removed from the vicissitudes of life. Rather, Rauschenberg said, “I always wanted my work—whatever happened in the studio—to look more like what was going on outside the window.” This meant that he was also engaged in other avant-garde scenes, such as music and dance.

Scholar Brandon Joseph wrote, “Throughout his career, Rauschenberg was most inventive when in intense, dialogic, and collaborative contexts, from Black Mountain to the Merce Cunningham Dance Company (for which he provided sets, lighting, and costume design) to the Judson Dance Theater (which he lit and performed with) and beyond.” Joseph claimed that “none of Rauschenberg’s contemporaries…would maintain the artist’s multiplicitous and inherently deconstructive interest in combining mediums (and media) into amalgams that would exist simultaneously within all of the media they straddled—and at the same time none.”

Jasper Johns (1930-)

If there is a figure who came close to Rauschenberg’s inventiveness, it was his friend, lover, and collaborator Jasper Johns. It’s hard to even sum up his oeuvre, and anyone hard-pressed to name his most famous piece would have to choose between the flags, the maps, the numbers, the cross-hatch paintings, the beer cans, the plaster heads, and so on. Johns was an erudite, serious, and accomplished artist, but he chose to incorporate quotidian objects and imagery, “things the mind already knows,” as he put it.

Johns had started off as a painter but struggled with the legacy of Abstract Expressionism. He destroyed all his previous work and moved into recognizable objects like the flag and the alphabet. He preferred to use primary colors and while he did use paint, he mixed it with encaustic to create a quick-drying material that had almost sculptural qualities.

The Broad Museum says of Johns’ early encaustic paintings that “Johns presents images that move into the realm of objects and wrestle with the validity of representation as a philosophical concept. The targets and flags, in the words of critic Leo Steinberg, were ‘co-extensive’ with their canvases, existing somewhere between a symbol and a thing in the world. Not only did these paintings begin Johns’s successful dismantling of modern art through his ironic analysis of structures and rituals, but they also became the innovative new ground on which a generation of painters and sculptors made their work.”

Claes Oldenburg (1929-2022)

Claes Oldenburg made the case, as emphatically as Warhol with his soup cans, that food could be art. A hamburger, a piece of pie, french fries and ketchup—Oldenburg took American comfort food and made it into rather uncomfortable art. The pieces were grotesquely large, made of either plaster or vinyl. The vinyl pieces, or the “soft sculptures,” flopped, sagged, and sighed, while the plaster pieces maintained a brittle rigidity.

Oldenburg opened The Store in 1961, recreating the look and feel of neighborhood shops but with a spin. He had numerous small art pieces displayed like normal wares, but they were made of plaster-dipped muslin over wire and covered with garishly bright paint and had something uncanny about them. Like Rauschenberg and Johns, as well as the Pop artists, Oldenburg was interested in the banal, in the disposable, in the detritus of late-capitalist society.

In a 1961 artist’s statement, Oldenburg elucidated his feelings about art: “I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, / that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum. / I am for an art that grows up not knowing it is art at all, an art given the chance of having a starting / point of zero. / I am for an art that embroils itself with the / everyday crap and still comes out on top. / I am for an art that imitates the human, that is / comic, if necessary, or violent, or whatever is / necessary.”

Cy Twombly (1928-2011)

Cy Twombly’s scrawls and scratches represented a new type of gesture in visual art. Gagosian Gallery explains that “he produced works that [were] simultaneously personal and mythological, allowing narrative, language, and inner visions to erupt from his intimate, abstract notations,” doing so through painting’s traditional tenets, such as using canvas and hanging works from the wall, but ultimately deviating from many of the medium’s other characteristics.

He made marks and then erased them, referenced calligraphy and graffiti, left gaps and fragmented lines, traversed centuries, and conflated civilizations. He brought in sex, dirt, and violence, dialoguing between the ancient and the contemporary.

In 1962’s Leda and the Swan, he took the ancient myth of Jupiter turning into a swan and raping Leda and abstracted it into a cacophony of line and splotch and smear. The violent assault of Leda comes across through the violent assault on the canvas by crayon, pencil, and paint. The colors suggest semen, blood, feathers, and feces; the few discernible images of a window, heart, and phallus suggest the outlines of the story, but it is the feeling produced by the piece that gives it its power. Academy (1955) is sparser, using oil-based house paint (which Twombly smeared with his fingers), pencil, colored pencil, and pastel on canvas to create what looks simply like gray pencil scrawlings on canvas.

Critic Ann Temkin remarked that for Twombly, “the canvas was a field for mark-making that shouted and whispered, surged and slowed, swirled and skittered. The approach harked back to the automatism of the Surrealists…but now it had traded biomorphic elegance for a seemingly untutored rawness.” Temkin concluded that “Academy alludes to a tradition, a school, a set of accepted practices. Yet it is attached to a painting that writes itself out of art school and finds instead a territory unoccupied by official precepts or proscriptions,” and indeed, Academy is certainly something that its namesake would not have (initially) accepted.

John Cage (1912-1992)

John Cage was a composer who studied with modernist, atonalist composer Arnold Schoenberg. Like all composers, he sought to communicate through music, but he abandoned hierarchy and order in his pieces, not to mention the heroism and ego that came with being a composer. He valued the senses, chance, and spontaneity, and was also inspired by Duchamp’s readymade, looking for ways to interpret that pulled from real life in music. Cage said of Duchamp’s famous The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (1915-1923) that the thing he liked so much is that “I can focus my attention on wherever I wish. It helps me blur the distinction between art and life and produces a kind of silence.”

And it was silence for which Cage became famous (or infamous). In his piece 4’33, a piano player sits down on the bench before the instrument but does not touch the keys for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. In that time span, what seems to be silence is instead filled with sounds—people coughing, shuffling their feet, whispering to their companions, moving their chairs, tapping their heels. The first time this was staged, the audience’s consternation was palpable, but Cage didn’t care; he was asking his audience what music really meant—what the limits of silence and sound really were.

The composer and scholar Kyle Gan suggested that the piece “begged for a new approach to listening, perhaps even a new understanding of music itself, a blurring of the conventional boundaries between art and life.”

Judson Dance Theater: Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, and More

The Judson Dance Theater was a collective of dancers, choreographers, and visual artists headquartered at the Judson Memorial Church in Manhattan’s West Village. The Church was a well-known performance space where Judson staged numerous works that challenged prevailing notions of dance. The main figures, including Yvonne Rainer (1934-), Trisha Brown (1936-2017), Lucinda Childs (1940-), and Simone Forti (1935-), wanted to democratize dance by emphasizing “task movement”—the commonplace, anti-expressionistic gesture.

The New York Times said of the movement in 1982, “following their own creative hunches, the Judson dancers experimented with structures ranging from the most rigid to the most improvisatory and incorporated many kinds of movements into compositions. To simplify what resulted, it could be said that these choreographers tended to emphasize the physical reality of the here and now and to maintain that any kind of movement can serve as a dance movement.”

We Shall Run, a 1963 piece, consisted of dancers simply running across the stage. They wore ordinary clothing and did simple, repeated actions. In Trio A, Yvonne Rainer’s 1966 masterpiece, there was a solo performer with no music—another thing Judson wanted to do was separate dance from music, the former being usually subordinated to the latter—who performed everyday movements. It was an exploration of action, not storytelling, and avoided any dramatic gestures like leaps or pirouettes. Though it was a difficult piece for a dancer to perform, it looked deceptively simple.

Rainer’s 1965 “No Manifesto,” a text she penned to articulate the new type of dance she promulgated, can describe much of neo-dada art as a whole:

“No to spectacle. / No to virtuosity. / No to transformations / and magic and / make-believe. / No to the glamour / and transcendence / of the star mage. / No to the heroic. / No to the anti-heroic. / No to trash imagery. / No to involvement of / performer or spectator, / No to style. / No to camp. / No to seduction of / spectator by the wiles / of the performer. / No to eccentricity. / No to moving or being / moved.”

While most people know the name Pablo Picasso, how many of his artworks can you name? Did you know that across his 70-year career, he produced more than 50,000 works, including paintings, drawings, sculptures, ceramics, and more? The Spanish master manipulated mediums, forms, and genres, never ceasing to experiment and never settling on one style for too long. Consequently, he has left behind an eclectic portfolio from the melancholic depths of his Blue Period to the radical geometric fragments of Cubism and the agonizing protest of his political murals. Start your exploration of Picasso with 12 of his most iconic masterpieces that every art lover should know.

1. Self-Portrait, 1900

Pablo Picasso began his artistic training quite conventionally, with the Old Masters and Roman Antiquity as the key source materials. However, by his early 20s, he had already begun experimenting with modernist techniques. Picasso created this self-portrait when he was only 18 years old, a year before he moved from Barcelona to Paris. He already demonstrated immense technique and command of his medium, working in a Post-Impressionist style that is still quite realistic but already departing into experimentation. Over the years, Picasso created countless self-portraits that would evolve with him and his artistic styles.

2. The Life, 1903

The Life was one of the most important paintings from Picasso’s Blue Period that came after the suicide of his friend Carles Casagemas. Casagemas suffered from depression and shot himself in a Parisian cafe in front of his friends. Traumatized by his death, Picasso started painting in blue and green tones, usually on subjects of loss, poverty, and despair. The Life features a portrait of Casagemas, almost nude, embraced by the woman who rejected him not long before his death. Curiously, an X-ray of the painting showed that originally the work was a self-portrait, later repainted to resemble Casagemas.

3. Acrobat on a Ball, 1905

In 1904, Picasso fell in love with Fernande Olivier, a French artist and model who became his first long-term partner and major muse, easing the deep depression of his Blue Period. He gradually shifted tones and moved towards pinks and oranges. This stage of his life is usually called the Rose Period. He often painted groups of traveling performers and acrobats with whom he felt affinity. At the time, he lived in an artists’ commune called Bateau-Lavoir, sharing space with artists like Amedeo Modigliani and Georges Braque. Bateau-Lavoir was a former factory building, almost ruined and squatted by artists, poets, and failed actors.

