#artists smoking

Smoke Gets In Your Eyes

Official portraits, casual snapshots, documentary photos, and publicity stills all attest to the pervasiveness of smoking in the art world of the second half of the 20th century. In fact, it’s hard to find images of certain postwar artists without a cigarette in hand. In striking contrast, today, even the artist would be forbidden from smoking next to his/her own work, which is on balance good, from a conservation and public health point of view. The silent excising, editing and effacing of smoking from photographs, which one encounters routinely is, however, deplorable from a historical point of view.