From Frida Kahlo to Billie Holiday – why we have got artistic female addicts all wrong


Professor Sally Marlow
Fri, 2 February 2024 


Frida Kahlo in bed at her home, La Casa Azul, Mexico City - Gisele Freund/Photo Researchers History/Getty Images

The work of Frida Kahlo, Billie Holiday, Anna Kavan, Andrea Dunbar and Nan Goldin represents more than a century of creativity. All five women struggled with drugs and alcohol, and there has been much speculation about how their art was affected by their addictions. As an addiction scientist, I wanted to take the opposite approach, and, in Radio 3’s The Essay, see what I could learn about these women’s dependencies by looking at their work.

Of course, all five are brilliant, ground-breaking. Kahlo was the first Mexican artist to have works in the Louvre and New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Holiday had more than 200 hit records and regularly sold-out Carnegie Hall. Kavan was a writer described by Brian Aldiss as “De Quincey’s heir and Kafka’s sister”, while Andrea Dunbar’s play Rita, Sue and Bob Too not only spawned a hugely successful film, but was also a phenomenal piece of social commentary which predicted the #MeToo movement and grooming scandals by more than three decades.

As for the only living artist included in this select group of five, Nan Goldin, her work is considered so valuable by the world’s leading art institutions that when she threatened to remove it if they did not sever ties with the family she saw as her tormentors, they one by one acquiesced.


What struck me while researching the programme was just how often all five women have been characterised as “addicted” artists, which is at best reductive and at worst offensive. I came across various patronising and lazy stereotypes. Whether it’s Andrea Dunbar referred to as “genius from the slums” or headlines about Anna Kavan’s house containing “enough heroin to kill the whole street”, these women are defined time and time again by their problems and the circumstances which led them to use drugs and alcohol, rather than their talent.

It’s not even as if they all explicitly reference alcohol and drugs in their work. For example, there are no pills, syringes or cocktail glasses in Frida Kahlo’s paintings. Andrea Dunbar didn’t write plays about alcohol, it’s simply part of the backdrop.

Playwright Andrea Dunbar in Bradford - Peter Lomas/ANL/Shutterstock

There are, of course, double standards. We read male authors like Jean Cocteau and Edgar Allen Poe and look at work by Jackson Pollock and Picasso without giving their addictions a second thought. However, when it comes to women, the idea of the neurotic artist whose talent is really not a talent has been constantly re-enforced. It’s only relatively recently that a critical mass of women artists have achieved acclaim, and we don’t seem to be fully comfortable yet with a narrative that a woman artist can simply be an artist. This may change as the work of artists like Rachel Whiteread, Cornelia Parker and Hilary Mantel becomes the norm, using architecture, physics and history for inspiration rather than autobiography and trauma.

It is clear that the art of the women I looked at for the series is great in its own right, but also instructive in teaching us about the nature of addiction. Kavan used heroin for decades as well as wrote about it, most famously in Julia and the Bazooka, a short story collection about what she calls “injected tranquillity”, published in 1970 shortly after her death. She details the devastating inevitability of relapse in The Old Address, following a stay in some sort of medical facility; and in High in the Mountains describes how a particular drug (perhaps cocaine) makes the protagonist feel.

But it is from Julia and the Bazooka that I learnt most about addiction. Julia has a kindly doctor who prescribes her heroin, and Anna had just such a doctor in her own life. The context is important here. The Departmental Committee on Morphine and Heroin Addiction of 1926 recommended that medical professionals could legally prescribe heroin or morphine to those addicted to it if it would enable patients “to lead useful lives”, and doctors prescribed right up until 1968.

British novelist Anna Kavan

There were just a few hundred people receiving heroin prescriptions from their doctor at any one time and Anna Kavan was one of them. She is arguing in the story for a medical approach to heroin addiction, not a criminal one. It is likely that this medical approach meant that she lived until she was almost 70, and was spared some of the dangers of unknown purity of produce and organised criminal distribution.

In the work of the five women I chose for the series, the drug references are most explicit in the photography of Nan Goldin. Goldin took candid pictures of her life beginning in the 1970s, well before everyone else started doing it on social media. She became addicted to heroin, but in the 1980s got clean. Then in 2014 she had surgery on her wrist and was prescribed painkillers in the shape of an opioid cousin of the morphine and pethidine Kahlo had been prescribed 90 years previously.

This was Oxycontin, the prescription opioid which underlies much of the current opioid epidemic in the United States. Goldin was addicted immediately and lost three years of her life until a second detox and rehab. During those three years, she kept on taking photographs, which she brought together in a 2019 slide show, Memory Lost, a startling, bleak pictorial record of her addiction the second time round.

US Photographer Nan Goldin - JOHN MACDOUGALL/AFP via Getty Images

She used this to raise awareness and start a campaign against the Sackler family, one branch of which owned Purdue Pharma, manufacturers and marketers of Oxycontin. Goldin’s experience and art shows that addiction never really goes away. Many people who have managed to quit drugs or alcohol describe themselves as “in recovery”, not “recovered”, acknowledging that relapse in addiction is common even after a long period of not using.

In Goldin’s photo Dope on my rug, taken in 2016 during the height of her addiction to oxycontin, four bottles of prescription opioids and eight blister packs of pills are scattered amongst packets of cigarettes, a hard drive, a note pad and a camera – an enormous amount of drugs and an enormous part of her life.

In making this series I discovered just how little those around these women understood or acknowledged that they needed help and support with their addictions. Frida Kahlo attending her own art opening in her bed was not a charming eccentricity, but a strong sign that she was struggling. It was as if art was the only way these women could make themselves heard, whether about their addictions, or about the circumstances which exacerbated them.

Billie Holiday: 'Dope never helped anybody sing better or play music better or do anything better.' - Bill Spilka/Getty Images

It is extraordinary to me that these women produced the art they did while drugs and/or alcohol were so much a part of their lives. Drugs and alcohol rarely make anyone more creative or more productive, although they often make people think they are more creative. As Billie Holiday recognised in her autobiography, “Dope never helped anybody sing better or play music better or do anything better.” In fact, drugs almost always have quite the opposite effect, they dull the senses and blunt the edges.

Therefore we should recognise these five remarkable talents despite their addictions, not because of them. Let’s not stigmatise them or fetishise them, let’s celebrate them.

Professor Sally Marlow is Professor of Practice in Public Understanding of Mental Health Research at King’s College London. The Essay: Women of Substance is on Radio 3 from Monday 5-Friday 9 Feb at 10pm