Hate the sin, nev­er the sin­ner. — Clarence Dar­row

As a cul­ture, we’ve large­ly stepped away from the sen­ti­ment described by the famed lawyer’s 1924 defense of mur­der­ers Leopold and Loeb.

Apply it to one of the many male artists whose exalt­ed rep­u­ta­tions have been shat­tered by alle­ga­tions of sex­u­al impro­pri­ety and oth­er ruinous behav­iors and you won’t find your­self cel­e­brat­ed for your virtue in the court of pub­lic opin­ion.

But what of those artists’ cre­ative out­put?

Does that get bun­dled in with hat­ing both sin and sin­ner?

It’s a ques­tion that his­to­ri­an and for­mer cura­tor Sarah Urist Green is well equipped to tack­le.

Green’s PBS Dig­i­tal Stu­dios web series, The Art Assign­ment, explores art and art his­to­ry through the lens of the present.

In the episode titled Hate the Artist, Love the Art, above, Green takes a more tem­per­ate approach to the sub­ject than come­di­an Han­nah Gads­by, whose solo show, Nanette, includ­ed an incen­di­ary take­down of Picas­so:

I hate Picas­so. and you can’t make me like him. I know I should be more gen­er­ous about him too, because he suf­fered a men­tal ill­ness. But nobody knows that, because it doesn’t fit with his mythol­o­gy. Picas­so is sold to us as this pas­sion­ate, tor­ment­ed, genius, man-ball-sack. But Picas­so suf­fered the men­tal illness…of misog­y­ny.

Don’t believe me? He said, “Each time I leave a woman, I should burn her. Destroy the woman, you destroy the past she rep­re­sents.” Cool guy. The great­est artist of the 20th cen­tu­ry. Picas­so fucked an under­age girl. That’s it for me, not inter­est­ed.

But Cubism! He made it! Marie-Thérèse Wal­ter, she was 17 when they met: under­age. Picas­so, he was 42, at the height of his career. Does it mat­ter? It actu­al­ly does mat­ter. But as Picas­so said, “It was perfect—I was in my prime, she was in her prime.” I prob­a­bly read that when I was 17. Do you know how grim that was?

Grim.

A dif­fer­ent sort of grim than the hor­rors he depict­ed in Guer­ni­ca, still an incred­i­bly potent con­dem­na­tion of the human cost of war.

Should exemp­tions be made, then, for works of great genius or last­ing social import?

Up to you, says Green, advo­cat­ing that every view­er should pause to con­sid­er the rip­ples caused by their con­tin­ued embrace of a dis­graced artist.

But what if we don’t know that the artist’s been dis­graced?

That seems unlike­ly as cura­tors scram­ble to acknowl­edge the offender’s trans­gres­sions on gallery cards, and emer­gent artists attempt to set the record straight with response pieces dis­played in prox­im­i­ty.

Green notes that even with­out such overt cues, it’s very dif­fi­cult to get a “pure” read­ing of an estab­lished artist’s work.

Any­thing we may have gleaned about the artist’s per­son­al con­duct, whether good or ill, proven, unproven, or dis­proven, fac­tors into the way we expe­ri­ence that artist’s work. The source can be a paper of record, the Inter­net, a guest at a par­ty repeat­ing a per­son­al anec­dote…

It can also be painful to relin­quish our youth­ful favorites’ hold on us, espe­cial­ly when the attach­ment was formed of our own free will.

What would Han­nah Gads­by say to my reluc­tance to sev­er ties com­plete­ly with Gauguin’s Tahi­ti paint­ings, encoun­tered for the first time when I was approx­i­mate­ly the same age as the brown-skinned teenaged mus­es he paint­ed and took to bed?

The behav­ior that was once framed as evi­dence of an artis­tic spir­it that could not be fet­tered by soci­etal expec­ta­tions, seems beyond jus­ti­fi­ca­tion today. Still, it’s unlike­ly Gau­guin will be ban­ished from major col­lec­tions, or for that mat­ter, the his­to­ry of art, any time soon.

As Julia Halperin, exec­u­tive edi­tor of Art­net News observed short­ly after Nanette became a viral sen­sa­tion:

A Net­flix com­e­dy spe­cial is not going to com­pel muse­ums to throw out their Picas­sos. Nor should they! You can’t tell the sto­ry of 20th-cen­tu­ry art with­out him…. Although gloss­ing over, white­wash­ing, or shoe-horn­ing sto­ries of Picasso’s abuse into a com­fort­able nar­ra­tive about pas­sion­ate genius may be use­ful to main­tain his mar­ket val­ue and his bank­a­bil­i­ty as a tourist attrac­tion, it also does every­one a dis­ser­vice… we can under­stand Picasso’s con­tri­bu­tions bet­ter if we can hold these two seem­ing­ly incom­pat­i­ble truths in our minds at once. It’s not as uplift­ing as a straight­for­ward tale about a vision­ary cre­ative whose flaws were only in ser­vice to its genius. But it is more honest—and it might even help us under­stand the evo­lu­tion of our own cul­ture, and how we got to where we are today, a lot bet­ter.

Green pro­vides a list of ques­tions that can help indi­vid­ual view­ers who are reeval­u­at­ing the out­put of “prob­lem­at­ic” artists:

Is the work a col­lab­o­ra­tive effort?

Does the work reflect the val­ue sys­tem of the offend­er?

Are we to apply the same stan­dard to the work of sci­en­tists whose con­duct is sim­i­lar­ly offen­sive?

Who suf­fers when the offender’s work remains acces­si­ble?

Who suf­fers when the offender’s work is erased?

Who reaps the reward of our con­tin­ued atten­tion?

As Green points out, the shades of grey are many, though the choice of whether to enter­tain those shades varies from indi­vid­ual to indi­vid­ual.

Read­ers, where do you fall in this ever-evolv­ing debate. Is there an artist you have sworn off of, entire­ly or in part? Tell us who and why in the com­ments.

Watch more episodes of the Art Assign­ment here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

George Orwell Reviews Sal­vador Dali’s Auto­bi­og­ra­phy: “Dali is a Good Draughts­man and a Dis­gust­ing Human Being” (1944)

When The Sur­re­al­ists Expelled Sal­vador Dalí for “the Glo­ri­fi­ca­tion of Hit­ler­ian Fas­cism” (1934)

The Gestapo Points to Guer­ni­ca and Asks Picas­so, “Did You Do This?;” Picas­so Replies “No, You Did!”

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in NYC on Mon­day, Jan­u­ary 6 when her month­ly book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domaincel­e­brates Cape-Cod­di­ties (1920) by Roger Liv­ingston Scaife. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.