Sandra Hanekom’s Ten drawings in pencil and pressure, is a series of portraits of famous women who suffered with mental illness in one way or another. These women also, significantly, were connected romantically to successful or famous men of their time.
2010
Pencil and pressure on paper
27 x 19cm
R2 900 each (framed)
R25 000 set of 10 (framed)
Camille Claudel – Sculpting Madness
Camille Claudel 1864 – 1943) was a noteworthy French sculptor of the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries.
She was intimately connected to Auguste Rodin, to whom she was a source of inspiration, his model, his confidante and lover. She never lived with Rodin, who was reluctant to end his 20-year relationship with Rose Beuret. Knowledge of the affair agitated her family, especially her mother, who never completely agreed with Claudel’s involvement in the arts. As a consequence, she left the family house. In 1892, after an unwanted abortion, Claudel ended the intimate aspect of her relationship with Rodin, although they saw one another regularly until 1898.
After 1905 Claudel appeared to be mentally ill. She destroyed many of her statues, disappeared for long periods of time, and exhibited signs of paranoia and was diagnosed as having schizophrenia. She accused Rodin of stealing her ideas and of leading a conspiracy to kill her. After the wedding of her brother (who had supported her until then) in 1906 and his return to China, she lived secluded in her workshop.
Ingrid Jonker – Finding Flotsam
Ingrid Jonker (1933 – 1965) was an iconic South African poet of the mid twentieth century.
After the death of her mother and her father’s subsequent re-marriages, an irreconcilable rift grew between father and daughter. During the 1950s Jonker’s father, already a writer, editor and National Party Member of Parliament, was appointed chairman of the parliamentary select committee responsible for censorship laws on art, publications and entertainment. To his embarrassment, his daughter was vehemently opposed to these laws and their political differences became public. In a speech in parliament Jonker’s father denied her as his daughter. During the same time period she had affairs with two writers, Jack Cope and André P. Brink. One of these affairs resulted in a pregnancy and she underwent an abortion (a crime in South Africa at the time). The mental distress of her father’s rejection and the abortion contributed to her decision to enter the Valkenberg Psychiatric Hospital in 1961.
During the night of 19 July 1965, Jonker went to the beach at Three Anchor Bay in Cape Town where she walked into the sea and committed suicide by drowning. On hearing of Jonker’s death, her father reportedly said: “They can throw her back into the sea for all I care.”
Gene Tierney – What a Life – Heaven can wait
Gene Tierney (1920 – 1991) was an American film and stage actress. Acclaimed as one of the great beauties of her day, in Tierney’s first part on Broadway, she carried a bucket of water across the stage in What a Life! (1938). Notable roles include Martha Strable Van Cleve in Heaven Can Wait (1943).
Tierney’s young success on Broadway led her father to set up a corporation, Belle-Tier, to fund and promote her acting career (He later went on to steal all of her money). On the front of romance, Tierney has been connected to Howard Hughes (who tried unsuccessfully to seduce her), Prince Aly Khan (whose father met their plans for marriage with fierce opposition) and, finally, a young John F. Kennedy (told her he could never marry her because of his political ambitions).
Tierney suffered throughout her life with mental health issues which resulted in her interment at various psychiatric institutions across the States, during which she received much shock treatment. She became an outspoken opponent of shock treatment therapy, claiming that it had destroyed significant portions of her memory.
In 1957, Tierney was seen by a neighbor as she was about to jump from a ledge. The neighbour alerted the police, who prevented the suicide. Tierney died in 1991, shortly before her 71st birthday, of emphysema.
Lady Caroline Lamb – Byron’s bonfire
Lady Caroline Lamb (1785 – 1828) was a British aristocrat and novelist, married to the 2nd Viscount Melbourne, the Prime Minister, but best known for her 1812 affair with Lord Byron.
From March to August 1812, Lamb embarked on a well-publicized affair with Lord Byron. He was 24 and she 27. She had spurned the attention of the poet on their first meeting, subsequently giving Byron what became his lasting epitaph when she described him as “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.” His response was to pursue her passionately.