4. Portrait of Gertrude Stein, 1905-06

One of the most famous portraits of Picasso’s pre-Cubist era was of Gertrude Stein. Stein was a prominent art collector and writer whose influence, in many ways, defined the culture of her era. Picasso’s work on the portrait was far from easy, with more than 90 painstaking sittings producing almost no result. The artist was dissatisfied with his work on the face of his model and even thought of abandoning the work altogether. At some point, he erased part of the image and left his studio for several weeks. The break forced Picasso to rethink his relationship with the painted image. Instead of relying on the physical accuracy of the face and body, he decided to focus on the impression Stein created as a personality: confident, substantial, and observant.

5. Self-Portrait, 1907

Another self-portrait, this time at the age of 25, reflected Picasso’s obsession with African and Romanesque art. At the time, he was looking for alternatives to traditional Western visual language and found them in African sculpture. In May 1907, he visited the dusty, poorly lit Ethnographic Museum of the Trocadéro in Paris. He later described seeing traditional African ceremonial masks and sculptures for the first time as a spiritual awakening. His images were already being simplified to straight lines and geometric forms, but they did not exactly reach the mathematical complexity of Cubism.

6. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907

Les Demoiselles d’Avignon was one of Picasso’s most radical works. It shook the art world and launched an aesthetic revolution that would lead to the birth of Cubism. In this work, Picasso’s obsession with African art reached its peak. Picasso painted a group of sex workers; at the time, these women often earned extra by posing for artists. According to some art historians, the shocking and threatening faces and curves of their bodies were dictated by Picasso’s experience of venereal disease caught in a Parisian brothel. Suffering from symptoms, the artist channeled his suffering into the fear of women he felt were responsible for his state.

7. Ma Jolie, 1912

After Les Demoiselles, Picasso focused on the invention of Cubism. Cubism was a highly intellectual form of art that required dissecting and analyzing objective reality, turning it into a collection of planes, forms, and angles. To focus on the analytical aspect, Cubists like Picasso and Georges Braque simplified the color palette to grays and browns. Ma Jolie was one such bold experiment, representing Picasso’s then-partner, Eva Gouel, playing the guitar.

8. Portrait of Olga in an Armchair, 1917-18

After World War I, many Western artists took a step back from their radical experiments and returned to more traditional art forms. Picasso was one of them, temporarily moving to the Neoclassical style. One of the most famous works of that period was the portrait of Olga Khokhlova, a Ukrainian dancer who came to France with Sergei Diaghilev’s dancing company Ballets Russes. Picasso painted it to celebrate their engagement. Even though he painted Olga in a conventional style, he still added his signature experimental element by leaving most of the canvas blank. The marriage lasted for 17 years but was rarely a happy one due to Picasso’s infidelity.

9. Guernica, 1937

Guernica is perhaps the most famous anti-war painting ever painted. In 1937, German forces bombed the Spanish town of Guernica at the request of right-wing dictator Francisco Franco. Spain at the time was going through a bloody civil war, and the left-wing Republican government tried to gather support in Europe. Picasso painted the shocking image of the city in chaos for the Paris World Fair as an attempt to raise awareness about the conflict.

10. The Weeping Woman, 1937

The Weeping Woman was one of the most famous paintings by Picasso and one of the ugliest illustrations of his behavior towards women. Starting a relationship with Dora Maar, he did not care enough to break up with his previous lover, Marie-Thérèse Walter. Amused, Picasso openly pitted both women against each other and even tried to force them to physically fight each other. Dora Maar’s distressed image became the basis for The Weeping Woman. Picasso turned a talented and sharp-witted woman into a hysterical mess during an ugly breakdown. This was not the type of gesture one would expect from a caring partner.

11. Bull’s Head, 1942

Although the work of Pablo Picasso is most frequently discussed in relation to his painting, he was a multi-faceted and curious artist who enjoyed experimenting with mediums. He worked with costume design, architecture, ceramics, and, of course, sculpture. One of his most famous creations was a Dada-like assemblage, Bull’s Head, made out of a seat and handlebars of a broken bicycle. Famous Parisian photographer Brassai, who was a close friend of Picasso and had recorded conversations with the two in the painter’s studio, once asked him about the work. Picasso told him that the idea of combining these objects came to him in a flash, without conscious thinking.

12. Ecce Homo, 1971

One of Pablo Picasso’s last works was a strange image based on an etching by Rembrandt van Rijn. The original image illustrated the Biblical scene of Jesus being presented in front of the crowd just before his execution. Picasso was not religious, but he revered Rembrandt, and thus, he reimagined the scene into a secular image of a theatrical play and its audience. The chaotic crowd featured familiar faces: fellow artists, ex-partners, and other significant figures in Picasso’s life. For the artist who died less than two years later at the age of 91, this work was, in a way, the final bow at the end of his career.

Robert Mapplethorpe was born in Queens, New York, in 1946. He had a very religious upbringing but chose to rebel against his mother’s wish for him to join the priesthood by studying art. He enrolled in Pratt Institute to study for a Bachelor of Fine Arts immediately after finishing high school, but he dropped out before getting his degree. Still, he managed to become one of the icons of photography, forever revolutionizing the art form.

Robert Mapplethorpe: The Emergence of an Artist

Shortly after dropping out of college, Robert met Patti Smith. This iconic personality in the punk rock scene first came to New York with dreams of being a poet. When she ran into Mapplethorpe, the two hit it off immediately and started dating and living together. At the time, Mapplethorpe’s main means of art expression was art collages. He would buy magazines, especially homoerotic magazines, cut up the images, and use them to create new art.

In 1969, he started exploring his homosexuality, which meant that his relationship with Patti Smith had to undergo some changes. The two kept living together but moved to the famous Chelsea Hotel, home to many great artists in the 1970s. This allowed Robert Mapplethorpe to quickly infiltrate the New York art scene and get ahold of his first camera. Using a Polaroid, he began to take photographs—mainly portraits of friends and artists. Among his first works was Patti Smith’s first album cover: the 1975 Horses. 
Robert Mapplethorpe was also getting acquainted with the gay scene in New York, and after a while, this became the main subject of his work. Among photography enthusiasts, Mapplethorpe is famous for bridging the gap between art and pornography. This debate often caused him more controversy than praise and his career was marked by many accusations for obscenity.

The Aesthetics of a Mapplethorpe Photograph

In a Robert Mapplethorpe photograph, no matter the subject, the framing is almost always identical. The subject stands alone in the middle of the frame and quite simply emulates a sculpture. This could be a man, a couple engaged in sexual activity, or a flower—Mapplethorpe’s work has a rigid yet sophisticated element. These photographs have the timeless quality of a 16th-century sculpture and the identity of the 1970s sexual revolution—works of art that are both timely and timeless.

As mentioned before, Mapplethorpe’s work was often the subject of the obscenity debate. Can pornography ever be considered art? And where exactly is the elusive line between the two? This debate is reminiscent of the debate around Andy Warhol’s early works, and indeed around found art in general. Is it the setting that renders something art, or is it merely the definition?

In Mapplethorpe’s case, aesthetics play a vital role in deciding the debate. His work is almost always in black and white. Black and white in photography, when it stopped being a necessity and became an artistic choice, took on two missions: to glamorize or to dramatize. The interesting thing about Mapplethorpe’s work, however, is that it constantly drifts between both the realms of high art and more controversial, taboo subjects.

Sexuality and How to Portray It

Portrayals of sadomasochistic sexual acts gain the status of high art through Mapplethorpe’s unique and deliberate lens. What truly sets them apart from mere exploitation is the simple fact that they are not exploitative in nature. The focus is on the act, the participants, the minimalistic setting, the precise framing, and the interplay of dual colors—but more importantly, it is on the raw, visceral experience itself. Through these elements, Mapplethorpe elevates the experience, turning it into something transcendent. All these components come together to paint an image of a carnal, intimate experience that is, paradoxically, made holy, turning the taboo into a deeply thoughtful exploration of human form and desire.

Sexuality for Robert Mapplethorpe is a vast ocean, one he spent the majority of his career exploring. His depictions of sexuality ranged from nude models to acts of BDSM, a photograph of male genitalia to one depicting it in painful torture—but as Patti Smith describes Robert’s work in Just Kids, “His obscenity is never obscene.”

Mapplethorpe was aware of the debate around his work, yet surprisingly, he never really took a side. He referred to his own work as pornographic and seemed to have no issue with the term. On the contrary, Mapplethorpe never saw the point in separating art and pornography, even in definitions, because for him, they were one. His work shamelessly explored male sexuality, seeking to deify it much in the same way ancient sculptors did with female beauty. In a sense, he was creating the male Venus, but through a different art form—through countless subjects and a continuous expansion of what sexuality could be understood as. By challenging conventional boundaries, Mapplethorpe not only redefined masculinity but also pushed the limits of how sexuality could be portrayed.

It is also worth noting that he never shied away from confrontation or public debate. On one occasion, while sending out invitations to an exhibition at a prestigious gallery, he included photographs of male genitalia with a whip, shocking unaccustomed recipients. This bold move reflected his willingness to challenge societal norms and provoke thought. A significant element in Mapplethorpe’s ability to portray male eroticism so uniquely is his personal involvement in the acts themselves, rather than merely being an observer. His intimate engagement with the subjects added an authenticity and depth to his work.

Mapplethorpe: Working Unapologetically

It is important to note that Robert Mapplethorpe’s images of extreme sexual acts were captured at a time when the gay community was facing an unprecedented pandemic.

While gay men were dying of AIDS, Mapplethorpe’s photography attempted to deify the male body that was suffering due to the deadly disease. In his photographs depicting BDSM acts, details await those brave enough to keep looking beyond the initial shock. Muscles, body hair, male genitalia—the lens sheds light on the men, and on what exactly makes them men, before portraying their desire.

The shock is intentional, especially considering the aforementioned circumstances. With the rise of the AIDS pandemic came a new surge of homophobia. Artists chose different methods to deal with it. For filmmaker Arthur J. Bressan Jr., director of Buddies (1985), humanity and emotion are his canvas. For Mapplethorpe, the unapologetically extreme is the only answer.

