… Elmyr de Hory… to fake a Jackson Pollock like this one currently in dispute, according to this morning’s NYT. 
All they would have to do is photograph my desk and fill in the blanks. Now counterfeiting a Vermeer – that’s a challenge!
It wouldn’t take my favorite art forger…
May 29, 2005 - 9:25 am
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I’ve never been able to figure out Pollock at all: all of them look less like a painting than the dropcloth under the easel.
Art forgery or physics knock-off?
My favorite at the mo is Winslow Homer (MoMa’s click-thru, plus one or two or three).
Charlie:
Well that was pretty much his technique. The man perfected spilling paint.
But then I am just some redneck Hoosier so what do I know?
It certainly looks Pollocks.IIRC Picasso when asked if a painting was his would ask if it was any good,if the answer was in the afirmative he would say yes.
Buddy,
Second Winslow Homer. There must be something wrong with our taste, because he sure doesn’t get the attention I think he ought.
The Andy Warhol school led to big-name artists openly just signing other people’s work, what was that guy’s name, David Hockney?, famous for it 20 or so years ago, unconsciously showing just how corrupt the art market had become, self-promoting cynics selling to gone-brainless inherited money. Artists claiming the cutting edge of society were so right back about then, alas. Thank goodness we somehow started waking up. Maybe it so much heroin and gunplay among this salon, that clued us proles that all was not well.
Chuck, maybe because he’s so American, and/or doesn’t fit into any of the European schools very well. There’s just so much he handled well–don’t think anybody ever did such ‘alive’ watercolors. Somehow we have some great painters–Norman Rockwell, the elder Wyeth, Charlie Russell, many others, that get dissed off as ‘mere illustrators’…whatever the hell that means.
Buddy,
When the impressionists ventured outdoors it was a revolution, but Charlie Russell and Winslow Homer lived there. It shows, I can almost smell the sea and the cut grass in the Homer paintings.
PeterUK — What?
Buddy — That’s the Metropolitan Museum. This is MoMA.
But they’re both amazing.
In some dimly remembered Jay Ward cartoon of my childhood, I can still hear a mention of the “famous painter, Jackson Plop”.
Ahh, television at its finest.
My late father was one of De Hory’s assistants when he lived in New Orleans. Apparently, De Hory was a mediocre artist; Dad saw him accidentally wipe the glaze off a cherub’s cheeks on a painting he was trying to restore. But he was a good forger and was also very, very good at chatting up the wealthy folks who invested in art. Be it said that Dad was kind of naive in his early 20s. He didn’t realize what was going on until later.
Where else but here do you run into a story like ahem’s…rich! Chuck, me too. Russell’s night scenes are just too much, for anyone who’s ever seen the like. He was the real deal. Charley, right, MoMa is the modern art, as I keep telling my typist. You know how it is with dictation, heh heh.
Chaelie,
Well it looks like pollocks to me.
No offense but JMW Turner beats the pants off of Homer and the rest of the Impressionists. He created Impressionism before there were Impressionists. He lived from 1775-1851.
Probably my favorite. Another. More.
Yeh, I like him, too. Good stuff…I’d never seen those…they’re much more impressionistic than his more famous more representationals. Thanks for the pointer, good site, too!
One of Turner’s best: Rain, Steam, and Speed.
Well, I like it all. Though Pollock is certainly not one of my favorites. I love Mondrian and have an especial love for anything by Paul Klee and also the mobiles of Calder.
On the more representational end I’m partial to landscapes and never tire of looking at Bierstadt or any from the Hudson River School.
Syl, If you like Hudson River School, I’m sure you saw “Last of the Mohicans”…there’s an even better evocation of the north woods wilderness in the movie “Black Robe”. Klee and Calder, ditto, playfulness, we lose it so easily.
Couple of little facts about Turner,He had himself strapped to the mast of a ship in a gale so he could depict it.That his sunsets were courtesy of Krakatoa which threw so much dust that it coloured the sky around the world.
My mother once told me a story about attending some art class; the prof. randomly put up slides of Pollock and his imitators and, without letting away which was which, he asked the class which ones they liked. Pollock scored significantly higher.