Lamb and Lord Byron publicly decried each other as they privately pledged their love over the following months. After Byron broke things off, Lamb’s husband took the disgraced and desolate Lamb to Ireland. The distance did not cool Lamb’s interest in the poet; she and Byron corresponded constantly during her exile. When Lamb returned to London in 1813, however, Byron made it clear he had no intention of re-starting their relationship. This spurred what could be characterized as the first recorded case of celebrity stalking as she made increasingly public attempts to reunite with her former lover.
Lamb’s struggle with mental instability became more pronounced in her last years, complicated by her abuse of alcohol and laudanum. By 1827, she was under the care of a full-time physician as her body, which had always been frail, began to shut down. Lamb died on 25 January 1828.
Sylvia Plath – Words Impaled
Sylvia Plath (1932 – 1963) was an American poet, novelist, children’s author, and short story author who lived and worked in the United Kingdom for much of her life.
Her talent as a writer blossomed at an early age, with her first poem published in the Boston Herald’s children’s section. During her third year of college Plath was awarded a coveted position as guest editor at Mademoiselle magazine, during which she spent a month in New York City. The experience was not at all what she had hoped it would be, beginning within her a seemingly downward spiral in her outlook on herself and life in general. Following this experience Plath made her first medically documented suicide attempt by crawling under her house and taking an overdose of sleeping pills. Plath went on to attend Newnham College, Cambridge, where she met the English poet Ted Hughes. After a brief courtship, they were married on June 16, 1956.
Plath’s marriage to Hughes was fraught with difficulties, particularly surrounding his affair with Assia Wevill, and the couple separated in late 1962. In February of 1963, Plath took her own life after she completely sealed the rooms between herself and her sleeping children with “wet towels and cloths.” Plath then placed her head in the oven while the gas was turned on and the pilot light was not lit. The next day an inquiry ruled that her death was a suicide. However, it has been suggested Plath’s suicide attempt was too precise and coincidental, and she had not intended to succeed in killing herself.
Vivian Leigh – Storm in a teacup
Vivien Leigh, Lady Olivier (1913 – 1967) was an English actress. During her 30-year stage career, she played roles ranging from the heroines of Noël Coward and George Bernard Shaw comedies to classic Shakespearean characters such as Ophelia, Cleopatra, Juliet and Lady Macbeth. She won two Best Actress Academy Awards for playing “southern belles”: Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind (1939) and Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), a role she had also played on stage in London’s West End.
Laurence Olivier saw Leigh in The Mask of Virtue, and friendship developed after he congratulated her on her performance. Olivier and Leigh began an affair after acting as lovers in Fire Over England (1937). In 1940 they were married and pursued a great number of successful collaborations with each other.
Lauded for her beauty, Leigh felt that it sometimes prevented her from being taken seriously as an actress. However, ill health proved to be her greatest obstacle. For much of her adult life Leigh dealt with bipolar disorder. She earned a reputation for being difficult to work with, and her career suffered periods of inactivity. She also suffered recurrent bouts of chronic tuberculosis, which she was first diagnosed with in the mid-1940s. Leigh and Olivier divorced in 1960, and she worked sporadically in film and theatre until her death from tuberculosis in 1967.
Virginia Woolf – Abiding Voices
Adeline Virginia Woolf (1882 – 1941) was an English novelist, essayist, diarist, epistler, publisher, feminist, and writer of short stories, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century.
Woolf has been hailed as one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century and one of the foremost modernists. She is considered one of the greatest innovators in the English language. In her works she experimented with stream-of-consciousness and the underlying psychological as well as emotional motives of characters. Woolf’s reputation declined sharply after World War II, but her eminence was re-established with the surge of Feminist criticism in the 1970s.
The sudden death of her mother in 1895, when Virginia was 13, and that of her half-sister Stella two years later, led to the first of Virginia’s several nervous breakdowns. The death of her father in 1904 provoked her most alarming collapse and she was briefly institutionalized. Her breakdowns and subsequent recurring depressive periods, modern scholars have suggested,were also influenced by the sexual abuse she and Vanessa were subjected to by their half-brothers George and Gerald Duckworth.
