Courbet

When the name of American-born artist James McNeill Whistler comes up most people immediately think of his iconic painting Arrangement in Grey and Black #1, an austere portrait of Anna McNeill…
For six weeks in 2011, visitors to room 20 of the Parisian Musee d'Orsay didn't know what to look at first—Gustave Courbet's L'Origine du Monde (1866), or the woman copying it at a nearby easel.
Are artists really more tortured than the rest of us? Let's consider this myth and the studies that assess whether there might be a link between creativity and mental illness.