Respected Artists Who Were Actually Terrible People

It's common knowledge that you don't need a beautiful soul to create beautiful art. Look at any number of famous painters, musicians, or writers, and it's clear that a beautiful soul is a requirement that ranks way below being a higher-functioning alcoholic in the creativity stakes.

But while you're probably aware that not all artists are paragons of virtue, you're likely less aware of just what total waste-expelling orifices some of them are. There are artists out there whose names you can recall with greater ease than you can recall your own mother's birthday, towering geniuses in the worlds of painting, music or design who are so unlovely that spending time with them would be the psychological equivalent of hurling yourself into a waste disposal unit. Think great art can't be made by people who are total art-holes? This pantheon of pimps, murderers, bullies, and rip-off merchants begs to differ.

You've never heard of street artist Cartrain, but he's the kid who pulled off the costliest art heist in British history. At least, according to Damien Hirst. But, as you're about to see, Hirst's word isn't exactly unbiased regarding Cartrain. In 2009, the mega wealthy art superstar spent an entire year pursuing a vendetta against the 16-year-old, having the boy arrested and banned from every gallery in London (via The Guardian).

The origin of this feud was a collage Cartrain tried to sell. Supposedly a portrait of Hirst, it depicted the artist with his own diamond-encrusted skull artwork for a head. It was clearly a teenager's slightly-lame attempt at being edgy, but Hirst apparently thinks he has a monopoly on lame attempts at edginess. He sued Cartrain for £200 and demanded all copies of his work destroyed.

In retaliation, Cartrain snuck into a Hirst exhibition in London and stole a box of pencils from Hirst's sculpture Pharmacy. So Hirst did the totally rational thing and reported Cartrain to the police. Oh, and he valued the pencils at £500,000, since they were part of one of his artworks, meaning Cartrain could have been charged with the biggest art theft in U.K. history (via the Independent). Cartain was then banned from every gallery in London because Hirst may be able to take a pickled shark and turn it into art, but apparently he can't take a joke.

"He needed the blood of those who loved him." No, it's not the tagline for an emotionally tortured vampire movie. It's what Pablo Picasso's granddaughter Marina once said about her painter grandpa. One of the most famous artists who ever lived, Picasso completely changed what modern art could be. All he had to do to scale these dizzying heights was grind countless women into the dust. According to Marina, Picasso's repeated psychological destruction of the women he knew was all part of his bizarre creative process (via Paris Review).

Picasso himself wasn't shy about these views. He's on record as calling women "machines for suffering." He just left off the part where he was the sadistic machine operator, pulling at the levers marked "total breakdown." He ensured his children and their wives depended on him for money. When Marina's parents broke up, he kept her and her alcoholic mother in poverty to teach them a lesson (via the New York Times). Remarkably, that was a good outcome. The Telegraph reports that, of the seven significant women in Picasso's life, two committed suicide and two went mad.

Being one of Picasso's women meant watching as he slept with hundreds of people behind your back and treated you like trash. He once said he thought women were either goddesses or doormats, and it seems he enjoyed turning the former into the latter.

Francis Bacon's twisted portraits of screaming faces, dying popes, and inhuman creatures has inspired more terrible teenage imitators than any artist this side of J.D. Salinger. He was a drunk known to his best friends as a sadistic ogre who saw the awfulness inside himself and decided to paint it in excruciating detail. But even these descriptions don't do justice to Bacon's twisted temperament. As a profile in NY Mag details, he was all this plus an emotionally abusive lover who drove his boyfriends to despair and suicide.

Throughout his whole life, Bacon seemed to see sexuality as something that involved predator and prey. Sometimes — as with the stablehand who tied him up and whipped him when he was a teenager — he was the prey. Other times, he delighted in being the predator. His love affair with George Dyer (seen above in a painting by Bacon) reached past Fifty Shades of Grey extremes that were detailed in the film Love is the Devil. While Dyer supplied the physical abuse, Bacon provided the emotional side, often acting cold or dismissive toward his boyfriend. During a trip to Paris, Bacon ghosted the mentally unstable Dyer so badly that the poor man took his own life.

Not that Bacon seemed to escape his own hideous nature. He constantly talked about what an awful person he was, saying he was irredeemable. No arguments there.

He called himself "Australia's first great composer." Percy Grainger spent the first half of the 20th century writing his own, relatively well-received works, and more importantly, preserving English and Irish folk songs that would have otherwise been lost forever. Although he was an icon in his time, he's significantly less well known today. That's probably for the best. Grainger had views that could euphemistically be called "challenging." His entire life's work was dedicated to preserving the superiority of the Nordic race, while proving the inferiority of Jewish people.

The Times Higher Educational Supplement has the details in their review of Grainger's own Selected Letters. Grainger didn't preserve British folk songs out of any love for the genre. He did it because he worried that history would otherwise lose evidence of the "creative genius" of the white race. He loudly complained about intermarriage and about composers who performed non-Nordic music, all while enthusiastically pumping up the work of Nazi Party favorites like Houston Stewart Chamberlain, otherwise known as "Hitler's John the Baptist." When World War II broke out, he actively turned down opportunities to help Jews fleeing Germany. You were a real gem, Percy.

In 1894, France convicted Jewish army captain Alfred Dreyfus of selling military secrets to Germany (via Britannica). While it later emerged that Dreyfus was framed, this aspect apparently slipped Edgar Degas' attention. One of the greatest of all the Impressionists, Degas (above, self portrait) was a painter who changed how movement could be depicted on a canvas. In the wake of the Dreyfus Affair, he also changed how rabidly anti-Semitic a famous painter could get away with being. Convinced the captain's conviction showed Jews couldn't be trusted, Degas became so racist he made Wagner look like a bleeding heart liberal.

The Chicago Tribune has the sordid details. The Dreyfus Affair brought all of Degas' racism exploding out. In its wake, he cut off contact with all Jewish people, including at least one friend who had been like a family member to him. He also began viciously attacking the works of Camille Pissarro, the only Jewish Impressionist. When friends gently reminded him that he used to rave about Pissarro's work, Degas declared "that was before Dreyfus."

At times, the painter's anti-Semitism crossed over from plain crazy into certifiably insane. He once suffered a screaming meltdown in front of a model, chasing her out of his studio for being Jewish, though she was actually Protestant. Fittingly, by the time of his death in 1917, Degas had been abandoned by his friends, who were fed up with his racism.

If you're an art historian in the 21st century, Benvenuto Cellini's whole deal is that he was a seriously talented Mannerist goldsmith. If you were one of his 16th-century neighbors, though, Benvenuto Cellini's whole deal was that he was a dangerous psychopath who might literally murder you over the smallest perceived slight. While other bygone artists are notorious for fighting or bedding, Cellini just straight killed a whole bunch of people.

Italy Magazine has the story, and it reads like a rejected film treatment for a 16th-century slasher franchise. As a teenager Cellini frequently brawled, eventually being forced to flee his hometown. As an artist's apprentice, he often fought with his rivals, once using a knife. But it wasn't until the Sack of Rome in 1527 that the twenty-something Cellini got his first taste of blood. He killed at least two of the invading soldiers. Evidently, he liked it.

After that, Cellini pretty quickly began murdering people. When one of his brothers was killed by the city watch for a murder he'd committed, Cellini killed one of the watch's corporals. One witness who saw Cellini beat a man half to death was in turn knifed dead by the artist before he could testify. When Cellini became subject of a lawsuit while visiting France, he crippled the plaintiff's legs in revenge. Maybe it wasn't the most mature way to deal with problems, but it certainly worked. Cellini himself lived to the ripe old age of 71.