But the thing that makes Mapplethorpe’s photographs so striking, and ultimately lasting, is the fact that they are primarily shapes. Working in a studio granted him the liberty to carefully select every component of a photograph. In Robert Mapplethorpe’s work, nothing is arbitrary; everything is chosen with meticulous attention to even the smallest details. The details vary in quantity, depending on the nature of the photograph. Some may take hours to fully digest, while others convey their meaning with just two or three elements.

Robert Mapplethorpe’s Most Famous Portraits

This is one of Robert Mapplethorpe’s most famous works, and it’s easy to see why. The two subjects contrast in nearly every way: one’s eyes are closed while the other’s are open, one is pale and white while the other is Black, one is at rest and the other is alert. Yet, despite their contrasts, the lasting impression is one of completeness—two opposites coming together in harmony, much like the age-old Yin and Yang.

Thomas (1987) is another one of Mapplethorpe’s masterpieces. He often said that if he had been born in another era, sculpture would have been his medium of choice. And more often than not, his photographs behave exactly like sculptures. Thomas gives the feeling that even after the shot was taken, the subject remained in his choreographed perfection. That is the alluring quality of Mapplethorpe’s photography: being stuck in time longer than the click of a camera.

Mapplethorpe’s portrait of Andy Warhol does exactly what it is supposed to do: frame a landmark of modern art for all to see. There is no mistaking the purpose of this photograph: the subject is centered and singular, the black-and-white photography has low contrast, reminiscent of a flashback in a film, and the light is cast in a circular shape as if framing a culprit. Simple, yet striking. Simple, but everlasting.

Early 20th-century technological advancements radically transformed warfare. World War I soldiers mostly fought in trenches, which led to a staggering number of facial and head injuries. American sculptor Anna Coleman Ladd was among those who applied her artistic skill to help soldiers regain their faces. She created life-like metallic masks to cover the injuries and help veterans lead normal lives again.

World War I Combat: The Emergence of Anna Coleman Ladd’s Masks

World War I presented not only a previously unseen scale of human involvement but also significant advancements in the domain of technical progress, although ‘advancements’ is not the best word to describe the instruments used for human destruction. Chemical weapons, airplanes, machine guns, and bombs radically changed the strategy and tactics of combat, unleashing unprecedented destruction. Moreover, the warfare itself changed—from open spaces, the fight moved to the trenches.

The most horrifying product of trench warfare was the transformed character of typical battle wounds. Shrapnel not only pierced the flesh but tore it to pieces and shattered bones. Fighting in trenches has also meant that the human head and face became the body parts most exposed to shooting and explosions. Consequently, the number of face injuries became staggering, and no doctor was prepared to deal with it on such a scale. Soldiers returned home, if they returned at all, with their entire faces missing, with chins and noses shaved off.

The soldiers’ facial injuries were so severe and so widespread that surgical experiments became necessities, with doctors desperately trying to gather faces from pieces. Aesthetical issues were secondary: functionality and safety came first. Plastic surgery developed quickly but not quickly enough. Many soldiers suffered from phantom pains, feeling parts of their bodies and faces that were not there anymore. The condition currently called body dysmorphia was the most common and mentally traumatic occurrence. Human faces are body parts we recognize best in ourselves and others, directly associating them with persons and personalities. These soldiers lost not only their faces but their sense of self.

The ethical side of the issue was also far from being balanced and healthy. European hospitals that treated such injuries, along with more regular ones, painted some of the benches on the premises as designated seats for someone with a supposedly disturbing appearance. Caring for the emotional well-being of healthy people inevitably puts the patients’ mental health at even higher risk than it already was. Facial surgery wards strictly banned mirrors and other reflective surfaces so that the wounded soldiers would not see their faces, at least for a while. Still, they frequently had to treat mental breakdowns and fits of shock after someone accidentally caught a glimpse of their injuries. The soldiers’ families were often as shocked—for example, children were scared of their fathers.

Anna Coleman Ladd Before the War 

Anna Coleman Ladd started her career as a conventional and rather talented sculptor. Born in Philadelphia in 1878, she went to study sculpture in France and Italy. Upon returning home, she married a physician and worked as a professional artist, creating painted and sculpted portraits that were in high demand. Coleman Ladd’s artistic works were hardly outstanding on their own but presented a great skill.

Her portrait busts did not demonstrate any dramatism or strong character like those of more famous sculptors, but this was exactly the thing that would make her perfect for her future occupation. Anna Coleman Ladd knew real human faces well and could easily convey them in marble or bronze. When World War I started, her husband was put in charge of an American military hospital in France, so the couple moved to Europe. A British art critic, Lewis Lind, who was familiar with Coleman Ladd’s work, sent her a letter noting her talent for creating natural-looking faces and offered her a new opportunity to work and help.

Inside Anna Coleman Ladd’s Studio

In December 1917, Anna Coleman Ladd opened her prosthetics shop in Paris, partially funded by the American Red Cross. In the preceding months, she visited French hospitals to both train and demonstrate her work to the surgeons, who would later refer recovering patients to her. The sculptor did everything to make the soldiers’ experience as comfortable as possible. Her workshop looked like a salon rather than a hospital ward, with patterned cushions, flowers, posters, and tea served. She started her work by making a mold of the injured face once it had healed enough not to cause too much pain.

From the mold, she made a plaster cast. Next came the most difficult and exciting part—reconstructing the actual face. The sculptor relied on pre-injury photographs, if available, as well as information from family members. If none were present, she asked the soldier to describe himself. Usually, the likeness was striking, with new faces indistinguishable from original ones from a distance.

On at least one occasion, a soldier’s wife sent Anna Coleman Ladd a letter asking her to change something in the mask. Her husband lost both his eyes in combat, and his wife asked to repaint the mask’s artificial eyes with the same dark brown color he had before. Sometimes, a mask covers the entire face, and sometimes, only an injured part of it. In both cases, the masks were usually fixed onto a face with spectacles hooked behind the ears. In rarer cases, the sculptor used strings tied at the back of the head.

Francis Derwent Wood: Another Pioneer of Facial Prosthetics

Anna Coleman Ladd was not the only artist who became a specialist in facial prosthetics at the time. Initially, the idea came from the British sculptor Francis Derwent Wood, who opened the Masks for Facial Disfigurement Department at one of London Hospitals, which soldiers called “The Tin Noses Shop.” Derwent Wood was the first person Coleman Ladd was referred to in order to get familiar with the basics of the work.

Francis Derwent Wood’s main achievement was the idea of using galvanized copper for masks. Before him, some doctors tried to work with rubber, but it was too heavy and hot and gave off an unpleasant smell, making it too uncomfortable to wear. Wood’s invention was thin, light, and comfortable to use. Some soldiers even slept in those masks, either forgetting or unwilling to take them off at night. To imitate facial hair, Wood inserted thin pieces of cut metal.

Constructing Faces

However, Anna Coleman Ladd went a step further in her craft, surpassing her colleagues in quality. Compared to other mask-makers, her work was rather slow and it took more time, but the result was more convincing than ever. She carefully matched the paint tint to the skin tone of her patient, comparing how it looked in natural and artificial light. To make the metallic surface look like real skin, she experimented with paint components. Oil paint proved to be too messy and easily chipped, so the sculptor used washable hard enamel. She used a blue tint to draw a hint of stubble on the masks’ cheeks and chins. She created eyelashes, eyebrows, and even thick mustaches from real human hair. The lips of the masks were usually slightly parted so the patient could smoke through them.

Sometimes, the masks were temporary solutions that would help the patient to function between surgeries that would eventually restore his face. Yet, in most cases, these masks stayed with their owners for the rest of their lives. The masks, however, were not as durable as their owners wanted them to be, and after two or three years, the paint started to chip, while the thin metal distorted. Still, many soldiers were so attached to them that they would not take them off, even to order a new one. Some of them sent letters to Anna Coleman Ladd, expressing their gratitude for bringing their normal lives back. Despite the positive connotations, these letters were utterly devastating, as those people believed they were no longer welcome in their homes after their injuries.

Still, although the masks provided sensory and visual comfort to the soldier and his social circle, they could not make up for the terrible injuries. Many of them were unable to eat, speak, or see. The masks, although realistic enough, were still motionless and sometimes created an uncanny valley effect. Nonetheless, the wounded soldiers believed them to be much better than their actual faces.

Anna Coleman Ladd in the Post-War Era

Despite the enormous impact Anna Coleman Ladd made on the lives of the soldiers she treated and the whole field of post-traumatic treatment, she did not stay in Paris for long. Only a year after she opened her workshop, she returned to the USA, leaving sculptors Mary Louise Brent and Jane Poupelet in charge of the production. In the following years, she continued working on sculpture, creating several war memorials. Perhaps she was more traumatized by the war than she expected it to be. Many unfinished busts created by Coleman Ladd after returning from France have no faces, almost like the soldiers she used to treat.

During several years of the workshop’s existence, Coleman Ladd and her assistants created around 200 masks. Despite plenty of evidence and photographs from these years, none of the actual copper faces have survived. Either they deteriorated beyond repair, or their owners were buried with them still protecting their faces.

Today, Oscar Wilde’s tomb is the main attraction at Paris’s Père Lachaise cemetery, drawing crowds who, since they are no longer allowed to kiss the stone, take selfies in front of it instead as they listen to tour guides recounting Wilde’s witticisms. The discreet glass screen around the sculpture, a marble sphinx, which is one of the cemetery’s more bizarre monuments, bespeaks its checkered history. We may think of tombs as unchanging, a symbol for the silence and stillness of the grave—yet Wilde’s tomb has been anything but silent.

The Last Days of Oscar Wilde

When Oscar Wilde died in Paris on November 30, 1900, aged 46, he was one of the most notorious figures in Europe. Five years earlier, in London, he had endured three highly public trials for “gross indecency” that had transformed him from a fêted playwright into a pariah.

