Dying for Your Art (ep. 185)

Voted on by our Patreon, we dive into the deadly side of sculpture, painting, ballet and more!

01:36 Blucifer

04:00 Get the lead out

10:00 Ballet blazes

20:45 Death by a thousand face

26:43 The Conqueror and the conquered

Links to all the research resources are on the website.

Hang out with your fellow Brainiacs. 

Reach out and touch Moxie on Facebook, Twitter,  or Instagram. 

Become a patron of the podcast arts! Patreon or Ko-Fi.  Or buy the book and a shirt.

Music: Kevin MacLeod, David Fesilyan, Dan Henig. and/or Chris Haugen.

Sponsors:  Dumb People with Terrible Ideas, History Obscura, Sambucol

Want to start a podcast or need a better podcast host?  Get up to TWO months hosting for free from Libsyn with coupon code "moxie."

In 2013, Canadian artist Gillian Genser started to feel sick and for two years, no doctor one could determine why.  Agitation, headaches, and vomiting gave way to hearing loss and memory problems.  Finally, Genser was diagnosed with heavy metal poisoning.  But she didn’t sculpt or work with metal; she worked with seashells.  My name’s…

Art is beauty, art is life, art is what breathes magic into the mundane.  We’ve all seen the bumper sticker that say “without art, the Earth is eh.”  But what that pithy bit of sticky-backed vinyl doesn’t tell you is that art is also absolutely fraught with danger and sometimes, art can be death, too.  topic voted on by Patreon

 

We opened with a sculptor, so let’s start there.  It’s also the most obvious one, to my mind, and I like to get obvious stuff out of the way so we can get to that sweet, sweet obscura.  If you’ve ever flown into Denver airport –perhaps to investigate for yourself the truly boggling number of conspiracy theories around it– you’d be hard-pressed to miss the 32 ft/9.7m tall blue fiberglass horse sculpture, complete with glowing red eyes.  Love it or hate it (and many people do), the statue officially called The Mustang but colloquially known as “Blucifer” is eye-catching.  And life-ending.

 

The man behind this now iconic piece was Luis Jiménez, who grew up working in his father’s neon sign shop – Blucifer’s glowing red eyes are actually a hat-tip to his father – wanted the piece to feel more blue-collar and less artsy.  The specific inspiration came from waking in the night to a noise in the living room, only to discover their blue Apolloosa horse had somehow gotten into the house.  An actually blue Apolloosa isn’t as blue as Blucifer would be – that’s a nod to the art of Jimenez’s Latin-American forebears. 

 

The enormous sculpture is made up of three pieces – the head, torso and hindquarter – in total weighing 4.5 tons.  The 65 year old Jimenez had just declared the head to be complete when a section being moved from his studio came loose and pinned him against a steel support, severing an artery in his leg, resulting in fatal exsanguination.  Blucifer had to be finished posthumously by his family, friends, and professional lowriders and racecar painters Richard LaVato and Camillo Nuñez.  I and we should really stop calling The Mustang “Blucifer,” btw the way.  Jimenez widow and executor of his estate Susan keeps an understandably close eye and firm hand on how The Mustang is used, refusing almost all requests to license the image.

 

Okay, sculpture is inherently dangerous.  Maybe we should stick to something safer, like painting.  C’mon, we’re three minutes into the episode, you know that’s a fake-out.  Ah, I could never put anything past you.  Paints have a long and storied history of being made out of things that are antithetical to good health and long life.  Ancient Romans and medieval monks alike used cinnabar for its rich red color, never knowing the dangers of preparing and working with what is actually mercury ore.  Similar problem with its replacement, vermillion, which can combine with elements in the air to form mercury chloride.  It’s any wonder the moniker “mad monk” was still available when Rasputin came along.  Even the cadmium red that you can buy today is not without concern, as authorities in Sweden want to see it banned for contaminating the water supply from artists washing their brushes.  Fellow lovers of the macabre side of history will probably know about Scheele’s Green, an extremely popular dye used in wallpaper, dress fabric, toys and even food.  Unfortunately for everyone caught up in this early 19th century fad, it got its vibrant color from an arsenic compound.  There are adherents to the theory that Scheele’s Green wallpaper is what killed Napoleon Bonaparte in his exile-home on the island of Saint Helena.  As the wallpaper molded from humidity, it released arsenic into the air.  The more time Boney spent in bed, the sicker he got, and the more time he spent in bed.  Lather, rinse, repeat until you have a dead former emperor.

