Broke in Bohemia

Renoir's The Bohemian

Punk-rock made this worse with Johnny Rotten and the late Malcolm McClaren spouting the evils of consumerism but then working in marketing campaigns.

The irony is that the art-school generations of British music, from The Rolling Stones to Blur, were largely middle class kids. Admittedly Damon Albarn or Mick Jones made an effort to develop a rapport with, and celebrate, the common class, at the same time Mick Jagger had his wildly changing accent and Paul Simonon’s wife founded Agent Provocateur. This begs the question: Does being poor, or underprivileged, make you a better painter?

Picasso and Dali, almost certainly the two best artists of the 20th Century, made a point of dressing immaculately in public. The real Banksy doesn’t look out of place in a Tuxedo at the Sundance Festival, and Sam Taylor-Wood recently graced the red-carpets for the premiere of Nowhere Boy looking very much in place.

Throughout history royally-appointed artists have faced criticism but the nineteenth-century Poet Laureates, Kipling and Tennyson, were probably the best poets of their day (it is still If and Rime of the Ancient Mariner that are regarded as the best British poems) while the artists of the Spanish Golden Age and the Church-appointed sculptors of the Italian Renaissance produced the finest works of heritage.

However Manet and Delacroix’s breaking with the French Academy, or the tremendous output of Van Gogh or Rembrandt considering the poverty in which they lived for so much of their lives is exemplary. While Dali and Van Gogh’s rebellions against their wealthy fathers satisfy the belief that the hunger to create art where it wasn’t before, to throw yourself into the depth of your imagination and to the limit of your abilities, to stretch and strain and exhaust faculties to create your art, have the very most Thatcherian values.

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