Resisting his friends’ advice following his arrest to flee and find refuge in Paris, Wilde had taken to the stand in the Old Bailey and defended what his prosecutors called (taking a phrase from a poem by Wilde’s lover, Lord Alfred Douglas) “the love that dare not speak its name.” Sentenced to two years’ hard labor, Wilde was physically and artistically broken on his release in 1897. He spent the remainder of his life in exile on the Continent, making his way at last to the French capital, a haven where men like Wilde were not ostracized for their proclivities.

Although his supporters hoped Wilde might be moved by this kindlier, more artistic atmosphere into returning to writing—in prison, he had outlined some vague plans for future writings on aesthetics and on the life of Jesus Christ, as well as writing an epistle to Douglas now known under the title De Profundis—he found that he had “lost the joy of writing.”

He fell ill with meningitis in late 1900 and, confined to his hotel room in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, is supposed to have uttered the last of his infamous quips: “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One of us has got to go.” His dutiful friend, former lover, and literary executor Robbie Ross was present when Wilde died, along with a Catholic priest who administered the last sacraments. The great outsider who, for a brief, brilliant spell, was the cream of British society was buried outside the walls of Paris in the Cimetière de Bagneux.

There, his remains lay until 1909, when Wilde’s supporters began to make plans to have them reinterred beneath a singular piece of sculpture.

Finding a Sculptor for the Tomb

For the sculpture adorning Wilde’s final resting place in Père Lachaise, Ross chose Jacob Epstein, who would go on to produce war memorials at Coventry Cathedral and the Trade Union Congress and the bust of William Blake in Westminster Abbey.

When he got the commission from Ross, though, Epstein was in his late twenties, making a name for himself in London for revolutionizing sculpture through his avant-garde vision and apparent disregard for classical beauty. Like his peer, Eric Gill, Epstein did not shy away from representing nude bodies, often contorted in uncomfortable-looking ways. By the time Ross announced him as the sculptor of Wilde’s tomb, Epstein had already courted controversy with a series of sculptures designed to adorn the facade of the British Medical Association building on the Strand in London.

It was perhaps Epstein’s willingness to create figures, including a pregnant woman and (more importantly) male nudes, and to weather the storm that this brought upon him that made Ross select the sculptor to design and build the monument to Wilde. Like the departed playwright, the sculptor was devoted to innovating new forms in his chosen art and unafraid to face the consequences these innovations might incur.

For what was only his second commission as a sculptor, Epstein began a design based on a subject that would have pleased many of Wilde’s remaining supporters: Narcissus, a character from Greek legend who falls in love with his own reflections, and about whom Wilde had written what he called a “poem in prose.” As a handsome young man entranced by male beauty (even if it is his own), Narcissus was an iconic figure for many men who loved men in the late 19th century, especially those who, like Wilde, looked upon ancient Greece as an ideal civilization which not only tolerated, but celebrated, relationships between men.

Making the Sphinx

However, Epstein soon abandoned the Narcissus design, turning away from ancient Greece to favor a design influenced by ancient Egypt and Assyria. Epstein and his fellow sculptor Gill were interested in the art and sculpture of ancient Egypt as they explored a primitivist approach to their work (contemporaries such as Pablo Picasso and Amedeo Modigliani were similarly beginning to take an interest in so-called primitive art and sculpture).

Egypt was also, though, a particularly apt choice to honor Wilde, who was often seen wearing a large, Egyptian-style scarab ring and was fascinated by what he saw as a more exotic, permissive way of life in Northern Africa at this time, having traveled to Algiers with Douglas in 1895.

Epstein’s design for the winged figure on the tomb, which seems to lean forward like a carving of a woman on a ship’s prow, also references a poem by Wilde, written over several years and finally published in 1894, called The Sphinx. In the poem, Wilde revises the tradition of the Sphinx demanding a riddle from any passing travelers. Instead, Wilde’s speaker asks the Sphinx a series of questions, finding her silence inscrutable and frustrating. Making lurid conjectures about the Sphinx’s past, in “foul dreams of sensual life,” Wilde’s speaker muses on the Sphinx’s strange, composite body.

Although Epstein’s sketch for the monument is somewhat ambiguous on this score, the sculptor conceived of the Sphinx’s body as being made up not only of multiple species but also of male and female parts. Despite its feminine facial features and the curve of its breasts, and despite the addressee in Wilde’s poem being identified—traditionally for a Sphinx—as female, Epstein also sculpted a penis and testicles for his Sphinx.

These hermaphroditic aspects would attract attention to Wilde’s tomb before it was even installed in Père Lachaise. It was perhaps inevitable, with a bold young sculptor who had already caused outcry creating a monument to a man who had died in such disgrace that, for decades, many in England did not dare even to utter his name.

The Tomb Is Unveiled—And Soon Re-veiled

From 1909 to 1912, Epstein worked on the marble sculpture for Oscar Wilde’s tomb. Having settled on the Sphinx concept, he retained the Assyrian influences. At the same time, he tinkered with various details such as a smaller winged figure—an angel or trumpeting messenger—behind the ear of the main figure, and personifications of Fame, Intellectual Pride, and Luxury around its head.

Before transporting it to Paris, Epstein exhibited the sculpture in his London studio, and the press praised it as a great work of art. French customs officials did not agree. Refusing to recognize that Epstein’s sculpture was a piece of art and therefore worthy of a reduced import fee, they classed the Sphinx as merely a block of marble and calculated the import duty accordingly. Robbie Ross, Wilde’s executor, was forced to pay £120 just for the sculpture to enter France.

There were further troubles ahead once the sculpture arrived in Père Lachaise. Deeming the Sphinx offensive to look at because of its male appendage, Parisian authorities requested that Epstein modify the sculpture: remove the penis and testicles or cover them up somehow. In the meantime, they placed a tarpaulin over the entire monument.

A game of back-and-forth between artists and authorities followed, with Epstein removing the tarpaulin, and the officials at Père Lachaise replacing it. On occasion, Epstein was accompanied in these undercover rescue missions by Welsh artist Nina Hamnett, who was a mutual friend of Modigliani and fellow sculptor Constantin Brancusi.

Soon, the tomb was placed under constant surveillance, and Epstein resorted to bribing the officer to look away so that he might slip into the cemetery and restore his sculpture to its former glory. Not only was it being routinely covered up, but plaster had been applied to the Sphinx’s nether regions to reduce the apparent size of its testicles, which the authorities considered too large. Epstein was aghast at the modification made to his work of art—which customs officials had failed to even acknowledge as art—against his will.

The case attracted the attention of various Bohemian figures from the worlds of art, literature, and even occultism inhabiting Paris at the time.

The Tomb Is Unveiled Again—Enter Aleister Crowley

One Bohemian denizen of Paris who felt strongly about the censorship of Epstein’s sculpture was Aleister Crowley, founder of the occult league the Order of the Golden Dawn. In 1913, Crowley placed a notice in Parisian newspapers announcing his intention, “in the name of the liberty of art,” (Churton, 2022, p. 240) to rid the monument of its tarpaulin once and for all.

Calling on any sympathizers to join him in protesting “against the prudish and pornophile tyranny of the bourgeois,” (Churton, 2022, p. 241) he devised an elaborate plan to stay late at Père Lachaise the evening prior to the protest, hook up the tarpaulin with fine wires, and station an accomplice in a nearby tree, who would, while Crowley made his triumphant speech the following day, pull the tarpaulin away and unveil the sculpture in all its glory. Amazingly, the arrest that Crowley anticipated—and must have hoped for—did not take place. A crowd of supporters turned up, but the cemetery officials allowed the ceremony to go ahead.

Worst of all for Crowley, Epstein was not terribly impressed with his display of heroic anti-censorship action. A few days later, the sculptor wrote to the London Times to make it publicly known that Crowley had acted without his approval. Although he was sure Crowley and his supporters must have had a “jolly occasion” in liberating the Sphinx, Epstein himself now felt that the sculpture ought to have remained covered until the authorities agreed to have the additional plaster covering the Sphinx’s testicles removed.

The Tomb Is Altered—And Crowley Returns

What had been meant as an unerring tribute to the genius of Oscar Wilde was instead giving rise to constant squabbling and subterfuge, and by 1914, Robbie Ross recognized that the situation was untenable. Again without consulting Epstein, Ross arranged for another artist to create a bronze plaque shaped like a butterfly, which would act as a “cache-sexe,” preserving the Sphinx’s modesty.

Although this finally placated the Parisian authorities, who now permitted an official unveiling of the monument, Epstein did not attend the ceremony. Not only was his work displayed in a form fundamentally different from his intention, but there was an irony in the choice of the butterfly, as this had been the emblem of James McNeill Whistler, who had had a series of well-publicized verbal sparring matches with Wilde in the 1880s.

The tomb in its present form now seemed to tell a tale of artistic intentions which could never quite be realized due to prudery and cowardice, rather than commemorating the wit and bravery of a man who had published a volume of essays called Intentions which revealed his ability to realize his own artistic intentions exactly as he wished.

That is, until the butterfly plaque disappeared. In another attempt to épater les bourgeois and right the wrong done unto the up-and-coming genius sculptor, Crowley had struck again. He approached Epstein one day in London, wearing around his neck a bronze butterfly. Finally, the sculpture could be seen as Epstein had wished it. So the situation remained until 1961 when the Sphinx’s testicles themselves disappeared. Their whereabouts remain unknown.

In 2000, the artist Leon Johnson staged a performance at the tomb titled “(Re)membering Wilde,” which included readings of De Profundis, Wilde’s prison letter to Douglas, and the temporary attachment of a silver prosthetic to the now shattered crotch of the Sphinx.

The Afterlife of Oscar Wilde’s Tomb

By the second half of the 20th century, attitudes towards Wilde were changing. Amid the decriminalization of sex between men in Britain, his trials and imprisonment were now seen as a national outrage, and he became emblematic as a victim of state-perpetrated prejudice. Audiences rediscovered his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, plays such as The Importance of Being Earnest, and reveled in his pithy epigrams (even those he might not have actually said).

