The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People

by David Wallechinsky

  VINCENT VAN GOGH (Mar. 30, 1853-July 29, 1890)

  HIS FAME: Among Dutch painters, Van Gogh, a Postimpressionist, is generally considered second only to Rembrandt. His masterpieces include The Potato Eaters and L’Arlésienne.

  Van Gogh at 19

  HIS PERSON: Born in Zundert, the Netherlands, Van Gogh was the son of a clergyman. At 16 he was apprenticed to art dealers Goupil and Co., working first in the firm’s office in The Hague and later at its branches in London and Paris. After wandering from job to job, he eventually turned to religion. In 1879 Van Gogh ministered to the poor in Le Borinage, a Belgian coal-mining region, until a conflict with church authorities led to his dismissal. In great despair, he found solace in painting. From 1880 until his suicide 10 years later he turned out hundreds of watercolors, oils, and sketches. Regrettably he lived to see only one painting—The Red Vine—sold. He lived on an allowance from his deeply devoted brother Theo. Perhaps Vincent’s beautiful ideas were too unorthodox for his time. For example, he once had a fight with his art instructor at the Antwerp Academy of Art over the proper way to draw a woman. Asked to draw the Venus de Milo, Vincent endowed her with large hips, enraging his teacher, who slashed at the drawing. “God damn you!” yelled Vincent. “A woman must have hips and buttocks and a pelvis in which she can hold a child!”

  In 1886 he moved to Paris, where he fell in with such artists as Toulouse-Lautrec and Paul Gauguin. Toward the end of 1888 he and Gauguin lived and worked together in Arles, in the south of France. Although the pair produced prodigious amounts of work, they were temperamentally incompatible, and their love-hate relationship provoked many feuds. During one quarrel, Gauguin refused to eat at the same table with Van Gogh, citing hygienic reasons and their differing outlooks on life. After another heated argument, Van Gogh, jealous of Gauguin’s success with the Arles prostitutes, cut off part of his own left ear. The incident had definite sexual overtones: Van Gogh put the ear in an envelope and took it to a prostitute who preferred him to Gauguin. When the lady opened the envelope containing the bloody ear, she fainted.

  Van Gogh suffered recurrent fits of madness, voluntarily spent a year in an asylum, and ultimately committed suicide by shooting himself in the stomach while hiding behind a manure heap in a farmyard. He was 37. His genius was not fully recognized until more than a decade after his death.

  LOVE LIFE: It is quite possible that if Van Gogh had been more successful in love, he would have lived longer—but he might never have picked up a brush. The failure to find lasting female companionship throughout his life contributed to his breakdown and suicide.

  One of Van Gogh’s early bouts of depression followed his rejection in 1874 by Ursula Loyer, his landlady’s daughter. After concealing his feelings for months while working for the Goupil Gallery in London, he suddenly exploded, blurting out his love to a shocked and repelled young lady. He repeated this performance with a second girl, his recently widowed cousin, Kee Stricker Vos, who was visiting the Van Gogh home in Etten. Again he hid his feelings until they erupted in an urgent proposal of marriage. “No! Never, never!” Kee replied and promptly returned to her parents in Amsterdam. This time Van Gogh did not give up so easily. Using borrowed money, he gave chase to Amsterdam, where he barged in on the Strickers during dinner. When he was announced, Kee ran out before he could talk to her. The Strickers tried to be polite, but Van Gogh would not leave until he saw his love. On his third visit, he plunged his hand into the flame of an oil lamp, vowing to keep it there until Kee appeared. Now more determined than ever to keep this apparent madman away from their daughter, the Strickers bluntly told Van Gogh that his suit was pointless.

  By this time Van Gogh was sexually frustrated. “I must have a woman or I shall freeze and turn to stone,” he once complained. Taking to the streets, he discovered that he liked prostitutes, because they were “sisters and friends” to him, outcasts like himself, and would not reject him. Van Gogh preferred faded, slightly older prostitutes whom he could nurture. He soon found the ideal candidate in a pregnant prostitute named Clasina Maria Hoornik, whom he called Sien (“His own”). She and her five-year-old daughter moved in with him, and she soon bore Van Gogh a son, Willem, whom he adored. Much to the shame of his family, Vincent lived with Sien for more than a year and considered marrying her. In return, Sien posed for him (she is the crouched nude figure in the “Sorrow” lithographs) and gave the artist a case of gonorrhea that put him into a hospital bed for more than three weeks. He did not resent this, however, feeling that the rigors of her childbearing were a far greater burden. But the idyll passed, as he saw Sien’s true colors. She was slovenly, bitchy, and usually drunk. From then on, he no longer referred to her by name, but called her “the woman with whom I live,” or just “the woman.” When she eventually returned to the streets, Van Gogh lost his “family” and left The Hague.

