<p>As for Wagner, there’s one where I both loathe the person and the creations.</p>
<p>I am not a Wagner fan, but some people think his music was brilliant. That is why I thought he was a good example.</p>
<p>In an earlier thread, people were saying that since Woody Allen married Soon Yi, they couldn’t abide his movies.</p>
<p>Joan Crawford, President Clinton (I actually like him, but some may say he fits in this category), Hillary Clinton (ditto).</p>
<p>Oh no! Not Joan Crawford! She was SUCH a great selfless pie baking mother in MILDRED PEIRCE. She gets a pass from me, especially after seeing her slap Veta (Anne Blythe) Besides, she is safely dead and buried so none of that money I dished out for the Criterion edition MILDRED PEIRCE will see her bank account.</p>
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<p>I agree with JHS. The artists, authors, and composers who did disgraceful things are legion. I love the books of Patrick O’Brian, but the guy was cold and disagreeable in person. And earlier in his life had abandoned his wife and kid and run off with another woman and basically lived a lie for rest of his life. (He died in 2000 and was outed shortly before he died). But I still love his books.</p>
<p>Oh, she had us fooled…remember “Mommie Dearest”?</p>
<p>(I just watched the original “The Women” on TCM and my, she was great at evil).</p>
<p>“The Women” was one of Crawford’s best performances. I just finished reading “Dark Victory,” a biography of Crawford’s great rival, Bette Davis. Davis has long been my favorite actress - I think she’s glorious in the films she made at the peak of her career (The Letter, Now Voyager, Dark Victory, All about Eve, etc.). Sadly, the biography shows that she was not at all nice. She was insecure, self-centered, manipulative, and uncaring about the needs/feelings of others. (And I always thought Crawford was to blame in their relationship!) But that doesn’t change how much I love and respect her work. It makes me sad that she caused herself and her loved ones so much unhappiness. But if she’d been a nice girl, her performances probably wouldn’t have been so memorable.
Sad yet true. A wonderful example of a great artist who was also, by unanimous accounts, a thoroughly decent human being (with exquisite manners, too): Fred Astaire. Though he was said to get crabby when people showed up late for rehearsal or didn’t work as hard as he himself did. :)</p>
<p>Leni Riefenstahl- Olympia I and II, Triumph of the Will. Brilliant film making, visually beautiful images. I can never watch current Olympic coverage and fail to find it sadly thin and visually lacking by comparison.
But Leni was not nice.</p>
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Of course this will depend on how high you set the bar, but I don’t really think it’s true. I think because the crazy, transgressive artist is such a familiar stereotype, when an artist is crazy and transgressive we tend to see his personality and his occupation as correlated, but when an artist is stable and well-adjusted we don’t. There’s a Hawthorne for every Poe–but it’s only the Poes that we think of as being “artist-like.”</p>
<p>Yes Jacdad----Riefenstahl was not only a nasty Nazi, she used her brilliant technique to glorify the worst of the worst. In fact H and I are always referring to the “Riefenstahl conundrum” when referring to bad people selling a worst agenda with good art.</p>
<p>And Frazzled…I met Fred Astaire when I was 22. The nicest five minutes of my entire life.</p>
<p>I used to work out to some songs by Chris Brown. Not exactly art, but the rhythm of his music is just perfect for the pace I like to keep while on the treadmill. </p>
<p>Post-Him-Beating-Rihanna-Up-Innocent, I’m still torn on whether it’s right to listen to his music at all anymore.</p>
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!!! Oh, wow - what a great memory! (And how I wish it was mine …)</p>
<p>Bing Crosby was kind of messed up, and Spencer Tracey cheated on his wife with Kathryn Hepburn.</p>
<p>I agree with the consensus that accessing the deepest recesses of the creative mind often leaves the artist a little unhinged, but then how much creativity do you encourage in your kids? Does it scare you if they want to pursue a creative–art, music, film–career? </p>
<p>I have a friend who did not want her kids to get the academic honors with distinction dipoloma because it required an art class, and her kids are on a narrow track to med school or law school. She said,“That stuff is fine for other people, but not my kids.” Her daughter would’ve loved to take some dance classes, or be in the choir. Nope. </p>
<p>I’m wandering off my own topic here.</p>
<p>I will say that I put any pedophile artist in his or her own repugnant category. </p>
<p>I guess I should go rent Mildred Pierce. I never had any trouble hating Joan Crawford because I’ve only seen her in “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane.”</p>
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Well, but now we’re getting into pretty mundane and universal kinds of ‘loathability.’ It’s true that we probably won’t find many saints in the ranks of artists, but that doesn’t really distinguish them from the general population, does it?</p>
<p>Yes, that sort of philandering cad behavior isn’t really in the same category with child molestation or physical abuse of wives, girlfriends, children. Bing Crosby’s daughter did write a book about him that made him sound borderline monstrous. He used to hit his kids with a belt, which as I write that sounds really bizarre to me. How angry do you have to be to hit your kids with a weapon?</p>
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Standard parenting procedure in much of the US at one point. My dad used to hit us with a belt–not terribly hard or terribly often, but certainly hard and often enough to remember vividly. And I wouldn’t call him ‘borderline monstrous.’ </p>
<p>I think this is one of those areas of life, like attitudes toward homosexuality, where genuine and (hopefully) permanent progress has been made in our lifetime. I don’t judge my father’s parenting methods; they were what he knew, and he applied them in a sane and measured way. But I like ours better.</p>
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<p>My comment wasn’t limited to “crazy, transgressive” artists. Wallace Stevens and T.S. Eliot, for example, were neither crazy, transgressive, nor nice. George Balanchine was not crazy, transgressive, or nice, either.</p>
<p>I happen to like Wagner’s music a lot, and I think he gets a partial bum rap on anti-Semitism. (He was probably no more anti-Semitic than was normal for his class and time, which was to say plenty anti-Semitic. But he’s not really responsible for his widow and daughter-in-law’s infatuation with Hitler, or for Hitler’s with him.) Nevertheless, he was not a pleasant human being by any standard.</p>
<p>I’ll accept Fred Astaire as a counterexample – a brilliant, unique artist, who by all accounts was a fine person. I’m less certain about Hawthorne, both because I don’t know much about his biography, and because I have never understood what’s so great about his work. (He was doubtless a great American writer of his time, but not so clearly a great writer.) How about some others?</p>
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<p>Well, he wrote a widely published essay against Jews, “Das Judenthum in der Musik” (it seems he had issues with Meyerbeer and Mendelssohn). </p>
<p>His music makes me feel like I am being punched repeatedly in the head. But, since great art is subjective, and this thread is about great artists who were sketchy in real life, I’ll leave Wagner on his own, decomposing…</p>
<p>Another counterexample I can think of is J.S. Bach. By all accounts he was even tempered, well liked, and had a very happy marriage to Anna Magdalena after his first wife died, and was very close to his children.
Margot Fonteyn, arguably one of the greatest ballerinas, was never a diva, always graceful in real life. I have a friend who knew her at the end of her life, and he recounted what a lovely woman she was.
Among actors, Paul Newman could set a few examples.</p>