Do Great Artists Have More Sex?

Although I risk impinging on the territory of fellow Big Think blogger Marina Adshade of Dollars and Sex, I can’t help but comment on a recent report in The Guardian titled “When art breeds success in the bedroom: Does success as an artist bring you more sexual conquests? Well, yes and no, say researchers.” Marc Abrahams, editor of the Annals of Improbable Research and chief organizer of the humorous and thought-provoking Ig Nobel prize, stumbled across an article in the Frontiers of Psychology titled “Status and Mating Success Amongst Visual Artists” written by UK researchers Helen Clegg, Daniel Nettle, and Dorothy Miell in which the trio argue that successful male artists have a lot of sex, whereas less successful male artists have less. When you talk about female artists, however, success means pretty much nothing at all when it came to their sex life. At the risk of going against their findings (and of sounding like Carrie from Sex and the City), is really true that great male artists have greater sex? Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Do Great Artists Have More Sex?"

After the Fall

When she was fifteen and working as an acrobat in a circus, Suzanne Valadon fell from a high trapeze and ended her career under the big top. Born September 23, 1865, Valadon soon found a new purpose for her beauty and athletic build—modeling for the great artists of France. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Pierre-Cécile Puvis de Chavannes, and many other artists soon immortalized Valadon again and again. (Toulouse-Lautrec’s Portrait of Suzanne Valadon appears above.) Valadon soon became more than a model, having affairs with both Renoir and Puvis de Chavannes, among others. She gave birth, perhaps from one of these liaisons, to a son who would one day become the artist known as Maurice Utrillo, fueling rumors that the father had to be one of the great artists. After progressing from model to lover, Valadon soon enticed these artists to show her how to paint. Edgar Degas, for whom Valadon never modeled and never entangled romantically with, encouraged Valadon’s efforts and showed her techniques of drawing and pastels. From humble beginnings, Valadon soon found herself in select artistic circles.

Of all the artists Valadon worked with, Degas seems to have had the greatest influence. Valadon drew and painted countless Degas-esque nudes, as in After the Bath (above, from 1908). Although her drawing technique differs from that of Degas, Valadon’s choice of subject matter clearly links her to Degas. Valadon even uses many of the unconventional poses Degas placed his female nudes into, accentuating the curves and lines produced in those awkward, unguarded moments. Looking at a work such as After the Bath, you see some of the possibilities that Degas never explored in his pursuit of other experiments. Valadon never creates the dizzying, almost pulsating pastels Degas mastered, but her simplicity of line and flat color seem like prophesies of the later work of the Fauves or even the early Pablo Picasso.

Valadon never lost her allure for men. Even the almost asexual classical composer Erik Satie fell for Valadon, and fell hard. Satie proposed to Valadon on their first date. Although she never married Satie, she did run through a series of husbands as she continued to mature as an artist and develop her own style. The nudes of her Degas-influenced period gave way in the twentieth century to still lifes with flowers and landscapes such as View from My Window in Genets (Brittany) (above, from 1922). The first woman painter admitted to the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, Valadon broke new ground for women in the still male-dominated art French art world and earned the respect of several generations of male artists. Picasso, Andre Derain, Georges Braque, and other artists attended her funeral in 1938, paying their respects to a unique figure in French painting of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century—a woman who knew life from both sides of the easel and acrobatically leapt over every obstacle on her way to the top.

Child of the Streets

At its peak, the Montmartre section of Paris in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century pulsated as the heart of the bohemian art scene, with the Moulin Rouge and other lively venues as the accompanying soundtrack. In the middle of all that excitement, Maurice Utrillo was born and raised. Born on Christmas Day 1883, Utrillo grew up to paint countless scenes of the Montmartre streets (one example above) he knew and loved. Perhaps the most famous fact about Utrillo involves the mystery of his father, who may have been one of the great artists of the time.

Suzanne Valadon, Utrillo’s mother, posed for such artists as Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Pierre-Cécile Puvis de Chavannes, Berthe Morisot, and Edgar Degas after her career as a circus acrobat ended with a fall from a trapeze. Valadon learned to paint watching these artists and eventually Degas served as a mentor. The beautiful Suzanne bedded many artists as well, which led to the disputed patrimony of Maurice (whose La Belle Gabrielle Montmartre appears above). The minor Spanish painter Miguel Utrillo y Molins legally claimed paternity in 1891, but the rumors of an art star father dogged Utrillo to the end of his life, overshadowing in some ways his own artistic achievement.

There’s a long-standing joke that Miguel claimed parentage of Maurice just to put his name to a creation by Renoir or Degas. Maurice’s work, however, is not a joke. Works such as La Rue Tholoze (above, from 1913) capture quietly the daily life of Montmartre in a way that Toulouse-Lautrec’s boisterous café scenes do not. Utrillo shows the flip side of Montmartre—the side that a young boy growing up amidst all the noise and excitement would know firsthand. Few people populate Utrillo’s street scenes of Montmartre, giving the feel of the quiet early morning when people were sleeping off the effects of the previous night’s festivity. Despite the clear quality of his renderings, Utrillo’s name often appears on bad fakes that take advantage of the touristy hunger for souvenirs of the bohemian neighborhood. There’s a Hopper-esque quality to some of these scenes in their architectural emptiness, the loneliness of a café when everyone has gone home. You might even see a hint of loneliness from a man who never truly knew his full heritage but could only guess at potential genius in his blood.