Well, Truepeers, a Philistine could say something about a low baseline…but I’m not anti-Pollock. Abstract art really has a great problem in that it’s essentially Romantic (bound to it’s creator, rather than stand-alone on-merit), while trying to be the very opposite. IOW, if Pollock had been a Dilbert, would his art be appreciated? Or was his lifestyle/persona–like Picasso’s– intrinsically part of the appeal of his made objects? Take a look at this great Gregory Wolfe essay on just that sort of question, currently up on NRO.
Yeah, that’s a good essay Buddy. I agree that we are moving into an era where the romantic idea of the artist will wither away and we will return to notions of craftsmanship.
Obviously Pollock’s lifestyle/persona was part of his appeal, but that’s not to say that all paint splatterers are equal in their splattering merits. The romantic lives a lie about the importance and uniqueness of his individuality as such, but he does so in an attempt to resist the forces of a market society that seem to threaten to reduce him to some automaton. And by resisting the market he may indeed create a real value in the market, the work that for a moment upholds the promise of a distinctiveness that is not like all the others. So I am impressed by my mother’s story, not that i spend my time studying Pollocks or such.
The reason I think we will return to an idea of craftsmanship is that the era of the artist making, or being the focus of, fundamental discoveries about humanity seems to have played itself out. Whatever the limits of romanticism, modernism, postmodernism, there is nonetheless something essential that they taught us about our humanity. But it seems today that the esthetic experiment is playing itself out, at least in some disciplines (though some, like film, remain strong). There was a time when great thinkers aspired to write novels – Chesterton, Camus, dare I say Sartre – but today the most ambitious, it seems to me, limit themselves, like bloggers, to commentary, and maybe poetry, where the literary cutting edge in human self-understanding seems to be.
The reason for this is ethical. The romantic artist makes a great claim on the public attention – unlike the craftsman – for his purported discovery of some new and fundamental aspect of humanity in history. Not only does this attract the possibility of more resentment than it can handle, it relies on certain sacrificial gestures which we can no longer take as seriously as the artiste of old would like us to (because the seriousness of national high culture is tied, historically, to the great violence of the 20thC). A work of art is defined in large part by the means of its closure, while the intellectual commentary which is essentially ethical and not esthetic, is part of a ongoing conversation which we can all join and take up in defining what our times say about the unfolding possibilities inherent in human origins.
The romantic attracts more resentment today than he recycles back into the market system. SO we turn increasingly towards the craftsman who has a less problematic relationship to the marketplace. We value the work ethic behind his learned skill and because we can no longer value the artiste’s pretension to unique individuality unless it is in a field where no one performance excludes the possibility of another’s. Body modification is exemplary of this. Salieri would like our time.
All of this is to point out why I disagree with this statement of WOlfe’s:
“The moment that art is made subservient to some ethical or political purpose, it ceases to be art and becomes propaganda. Art seems to require an inviolable freedom to seek the good of the artifact, without either overt or covert messages being forced into it. And history demonstrates that it is simply a statement of fact (to paraphrase Aquinas) that rectitude of the appetites is not a prerequisite for the ability to make beautiful objects. Thus our poisoner with his exquisite prose. Or Picasso brutalizing the women in his life. Or the legion of artists and scientists who drank or drugged themselves to death.”
I think, rather, that art is always ethical and political (though it may not be subservient to established political purposes – his meaning here is unclear), and it is precisely the ethical limits of romanticism that are the reason for our present return to craftsmanship.
Oy. Buddy, I disagree. I read the NRO piece and was simply amused by it. Virtue? Pfeh.
It’s the reaction to the artwork that gives rise to all these theories. Artists themselves can be just as deluded concerning their own motives and methods.
We all know that correlation is not causation, yet so easily conflate the artist with the art.
If I hadn’t looked in on this thread so late at night, hadn’t entered my daily Dada period, I’d probably find something to disagree with the bof a yez. But, Truepeers is saying that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and Syl is saying that only how it smokes matters. Maybe old Gregory Wolfe WAS flying a little high there, with the transcendentalism and ‘subcreation’ loftiness. That can get pretty dark, thinking you ought to follow art that you like, all the way into the artist’s head. Maybe ‘the play’s the thing’ as the Bard said.