  In 1884 Van Gogh had a relationship such as he had never known before. This time a woman was chasing him. She was Margot Begemann, his next-door neighbor in Nuenen, a dowdy, sexually repressed 41-year-old spinster. She thought the artist was her last opportunity for marriage. Van Gogh compared her to a Cremona violin mangled by inept craftsmen. Yet, whether from pity or genuine affection or both, Van Gogh agreed to marry her. When her parents forbade the union, Margot responded by swallowing strychnine, which Vincent, in the nick of time, forced her to throw up. The marriage never took place.

  In 1887 Van Gogh confided to his sister that he was going through a string of meaningless affairs “from which I emerge as a rule damaged and shamed and little else.” He frequented Parisian brothels with friends like Toulouse-Lautrec, had an affair with a female café owner and another reportedly with a 19-year-old boy. He contracted venereal disease from time to time and complained of increasing impotence.

  HIS THEORIES ON ART AND SEX: In a letter to a friend, Van Gogh expounded on the sexual and artistic merits of famous painters and writers.

  Degas, he said, “does not like women, for he knows that if he loved them and fucked them he … would become insipid as a painter. He looks on while the human animals, stronger than himself, get excited and fuck….”

  “Rubens! Ah, that one! he was a handsome man and a good fucker.”

  Delacroix: “He did not fuck much, and only had easy love affairs, so as not to curtail the time devoted to his work.”

  And so on about Courbet, Cézanne, and even Balzac.

  Van Gogh summed up his comments pithily when he wrote: “Painting and fucking are not compatible; it weakens the brain…. If we want to be really potent males in our work, we must sometimes resign ourselves to not fucking much.”

  HIS THOUGHTS: “The world seems more cheerful if, when we wake up in the morning, we find we are no longer alone and that there is another human being beside us in the half-dark. That’s more cheerful than shelves of edifying books and the whitewashed walls of a church….”

  —W.A.D., E.K., and A. W.

  The Deaf Lover

  FRANCISCO DE GOYA (Mar. 30, 1746-Apr. 16, 1828)

  HIS FAME: The leading Spanish artist of his day, Goya was both prolific and versatile. His work, much of it executed with a realism that bordered on caricature, ranged from official portraits of the Spanish court to gory scenes of war and torture, to religious themes, to Los Caprichos, a collection of more than 80 etchings satirizing Spanish society, including demonic depictions of witches; helpless human beings attacked by strange, vile creatures; and other phantasms of Goya’s vivid imagination.

  HIS PERSON: Raised largely in Saragossa, Goya set out early to become an artist. His career was one of steady progress—designer of royal tapestries, member of the prestigious Academy of San Fernando in Madrid, court painter to both Charles III and Charles IV—until a near-fatal illness struck in 1792 when he was 46. He lay for a time paralyzed and nearly blind and complained of dizzy spells and funny noises in his head. Physicians diagnosed that he had syphilis. He recovered in about a year but was thereafter stone-deaf.

&nbs
p; Goya’s Self-Portrait, 1783

  In 1795 he was chosen to succeed his brother-in-law Francisco Bayeu as painting director at the Academy of San Fernando, but because of his deafness he proved ineffective in the post and accepted instead the title of honorary director. Despite the political upheaval during and after the French occupation of Spain (1808-1814), Goya managed to survive as court painter. Even his sensual “Maja” paintings somehow escaped the wrath of the Inquisition, though formal charges of obscenity were lodged against him. But a crackdown on liberals in 1824 so threatened his security and peace of mind that he took refuge in Bordeaux, France, where he lived and worked in self-imposed exile.

