Tragic death gives added impact to art

Would James Dean still be a style icon if he’d lived to be 60?

Would John Lennon be revered at quite the same level had he not been killed when he was 40?

Was Marilyn Monroe really the most beautiful woman who ever lived?

It’s impossible to prove either way.

And we have to bear in mind that Cliff Richard was a once a hip young thing, Mick Jagger was a sex symbol, and Paul McCartney wrote Hey Jude and Let it Be, even if he could later be found warbling We all Stand Together along with The Frog Chorus.

It’s probably a fair point that no one, however talented, can sustain that moment when their flame burns brightest and they can do no wrong.

And let’s face it – even the coolest among us get to the stage where we have no idea what’s number one in the charts, we care more about whether our clothes are comfortable than if they are fashionable, and we start confusing an iPhone with an Android.

Dying young means you never get to that point. But it also, of course, means you die.

And no one will ever know what you may – or may not – have achieved had you lived another 20, 30 or even 40 years.

The sense of regret that will always be associated with ‘what if?’ lends a special brand of poignancy to the work left by those who died before their time.

That’s not to say the talent they had in life wasn’t genuine, simply that there’s no mellow dotage or rocking on regardless à la Rolling Stones to colour what went before.

The current Rex Whistler exhibition at Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum is aptly subtitled A Talent Cut Short, and much of the work on display was inspired by the Second World War that cost the talented artist his life.

His paintings raise the ghosts of the poets of a generation earlier who wrote of the senseless slaughter and horror of the trenches, and whose knowledge that they were unlikely to make it home gives devastating impact to their words.

A life lost so young is always tragic, but if there is a silver lining it’s that death focuses our attention, not just on the legacy of the work left behind but on the possibilities left unexplored.

We may not relish the idea of John Lennon’s own personal Frog Chorus, but we all surely wish he’d had the chance to make it.

We don’t know what he may have achieved if he’d lived another 20, 30 or even 40 years, but we do understand the tragedy of not knowing.

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