 

The grand-pappy of all paint problems is plumbum, aka lead.  If you’ve purchased a house, at least in the US, built before 1970-whatever, you got a written warning about the possibility of lead-based paint.  Lead in paint goes waaay back, like 4th century BCE way back, and the health risks to the artistic set have been known since the 1700s, though it would still take a century or two for people to connect the condition with the cause.  It’s suspected that some of the great Western masters like Michelangelo, Caravaggio, and Goya suffered from some form of lead poisoning.  Lead poisoning was in a tie with syphillis for suspected causes of Caravaggio’s death, until recent studies of his bones found he probably died of sepsis, having picked up staphylococcus from a sword wound, like you do.  Ah the good old days, when life was simple, everyone ate local, organic food, and you died at the ripe old age of minor injury.  At least, researchers are pretty sure the bones are his.  Sometimes science isn’t an exact science.

 

The 1834 London Medical and Surgical Journal describes this “painter’s colic” as sharp stomach pains occurring in patients with no other evidence of intestinal disease.  Learned types called it  saturnism, derives from the alchemic name for lead.  While typesetters, tinkers, and, as anyone who’s learned five minutes of Roman history will attest, drinkers of leaded wine fell victim to saturnism, the disease was most widespread among those who worked with paint.  What do those long hours slaving away over a hot canvas get you?  Tell ‘em what they’ve won! 

A “cadaverous-looking” pallor, tooth loss, fatigue, painful stomach aches, partial paralysis, and gout!

 

While you can’t and shouldn’t try to diagnose someone you’ve never examined(especially if you’re, you know, not a doctor), there are those who firmly believe that the troubled Vincent van Gogh suffered as pitifully as he did in life because of lead poisoning.  He apparently had the habit of licking his paint brushes to get a fine tip, a technique that often carries a high cost.  It mightn’t have been as unpleasant as it sounds to lick a brush that already has paint on it – lead has a sweet taste, hence its use in wine.  Others think Van Gogh might have suffered from epilepsy and bipolar disorder, but Julio Montes-Santiago, a Spanish internist who evaluated the existing evidence of lead poisoning among artists across five centuries for his paper in Progress in Brain Research, argues that lead poisoning likely contributed to his delusions and hallucinations.  Meanwhile, other scholars have disputed the lead poisoning hypothesis, arguing that the root of Van Gogh’s distress was porphyria, malnutrition, absinthe abuse or some combination thereof.  

 

The best evidence for lead poisoning among artists comes from the relatively recent case of, the 20th-century Brazilian painter Candido Portinari, creator of *massive murals.  Portinari used paints that were similar to those used by Van Gogh and was diagnosed with saturnism after bleeding in his stomach put him in the hospital in 1954.  His doctors strongly urged him to change to safer modern paints, but he dramatically complained, “They forbid me to live!”  He did try other media, but ultimately returned to his old paints, dying 8 years later.  

 

You might think flat-out telling someone “that thing you make art with is literally killing you” would have some effect, but if you do, you don’t know human beings very well.  We want what we want when we want it.  Combine that with how the slightest taste of success drives us headlong down our chosen path, and you have conditions ripe for disaster.  Don’t think dangers are confined to visual arts, either.  Dance can be deadly too.

 

Problem one: the nature of dance costumes in general and ballet costumes specifically.  They’re meant to be flowy and ephemeral, often meant to invoke a sense of otherworldliness, and therein lies the problem.  “If you imagine a sheet of newspaper and a hunk of wood, essentially, chemically, they are the same. But one will catch light way more quickly than the other,” says Martin Bide, a professor in the textiles, fashion merchandising, and design department at the University of Rhode Island.  “So if you have a very flimsy, flowing something that mixes well with air, it will burn quite readily.” 