  SEX LIFE: While young, Goya sowed acres of wild oats, and once while studying art in Rome he raided a convent to kidnap an upper-class Italian girl boarding there. This led to a duel, which Goya won, and to a love affair with the Italian girl. In 1773, settled in Madrid, Goya called on a friend he had met during his travels, Francisco Bayeu, who was the official court painter for King Charles IV and Queen Maria Louisa. Francisco introduced Goya to his sister Josefa, an attractive russet blonde who was disarmingly simple and honest. Entranced by Josefa, Goya set out to seduce her. He succeeded. She was four months pregnant when Goya was forced to marry her on July 25, 1775. Five months later their first child, a son named Eusebio, was born. The boy did not survive his childhood. In all, Josefa gave birth to five—possibly six—children, but only one, a son named Xavier, lived to maturity. The marriage proved profitable to Goya in another way. His brother-in-law, after all, had court connections, and Bayeu was able to get Goya a steady job in the royal tapestry factory. Once Goya had entrée to the aristocratic ladies of Madrid, Josefa faded into the background of his life. Goya was moved to paint only one portrait of her.

  Goya’s Naked Maja

  The most desirable of the aristocratic women was the headstrong, spirited, promiscuous, 20-year-old Duchess of Alba, who had been wedded to the moody Marquis of Villafranca when she was 13. Goya lusted for her from the first day he saw her. He had reason to. Her beauty was breathtaking. A contemporary said of her: “The Duchess of Alba does not have a single hair on her head which would not kindle the flame of desire. There is not a more beautiful thing in the world…. When she walks in the street everybody watches her from the windows, and even the children stop playing in order to look at her.”

  Goya met the duchess casually at a social gathering. Then, one day in the summer of 1795, she called on him at his studio. She wanted him to paint her face, that is, she wanted a makeup job. Goya wrote his close friend Zapater that she “sneaked into my studio for this purpose and got away with it; needless to say, this gives me more pleasure than painting on canvas; I am supposed to do her full portrait.”

  After that he began to see the Duchess of Alba often. He wanted to possess her, and she wanted him. At last, in the words of the period, she granted him “her final favors.” Ecstatic over his conquest, Goya confided in a letter to Zapater, “I finally know what life means.”

  When the Duchess of Alba’s ailing husband died in 1796, she withdrew to her estate in Sanlucar de Barrameda in Andalusia to mourn the occasion properly. She took Goya along. They stayed together for several months. He devoted himself to painting and having sexual intercourse with her regularly. She posed for him both dressed and undressed. Goya painted her respectably clothed in black, but wearing rings on the index and middle fingers of her right hand; one ring was inscribed “Goya,” the other “Alba.” Moreover, she was shown pointing down to a phrase scratched in the sand that read, “Solo Goya” (“Only Goya”). Other representations of the duchess in Sanlucar were more revealing. There were hundreds of sketches, many of them showing her in total nudity. “One of them,” wrote a contemporary, “shows the lady’s beautiful nakedness from the back, with her buttocks, waist, and hips exposed.” The duchess allowed Goya to save the drawings. On one of these he wrote, “It is madness to keep this, but each according to his own taste.”

  Returning to Madrid, the duchess temporarily abandoned Goya to have a love affair with an older man, Lt. Gen. Don Antonio Cornel. Embittered, Goya painted three pictures of the duchess that depicted her flightiness—one showing her with a double face. But by 1799 she was back in Goya’s arms once more and posing for the two paintings that were to become the artist’s most popular works, The Naked Maja and The Clothed Maja. The clothed version was to be hung in front of the naked one for propriety. Goya’s nude of her was the first such oil to be depicted, in the words of André Malraux, as “erotic without being voluptuous.” These two paintings the duchess kept for herself. They were later inherited by Manuel de Godoy, the queen of Spain’s lover.

  The Duchess of Alba died suddenly in July of 1802. She remembered her love for Goya in her will by bequeathing the sum of 3,500 reales annually to Goya’s son Xavier. Ten years later Goya’s wife, Josefa, died. The painter’s son had married a wealthy trader’s daughter by then and had his own residence. Goya was left quite alone.

  He moved out of Madrid to a place by the side of the Manzanares River. There he met a lively and liberal-minded young woman named Leocadia Zorrilla de Weis. She was still married to a businessman, Isidro Weis, but soon her husband petitioned for a separation from his wife on the grounds of her “misbehavior and infidelity.” Undoubtedly Goya, at 68, was making love to Leocadia. In 1814 she gave birth to a girl, whom she named Rosarito. Goya doted on the little girl and encouraged and trained her to paint, hoping in vain that Rosarito harbored real talent.