As Wilde assumed his place in the pantheon, the guardians of his tomb at Père Lachaise found themselves, yet again, having to intervene. Fans were flocking to the cemetery, leaving tributes of various kinds: flowers, handwritten notes, pages torn from editions of his books, and—most troubling for those responsible for the tomb’s upkeep—lipstick kisses.

In 2000, anticipating an influx of devotees marking the 100th anniversary of Wilde’s death, Wilde’s grandson Merlin Holland issued a public plea for the practice of kissing the tomb to stop. (By this time, Robbie Ross’s ashes had also been interred in the grave to rest with the remains of his revered friend.) Attempts to clean off the lipstick over the years were causing the stone to deteriorate, and in a final attempt to protect the tomb, in 2011, authorities installed a glass barrier around the lower half.

Of course, visitors remain determined to leave visible tributes, and the glass barrier is, itself, covered in lipstick kisses. These can be wiped away and replaced ad infinitum, while the stone remains untouched. This compromise seems the best conclusion to the story of this tomb, which was conceived as a definitive statement for posterity of art’s fearlessness and defiance, and which was nevertheless subject to the mundane vagaries of bureaucracy and prudishness. The tomb now represents exactly the paradox that Wilde recognized in the art of others and promoted in his own: that art may be both timeless and ever-changing at the same time.

Bibliography

Churton, Tobias (2022). Aleister Crowley in Paris: Sex, Art, and Magick in the City of Light. Inner Traditions.

Ellmann, Richard (1988). Oscar Wilde. Penguin.

Pennington, Michael (1987). An Angel for a Martyr – Jacob Epstein’s tomb for Oscar Wilde. Whitenights Press.

Rose, June (2002). Demons and Angels: A Life of Jacob Epstein. Carroll & Graf Publishers.

For Nietzsche, the greatest achievement for a human being was to become a “yes-sayer” to life. And, therefore, the highest praise he could bestow upon an individual would be an acknowledgment that they say yes to life. Nietzsche says of Raphael, with reference to his masterpiece the Transfiguration, that the Italian Renaissance painter “said yes, and did yes.” However, Nietzsche also believed that Christianity was the ultimate force of nay-saying. It is strange then that a painting of Christ’s transfiguration so inspired him.

Raphael’s Famous Painting

Raphael was commissioned to paint the Transfiguration in 1517 by Cardinal Giulio de Medici, who would later become Pope Clement VII in 1523. It was to be an altarpiece for a cathedral in the southern French town of Narbonne, where Medici held the office of archbishop.

Raphael died in 1520 before the completion of the Transfiguration. Speculation and conjecture were rife on how much of the final painting was actually done by Raphael and how much was completed by his assistants. However, during a cleaning of the painting in the 1970s, it was discovered that only some of the figures on the lower left-hand side of the work were finished by studio assistants; the rest was all Raphael’s own work.

Medici elected not to send the Transfiguration to France but decided instead to place it in the church of San Pietro in Montorio, Rome. It stayed there until 1797, when Napoleon, on campaign in Italy, took the painting back to Paris. Napoleon greatly admired Raphael, considering him the greatest artist in the world and his Transfiguration the greatest work of art. This is significant as Napoleon was Nietzsche’s most respected political figure. In his texts, he mentions the former French emperor approximately 150 times, frequently invoking him as a symbol of immense human will, though his ultimate philosophical assessment of Napoleon remained deeply complex and ambivalent.

Twilight of the Idols

Twilight of the Idols, or How to Philosophize with a Hammer, was published in 1889. That same year, Nietzsche suffered a mental collapse from which he never recovered.

The chapter we are concerned with here is “Skirmishes of an Untimely Man.” Section eight of “Skirmishes” does not reference Raphael directly but rather introduces an approach to life that Nietzsche explicitly associates with the artist. He calls the section “Towards a psychology of the artist.”

Nietzsche begins by claiming intoxication is a prerequisite for art. He is not just referring to drink and drugs but to intoxications of all kinds. Some of the things he lists include sexual excitement, any strong emotions, the performance of great skill, and intoxication brought on by the climate. What all these forms of intoxication have in common is that they are experienced, he says, as “a feeling of fullness and increasing strength.”

This feeling of fullness leads artists to idealize things. This is a process, Nietzsche says, whereby the artist imposes themselves upon things, forcing out of them their main features while weeding out all that is small and inconsequential.

In section nine, Nietzsche goes on to talk about artists who achieve this state. For him, these are the only genuine artists. There are people claiming to make art that are even hailed as artists, but for Nietzsche, only those imbued with the type of intoxication he spoke of in section eight are the real deal. He goes on to make a rather odd statement that there have been no Christian artists. To which he adds:

“Don’t try to be clever and throw Raphael or some homeopathic nineteenth-century Christian at me as a counter-example: Raphael said yes, Raphael did yes, which means that Raphael was no Christian…”

Saying Yes to Life

Throughout Nietzsche’s works, we witness his struggle to be what he calls a “yes-sayer” to life. In Gay Science 276, for example, he says: “all in all and on the whole: someday I wish to be only a Yes-sayer!” Historical figures that Nietzsche admires are all yes-sayers.

In Twilight of the Idols “Skirmishes” 49, Goethe, probably Nietzsche’s favorite writer and author of The Sorrows of Young Werther, is said to have said “yes to all.” It is interesting to note that Napoleon, the second-most-cited historical figure in Nietzsche’s works, also loved The Sorrows of Young Werther, taking a copy with him on his campaigns.

Napoleon was also responsible for a great deal of death. Nietzsche has no problem with “yes-sayers” saying no to things that endanger the affirmation of life. Consider the following from the preface of his Will to Power:

“I teach that one must say ‘no’ to everything that weakens and exhausts. I teach that one must say ‘yes’ to everything that strengthens, promotes the accumulation of power, and [increases] pride.”

Nietzsche admires those who say yes to all things, which includes saying no to anything that opposes “yes-saying.”

The Birth of Tragedy

The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music was first published in 1872. The work was born out of two lectures Nietzsche delivered on Greek drama. Here’s what Nietzsche has to say about Raphael and the Transfiguration in this work.

“In his Transfiguration, the lower half with the possessed boy, his despairing bearers, and the helplessly fearful disciples, shows us the reflection of the eternal original suffering, of the sole ground of the world: ‘appearance’ here is the reflection of the eternal contradiction, of the father of things. Now, out of this appearance rises, like the scent of ambrosia, a new vision-like world of appearance, which remains invisible to those caught in the first world of appearance—a brilliant hovering in purest bliss and painless contemplation through beaming, wide-open eyes. Here we have before our eyes, rendered in the highest symbolism of art, that Apollonian world of beauty and its substratum, the horrific wisdom of Silenus, and we understand their reciprocal necessity intuitively.”

When Nietzsche talks of the Apollonian, he is, of course, referring to the Greek god Apollo. For him, “Apollonian” captures the idea of certain qualities this god was supposed to possess. Nietzsche is thinking of such things as calmness, cheerfulness, reason, and logical thinking.

Nietzsche contrasts the Apollonian spirit with the Dionysian. What exactly Nietzsche means by the Dionysian is complex and evolved greatly over time; however, we can understand the “Dionysian” as capturing the traits associated with the god Dionysus. These include intoxication, impulse, and emotion.

Nietzsche believed that Greek tragedies were imbued with both the Apollonian and the Dionysian. These two drives exert themselves against each other and together help the artist create works of profound beauty.

Let us put all this together, with reference to Raphael’s Transfiguration.

Nietzsche’s Reception of Raphael’s Transfiguration

Nietzsche took great inspiration from Raphael’s Transfiguration. He must have felt a profound sense of beauty (as he understood it) on viewing the painting. Beauty for him, we remember, is not found in the world but given by human beings.

Something about beauty he also believed was that “people find beauty in everything that throws their image back at them.” (Twilight of the Idols, “Skirmishes” 19). What Nietzsche must have seen in Raphael’s work was, in some way, himself. And indeed, he saw the affirmation of his own idea of the struggle between the Apollonian and Dionysian.

We saw that Nietzsche considered Raphael a true artist and that, for Nietzsche, intoxication is an essential prerequisite of art. He believed that Raphael had a driving passion to use his artistic power to reveal the main features of life while paring away that which is small and inconsequential. To Nietzsche, this is what makes Raphael a yes-sayer to life.

His Transfiguration is then a giant yes to life for all who can see, to see. Raphael, through his work, counters the terrible nay-saying wisdom of Silenus.

What then of Nietzsche’s curious statement, mentioned above, that Raphael could not be a Christian (because Christians cannot create art)? Nietzsche believed art must say yes to life, but that Christianity as a religion was thoroughly nay-saying with regard to life. Like most of Nietzsche’s views, his position on Christianity is complex and nuanced.

His comments on Raphael and Christianity are useful for giving us a better idea of his esteem for the artist and his work. For Nietzsche, to be a yes-sayer to life is the highest achievement, and to call someone a yes-sayer the highest praise.

Caravaggio’s victim was Ranuccio Tomassoni, and he was what we would today call a gangster, coming from a wealthy Roman family. But how exactly did he lose his life? Was this a planned murder, or a brawl that got out of control? Caravaggio was sentenced to death by beheading in absentia, with a bounty placed on his head. The court even set an open bounty for him to be brought to justice, dead or alive. Let us uncover why the story of the killing continues to baffle historians.

Did Caravaggio’s Enemies Shape His Reputation?

Was Caravaggio truly a murderer in the modern sense, or did rivals and early biographers exaggerate his crimes? Some of the artist’s earliest critics believed his violent paintings reflected his character. The painter Giovanni Baglione famously claimed that Caravaggio “died as badly as he painted.” Later writers went even further. The art historian and critic Giovanni Pietro Bellori depicted him holding a sword instead of a brush, turning the painter into a symbol of artistic rebellion and danger.

His art was dominated by tenebrism, a heightened chiaroscuro that enhanced the acutely realistic depiction of people. Caravaggio’s characters not only possessed an unprecedented dramatism that would define the Baroque, but they were all too human. For his polished contemporaries, painting saints as commoners was nothing short of a crime.

