ARTISTS WHO DIDN'TMAKE ALIVING
zi...@interport.net
Dear posters to this group:
Sometimes I feel as though I have never posted anything. Did you read
my list, just off the top of my head of, artists now recognized as
great who did not make a living? You sure don't show that you did.
Here is an exact quote [in translation]. Camille Corot [world famous
and just subject of an exhibition which traveled from the Louvre to
Ottawa, the Canadian National Museum to the Metropolitan Museum of
Art] was 55 years old when he sold his first painting. He said
unhappily "I had a complete collection!"
Now, was he a professional until that time or an amateur?
For many years the artists of the world preferred as his finest works,
the paintings of his Italian period [when he was in his twenties]
between 1828 and 32. Was he a professional then? They are very great
paintings.
If he had not been a very rich young man, would he have been deserving
of government support? Or was he a Sunday painter who should have
been stopped from painting and returned to his father's clothing
store?
There are dozens and dozens of cases like that. So will you all please
recognize that the idea that art makes money if it is good has not
been true in modern times. Beginning at least with 1800. Some art that
is good since then has made money and some has not. Here is one more
anecdote.
J.B.S. Chardin the EIGHTEENTH CENTURY FRENCH PAINTER was very much
respected by his contemporary colleagues in the Academy. But he was
not a money maker. His paintings sold poorly. So they gave him the job
of being responsible for the hanging of the Academy shows in their
gallery. For this he got a salary and he got an Apartment upstairs to
live in without fee. His friend, the fashionable portrait painter and
pastelist, Quentin de Latour once asked him what his price was on a
particularly magnificent still life [and a large one, too]. Chardin
answered, 50 Louis. de Latour replied, why I get that for a pastel
face, and without even any hair or a background!
Quentin de Latour was a fine artist, but he is not remembered as a
very great one. Chardin is. Chardin's first commissions from the
crown [a series of over mantel oversize still-lifes] did not come
until he was quite old. But since the Academie was an offical organ of
the government, he had the equivalent of an offical NEA grant all his
life. And he needed it too.
And he was not a professional? And he should have been considered a
Sunday painter. By comparison all of you and me too, we are all Sunday
painters. So what the H... are you talking about?
Are any of you making huge quantities of money painting pictures -on
the level of let us say $500,000 a year? Well if you aren't by your
standards of price and sales, you are all a bunch of lousy artists.
I know such people. I don't think they are so great. And I think that
many,many artists who don't make that kind of money whether somewhat
successful or not, are just fine. From Chardin and Corot before he got
to be 55 on up and down.
My old teacher Richard Offner [an art historian I am afraid] used to
rail and rave and rant against Margaritone d'Arezzo, who got all the
good commissions which, Offner thought, should have gone to Cimabue!
Look up Margaritone in a history book [you will have to look hard,
maybe Vaval'a has him in La Crocifisso Toscano del Trecento. He is a
truly terrible thirteenth century painter, but he was preferred by
many of the powerful church officials. And now, because of this, we
have lost the last important Cimabue fresco cycle, that in San
Francesco in Assisi-Earthquakes have destroyed it. He never got enough
commissions so that no others of importance have come down to us!
Why is it so comforting to believe that all great artists make lots
and lots of money? It isn't true, you know.
By the way these were, none of them bad artists. They have had the
respect of other artists both in their own day and since then. Of
course there is bad art. I can even go to a museum like the Met and
point to it on the walls in every century. They also have great
paintings in the Met. Those are worthy of enjoyment and study.
Gabriel
Pascale Camus-Walter
I jump into the forum, and excuse me if I don't
know the background of the question, but my opinion is:
The time of the art and the time of economy are quite different.
How you lived (or survived) is quite unimportant regard to your work as
an artist, and nobody will never ask for that question when
looking at a picture. More: there is no visible difference between
a great work of art produced by a rich artist and a great work of art
produced by a miserable one.
The economy, which is an important question for the greatest majority
of our contemporaries, takes place in a very short range of time, the
dues fall all months or semesters, etc.. which also determines the
short-term views of our societies who wants to solve the problems only
in these very short lapses of time. But some phenomena HAVE to be
treatred in other ranges of time, especially everything which concerns
ecology, or human problems crossing the generations (education, art,
etc..).
Nothing can be added or deducted from the real value of a work of art by
the fact that it is sold at an expensive price or cheap, or not solded
at all.
Why? It's because it's real value (and art has an enormous value
because, dislike money, it's a cross-time and universal value) is given
by the addition of new elements of perception, which permits to convey
some unknown parts of the elemental world.Through the translation in
plastical elements by the artists, through this media, people can now
put words on it and integrate theses elements in the human world.
But who can really discern this and pay it to the right price?
This explains why it exists a great discrepancy between the value of the
market and the absolute value of an artwork.
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Pascale Camus-Walter/Strasbourg/France
¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨
Vous prendrez bien un peu de sucre dans votre artKfé?
http://www.imaginet.fr/~camwal/
artKfé: Un site consacré à l'art avec le musée virtuel de Malévitch sur
l'art moderne "De Cézanne au suprématisme", des poèmes sur écrans en
hommage à Juarroz et un passeport artistique pour faire le tour du
monde.
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William De Raymond
Thanks for the post.
--
William DeRaymond/Artist
'The abstract nature of reality is the source of beauty.'