Posted on 11/04/2009 3:20:11 PM PST by kristinn
.SNIP
ARTnews has reported that the White House has quietly de-listed a painting by Alma W. Thomas that it chose last month, among some 45 pieces borrowed from several Washington museums, to decorate the private White House residence and the West and East Wings.
Titled, “Watusi (Hard Edge)” from 1963, the work takes a Matisse collage and, as Holland Cotter wrote in The New York Times, praising the selection, “shifts the pieces around, cools the colors down, and adds a title that refers to a Chubby Checker song.”
“But through copying Matisse,” Mr. Cotter added, “she began to work out a format she would use again and again.”
Some conservative Web sites, like Freerepublic.com, had criticized the painting as a fraud, calling it a “re-colored reprint” and questioning the wisdom of hanging it in the White House. By late October, the painting, which had been destined for the East Wing, had been removed from the list of works bound for 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, ARTnews reported, though a second Thomas painting from 1973 remains on the list. The Hirshhorn Museum, which owns the painting, confirmed that the 1963 work had been sent back, but no one involved with the White House loans at the museum would say why, the publication said.
Semonti Stephens, the deputy press secretary for Mrs. Obama, said that the painting had been intended to go in the first lady’s office and that the the decision not to put it there was made only because its dimensions did not work in the space in which it was to hang.
(Excerpt) Read more at artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com ...
Art.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1630734/posts
Long ago (2006) Freeper Republicanprofessor (http://www.freerepublic.com/~republicanprofessor/ )did a series of art lectures here on FR.
I finally found the above thread (after a few hours of looking. Stupid me didn’t bookmark them back then).
Her profile page links to the entire series.
Go look at some real art.
That just proves you have good taste--better than some.
It seems that Mrs. Obama has the fashion instincts of a middle-schooler and the artistic sensibility of a kindergartener.
You go, 'Bubba!
Wholey crap, I would get kicked out of university for doing something like that. Thats plagiarism 100%.
And when the Congress does it, it's "appropriation", not "stealing."
Parent: "Did you have your hand in the cookie jar?"
Child: "No."
Just like Benjamin Franklin!
If we’d have tried that in kindergarten using construction paper, we’d have been given an F..
What the heck is so special about that?
Reminds me of this old Dave Barry article:
DAVE BARRY: Normal folks know modern art stinks
October 6, 2002
BY DAVE BARRY FREE PRESS COLUMNIST
Today we have an important art news update from England, or Great Britain, or the United Kingdom, or whatever they’re calling it these days.
As you may recall, the last time we checked in on the British art community, it had awarded a major art prize, plus 20,000 pounds (about $30,000) to an artist named Martin Creed, for a work titled “The Lights Going On and Off.” It consisted of a vacant room in which the lights went on and off.
Yes. He got thirty grand for that. Why? Because “The Lights” “Going On and Off” possesses the quality that your sophisticated art snot looks for above all else in a work of art, namely: no normal human would ever mistake it for art. Normal humans, confronted with a room containing only blinking lights, would say: “Where’s the art? And what’s wrong with these lights?”
The public prefers the old-fashioned style of art, where you have some clue as to what the art is supposed to represent. This is why the Sistine Chapel frescoes painted by the great Italian artist Mike L. Angelo are so popular. The public is impressed because (1) the people in the frescoes actually look like people, and (2) Mike painted them on the ceiling. The public has painted its share of ceilings, and it always winds up with most of the paint in its hair. So the public considers the Sistine Chapel to be a major artistic achievement, and will spend several minutes gazing at it in awe and wonder (”Do you think he used a roller?”) before moving on to the next thing on the tour, which ideally will be lunch.
The public has, over the years, learned to tolerate modern art, but only to the degree that it has nice colors that would go with the public’s home decor. When examining a modern painting, the public invariably pictures it hanging over the public’s living-room sofa. As far as the public is concerned, museums should put sofas in front of all the paintings, to make it easier to judge them.
This kind of thing drives your professional art snots CRAZY. They cannot stand the thought that they would like the same art as the stupid old moron public. And so, as the public has become more accepting of modern art, the art snots have made it their business to like only those works of “art” that are so spectacularly inartistic that the public could not possibly like them, such as “The Lights Going On and Off.”
Which leads us to the latest development in the British art world. You are going to think I made this development up. Even I sometimes wonder if I made it up, although I know for a fact that I did not, because I am looking at a story about it from the London Telegraph. Here is the key sentence:
“The Tate Gallery has paid 22,300 pounds of public money for a work that is, quite literally, a load of excrement.”
Yes. The Tate Gallery, which is a prestigious British art museum, spent 22,300 pounds — or roughly $35,000 — of British taxpayers’ money to purchase a can containing approximately one ounce of an artist’s very own personal . . . OK, let’s call it his artistic vision. The artist is an Italian named Piero Manzoni, who died in 1963, but not before filling 90 cans with his vision. According to the Telegraph, “The cans were sealed according to industrial standards and then circulated to museums around the world.”
Now if somebody were to send YOU a can of vision, even sealed according to industrial standards, your response would be to report that person to the police. This is why you are a normal human, as opposed to an art professional. The art museums BOUGHT it. The Telegraph states that, in addition to the Tate, both the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Pompidou Museum in Paris have paid actual money for cans of Manzoni’s vision. (Notice that I am tastefully refraining from making a joke involving “Pompidou.”)
Anyway, here’s what I’m picturing. I’m picturing a British citizen, a regular working guy who’s struggling to get by on what money he has left after taxes. He wakes up one morning, grabs his newspaper and goes into the bathroom. While he’s in there, he reads about how art snots have spent tax money — more money than he makes in a year — on this “art.” The guy becomes angry, VERY angry. He’s about to hurl the paper down in fury, but then, suddenly, while sitting there . . .
. . . he has a vision. And as he does, it dawns on him that he has a golden opportunity here, a chance to make, at last, some serious money.
I’m talking, of course, about art forgery.
I'd be curious to know the dimensions of the painting and the dimensions of its replacement.
How dare you question the honesty of the First Lady's deputy press secretary.
You must be some kind of troublemaker...
If you're not careful, you're gonna end up on a 'list'...
:-)
Looks like all they did was turn the image to the left and change the colors.
Why is this not an infringement upon the original?
Hey, I’m a neighbor too!
I sent you and Brown Deer a freepmail, let’s meet up!
Sometimes artists themselves paint the paper they use in the collage.
Don’t know if these pieces of paper were picked up at Office Depot, but I doubt it. whatever, it is unbelievable to think that this is 10 foot tall.
Rather like The Boating Party, which we took time to go see when we were in Washington for President Bush’s 2001 Inauguration.
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