The German artist and writer Joachim von Sandrart offered another explanation. For him, Caravaggio’s tragic death symbolized the end of one artistic age and the beginning of another. In this version of the story, Caravaggio did not simply die as a criminal in exile. He became the symbol of the dramatic turning point between the elegance of Mannerism and the realism of the Baroque.

Caravaggio’s Endless Criminal Record

Caravaggio had a pattern of bad behavior. He fled Milan for Rome after repeated physical altercations that culminated in the injury of a police officer. In Rome alone, between 1598 and 1606, he committed seven incidents before being accused of murder. Caravaggio left us with such a rich dossier that a recent exhibition in Rome could only focus on his devious behavior.

He was arrested twice for carrying a sword and a dagger without a permit; he was sued for beating a stranger with a stick and tearing his cape with a sword. And the record does not stop there. Caravaggio even assaulted a waiter by throwing artichokes at him because he didn’t distinguish between butter and oil artichokes. The story is as well-documented as it is absurd.

His Powerful Protectors in Rome

The question is then, how did troubled Caravaggio manage to escape prison for so long? Short answer: he survived thanks to a strong network of aristocrats and mighty patronage from Roman cardinals. In exchange for his art, he received unconditional legal, political, and financial support. Among the most prominent patrons Caravaggio had was cardinal Scipione Borghese. The high-profile support of the Church protected him closely, even if his reputation and painting style caused a scandal.

Probably the most central figure in Caravaggio’s ascent in Rome came from Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte. Del Monte introduced Caravaggio to elite collectors during his very early days in Rome. Thanks to him, the artist obtained the Contarelli Chapel commission and got to know the powerful Mattei and Barberini families. That immunity and protection were going to reach their limits.

What We Know About the Killing

Contemporary reports unanimously agree that Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio killed Ranuccio Tomassoni. The transcripts of his police records fill many pages. Caravaggio’s regular brawls were largely easy to bail out of by his powerful patrons in Rome. But not his last crime. What went down on May 29, 1606 between him and Ranuccio Tomassoni was beyond saving.

What the documents show is that the two had many violent arguments. The fatal fight was most certainly an unintentional killing prompted by a sword duel. Documents also say that it was arranged by eight other participants. One of Caravaggio’s supporters was also seriously injured.

What Prompted the Duel?

Countless rumors circulated after the incident. Many thought the quarrel was due to a gambling debt and a disagreement during a pallacorda game (a precursor of tennis). This was going to become the most entrenched account of all. Others reported that the duel, which took place in Campo Marzio, was driven by jealousy over a famous courtesan from Rome named Fillide Melandroni.

She was a model and lover of Caravaggio, and Tomassoni may have acted as her protector. In this scenario, Caravaggio aimed to castrate his adversary – some said he then used the same sword to murder him, others hinted that Tomassoni died as a result of the violent castration. Voices even suggested that the duel was fueled by political animosity, as Tomassoni’s family were loud supporters of the Spanish, whereas Caravaggio was partial to the French. No matter what happened, the consequences of the incident were too serious to escape through political favor. With this, Caravaggio’s Roman period came to an abrupt end.

In today’s terms, what went down was not premeditated murder, but rather resembled manslaughter. As the many statements show, it was difficult to determine the exact details of Tomassoni’s death and how Caravaggio provoked it. What is unequivocal is his sentence: beheading for murder. In the lingo of the times, that was called bando capitale.

The bounty that was attached to his sentence gave anyone who recognized him the license to kill him in the name of justice. The court sentence was the culmination of years of problems with the law, marked by recurrent arrests, summons, and fines, stemming from Caravaggio’s terrible legal record. With Tomassoni’s murder, Caravaggio had crossed the line from petty to murderous crime.

The Setting of an Exile: Naples and Malta

Caravaggio found refuge in Naples, at the court of Constanza Collona Sforza, far from the jurisdiction of Roman courts. In the aftermath of the sentence, the painter started to consistently depict beheadings. The characters he portrays, be they St. John the Baptist or David, resemble the artist. This led many art historians to believe he illustrated his own impending execution. After a few productive months in Naples, he headed to Malta in 1607, where Constanza’s son, Fabrizio Sforza Collona, was a Knight.

Scholars speculate that Caravaggio was hoping to obtain a pardon for Tomassoni’s killing from the Grand Master of the Malta Knights, Alof de Wignacourt. The painter thus befriended him. The Master was so proud to have such a gifted artist become the painter of the Order of the Malta Knights that he went as far as granting him knighthood.

This privilege didn’t last too long. In 1608, within less than a year, Caravaggio went back to his old habits. He was arrested due to another brawl ending in violence: he fought with a knight and almost fatally injured him. After months in prison, the painter managed to escape. This episode cost him his knighthood and set him on the road again.

Sicily and the Road Back to Rome

Caravaggio’s next destination was Sicily, where he was again received with open arms by his patrons. From his Sicilian period, we have numerous monumental altarpieces that adorn churches from Syracuse to Messina. Despite the recognition and financial success, accounts from the period indicate that Caravaggio was showing many bizarre habits.

From paranoia and sleeping in fully armed attire to destroying works of art at the slightest hint of criticism, the Milanese artist was slipping gravely. Many of the biographies outlining this period point to Caravaggio’s unescapable fear and lamentable attitude. In August 1609, led by his belief that he was being chased by enemies, he sought refuge with the Collona family back in Naples. His hope was that the protection of the Collona family would aid in obtaining an official pardon from the newly elected pope, Paul V Borghese.

In October 1609, a fight and attempt on his life occurred, and this time Caravaggio was the victim. The attack was so bad that his face was disfigured.

Making Amends and Painting for Pardons

From this moment on, Caravaggio tried to make amends in both Malta and Rome. His white flags were paintings of beheadings, which he sent to Wignacourt and to his previous die-hard patron, Cardinal Scipione Borghese. The artist counted on the family connection of his former patron and still hoped for a legal mediation with Pope Paul V.

Armed with three new paintings for Cardinal Borghese and emboldened by encouraging rumors from Rome, Caravaggio set out on the road in a small boat in July 1610. What happened afterward remains a subject of speculation, just like the story of his crime. The only solid evidence surrounding his death was a brief anonymous avviso, a type of private newsletter, which was sent from Rome to the court of Urbino. The letter, dated July 28, 1610, claimed simply that Caravaggio died of fever. Recent research placed his death ten days earlier, at Porto Ercole, in Tuscany.

Was Caravaggio Indeed a Murderer?

The short legal answer is yes. Historically, it is much more complicated, with an answer that requires wrestling with pre-modern Roman law. Caravaggio’s behavior after the alleged murder can be read both ways: as the erratic manner of a violent, vicious man trying to escape justice, or the desperate flight of someone unjustly accused of a crime he did not intend.

We have to ask ourselves how much of the reputation Caravaggio still carries today reflects historical fact, and how much reflects rivalry, myth, and Baroque-era storytelling. More than four centuries later, Caravaggio’s crime sits at the boundaries of history and legend, shaped by both rumor and historical documents. The only definite fact is that Ranuccio Tomassoni did indeed lose his life.

Maria Callas, a Greek-American operatic soprano, was one of the most influential opera singers of the 20th century. Her distinctive voice and charismatic stage presence dazzled audiences at the most famous opera houses, from La Scala in Milan to the Metropolitan in New York City, turning her into an icon in the 1950s and 1960s. As she began experiencing vocal problems, however, her career declined until she retired from the scene in 1965, when she was only 41 years old.

Maria Callas’ Biography: The Early Years

Maria Callas was born Maria Cecilia Sophia Anna on December 2, 1923, in New York City, the third child of Evangelia and George Kalogeropoulos. Her father later changed the family name to Callas, a word easier for English speakers to pronounce. Her parents, both Greek immigrants, already had a daughter, Yakinthi (“Jackie”), and a son, Vassilis, who died of meningitis in 1922 when he was only two years old. The increasingly worsening relationship between her parents turned Maria Callas’ childhood years into a challenging period. In 1937, after the end of her marriage, Evangelia returned to her native Greece with her two young daughters (Maria was 13 at the time).

From an early age, Maria Callas’ musical talent became evident to her mother, who pushed her youngest daughter to perform. The relationship between Maria and her mother, however, was rocky, with the young singer feeling her mother preferred her older sister.

“My sister was slim and beautiful and friendly, and my mother always preferred her. I was the ugly duckling, fat and clumsy and unpopular. It is a cruel thing to make a child feel ugly and unwanted… I’ll never forgive her for taking my childhood away. During all the years I should have been playing and growing up, I was singing or making money. Everything I did for them was mostly good and everything they did to me was mostly bad,” declared Maria Callas in a 1956 interview with Time.

Upon her return to Greece, young Maria enrolled at the National Conservatory, where she studied with singer Maria Trivella. At the time, her voice was still in the contralto range, the lowest female singing voice. However, when she continued her studies at the Athens Conservatory under the guidance of Elvira de Hidalgo, Callas’s voice rose to the soprano range, the highest human vocal register. The word soprano comes from the Italian sopra (meaning “above”), which, in turn, can be traced back to the Latin superius, a term used to refer to the highest register in the 13th-16th centuries polyphonic (multipart) music.

In 1942, the young singing prodigy was ready to start her professional career, making her debut in the title role of Italian composer Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca in Athens. By that time, Fascist Italy had already invaded Greece. The following year, the Italian forces were joined by the German army. Greece remained under Axis control until 1944. Little is known about Callas’ life during World War II, but the singer later accused her mother of forcing her to entertain Italian and German soldiers with her singing. As a result, Maria severed all contact with her mother. While Callas’ operatic career was set back by World War II, she nevertheless continued to perform.

La Divina: An Opera Icon

After the end of the war, 22-year-old Maria Callas returned to her native New York City. By that time, she had already sung in seven operas with a total of 56 performances. While her scheduled performance as the title role of Puccini’s Turandot for the inauguration of a new theater in Chicago fell through, her career soon took off in Italy. In 1947, she made her debut at the Arena in Verona in the title role of Amilcare Ponchielli’s La Gioconda in a production featuring the Italian conductor Tullio Serafin, her future mentor.

