You call that art?? Get outta here with that pretentious artsy-fartsy highfalutin' stuff. That's not art. THIS is art:
Posted on 10/17/2006 9:01:12 PM PDT by verum ago
Pablo Picasso's "dream" painting has turned into a $139 million nightmare for Steve Wynn.
In an accident witnessed by a group that included Barbara Walters and screenwriters Nora Ephron and Nicholas Pileggi, Wynn accidentally poked a hole in Picasso's 74-year-old painting, "Le Reve," French for "The Dream."
A day earlier, Wynn had finalized a record $139 million deal for the painting of Picasso's mistress, Wynn told The New Yorker magazine
The accident occurred as a gesturing Wynn, who suffers from retinitis pigmentosa, an eye disease that affects peripheral vision, struck the painting with his right elbow, leaving a hole the size of a silver dollar in the left forearm of Marie-Theresa Walter, Picasso's 21-year-old mistress.
"Oh shit, look what I've done," Wynn said, according to Ephron, who gave her account in a blog published on Monday.
Wynn paid $48.4 million for the Picasso in 1997 and had agreed to sell it to art collector Steven Cohen. The $139 million would have been $4 million higher than the previous high for a work of art, according to The New Yorker.
Cosmetics magnate Ronald Lauder paid $135 million in July for Gustav Klimt's 1907 portrait "Adele Bloch-Bauer I."
Wynn plans to restore "Le Reve" and keep it.
I like only a small handful of Picasso's works. I agree with you that he was mostly just a huge self-marketer in his later days. He is the equivalent of today's Thomas Kinkade - another artist whose "works of art" I absolutely cannot tolerate to even glance at.
And she also has six fingers on one of her hands . . .
You call that art?? Get outta here with that pretentious artsy-fartsy highfalutin' stuff. That's not art. THIS is art:
LOL
That would be the Gilcrease Museum, and yes it is worth a trip to Tulsa.
Now that I've seen a picture of the "art," I would agree with others that Wynn certainly made an improvement. Somebody should pay him $139 million to burn it. It is a monstrosity and an offense to the eyes.
... and I don't have a problem with that shameless self marketing. Better to make a buck while you are still alive than after the worms are done with ya.
Always felt that Picasso's work bounced around in quality. I can appreciate works like the Accordionist where their was depth to the piece, but when he reduced the cubism to two dimensions it started looking like the work of a 5 year old. When someone buys a work like Dream, they are buying a brand name. No one can convince me that it represents the best of cubism, so why pay the price ?
Bouguereau's nudes are okay, but I prefer paintings like his Petites Maraudeuses--1872, Au Bord du Ruisseau--1875, Petite boudeuse-1888, Calinerie-1890>Le Goûter--1895, and some others showing clothed people.
Not that I'm opposed to 'nekkid chick paintings'--Bouguereau's Le Printemps--1886 (obvious homage to Botticelli) is very nice, for example. For the most part, though, I think his non-nudes are more to my artistic taste.
Not sure I count that as art ~ more on the order of colorizing a photograph.
We caught a painting where Van Gogh had done that for part of the work. As I recall it's one of his early paintings of a beachfront home ~ may be in the Getty in LA or Carnegie-Mellon in Pittsburgh (we visited both within days of each other).
It was all pretty obvious to the discerning eye. Obviously someone had been beating on Van Gogh's head to "do something realistic and detailed", so he did.
My favorite Picasso paintings and drawings are available at:
You must be thinking of the stuff hanging in MOCA in Los Angeles.
we can deduce from the portrait that Picasso's girlfriend was obese, slept a lot, and had some sort of problem with her neck vertebrae."
Picasso had 6 major "loves" and many minor ones -- also a gay relationship with Max Jacob. It is said when Picasso was in love with a current mistress, he would pleasantly paint her -- but a mistress always knew when she lost favor for his paintings of her would become fat and ugly. The arrogant Picasso said, “When I was a child my mother said to me, ‘If you become a soldier, you'll be a general; if you become a monk, you'll end up as the pope.’ Instead I became a painter and wound up as Picasso.”
! LOL
Ah, the Hockney theory. Although I wouldn't doubt that the understanding of optical principles may have improved people's refinement of perspective, the camera obscura was never a practical aid for drawing or painting, even when one used a lens (without a lens it would be totally useless). There are plenty of artists today who can draw and paint without using such devices; I don't see why Bourguereau should have been any less capable.
Even though it's possible to photographically print an image onto canvas and then trace over it, which would be a huge step above using a camera obscura, paintings made by such methods generally look horrible. There is no way that a painting produced using a camera obscura would look any better. Indeed, given the practical difficulties of using such a device, it would be impossible to make even a decent trace-painted rendering of anything but the most hard-edged, motionless objects.
If I may offer an analogy, while traditional animators have often used motion-picture film enlargements for design reference, good animators basically never trace it directly. Rotoscoped animation tends to look rather flat, dull, and lifeless compared with animation drawn freehand. Even though rotoscoped animation might be "technically" more accurate, from an aesthetic standpoint it is vastly inferior.
Some people claim the quality of Bouguereau's works proves he must have used a camera obscura. I would claim that, to the contrary, it proves that he did not.
Human beings, of course, have tremendous accuity, but they do not and never did have the accuity of an eagle, and it takes an "eagle eye" (in the form of a 2X or greater lens) to give it to you on a two-dimensional surface.
Almost every experienced artist on Earth can differentate between detail paintings that required the use of a prosthetic and those that didn't. So can you.
Plenty in this case meaning enough to demonstrate that freehand drawing and painting are skills that can be taught, at least given a suitably talented and motivated student.
Human beings, of course, have tremendous accuity, but they do not and never did have the accuity of an eagle, and it takes an "eagle eye" (in the form of a 2X or greater lens) to give it to you on a two-dimensional surface.
You assume the artist is trying to trying to reproduce accurately the details of objects he has never seen except from the vantage point implied by the painting. That's absurd.
You ignore the fact that most artists have perfectly good legs, and can thus get up and examine things they need to look at closely. They also have imaginations which can make up aesthetically pleasing stuff to fill in the details they can't see.
A good artist will familiarize himself with any subject he intends to reproduce accurately. He will be able to remember what an obliquely-viewed object looked like, even if he cannot see it terribly well. And if the details as remembered don't strike his fancy, he'll supplant them with his imagination.
Almost every experienced artist on Earth can differentate between detail paintings that required the use of a prosthetic and those that didn't. So can you.
The tracing-paintings I've seen haven't impressed me. Perhaps you could point me to some better examples.
The trained and skilled artist can differentiate between a painting done with the eye only and one where a photograph was used to assist.
Given that the best artists use real models when possible, how does that fit in with your theory?
Since the human eye cannot, unaided, see that detail and its interactions with other detail (gradations and shades) unassisted, it's really more like photography than naturalistic drawing and painting.
If you prefer that sort of thing, fine. Just don't call it "art".
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