ΟΙ ΜΠΕΚΡΗΔΕΣ ΣΤΗΝ ΤΕΧΝΗ

 Τον Χάρο τον ρωτήσανε

πέντ’ έξι μερακλήδες, 

δίχως κρασί  πώς την περνούν

 στον Άδη οι μπεκρήδες.

What good can drinkin' do, what good can drinkin' do?

Lord, I drink all night but the next day I still feel blue



There's a glass on the table, they say it's gonna ease all my pain,

And there's a glass on the table, they say it's gonna ease all my pain

But I drink it down, an' the next day I feel the same



Gimme whiskey, gimme bourbon, give me gin

Oh, gimme whiskey, give me bourbon, gimme gin

'Cause it don't matter what I'm drinkin', Lord, as long as it drown this sorrow I'm in.

My man he left me, child, he left me here

Yeah, my good man left me, went away and left me here

Lord, I'm feelin' lowdown, just give me another glass of beer

I start drinking Friday, I start drinking Friday night

Lord, I start drinking Friday, start drinking Friday night

But then I wake up on Sunday, child, there ain't nothin' that's right

What good can drinkin' do, what good can drinkin' do?

Well, I drink all night but the next day I still feel blue!

*Songs about alcohol - Wikipedia

 TO ΠΟΤΟ ΣΤΗΝ ΤΕΧΝΗ

DRINKING IN ART

Drinking scenes: the relationship between artists and alcohol

Matthew Sperling

Source: apollo-magazine.com

BAL23242 "Hip Hip Hurrah!" Artists' Party at Skagen, 1888 by Kroyer, Peder Severin (1851-1909); 134.5x165.5 cm; Goteborgs Konstmuseum, Sweden; Danish, out of copyright

Turners, Dürers, or Bellinis
Do not spring from dry Martinis.
Goya’s genius, Rubens’ powers
Did not stem from whiskey sours.
Fumy brandies, potent ciders
Make no Holbeins, make no Ryders.
Alcohol’s ingurgitation
Is, in short, no substitution
For creative inspiration
Or artistic execution.
Guzzle vino
Till you’re blotto
Splotches will remain but splotches.
Perugino,
Ingres, Giotto
Were not born of double Scotches…

When the humorist Arthur Kramer published these lines under the title ‘Homily for Art Students’ in the New Yorker in 1946, he mixed up a potent brew of historical beliefs about art and drinking. The dry Martinis, whiskey sours and double scotches belong to the 20th-century booze-hound, particular about his drinks and able to afford quality liquor. The reader is invited to imagine Dürer and Rubens taking a booth in an uptown cocktail bar. The anachronism implies a continuity between the myths of hard-drinking artists from different eras: as if the beer-swilling painters of the Dutch Golden Age, the absinthe-addled wretches of 19th-century Paris, the tough guys of the New York School, liquored-up and rowdy at the Cedar Tavern, and several generations of British artists, stumbling out drunk in the late afternoon from Soho’s Colony Room Club, could all be imagined in some timeless bar- room. In disavowing the link between artistic inspiration, heightened creative powers, and the use of alcohol, the poem attests to how firmly the myth was established in the popular mind. By the time Kramer wrote his poem, the myth had become self-fulfilling.

‘Wine is a Mocker’, 1663–64, Jan Steen (c. 1626–79). Norton Simon Art Foundation

The earliest drunkard painter of legend is Frans Hals (1582/83–1666). The image of Hals as an alcoholic and wife-beater was established by Arnold Houbraken’s colourful biography in The Great Theatre of Dutch Painters (1718–21). It claims that Hals was ‘filled to the gills every evening’, and that when Anthony van Dyck came to meet him in Haarlem he was not at home, and ‘it took a long time to scour the taverns for him’. Hals’ reputation was fixed. Two hundred years later, on meeting a former lover of his who had returned from service in the First World War, Somerset Maugham remarked: ‘You may have looked like a Bronzino once, but now you look like a depraved Frans Hals.’ The suggestion is of a face like Hals’ The Merry Drinker (1630), rosaceous, worn and worldly. Houbraken’s life of Jan Steen (c. 1626–79) has a similar tenor to that of Hals, with many of its anecdotes focusing on Steen’s other work as a brewer and innkeeper. Recent scholarship has shown the myth of the drunkard painters of the Dutch Golden Age to be largely without foundation – a product of an incautious identification of artists with their subject matter, and a misunderstanding of just how respectable and dignified brewers were as civic figures. Houbraken is open about his inversion of the biographical fallacy, whereby he constructs the life from the nature of the work, writing that ‘Steen’s paintings are as his way of life and his way of life as his paintings’. The phrase ‘a Jan Steen household’ is still proverbial in Dutch for a home in rowdy disarray, after his many scenes of disordered domestic and public houses. In his autobiography Praeterita (1885–89), John Ruskin described how he inherited the prejudice, which he would never shake off, that ‘the old Dutch school’ were ‘sots, gamblers, debauchees, delighting in the reality of the alehouse more than in its pictures’. As Seymour Slive has written, ‘the fallacious idea that an artist who depicted merry drinkers must needs have been a tosspot himself dies hard’.