In the 1950s, her career skyrocketed, with Maria Callas performing in all the most prestigious opera houses in Europe and overseas. In the 1940s, she had mainly tackled traditional “heavier roles,” such as Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida, Isolde in Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, the mysterious Kundry (in Wagner’s Parsifal), and Brünnhilde (the valkyrie from the Norse mythology that inspired Wagner for his Ring Cycle). Tullio Serafin, however, encouraged her to take on “lighter roles,” especially from the so-called Italian bel canto repertoire.

Meaning “beautiful singing,” bel canto is a type of operatic singing born in the 16th century that requires vocal agility and control from the performers. In the mid-1950s, Maria Callas took the operatic world by storm, performing in operas by Vincenzo Bellini and Gaetano Donizetti (both bel canto composers) as well as Verdi, Rossini, and Cherubini. Due to her success in these roles, the singer is often credited with reviving bel canto after a period of decline due to its technical difficulties.

In 1950, Callas made her debut at the prestigious La Scala theater in Milan in the title role of Verdi’s Aida. In the following decade, she was the lead singer in the theater’s opening night six times. Her performance as Violetta, the tragic courtesan of Verdi’s La Traviata (literally meaning “the fallen one”), in the 1953 production directed by award-winning Italian stage and film director Luchino Visconti, is still considered a benchmark. Outside of Italy, she dazzled audiences in New York City, Mexico City, Berlin, London, Paris, Chicago, and Vienna, earning the nickname La Divina (“The Divine One”) from her fans. Maria Callas, with her distinctive eyes (and capped teeth), appeared on multiple magazine covers and in television shows.

Besides her distinctive vocal tone (almost melancholic in quality), Maria Callas became known for her acting ability. While most operatic singers tended to stand in the middle of the stage and sing, Callas had an innate sense of theater and the ability to portray her roles with charisma and passion. “She had an unusual ability to seek out the emotional nuance in phrases, in her arias and in her dramatic roles that went along with that particular timbre she had,” remarks opera critic Conrad L. Osborne.

While her exacting standards and dedication to her roles made her an icon of the operatic world, they also earned her a reputation as a demanding diva, causing disagreements with theater managers. In 1958, for example, Antonio Ghiringhelli, the manager of La Scala, lowered the curtains while she was still bowing to the audience. In the same year, her dispute with the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera was widely reported in the media.

Callas also made headlines due to her feud (that divided the operatic world into two opposing factions) with Italian soprano Renata Tebaldi, whose melodious and bright voice earned her the nickname voce d’angelo (angelic voice) and turned her into an international star.

What Were Maria Callas’ Most Famous Roles?

Throughout her career, Maria Callas sung more than 40 roles and recorded 20 operas. While her vocal range allowed her to perform a wide variety of roles, Callas moved theatergoers worldwide with her heartfelt interpretations of two operas: Vincenzo Bellini’s Norma and Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca.

Written by the 19th-century bel canto composer in 1831, Norma is a tragedy set in ancient Gaul, where the druids, led by King Oroveso, vow revenge against the occupying Roman troops. Overoso’s daughter, high priestess Norma, is in love with Roman proconsul Pollione, with whom she has two children. Pollione, however, has fallen out of love with Norma and is now courting another young novice priestess, Adalgisa.

Distraught, Norma contemplates murdering her children but cannot bring herself to do it. Meanwhile, Adalgisa promises to persuade Pollione to return to Norma. As news of the arrival of a new Roman official spreads, Overoso calls for a rebellion and demands a sacrificial victim. Norma offers herself as the victim, revealing to the druids that she has broken her vow of virginity. Deeply moved, Pollione joins her on the sacrificial pyre.

Widely praised for her powerful interpretation of the tragic but noble priestess, Callas became especially known for her rendition of Casta diva (Chaste goddess), the opera’s most famous piece, a desperate plea for peace.

Based on a French play with the same title, Puccini’s Tosca is a political and romantic tragedy set in Rome in 1800 during the Napoleonic Wars. The famed singer Tosca does not know that her lover, the painter Mario Cavaradossi, supported the newly dissolved free Roman Republic. While working on a portrait in the church of Sant’Andrea della Valle, Cavaradossi discovers fugitive Cesare Angelotti, a former consul of the republic, and agrees to help him hide from Baron Scarpia, the sadistic chief of police, in his secluded house in the countryside.

Sensing that Cavaradossi is hiding something from her, Tosca becomes convinced he is betraying her with another woman. When Scarpia storms into the church, he quickly realizes the painter has helped Angelotti escape. Meanwhile, Tosca arrives to tell Cavaradossi she has to cancel her date to perform in a gala. To arouse Tosca’s jealousy, Scarpia presents her with an alleged proof of Cavaradossi’s betrayal. Enraged, Tosca wants to confront her lover. A gloating Scarpia orders his men to follow her.

Upon realizing her mistake, Tosca tries to plea for her lover’s life with Scarpia, who taunts her by ordering his guards to torture Cavaradossi. Desperate, Tosca reveals Angelotti’s hiding place. Meanwhile, a messenger arrives with news of Napoleon’s victory at Marengo. Cavaradossi exults, and an enraged Scarpia sentences him to death. Tosca tries to negotiate a ransom, but Scarpia tells her he will only agree if she gives herself to him.

After singing Vissi d’arte (I lived for the art), asking God why he had forsaken her in her hour of need, Tosca reluctantly agrees to Scarpia’s proposal. The chief of police promises her he will stage a mock execution. When he tries to embrace her, Tosca stabs him to death, declaring É morto! Or gli perdono (He is dead! Now, I forgive him), a line Callas uttered with contempt mixed with anguish.

Tosca then goes to Castel Sant’Angelo, where Cavaradossi is held, explaining to him about the fake execution. The firing squad, acting on Scarpia’s orders, however, kills him. As a group of policemen arrives to arrest her, a desperate Tosca throws herself off Castel Sant’Angelo.

Who Was Maria Callas’ Husband?

During her career, Maria Callas made headlines not only for her performances but also for her love life. In 1949, she married wealthy brick manufacturer Giovanni Battista Meneghini, a man 20 years her senior who became her manager. While her husband was a shrewd businessman who managed to secure high fees, Callas later accused him of exploiting her and robbing her of her earnings.

In 1959, Callas and Meneghini were among the guests of a Mediterranean cruise organized by Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis on his yacht, the Christina. During the cruise, Callas fell in love with Onassis and later left her husband. Callas and Onassis’ affair was widely publicized by the media, but in 1968, the Greek businessman married Jackie Kennedy, the widow of US President John F. Kennedy.

Maria Callas’ Last Years and Cause of Death

By the time Maria Callas met Onassis, rumors had already begun to spread that her voice was experiencing a notable decline. In particular, music critics and supporters noticed her voice trembled and sometimes seemed on the verge of breaking when in the higher register. In the 1960s, as the troubles with her vocal cords increased, she decreased the number of her performances and ultimately retired in 1965. Her last operatic performance was in the title role of Tosca at the Covent Garden in London on July 5. She was only 41 years old.

In 1969, she starred in the film Medea by Italian poet and director Pier Paolo Pasolini. A few years later, in 1972, she taught a series of master classes on operatic singing at the Juilliard School in New York City. Two years later, she went on a world concert tour with Italian tenor Giuseppe Di Stefano, her long-time colleague (and lover). They held performances in Europe, North America, South Korea, and Japan.

The cause of the decline of Maria Callas’ voice has been the subject of endless speculation and studies. Many believe her extreme weight loss in the mid-1950s (she lost over 60 pounds in a year) and packed singing schedule are mostly to blame (in 1955 alone, she appeared in around 30 productions). Her colleague and close friend, operatic singer Tito Gobbi (who performed Baron Scarpia with Callas in several productions), however, claimed that Callas “simply” lost her confidence. According to Callas herself, her vocal troubles were caused by the weakening of the diaphragm.

In her book Cast a Diva: The Hidden Life of Maria Callas (2021), Lyndsy Spence declares that health issues led to the singer’s early retirement. Indeed, in the 1950s, Callas began to experience a troubling loss of vision coupled with sore teeth. During a rehearsal of Tosca, her wig caught fire when she stood too close to some candles. Her colleague Tito Gobbi had to improvise to avoid a tragedy. According to Spence, Callas’ issues were due to dermatomyositis, an autoimmune condition that causes muscle weakness. To ease her symptoms, Onassis unfortunately introduced the singer to prescription drugs.

Maria Callas died from a heart attack on September 16, 1977, in Paris, where she had lived as a recluse in her later years.

Maria Callas’ Legacy

Maria Callas’ later years have sometimes overshadowed her accomplishments. While many portray her as a “tragic figure,” heartbroken by Aristotle Onassis’ betrayal, she was a trailblazer in the operatic world. Her undeniable commitment to her art and high standards made her one of the most influential singers of all time, and her performances continue to inspire younger generations of opera singers.

As her international career coincided with the spread of LP records, opera fans can still enjoy her vocal prowess and interpretations in countless recordings (both official and pirated). Maria Callas’ life has also been analyzed and retold in fiction and non-fiction books, documentaries, and films. In 1995, American playwright Terrence McNally staged her classes at Juilliard in Master Class. In 2002, Italian stage director Franco Zefirelli, who worked with Callas in several productions, directed Callas Forever. More recently, Angelina Jolie depicted the legendary singer in Maria (2024).

From figuration through Surrealism to his late Abstract Expressionist style, Rothko turned color into emotion, mortality into presence, and viewing into a spiritual encounter—works that challenge language and linger long after they are seen.

Why “Abstraction” Falls Short of Explaining Rothko

What are we to make of abstract art? Throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, it has attracted as many accusations as praises. Because it does not depict the visible world, some have dismissed it as meaningless, while others have charged it with elitism or hermeticism. Yet abstraction does not “depict” things in the conventional sense, and to reduce it to a single mode of practice only adds to the confusion. Painters grouped under the label pursued radically different intentions through distinct methods and processes, rendering “abstraction” an imprecise and often misleading category.

