Two years ago I was flown to Reykjavik to interview the Icelandic performance artist Ragnar Kjartansson. It was a weird old trip, booked in at 48 hours’ notice, but Ragnar was consistently charming and generous. Indeed, the only slightly touchy moment came when I asked him about his 2012 video installation The Visitors, a berserk undertaking split across nine screens, in which the artist and an entourage of musician friends spend 52 minutes chanting the baleful refrain from a song written by his then recent ex-wife. The artist tensed up as he considered the question. ‘Shit, I gotta go,’ he said.
He probably did, but his reticence might also have had something to do with the fact that the work was possibly conceived as a cathartic means of putting his first marriage behind him. But I’m now getting divorced myself, and I can fully sympathise with his reluctance to elaborate on a work commemorating the collapse of his marriage: when it comes to these things, it’s deeply, illogically personal. More to the point, I can only salute his decision to address the subject in his art.
Romance – whether tender, or no-frills-carnal – has always been a draw for artists, yet there’s no real ying to its yang: divorce scarcely figures in the western pictorial tradition. In the grand scheme of things, the explanation barely merits elaboration: whether forbidden outright, turbo-stigmatised or prohibitively expensive to pursue, it hasn’t been an option until very recently. And while we might consider our national exceptionalism the result of one man’s decision to divorce his wife, we’ve shied away from portrayals of the subject just as hard as any other polity.
God knows how many heroes of the modern art canon separated from their spouses: Gauguin, Matisse, Kahlo, Willem and Elaine De Kooning – it goes on. Vanishingly few, however, have made any direct address to the fact in their work. Even now that it’s become a near-probable outcome to a marriage, divorce in art remains decidedly thin on the ground, and small wonder: the ordeal is about as fun as a weekend in Bakhmut and tedious in the extreme when relayed by others. It’s neither sexy nor easily reduced to visual shorthand, and for all the odd emotions it summons, it doesn’t readily correspond to the fiery passions traditionally favoured by artists.
Divorce scarcely figures in the western pictorial tradition
But those emotions should by rights be an obvious spur, not least when it comes to the constructive ambiguity of contemporary art. For all his circumspection, Kjartansson must agree: the aforementioned The Visitors is wistful, romantic, at times weirdly rousing. The same is true of Gerhard Richter, who reacted to his first divorce in the 1980s with a series of paintings depicting icebergs, based on photos he took off Greenland during a particularly stormy period of marital relations. They might plausibly represent the emotions and energies that so often lurk beneath the surface of a relationship. But would an artist as elusive as Richter really opt for such an obvious metaphor? Divorce will do that to you.
Societal agitation comes into it too, not least for the young, presumably married, woman in an 1880 painting by the artist and diarist Marie Bashkirtseff: she sits hunched over a copy of an essay on divorce by Alexandre Dumas fils, as if transfixed by the realisation of her own agency; you could launch a firework in the corner of the room and she’d barely blink. The emancipatory, awakening narrative here is an intriguing one: Dumas actually coined the term ‘feminist’, albeit not in its contemporary sense; his use referred specifically to male advocates of women’s rights.
What comes before and after divorce is often more revealing.
The ordeal is about as fun as a weekend in Bakhmut and tedious in the extreme when relayed by others
Compare Picasso’s ‘Large Nude in a Red Armchair’ (1929) – a gratuitously spiteful portrait of Olga Khokhlova – with earlier likenesses. Or contrast Jeff Koons’s ‘Made in Heaven’ pictures (1989) – for which he undertook a full-on porn shoot with his then-wife Ilona Staller (AKA Cicciolina) – with his later ‘Celebration’ series. By the time the latter was conceived in 1994, they’d had a poisonous divorce and she’d fled to Rome with their son Ludwig. Koons, convinced he’d get the boy back, dreamed up a run of monumental stainless steel sculptures based on kids’ party toys – balloon animals, Play-Doh shapes, dangling heart charms – to mark his homecoming. It didn’t work out that way: Ludwig stayed put in Italy; Koons, shouldering the eyewatering production costs, was brought to the brink of bankruptcy.
Like Holbein’s commissions for Henry VIII, it’s art wrought by divorce rather than about it, but the irony of context renders it sad as hell; even knowing his current net worth (c.$400 million) doesn’t help. Yet where I’m concerned, it prompts something approaching a cheery thought: thank god I don’t have children.
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