  In 1824, fearful of the excesses of a new government in Spain, Goya, accompanied by Leocadia and little Rosarito, fled to France and settled down in a small house with a garden in Bordeaux. Hot-tempered Leocadia often argued with Goya, but generally she amused him and looked after him. Goya spent his time taking walks, painting a little, napping a lot. He died at the age of 82.

  —W.A.D. and I.W.

  Model Lover

  AMEDEO MODIGLIANI (July 12, 1884-Jan. 24, 1920)

  HIS FAME: One of this century’s great original artists, Modigliani is famous for the 25 stone sculptures, approximately 350 paintings, and numerous drawings he produced during his short life. Most of his works are of women; many are nudes. Among the best-known are Seated Nude, Little Girl in Blue, and Jeanne Hébuterne.

  HIS PERSON: The youngest child of a Jewish merchant family, Modigliani was born in Leghorn, Italy, just as a business crash forced his father into bankruptcy. A quirk in Italian law eased the family’s pain: A bankrupt could keep a bed in which a woman had recently given or was about to give birth. At the moment of Modigliani’s birth, officials were seizing the household goods, but the family took full advantage of the law and heaped the maternal bed with personal possessions and valuables. That incident, in which good fortune was salvaged from a dire predicament, is perhaps symbolic of Modigliani’s life.

  Modigliani at 33

  In 1895 and 1898 he contracted typhus. Forced to quit school, he turned to painting, which, except for a four-year period devoted to sculpting, he never left.

  Moving to Paris in 1906, Modigliani was swept up in the bohemian milieu of that city’s artists (Picasso among them). A prodigious drinker, Modigliani often stumbled through the streets drunk—and sometimes naked. His fights with other men over women were legion. He consumed enormous amounts of cocaine and hashish. In 1917 his one-man show consisting almost entirely of female nudes was closed by the police, who judged his paintings indecent. It was the only exhibition of his paintings during his lifetime. Through it all, Modigliani continued to paint until tubercular meningitis took his life. His fame while he was alive was restricted to the Parisian art community, but by 1922 he had become internationally acclaimed.

  SEX LIFE: Modigliani loved women. Hundreds, maybe even thousands, were made love to by this elegantly handsome painter. While still a schoolboy, he noticed how girls were smitten by his good looks. Legend places his loss of virginity at 15 or 16 years of age, when, it is said, he made love to a
maid employed by his family.

  Although he occasionally visited brothels, his favored sex partners were his models. During his career he had hundreds of models. Most sat for him in the nude, and before the painting sessions closed, they had usually made love with him. His preferred subjects (and lovers) were simple women, such as the peasant girls who took in laundry for a living. Flattered by the attentions of this attractive artist, these humble women eagerly gave themselves to him.

  SEX PARTNERS: Despite his many sex partners, Modigliani loved only two women. The first was Beatrice Hastings, an aristocratic British poet five years his senior. They met in 1914, made love the first night, and became inseparable. They drank, danced, and fought. Modigliani beat her frequently. When enraged—usually because she had paid attention to another man—he would literally drag her down the street by her hair. She inspired him, however, and in the bloom of their love he entered his most prolific period of painting, with Beatrice often sitting as his model. Nonetheless, this affair, because of its intensity in all likelihood, did not last. Beatrice fled from him in 1916. They never saw each other again.

  Modigliani mourned this loss, but not for long. In 1917 he met Jeanne Hébuterne, a 19-year-old art student from a French Catholic family. A tiny, pale girl, Jeanne and Modigliani set up house on the Côte d’Azur within months of their first meeting, despite her parents’ opposition to the Italian Jew. It was her lot not only to model for Modigliani, but to see him through his final, failing years, as his health, ever fragile, worsened owing to debauchery. In November, 1918, their love produced a baby girl, and in July, 1919, Modigliani vowed to marry Jeanne “as soon as the papers arrive.” Why they never married remains a mystery, since they were devoted to each other and remained together until Modigliani’s death six months after his oath. As the painter lay dying in Paris, he supposedly suggested that Jeanne join him in death “so that I can have my favorite model in paradise and with her enjoy eternal happiness.” Jeanne was in a state of despair on the day of Modigliani’s funeral. Pregnant with a second child, she jumped out of a fifth-floor window to her death.