Abstract Expressionism emerged in mid-20th-century America as a heterogeneous movement, and Mark Rothko (1903–70) came to be regarded as one of its central figures. Yet even this term proves inadequate. Rothko rejected the label “Abstract Expressionist,” and especially the designation “abstract,” which he saw as obscuring his concern with a reality beyond the physical world. As he put it, “I do not believe that there was ever a question of being abstract or representational. It’s really a matter of ending this silence and solitude, of breathing and stretching one’s arms again.” What is at stake here is not formal categorization, but a response to a modern condition of isolation and spiritual deprivation.

From Form to Spirit: Rothko’s Mature Vision

Having moved through expressionist distortion, Surrealism, and a “multiform” phase in the 1940s, Rothko arrived at his mature style by the late 1940s. This phase went beyond aesthetic innovation or dialogue with tradition. His paintings, he insisted, were “human dramas,” often tragic in implication, grounded in the inescapable fact of human mortality. Beauty, understood as a conventional aesthetic goal, was irrelevant. Rothko’s aim was not the beautiful, but the truth of spiritual experience.

For this reason, the charge that his work is elitist or hermetic fails to account for his intentions. Rothko conceived his paintings as presences—works meant to be encountered with empathy and openness. In this sense, they are social rather than exclusionary. Although he stripped away many pictorial conventions, including illusionistic space, figuration, and traditional figure-ground relations, he retained elements capable of crossing cultural boundaries. Brooding dark hues and blacks evoke mortality, while softly shifting fields of color create a sense of movement and instability. Through these means, Rothko sought to create a space in which emotion could be enacted in painting and reactivated in the viewer, provoking what he called “basic human emotions.”

The poet Stanley Kunitz, a close friend of the artist, described Rothko as a “shaman” whose art had its origins in magic and was inherently ethical and spiritual. While not Rothko’s own language, the description captures something essential: his abandonment of traditional conventions signals a desire to return to the beginnings of human expression. For Rothko himself, the spiritual was not an ancillary concern but the prime goal of his work.

The Limits of Language in Modern Art

By the mid-20th century, a current in literary criticism and modern art privileged the artwork itself over the so-called “heresy of paraphrase,” the belief that description inevitably mutilates the work it seeks to explain. From Russian Formalism to English New Criticism, skepticism toward the sufficiency of critical language gained traction, and many Abstract Expressionists shared this view. Rothko was among those who doubted that words could do anything but distort the experience of art.

For this reason, Abstract Expressionist works were often deemed uninterpretable by both supporters and detractors. As interpretation belongs to the linguistic, it was widely held to be incommensurable with other art forms. Writing later, Jean-François Lyotard would argue that verbalizing art amounts to ideology, since the true artistic experience lies beyond words.

Beyond Words

In Rothko’s late work, however, the failure of language is not merely inevitable but desired. Just as his paintings negate figuration and the objects of the visible world, they also expose the insufficiency of description, whose referents remain tied to the physical realm he sought to transcend. Description, with its habits of categorization and comparison, runs counter to Rothko’s aim of a universal sublimity freed from linguistic constraint. His paintings, he insisted, were to be encountered as pure “presences,” living as organic forms rather than as images to be decoded.

This resistance to explanation was shared by other modernists. The sculptor David Smith spoke of his work as a “return to origins, before purities were befouled by words,” and Rothko similarly warned that explanation causes a “paralysis of the mind and imagination.” Such paralysis, he feared, did not only afflict the artist who explains, but also the viewer, whose freedom of response might be compromised by preconception.

The Power of Presence

Rothko’s aversion to fixed meaning was shaped in part by a broader postwar context. After the Second World War, illusionistic realism had become associated with propaganda through its use by Nazi and Soviet regimes, while even Social Realism was viewed with suspicion. Against this backdrop, Rothko developed a horror of particularized meanings being imposed on his work. The viewer’s autonomy was paramount, even if it remained guided by the paintings’ emotional and spiritual evocations.

The resulting “poverty” of language, asserted by Rothko and embodied in the silent presences of his late paintings, renders them effectively unwritable and uninterpretable. Their frequent lack of titles, or reliance on color alone, reinforces this refusal of linguistic mediation. What is not at stake in these brooding, delicately shifting forms is a determinate meaning that can be rendered in prose. Yet this does not imply an absence of communication. Though they represent no narratives, figures, or objects, the fact of the canvas, its colors, and the moods they evoke remains undeniable—if ultimately indefinable.

Language and Rothko

Despite its limits, language can still criticize, analyze, and contextualize art—tasks to which it is endemic. What it cannot do, however, is articulate the total experience of visual art, and least of all Rothko’s painting. Even ekphrasis, developed in the Renaissance to describe artworks, could never fully convey effect or response. Description is by nature partial and therefore limiting.

This limitation is more acute in abstraction. While analysis can trace relationships and developments between works, Rothko’s paintings ultimately stand in self-evidence: they resist exhaustive description and can only be minimally indexed. Rothko himself opposed the imposition of literary interpretation on his work, though he did make occasional statements that clarified his intentions. In 1947, as he approached his mature style, he expressed a sense of confinement within American society, which he believed was hostile to art as a vehicle of true liberation. The transcendental experience he saw as art’s mission, he argued, had been marginalized by consumerism and could only be recovered by abandoning the security of the familiar.

Tragedy, Mortality, and the Transcendent

For Rothko, preconceptions were obstacles to authenticity. He described them as “the doorway through which one left the world in which they occur,” a necessary threshold for both artistic process and viewer reception. His paintings, he insisted, were “dramas,” with shapes acting as performers—organic forms endowed with volition and passion, unburdened by the “finite associations” of the visible world.

Two tragic conditions animate this vision. The first is the modern loss of the transcendental, resulting in what Rothko called human incommunicability. The second is the tragic fact of human mortality. His paintings confront both: they affirm existence while proposing vast, seemingly limitless spaces meant to intuit spiritual eternity.

The late works were conceived as communal encounters with this boundless spirituality. Rothko even specified an intimate viewing distance—18 inches—so that the paintings might envelop the viewer. This impulse culminated in the Rothko Chapel, where the viewer is physically encircled by the works. Far from elitist or exclusionary, Rothko intended a universal address, seeking what he called “an unexpected and unprecedented resolution of an eternally familiar need.”

Although abstract in their refusal of depiction and narrative, the paintings are not meaningless. Rothko avoided symbols, which he saw as bound to language, and instead sought to register “basic human emotions” as directly as possible through color and shape. Yet the works point beyond the artist’s own emotions. They demand the engagement of a “sensitive” viewer—since, as Rothko put it, “a picture lives by companionship”—and they attempt an alchemy of experience. Ordinary materials are transformed into luminous, indeterminate spaces that strain against definition, offering, however briefly, an encounter in which finitude itself seems to be overcome.

Intention and Impact

From the 1930s onward, Clement Greenberg dominated mid-century art criticism. An anti-intentionalist, he argued that only the completed painting mattered, not the artist’s intent. While Greenberg’s ideas became orthodoxy, they still offer valuable insights.

Rothko, though sparing in words, explicitly aimed to express “basic human emotions.” Unlike the High Modernists, who rejected intention entirely, Rothko’s late paintings not only demand that they be looked at, as Greenberg insisted, but also engage the observer, erasing the distance implied by pure visual contemplation.

Rothko’s approach resonates with Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist view that meaning resides in the spectator’s engagement rather than the artist’s intent. Yet Rothko extends this further: his works are simultaneously records of his own confrontation with the sublime and invitations to the receptive viewer, whom he called his ideal “sensitive” observer, to partake in the experience.

In this way, Rothko’s paintings balance intention and reception, making the viewer both spectator and confidante, co-participant in the emotional and spiritual encounter.

Color and the Sublime

In 1948, Barnett Newman argued that European art failed to reach the sublime due to its “blind desire to exist inside the reality of sensation.” This resonates with Rothko, whose color fields pursue an unnameable sense of the sublime, beyond figurative or conceptual content.

Rothko subtly modulated tones across works—bright greens and reds, contrasting darks, later nuanced dark hues—creating an “oceanic vision” bounded only by the frame, which marks both the threshold between everyday reality and spiritual space, and between the sensibilities of artist and viewer.

Art historian Claude Cernuschi observed that the relationships in a Rothko painting exist as much in the spectator’s mind as on the canvas, echoing techniques seen in Impressionism. For Rothko, the canvas itself and its paint are objects to be transcended, evoking human emotion directly through color and light: “it’s not color, it’s light.”

From Painting as Act to Painting as Presence

Harold Rosenberg described action painting as “the act itself is the object,” a notion that applies to Pollock but not to Rothko. For Rothko, painting is the start of a process, not its end. His late works are “pure presences,” inviting viewers into both the painting and their own encounter with the transcendent, often within the tragic awareness of mortality.

While Rothko shares with Sartre a concern for authenticity, he diverges conceptually. Sartre’s nothingness negates being; Rothko negates appearances to evoke spiritual reality. Figure-ground distinctions are irrelevant—each painting becomes both “ground” and quasi-subjective “figure,” facilitating communion with the intangible.

Critics Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit note that from the 1950s onward, Rothko “subverted the readability of forms,” culminating in the Rothko Chapel. Visibility is superseded by the visionary: organic, volitional shapes move and grow as the viewer engages, transforming the act of looking into holistic participation rather than isolated perception.

Rothko and Spiritual Reality

Jeffrey Weiss links Rothko to Sartre’s notion of “double nihilation”: the absent figure experienced as presence, where plenitude serves as ground. Yet this framing misrepresents Rothko. He does not negate being, only the appearances of the physical world, producing communion with something spiritually real and intangible. In this respect, he aligns more closely with Platonism than with existentialism, privileging spiritual reality over nothingness.

Bersani and Dutoit describe Rothko as “retrogressive,” returning to the moment of looking, yet in his paintings, presence is palpable. Composed of “organic” and “volitional” shapes, these works grow and move as they are viewed. Rather than depicting objects, Rothko’s canvases engender holistic experiences of the organic presences they embody, guiding the viewer toward the visionary and sublime.

Bibliography

Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (eds), Art in Theory 1900-2000.