 

Problem two: the specific fabrics that were popular when spontaneous dancer combustion was an issue.  Bobbinet, cotton muslin, gauze, and tarlatan were all diaphanous materials that could be made more cheaply thanks to the machines of the industrial revolution, helping to make them more common on stage and off.  But their open weave also made them super flammable. They caught readily and burned *quickly.  So it was less like “Mais non, Lisette’s tutu has caught fire.  Let us help her put it out.” and more like “Mon Dieu, Lisette– now I’m on fire too!”  In one instance in 1861, at least six ballet dancers died when they tried to help one dancer whose costume caught fire backstage. Sometimes entire theaters would burn down from a single piece of clothing catching.

 

Problem three: the lights.  We’re talking about the era where candles were giving way to gas footlights, neither one of which is good to have sitting at the ankles of someone flitting about in a flowy dress.  Bonus fact: the term “to gaslight” may seem like it came out of nowhere five years ago, but it actually dates back to a play in 1938 called Gas Light, in which a husband messes with the lights in the house and tells his wife she’s seeing things when she comments.

 

Perhaps the most famous case of this tragic accident was Emma Livry who made her Paris Opéra debut in 1858 at age 16.  She was a prodigy and immediately rose to great fame.  In 185*9, imperial decree demanded that all sets and costumes be flameproofed with the best method available at the time, carteronizing, treating the fabric with flame-retardant chemicals.  This would make them relatively safe.  But the ballerinas refused to use it.  Many refused to perform in costumes or tutus that had been treated, as the process left the fabric dingy-looking and stuffer.  “I insist, sir, on dancing at all first performances of the ballet in my ordinary ballet skirt,” Livry wrote to the Paris Opéra’s director in 1860 in a formal declaration of independence.  This wasn’t a point she’d be able to argue for too long. 

 

On Nov. 15, 1862, Livry fluffed her skirts too close to a gas lamp and nearly instantly was engulfed in flames.  Another dancer and a fireman tried to save her as she ran frantically around, but by the time they smothered the flames with a blanket, she had suffered burns to 40% percent of her body.  The heat was so intense that her corset fused into her flesh.  She would die of sepsis while recovering.  Many dance scholars pinpoint Livry’s demise as the end of France’s dominant role in ballet, but it also inspired better safety measures: new designs for gas lamps, the invention of flame-retardant gauze and wet blankets hung in the wings just in case. 

 

It wasn’t only dancers whose lives were fraught with flames.  The fashions and materials of the time put all women of middling-and-higher socio-economic status in extraordinary danger.  In 1860, British medical journal the Lancet estimated that 3,000 women died by fire in a single year.  It wasn’t just the fabric, but also the shape of the dresses that caused women’s clothing to erupt in flames.  The popular silhouette in the 1850s was a giant bell shape, like Scarlett O’Hara in her curtain dress.  To get that voluminous shape, women used a cage crinoline, a contraption introduced in the 1850s generally made from hoops that were attached with tape and then fastened around the waist.  The crinoline allowed women to shed layers of petticoats they used to have to wear to get that shape, creating freedom of movement for their legs, as well as creating a boundary around them, letting them take up space in the world.  Unfortunately, this full skirt, and the air underneath it, created a funnel for fire, essentially a chimney, with you standing in the middle of it.

 

MIDROLL?

 

Lon Chaney, the first real horror movie star, was known as "The Man Of A Thousand Faces," and he earned it.  He was a pioneer in movie makeup, and in behind the scenes suffering.  For Chaney, the art of acting was the art of continual transformation, from pirate to Chinese shipwreck survivor, Russian revolution peasant to circus clown, to crusty railroad engineer to bell tower hunchback.  People used to joke, “Don't step on that spider! It might be Lon Chaney!”