Many Dutch drinking scenes try to have their cake and eat it, by offering themselves as allegories of moderation – take Steen’s Wine is a Mocker (1663–64 – while revelling in the possibilities for sensuous excitement, stirred flesh and dynamic composition that drunken misrule presents. When Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1525–69) paints The Battle Between Carnival and Lent (1559), carnival is clearly coming out on top within what we might call the libidinal economy of the painting, even while any respectable burgher knows he should side with Lent. When Jan Vermeer (1632–75) paints an enigmatically interrupted bourgeois idyll such as The Girl with the Wine Glass (1659–60), the centre of consciousness is the goosey girl, part naive and part knowing, who delights in being chatted up by the roguish gander, even as an allegory of Temperance looks on disapprovingly from the stained-glass window.

‘Gin Lane’, 1751, William Hogarth (1697–1764). Image: Wikimedia Commons

Perhaps the grimmest image in the annals of morally instructive booze art comes a century later, when William Hogarth (1697–1764) shockingly portrays the destructive effects wrought by cheap gin on the London poor in Gin Lane, which makes a pair with Beer Street (both 1751). The focus is on the addled wretch who sits on the top step leading down to a gin cellar. She picks at her snuff box with a cracked smile, her head tilted to the side, oblivious to the wardrobe malfunction which has left her sagging breasts exposed. Her bare legs are marked with syphilitic sores. Her infant boy tries to gain her attention with a last-ditch gadarene back-flip to his death in the gin-puddled stairwell. Below her is a horribly emaciated, possibly dead pamphlet-seller, accompanied by a sad black dog. The title of his pamphlet is ‘The Downfall of Mrs Gin’.

‘L’Absinthe’, 1887, Vincent van Gogh (1853–90). Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

Once the idea of the artist as bohemian had solidified in the mid 19th century, a large number of artists emerged who truly were tosspots. An article in the British Journal of Addiction in 1954 pictured a hideous drunken composite: ‘the late 19th-century Bohemian monster, the aristocratic dwarf who cut off his ear and lived on a South Sea Island’. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin were just three painters of the period whose heavy drinking contributed to an early death. Where beer and wine had been the chosen poisons of 17th-century Lowlanders, 19th-century French painting had a new magic potion: absinthe. Toulouse-Lautrec’s pictures were described by Gustave Moreau as ‘painted entirely in absinthe’; he would stop at every bar in Montmartre in order to étouffer un perroquet (choke a parrot), in the slang of the period; and he had a specially made hollow walking-stick which held an emergency half-litre stash of absinthe and a tiny shot glass. Absinthe was a boon to the colourist: in Van Gogh’s L’Absinthe (1887), the drink’s yellow-green picks up the murky, submarine tones of the sad view through the window; the brown wooden panelling of the walls looks like the side of a drunken boat becalmed in a sea of lonely alcoholic despon-dency. In both Édouard Manet’s The Absinthe Drinker (1859) and Edgar Degas’s L’Absinthe (1876) the pale greenish glass adds a sick glow to the murkily degraded metropolitan modernity (although in the former the glass of absinthe may be a later addition to the canvas).[......]

Drinking scenes: the relationship between artists and alcohol | Apollo ..

 

 See also:

 

The top 10 drinkers in art | Art and design | The Guardian

 

 

Blogs - The 21 Best Movie Alcoholics of All Time - AMC