As mad as Van Gogh

Ralph Albert Blakelock [1847-1919] 

His depression manifested in schizophrenic delusions in which he believed himself immensely wealthy – perhaps a compensation for his long struggle to provide for his family. In 1899, he suffered his final breakdown and spent almost the entire remaining twenty years of his life in mental institutions.

"Whom God wishes to destroy he first makes mad."
- Euripides, 425 BC

precariousness of reason

"Do not glory in your state, if you are wise and civilized men; an instant suffices to disturb and annihilate that supposed wisdom of which you are so proud; an unexpected event, a sharp and sudden emotion of the soul will abruptly change the most reasonable and intelligent man into a raving idiot."
- Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization, pp.211-212

sumasshedshy

"What are we saying when we say someone has ‘gone out of their mind’? The thing about going out of your mind is that the mind is still there; you can go back. You haven’t lost your mind. You’ve just gone out of it. The Russians use the same phrase. The Russian adjective meaning ‘crazy’, which is the same as the noun for ‘insane person’, is sumasshedshy, literally ‘who was going out of their mind’. Sofia Andreyevna Tolstoy, wife of Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, did go out of her mind at the family estate of Yasnaya Polyana in 1910. She didn’t lose her mind. She went back to it later, and lived another nine years. But she did lose her husband, who ran away from her and died of pneumonia in a rural stationmaster’s house a few days later."

Read the complete London Review of Books article here.

depending upon how you define art

"60% of the world's most important works of art are located in Italy. Half of those are in Florence."
- Graham McPherson "Suggs" [born 1961]

madness endeavor

Hieronymus Bosch [1450-1516], Entfernung des Wahnsinnsteins [The Cure of Folly (Extraction of the Stone of Madness)], Detail

Absinthe

Absinthe influenced artists Degas, Manet, van Gogh and Picasso, and writers Verlaine, Rimbaud, Wilde and Hemingway, among others.

"After the first glass, you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see things as they are not. Finally, you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world."
- Oscar Wilde [1854-1900]

Dali

"There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am not mad."
- Salvador Dali [1904-1989]

The Memorable Assassination

"...in one way or another all men are mad. Many are mad for money...Love is a madness...it can grow to a frenzy of despair ... All the whole list of desires, predilections, aversions, ambitions, passions, cares, griefs, regrets, remorses, are incipience madness, and ready to grow, spread and consume, when the occasion comes. There are no healthy minds, and nothing saves any man but accident—the accident of not having his malady put to the supreme test.
One of the commonest forms of madness is the desire to be noticed, the pleasure derived from being noticed. Perhaps it is not merely common, but universal." 

–Mark Twain [1835-1910], The Memorable Assassination