Melancholy and Thought

In this exhibit, the viewer can see a giant bronze statue portraying a man seemingly deep in thought, with furrowed brows and a hand on his face, hunched over with a pensive disposition. The majority of us have found ourselves in a state like this at some point, perhaps during a test we wish we had studied more for or when faced with a difficult decision that we wish we knew the answer to. Most of the time, having to put this much thought into something isn't ideal and feelings of anxiety or stress might arise if we can't escape this brooding state. A person will eventually sink into a position of despair if they can't draw a conclusion to whatever is being ruminated on, and this position is where melancholy and thought come into play. Additionally, in the past and even present-day, a connection has been drawn between melancholy and genius. This may be academic genius or artistic genius, as both are seen to tie into symptoms of melancholy (Barker).

Rodin, the sculptor of "The Thinker" was even seen to experience bouts of melancholy during his lifetime. He was sent away from home to a boarding school, and during this time experienced torment from the other students for his smaller stature and red hair. He took up drawing during his studies and found that it was something he really enjoyed. Poverty was a prevailing issue during his childhood, and he struggled to scrape together enough money to get by. This meant working during the day and being an artist at night. Unfortunately, Rodin faced a lot of rejection early-on in his drawing/sculpting career. After the death of his sister, whom he was very close with, in 1862, Rodin was devastated (Grunfeld). He proceeded to enter a religious institution, where he slowly recovered from his intense melancholy that stemmed from the loss of his sister. It was then that he started truly pursuing and having success with sculptures, commissioning his famous sculpture The Thinker in 1880 (Curtis).

There are many more examples of artists throughout history that used art as a manner to escape their melancholy and the grimness of reality, but there are also times when this excessive dedication to these passions drives them deeper into their melancholy such as with Van Gogh. Melancholy and genius have an interesting relationship, in which one will drive the other. Past beliefs have shown that excessive thinking can drive melancholy, which was countered in the past by the a remedy called the rest cure, in which a melancholic had to remain in bed with minimal intellectual or physical activity. This "cure" was disproved with the release of a story called The Yellow Wallpaper, in which the author Charlotte Perkins Gilman showed consequences of the rest cure in driving melancholics further towards madness. It's important to maintain a lifestyle which involves a healthy level of thinking and staying active to keep one's brain sharp without doing too much to drive a person to the point of insanity or melancholy.