Addiction in Art - Smoking

Mayas were perhaps the first people to represent tobacco smoking in art. Numerous depictions of smoking can be found from the Mayan era. Deities, kings and shamans are often depicted smoking in Mayan art and iconography.

During the 17th century, Dutch paintings with pipes symbolized misfortune. The Dutch artists meant to send a moral message that foolish behaviors like smoking will lead people into hardships.

Smoking’s prevalence among sailors, soldiers, and the rural poor along with its intoxicating effects led to an association with the lowliest people. Thus, smoking became a tool for artists to designate someone’s rank in society, and painters including Adriaen Brouwer, the Ostade brothers, and David Teniers II employed smoking in their portrayals of the low classes. Smoking also became a comedic prop for painters especially in festival and burlesque paintings.The impressionists painted scenes of everyday life that included cigars, cigarettes, or pipes, but they did not put symbolic importance in them. The post-impressionists returned symbolic meaning to smoking instruments.

Vincent van Gogh’s painting, Skull with a Burning Cigarette was a notable one which seems as an anti-smoking warning.Vincent van Gogh says in The Letters,Van Gogh Museum. "Now you well understand that if alcohol was certainly one of the great causes of my madness, then it came very slowly and would go away slowly too, should it go, of course. Or if it comes from smoking, same thing."This was produced in a time when Van Gogh's health was poor (due to stomach ailments and rotting teeth) and may reflect Vincent's own concerns about his state of well-being. Some interpret the work as being a statement of defiance against Vincent's faltering health.

 

Various forms of modern art have also included cigarettes. The Museum of Modern Art in New York City displayed Jac Leiner’s Lung in March 2009. This piece features 1200 Marlboro packs neatly folded and strung together. Leiner illustrates her own personal addiction by presenting the sickening amount of cigarettes that she unconsciously consumed over three years.

Another example called Why Can’t I Stop Smoking is on display at the St. Louis Art Museum,by Artist Sigmar Polke.This piece portrays an incompletely painted man on a large canvas with the title of the painting written across the top. It demonstrates the addictive power of cigarettes because the artist cannot overcome the addiction to finish something that he presumably loves to do: paint.An archetype in this piece could be The Test or Trial because the man is trying to quit smoking.

Artists worked out that smoking represented death centuries before doctors did. In Philip Guston's painting, The Hand: a hairy wrist thrusts from nowhere into air the color of ash. A cigarette is clamped between stubby fingers, and a wristwatch tells us it is four in the morning. Time is getting very short. Guston painted this in the last year of his life.

Smoking was in no way associated with death in English Painter William Hogarth's day - no studies had yet proved anything bad about it - yet he intuitively associates it with decay and decline, with time running out. He engraved a single word coming out of Time's mouth: "Finis", meaning the end. It looks like a puff of cigarette smoke.

For the truly cultured smoker, smoking is about knowing you will die. It is about acknowledging the fragility of your body and the marvelous terror of addiction. Every time they finish a cigarette they think about death.

Then why can’t they stop smoking?