Drunks On Canvas: The 11 Most Inebriated Moments In Art History

Image via Complex Original

While Adam and Eve caused the entire fall of man by eating an apple, our prehistoric ancestors may have eaten some rotting fruit off the ground that contributed to the development of civilization as we know it.  The fermented fruit contained mankind’s first taste of alcohol, and mankind has yet to stop chasing that buzz.

Archaeologists have evidence of alcoholic beverages being produced and consumed by almost every civilization since the Neolithic era, some 10,000 years ago.  There are even clay chards of what would have been the first beer bottles from this period.  Made from fruit, grains, and honey, their fermented mixtures may have been important sources of energy and nutrients. When humans eventually learned to cultivate crops, it may have been mainly for the purpose of producing more grains to make more alcohol.  It is more than likely that we had beer before we had bread; it is definitely true that beer was invented before the wheel. So, at the rise of mankind, at the very dawn of civilization, there was booze. And it was good.

With this great new drink also came great responsibility – the responsibility to document it and all the glorious things we would do while intoxicated.  Though it would be a long, long time before camera phones, Facebook, Tumblr, or Texts From Last Night were invented to capture and share pictures and tales of wasted people, humans have always known that this was a necessary task and so turned to art.  From ancient Greece to Renaissance Italy to Ming Dynasty China to here and now, artists have portrayed our beloved booze, the act of getting tipsy, the inebriated among us, and the drunks in us all.

So when you’ve thrown back one too many at your family Thanksgiving dinner or your company holiday party this season, there’s no need to feel embarrassed, sloppy, or uncouth.  Instead, you can be proud to be a part of a long and rich cultural and artistic tradition – a part of the Complex History of Art & Inebriation.

Check out the 11 Most Inebriated Moments in Art History.

Brygos Painter, A drunk man vomiting while a young slave holds his forehead, 500-470BC, National Museum of Denmark

The culture of Ancient Greece offered more than ample occasion to imbibe.  In the earthly realm, men conducted most of their important affairs, from business meetings to philosophical debates to general revelry, at drinking parties called symposia (in modern use, a symposium is a term for an academic conference).  The parties had dedicated moderators called symposiarchs who regulated the strength of the alcohol for the evening.  Those enterprising Greeks also invented the concept of “pouring one for the homies,” called libations, or spilling a small amount of wine on the ground to honor the Gods or the dead.  Symposium scenes often depict men toasting or talking, but some, like the one above, show the more visceral, after-hours moments.

Drunk Silenus supported by two young men, c. 300 BC

Ancient Greek religion even devoted an entire deity to drinking, Dionysos, the god of wine, ecstasy, and fertility.  He himself had a gaggle of lush friends and followers.  The drunkest of them all was Silenus, who was mythologized to possess valuable prophetic powers, despite the fact that he was almost always depicted as so drunk he couldn’t stand straight.  In Roman culture, these gods of became Bacchus and Silvanus, who were depicted much like their Greek counterparts, but became known for even worse debauchery.  Like co-ed symposia or an ancient-day Bohemian Grove, Bacchanalia were wild festivals held in secret, remote locations, where it is said that political schemes and conspiracies were planned.  The parties were outlawed in the 2nd century BC.

Manuscript, Noah drunk in bed, c. 1000

For the thousand-or-so years from the fall of the Roman Empire through the Middle Ages, Christianity ruled the Western world and art was pretty much reserved for the sole purposes of decorating churches and illuminating manuscripts.  There was almost no reason anyone put pen to paper except to illustrate scripture, so if an artist was going to portray a drunk person there had to be a Biblical reason for him to do so.  One that we see here and there is an image of Noah, who traded his Arc for a vineyard in his later years, passed out naked after drinking his own wine.

Master B R with the Anchor, Drunken Peasant and his Wife, c. 1480s

Artists in the Renaissance gained more latitude with their subject matter.  They could depict a variety of subjects from religious to classical to literary to contemporary.  Scenes of daily peasant life were especially popular in the north.  If the Occupy movement has taught us anything, it is that where there are peasants, there are drunk old men waxing incoherent, hands raised to the sky.

Joachim Beuckelaer (Flemish, ca. 1533-1574), Brothel, 1562

Although the Renaissance allowed artists to broach pedestrian topics like inebriation, it didn’t necessarily celebrate those behaviors.  Most people in this time, artists included, were still devout and God-fearing.  Pictures like Joachim Beuckelaer's likely had a moralizing purpose, to show the foolishness and debasement of indulgent behavior – that people become sloppy, slouching, groping, and even stand on their heads.  But the fact that the artist signed his name and the date in the mantelpiece of the picture, where the patrons tallied their drinks, indicates that he might have aligned himself at least a little with these debauchers.

Chen Hongshou (Chinese, 1598-1652), Self Portrait: the artist inebriated, 1627

The refined and delicate style of Chinese ink painting marks a contrast with the unceremonious subject of the ailing artist crumpled on the ground.

Jasper Johns, Painted Bronze (Ballantine Ale), 1960

Johns immortalized his, um, artistic inspiration, by casting beer cans in bronze.

Martha Rosler, Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems, 1974-5

Rosler’s installation consists of a series of photographs paired with texts describing the Bowery in New York City, a notoriously derelict neighborhood at the time. This work is a more cryptic than the scenes of blatant intoxication we’ve seen so far  - neither the sparse words nor the pictures of empty bottles and decrepit streets show the real drunkenness or get to the heart of the problem – they are inadequate to describe it.

Alfredo Vilchis Roque, Ex-voto: for delivering me from death the time I foolishly drove really drunk..., 1975

Roque also looked at the darker side of drinking with this ex-voto, traditionally an offering to a saint, about the dangers drunk driving.

Tom Marioni (American, 1937), FREE BEER (The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art), 1970-1979

First created in the 70s, this popular work by Tom Marioni is still performed today.  The reason for its longevity is pretty obvious – for this conceptual piece, the artist fills a refrigerator with beer and invites people to come drink it.  He then displays the empty bottles in the gallery, as relics and mementos of the social occasion brought about by the work.

Ted Parker, Drinking Buddies, 2011

Nowadays, we have a pretty much anything-goes attitude about the depiction of drunkenness.  A dog and a dolphin casually throwing back brews?  Cheers to that.