Virginia Stephen married writer Leonard Woolf in 1912. The couple shared a close bond throughout their time together. The two also collaborated professionally, in 1917 founding the Hogarth Press, which subsequently published Virginia’s novels along with works by T.S. Eliot, Laurens van der Post, and others.
After completing the manuscript of her last novel, Between the Acts, Woolf fell victim to a depression similar to that which she had earlier experienced. On 28 March 1941, Woolf committed suicide. She put on her overcoat, filled its pockets with stones, then walked into the River Ouse near her home and drowned herself. In her last note to her husband she wrote: “I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can’t concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do.”
Jean Seberg – Mongered Martyr
Jean Dorothy Seberg (1938 – 1979) was an American actress who starred in 37 films in Hollywood and France.
Jean Seberg’s romantic affairs took on the form of a complex maze of marriages and affairs, many of which she confessed to be violent and abusive. Her personal life was closely followed by the press and her support of the Black Panther Party meant that she was closely observed by the state.
In 1972, she developed a dependency on alcohol and prescription drugs. In her later life, Seberg dealed with clinical depression, something that was not revealed until after her death.
In August 1979, she went missing and was found dead eleven days later in the back seat of her car. The police report stated that she had taken a massive overdose of barbiturates and alcohol. A suicide note (“Forgive me. I can no longer live with my nerves.”) was found in her hand, and “probable suicide” was ultimately ruled the official cause of death.
Marilyn Monroe – A Madness Iconic
Marilyn Monroe (1926 –1962), born Norma Jeane Mortenson, but baptized Norma Jeane Baker, was an American actress, singer and model.
Although Monroe spent most of her early life between foster homes and in traumatic family situations, her success as a film star has gained her the title of pop and cultural icon.
Monroe had three marriages, first to James Dougherty, then to Joe DiMaggio, and lastly Arthur Miller. It was also widely rumored that she had had an affair with President John F. Kennedy, his brother Senator Robert Kennedy, or both. Marlon Brando, in his autobiography Songs My Mother Taught Me, also claimed that he had had a relationship with her.
All three marriages were fraught eventually with despair, but Monroe’s electric magnetism was always plain to see. In reflecting on his courtship of Monroe, Miller wrote, “She was a whirling light to me then, all paradox and enticing mystery, street-tough one moment, then lifted by a lyrical and poetic sensitivity that few retain past early adolescence.” Even after her death, for twenty years, DiMaggio had a half-dozen red roses delivered to her crypt three times a week.
Monroe suffered a number of spells of psychiatric instability during her life. On August 5, 1962, Monroe was found dead at her home in Brentwood, Los Angeles, California. The recorded cause of death as “acute barbiturate poisoning,” resulting from a “probable suicide”. However, many theories, including murder, circulated about the circumstances of her death and the timeline after the body was found. Some conspiracy theories involved John and Robert Kennedy, while other theories suggested CIA or Mafia complicity.
Frances Farmer – Time Served
Frances Elena Farmer (September 19, 1913 – August 1, 1970) was an American actress of stage and screen. She is perhaps better known for sensationalized and fictional accounts of her life, and especially her involuntary commitment to a mental hospital.
Despite rave reviews of almost every role she pursued, Farmer developed a reputation for being rebellious owing to her refusal to conform to the strict controls of the film studios of the days.
After some unfortunate run-ins with the law – for driving with lights on during the war-time balck-out and allegedly dislocating a studio hairstylists jaw – Farmer was transferred to the psychiatric ward of L.A. General Hospital. There she was diagnosed with “manic depressive psychosis.” Within days, having been sent to the San Fernando Valley and the Kimball Sanitarium in La Crescenta, Farmer was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. She was given insulin shock therapy. Her family later claimed they did not give their consent to the treatment.
This experience began a long string of stays in psychiatric institutions, from which Farmer never was able to really come back from. In 1970 Farmer died from esophageal cancer.