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To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.
The historian Johan Huizinga, describing “the waning of the Middle Ages,” seemed at the same time to depict the mood of the modern era: “A somber melancholy weighed on people's souls…It was fashionable to see only its suffering and misery, to discover everywhere signs of decadence and of the near end—in short, to condemn the times or to despise them” (1924/1955, p. 31). The dominant themes of modern art are gloom, depression, torment, loneliness, self-doubt, hypersensitivity, loss of identity and estrangement from the community. Avant-garde painters have always been antagonistic to conventional society. They defied traditional aesthetic norms, yet expected people to buy works they neither understood nor admired. Public hostility and contempt were often blamed for their tragic destinies. But an analysis of the lives of Jules Pascin, Arshile Gorky, Nicolas de Staël and Mark Rothko reveals that these four artists committed suicide not only to escape from pain but also to make a deliberate sacrifice for art.
In a letter of 1854 the rebellious painter Gustave Courbet recorded his acute sense of the artist's precarious existence and lamented, “in the society in which we live it doesn't take much to reach the void” (as cited in Hall, 2014, p. 235). Writing in The Trembling of the Veil (1922) about the “tragic generation” of the 1890s, W.B. Yeats described the poets and artists who suffered from spiritual despair, and whose promising careers were ruined early on by depression, dissipation, insanity and suicide.