.
22, suicide. Said, ‘You cannot see me from where I look at myself.’
Francesca Woodman
.
25, tuberculosis. Dandy. Said, ‘I have one aim, the grotesque. If I am not grotesque I am nothing.’
Aubrey Beardsley
.
27, heroin overdose. His tag was a crown.
Jean-Michel Basquiat
.
28, Spanish flu. Said, ‘He who denies sex is a filthy person who smears in the lowest way his own parents who have begotten him.’
Egon Schiele
.
31, meningitis. Said, ‘Some say they see poetry in my paintings; I see only science.’
Georges Seurat
.
32, AIDS. ‘Crack is wack.’
Keith Haring
.
33-ish, presumed lost at sea. Emo.
Bas Jan Ader
.
34, from his third heart attack in two months. Said, ‘Blue has no dimensions.’
Yves Klein
.
34, brain tumours. Said, ‘Don’t ask what the work is. Rather, see what the work does.’
Eva Hesse
.
35, plane crash. Said, ‘Abstraction is everybody’s zero but nobody’s nought.’
Robert Smithson
.
35, tubercular meningitis. His widow—eight months pregnant with the couple’s second child—committed suicide by defenestration the following day.
Amedeo Modigliani
.
36, fell from her thirty-fourth-floor apartment. The judge found her artist husband of eight months not guilty. In one of her performances, she had held a freshly decapitated chicken by its feet as its blood spattered her naked body.
Anna Mendieta
.
37, suicide by gunshot. Said, ‘The sight of the stars makes me dream.’
Vincent van Gogh
.
44, car crash. Said, ‘I am nature.’
Jackson Pollock
.
51, eleven days after his gangrenous left foot was amputated due to complications with syphilis and rheumatism. Painted a dead toreador.
Édouard Manet
.
58, arrhythmia, following a routine gall-bladder operation. Said, ‘Death is the most convenient time to tax rich people.’
Andy Warhol
.
69, melanoma, after near misses with gun and electrocution, and being crucified on a car. Said, ‘Nail me to my car and I’ll tell you who you are.’
Chris Burden
.
75, suicide by hanging. The note said, ‘I’m taking my life. The key is with the concierge.’
Pierre Molinier