 

In his efforts to bring his characters to screen with the greatest realism, Chaney employed painful techniques to distort and obscure his physical features, like a special harness to keep his legs bound tightly behind him to play a double amputation in The Penalty, which caused broken blood vessels.  His Quaisomodo costume didn’t include the 70 or 90lb rubber hump of the urban legend, just a 20 pound hump made of plaster that he had to carry on one shoulder all day, but the role did cause permanent partial vision loss in one eye due to the putty and adhesive tape.  

In a 1991 interview with Patsy Ruth Miller, The Hunchback of Notre Dame's Esmerelda, the actress conjectured that pain was part of Chaney's process. "I felt that he almost relished that pain," Miller said. "...It gave him that feeling he wanted to have of a tortured creature."  The Phantom of the Opera's wire-frame nasal appliance left him bleeding.  The primitive contact lenses he used to simulate blindness caused real damage to his eyes, necessitating glasses.  

If I didn’t list a role and its accompanying injury here specifically, it’s safe to assume that it did some damage to his back or joints, either through weight, constriction or being twisted into an unnatural position for long periods of time.

 

In 1929, filming the movie Thunder, a piece of artificial snow lodged in his throat and worsened an already nasty infection.  Doctors took his tonsils out, but his throat continued to bother him.  Despite this, he filmed his first talkie, The Unholy Three, a film about three circus performers who decide to go into the crime business together, in 1930.  When filming was complete, he traveled to New York where it was discovered he had bronchial cancer, then came pneumonia and it was a sadly rapid deterioration until his death that August.

 

Now if I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a dozen times, correlation doesn’t equal causation, so why do I mention a piece of fake snow in a way that clearly implies the snow is to blame for causing or at least hastening Chaney’s death?  Because, while that fake snow *could have been  feathers, cotton, paper, gypsum or even instant potato flakes, right up until the end of the 1950’s Hollywood’s favorite fake snow… was asbestos.

 

Quick science lesson: Asbestos, once considered the “Magic Mineral” for its flexible fibers that are resistant to heat, electricity, and corrosion, was highly sought after in the early twentieth century. It made for the perfect fake snow on movie sets because it was water- and fireproof, lightweight, didn’t melt, and was easy to handle.  But it was far from safe.  There is no safe level of exposure to asbestos, which causes deadly illnesses including mesothelioma and cancers of the lung, larynx, and ovaries. 

 

In order to create winter scenes in many old Hollywood movies, film makers used pure white asbestos fibers to replicate the look of snow.  As the fake snow consisted of pure white asbestos fibers, it proved very dangerous when inhaled, which becomes extremely likely when you’re dropping it from the rafters on people or blowing it around with industrial fans.  The use of asbestos was actually a suggestion from, I promise you you’ll never guess, the LA fire department, as an alternative to the inherently flammable cotton being used at the time.  The asbestos snow had brand names like ‘White Magic’, ‘Snow Drift’ and ‘Pure White’.  And yes, it absolutely was used in The Wizard of Oz, though ironically it probably wouldn’t make the top ten of awful things that happened to that cast, or even to Judy Garland alone.  Hearing about how the studio execs treated her would break your heart.

 

The biggest name you’d probably recognize who died from the asbestos related lung disease, mesothelioma was the king of cool, Steve McQueen.  He was diagnosed in 1979 and died in 1980, fully sure in his heart that stage insulation and stunt clothing he often wore, which were made of asbestos fibers, were responsible for his illness.  I could easily do a whole episode on accidentals on movie sets – I was a hormone-ravaged teenager when Brandon Lee died tragically on the set of The Crow (and I’ve wondered ever since if anyone would have seen or remembered the movie if it had gone off without a hitch).  And while sudden deaths fit the brief and you can read about several in the YBOF book chapter Lights, Curses, Action, I prefer the slow burn.

