Famous artists who struggled for years before their breakthrough

01Vincent van Gogh: ten years of painting, one sale in his lifetime

Van Gogh's case is so well known it has become a cliche, but the details deserve repeating because they are harsher than the myth. Van Gogh began painting seriously around 1881, at twenty-eight, after failing as an art dealer at Goupil, as a teacher in England, as a bookseller, as a theology student and as an evangelist in the coal mines of the Borinage in Belgium. During the ten years he spent painting, he sold only one canvas in his lifetime, The Red Vineyard, purchased by Anna Boch for four hundred francs at an exhibition in Brussels in 1890, a few months before his death. Four hundred francs at the time represented a modest income, barely enough to live on for a few weeks.

During those ten years, Van Gogh survived thanks to financial support from his brother Theo, who regularly sent money while trying to sell his paintings at the Paris gallery where he worked. The letters between the two brothers, one of the richest correspondence collections in art history, reveal an artist constantly tormented by financial anxiety, the feeling of being a burden and doubt about the value of his work. Van Gogh produced roughly nine hundred paintings and eleven hundred drawings in ten years. Today his canvases sell for tens of millions of dollars. Portrait of Dr. Gachet reached eighty-two million dollars in 1990.

02Claude Monet: twenty years before impressionism was accepted

Monet today is synonymous with artistic success. The Water Lilies are among the most reproduced works in the world, and the house at Giverny receives hundreds of thousands of visitors every year. But the first half of Monet's career was a constant struggle against poverty and institutional rejection.

In the 1860s and 1870s, Monet and his fellow impressionists were systematically refused by the official Salon, the only exhibition venue that mattered in the Paris of the time. The first independent impressionist exhibition in 1874, held in the studio of photographer Nadar, was met with devastating reviews. The term impressionism itself was originally a mockery, drawn from the title of Monet's painting Impression, Sunrise. The critic Louis Leroy had used the word to ridicule the movement.

During those years, Monet regularly struggled to pay his rent. He wrote to friends and collectors to borrow money. In 1878, his first wife Camille was seriously ill and the family could not afford to heat their home properly. It was only from the 1880s onward, thanks to the support of dealer Paul Durand-Ruel who bought their works in bulk at considerable financial risk, that the impressionists' situation began to improve. Monet had by then spent nearly twenty years creating in precarity.

03Yayoi Kusama: decades of invisibility before worldwide recognition

Kusama is today one of the most popular artists in the world. Her polka-dot installations and Infinity Rooms draw queues lasting several hours outside museums. But her trajectory is one of the most chaotic in contemporary art.

Born in 1929 in Japan into a wealthy but dysfunctional family, Kusama left Japan for New York in 1958 with enormous ambition and very little money. During the 1960s she produced radical work, performances, installations, happenings, that placed her at the centre of the New York avant-garde. But she never managed to convert that visibility into financial stability. She lived in precarious conditions, suffered from mental health problems and watched male artists around her, notably Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg, pick up ideas she had explored first and receive credit for them.

In 1973, physically and psychologically exhausted, Kusama returned to Japan and voluntarily checked into a psychiatric hospital where she still lives today. During the 1970s and 1980s she continued working in near-total anonymity in the West. It was only from the 1990s, through retrospectives in Japan and then in Europe and the United States, that the art world rediscovered her work. She was then over sixty. Her global recognition arrived after four decades of relentless work, half of it in the shadows.

04Jean-Michel Basquiat: from the street to galleries via hunger

Basquiat is often presented as a meteor: a dazzling appearance in the early 1980s New York art world, instant fame, premature death at twenty-seven. The reality is more nuanced. Before being represented by galleries, Basquiat spent several years living on the street or at friends' places, sleeping on benches in Washington Square Park, selling hand-painted postcards and T-shirts for a few dollars.

His graffiti work under the pseudonym SAMO, created with Al Diaz in Lower Manhattan in the late 1970s, attracted the attention of insiders but generated no income. It was the encounters with gallerist Annina Nosei, then dealer Larry Gagosian and collector Bruno Bischofberger, that transformed his financial situation from 1981 onward. But even at the peak of his short career, Basquiat remained haunted by the question of legitimacy, aware that the art world fetishised him as much as it celebrated him. His trajectory shows that even explosive talent does not automatically translate into recognition. It requires intermediaries, structures, people who believe in your work and defend it to buyers.

05Louise Bourgeois: a body of work recognised at seventy

Louise Bourgeois began exhibiting in New York in the 1940s. For the following decades she continued working with stubborn regularity, producing sculptures, installations and drawings that fitted no dominant movement. She was neither abstract expressionist in the 1950s, nor pop in the 1960s, nor minimalist in the 1970s. Her work, deeply personal, nourished by psychoanalysis and family trauma, escaped categories. And the market did not know what to do with it.

It was only in 1982, at seventy, that the Museum of Modern Art in New York gave her a retrospective, the first for a woman at that institution. That exhibition revolutionised the perception of her work and launched a recognition that amplified until her death in 2010 at ninety-eight. Her giant bronze spiders, the most famous of which, Maman, stands over nine metres tall, have become icons of contemporary art. In 2019 her sculpture Spider reached thirty-two million dollars at Christie's. It took forty years of exhibiting and continuous creation before the art world caught up with her work.

06Carmen Herrera: first sale at eighty-nine

Carmen Herrera's case may be the most extreme. Born in Havana in 1915, this Cuban-American artist had been practising geometric abstraction since the 1940s. She lived and worked in Paris, where she exhibited at the Salon des Realites Nouvelles alongside artists like Theo van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian. Back in New York in the 1950s, she continued painting without interruption for decades, but without commercial success. Her work, rigorous and pared-down, was too geometric for the abstract expressionist market, too austere for pop art, too quiet for neo-expressionism.

In 2004, at eighty-nine, she sold her first painting. A gallerist at Lisson Gallery discovered her through a press article and began representing her. Within a few years Herrera became one of the most respected artists of her generation, with exhibitions at the Whitney Museum, Lisson Gallery and institutions worldwide. She continued painting until she was one hundred and six. Her story demonstrates that lack of sales is not a verdict on the quality of the work. It is a verdict on the state of the market at a given moment.

07What these stories change for you

You do not live in the nineteenth century and you do not need to wait forty years for the world to notice. The tools that exist today, online platforms, collector networks, fairs accessible to independent artists, considerably shorten the distance between creation and visibility. But these stories recall a truth that the myth of instant success tries to erase: building an art career takes time, and the time you spend creating without selling is not wasted time. It is invested time.

Van Gogh, Monet, Kusama, Basquiat, Bourgeois, Herrera: none of these artists stopped working because the market did not respond. They continued because the work was the purpose, and recognition, when it came, was the consequence of that perseverance, not its cause.

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