 

There are a lot of factors to consider when making a movie and choosing the right location to shoot a film is a pivotal decision.  You have to take into account things like lighting conditions, availability of utilities, and proximity to noisy things such as airports.  What you should not have to consider is the radiation level, but you should not ignore it either.  The producers of the film 1956 movie The Conqueror chose an area of Utah desert a hundred miles away from the Nevada Test Site.  (They also chose to cast John Wayne as Genghis Khan.)   Throughout the 1950’s, approximately 100 nuclear bombs of varying intensities were detonated at the Nevada Test Site.  The mushroom clouds could reach tens of thousands of feet high; desert winds would carry radioactive particles all the way to Utah.  The area in which The Conqueror filmed was likely blanketed in this dust.

 

The Conqueror, co-starring Susan Hayward, Agnes Moorehead, and Pedro Armendáriz, was a moderate box office success, but a critical failure and soon found itself on ‘worst films of all time’ lists.  The true legacy of the film had yet to be revealed.  Of the 220 people who worked on the production, 92 developed some form of cancer, with 46 dying of it, including Wayne, Hayward, Moorehead, and Armendáriz.  The director, Dick Powell, died of lymphoma in 1963.  Wayne developed lung cancer and then the stomach cancer that would ultimately kill him in 1979.  Wayne would remain convinced that his chain-smoking was to blame for the cancers, even as friends tried to convince him it was from exposure to radiation.  Wayne’s sons, who visited the set during filming and actually played with Geiger counters among the contaminated rocks, both developed tumors.  Susan Hayward died from brain cancer in 1975 at 57.

 

The authorities in 1954 had declared the area to be safe from radioactive fallout, even though abnormal levels of radiation were detected.  However, modern research has shown that the soil in some areas near the filming site would have remained radioactive for sixty years.  Howard Hughes, producer of The Conqueror, came to realize in the early 1970’s that people who have been involved with the production were dying.   As the person who approved the filming location, Hughes felt culpable and paid $12 million to buy all existing copies of the film.  Though the link between the location and the cancers that cannot be definitely proven, experts argue that the preponderance of cases goes beyond mere coincidence.

 

And that’s…

Sculptor Gillian Genser used mussel shells in her work, sanding and grinding them, and they likely came from water contaminated with industrial waste.  After 15 years, she had built up high levels of arsenic and lead in her blood.  She will "never fully recover," in her own words, but she did complete her mussel-sculpture, a depiction of the biblical Adam, link in the show notes. She calls him her "beautiful death."

Sources:

https://www.ozy.com/true-and-stories/the-ballet-girls-who-burned-to-death/71244/

https://www.racked.com/2017/12/19/16710276/burning-dresses-history

https://www.oddee.com/item_99203.aspx

https://bookshop.org/books/your-brain-on-facts-things-you-didn-t-know-things-you-thought-you-knew-and-things-you-never-knew-you-never-knew-trivia-quizzes-fun-fa/9781642502534

https://www.armco.org.uk/asbestos-survey-news/asbestos-was-used-as-fake-snow-in-many-old-hollywood-movies/

https://www.grunge.com/267772/the-amazing-life-and-tragic-death-of-lon-chaney/

https://www.dogfordstudios.com/killer-art-art-that-has-actually-killed-people/

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/7-deadly-art-materials-to-watch-out-for-1081526

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/11/how-important-is-lead-poisoning-to-becoming-a-legendary-artist/281734/

https://noahchemicals.com/blog/the-toxic-histories-of-five-famous-pigments/

https://www.dogfordstudios.com/killer-art-art-that-has-actually-killed-people/

https://owlcation.com/stem/Cinnabar-A-Beautiful-But-Toxic-Mineral-Ore-and-Pigment

https://www.asbestosdiseaseawareness.org/newsroom/blogs/its-snowing-asbestos-the-haunting-truth-about-the-white-christmas-killer-set-and-continued-imports-and-use/

https://www.cpr.org/2019/11/04/everything-you-ever-wanted-to-know-about-blucifer-the-demon-horse-of-dia

https://www.burlington-record.com/2021/06/11/blucifer-just-turned-13-but-the-family-of-the-artist-who-died-creating-it-would-prefer-you-dont-call-it-that/

https://www.livescience.com/64224-sculptor-unknowingly-poisons-herself-with-her-own-art.html