What would you pay for Pablo Picasso’s palette?
Seventy thousand dollars or so? Someone shelled that out back in 2020.
I looked that fact up because of this comment by “Oligonicella”:
I have a long running joke of a habit as I paint. I clean my palette board off at the end of each session because I use a mix that dries fairly rapidly. I do this by scraping with a palette knife and then smearing it on a smaller canvas.
After repeated sessions at the real painting it starts looking like post modern art, which is exactly the mockery I’m looking for.
I’ve sold two – “Old Man’s Lament” and “The Detritus of Life”.
Coming summer I’ve another portrait lined up. Maybe scrape off “Clinging to Existence”. Heh.
No offense to Oligonicella, but I doubt the going rate was $70K. The person who did pay that for the used Picasso palette was buying, not a work of art, but a sort of talisman, a relic of the Great Artist. I recall reading somewhere that Picasso used to say any time he signed his name to anything, even a napkin, people could sell it for big bucks. It must be very odd to have that degree of fame in one’s own lifetime.
Picasso’s star has somewhat fallen compared to in his heyday. He’s unwoke, of course, and unusually prolific and so his works aren’t rare. But don’t try to buy a painting of his for bargain prices. Don’t even try to buy a signature of his for a pittance. It’ll set you back about two thousand dollars.
I read a story about Salvador Dali once, that he frequently liked to dine out with large parties of friends, and then he would happily pay for the meal with a check that he would sign with a flourish – secure in the knowledge that he was famous enough to have good odds that it would never be cashed by the restaurateur, who would view it as a keepsake.
Oligonicella: That’s a gas. If you’ve been able to sell these palette-cleaners, I hope you’ve found something appropriately absurd to spend the money on!
I’m one of those people who likes art representational, even if stylized. I wouldn’t, myself, pay for one of Picasso’s paintings, much less his palette. Of course, I couldn’t afford to anyhow, so my defiance means nothing. 🙂
Kate:
Actually, prior to his cubist period, some of Picasso’s art was quite representational. For example, in his Blue Period and Rose Period. You may still not like it, of course.
Picasso’s work is simply a reflection of modern ‘tastes’ and the perfect condemnation of them. Representational art simply couldn’t advance any further, so it was necessary to renounce what came before to make way for it’s opposite, empty meaningless scratching’s claimed to offer ‘new’ insights.
Geoffrey Britain:
I’m not a huge Picasso fan, but I like some of his stuff, and I beg to differ on the “empty meaningless scratchings” characterization, at least applied to his art. His cubism (and that of Braque, some of whose work I like a lot) was not empty and meaningless. It is not completely abstract, either. For the most part (although not always in the Cubist period) you can see quite well what he is painting. Many later artists, and art today, I really don’t like. And if you’re saying that Picasso was transitional to that later art, I’d agree. But his own work is not empty.
Re: Picasso
No, he was a master, even genius, artist. As neo mentions, he was an accomplished realist painter as a young man before cubism and all that.
I once had a book of his early, realist paintings and one can see he was obviously a prodigy.
He wasn’t a fool either in his later modern work. I admire his modern work too. BTW he was a workaholic. He painted everyday, most of the day.
True, he was not a nice man and he was a communist.
My favorite Picasso story:
_______________________________
Somebody was saying to Picasso that he ought to make pictures of things the way they are — objective pictures. He mumbled he wasn’t quite sure what that would be. The person who was bullying him produced a photograph of his wife from his wallet and said, “There, you see, that is a picture of how she really is.” Picasso looked at [the photo] and said, “She is rather small, isn’t she? And flat?”
–Gregory Bateson
neo:
No offense to Oligonicella, but I doubt the going rate was $70K.
Yeah, no, no offense taken at all. I’m pleased it amused you.
Since my scrape canvases accumulated globs and even incorporated Hizi’s (dog) ambient hair they got “full” after a while. It was a joke to me but I had two in the back room when a crafts fair popped up.
I named them “Old Man’s Lament” and “The Detritus of Life” because so much of the harsh modern art is angst labeled and it seemed funny to sit an obviously old man between the two pieces of crap and chat with people. See if any college art students commented. Didn’t see any. .
I didn’t really care one way or another if I sold them so I slapped $50 on each and som-bitch, they sold. Some woman, forty-ish and a nondescript guy.
Every once in a while I’ll fantasize they had them framed and will talk to guests about the uncertainty and fear of aging inherent in the artist’s strokes. Not brush strokes, but a knife because the artist was raging against the oncoming darkness.
Or something.
Oligonicella:
Fifty ain’t bad. Conceptual art.
But you know…
As an amateur photographer I love to take pictures of derelict painted walls. I look to find the right place to stand, from the right angle, so a composition clicks.
It’s not Ansel Adams at Yosemite. It’s usually a mild aesthetic effect. But something pops and that’s all I’m going for.
I question whether Oligonicella’s scrape paintings are all equally meaningless. Perhaps some are more equal than others.
Oh, I’m sure one can find meanings buried in them. “Detritus” has a rainy dimly lit street feel if you view it sideways… from a decent distance. And squint.
People are good at projecting their imaginings and hallucinations so if someone wants to see things, great for them.
I did too, recall. I saw a joke. 🙂
***
Bwahahaha! I just thought of something. The next one won’t be “Clinging to Existence”. I’ll use “Greetings From the Far Side of the Styx”.
Two jokes in one.
Oh, I’m sure one can find meanings buried in them.
No, not meanings, but aesthetic impact.
Consider Mondrian. Straight lines. Rectangles. Primary colors. Seemingly random. But damn…
Or, closer to your scrape paintings:
Jackson Pollock and his drip paintings.
Damn.
We then part ways on our aesthetics. 🙂
Must we?
Can you not find some satisfying aesthetic to some abstract art?
Jackson Pollock wasn’t trying to compete with Leonardo Da Vinci. Yet some people, including moi, find Pollock’s paintings powerful.
Oligonicella; huxley:
Many people find totally abstract art a bridge too far. However, with Pollock, I’ve noticed it helps to see the painting in person – the size of the painting and the thickness and intricacy of the paint.
Oligonicella: did you spend your $50 gains, or frame them?
After all, the signature of the applicable Sec. of the Treasury had to have some additional market value greater than $50 🙂
I never bought a Picasso but I have painted one.
When I was in high school, our local paper (for some now forgotten reason) printed a full-color photo of some Picasso piece that was in the news (I have forgotten it’s name in the ensuing 50+ years).
My mother really liked it.
We (IOW, my dad) had recently put a master bedroom addition on the back of our post-WWII demobbed-veterans tract home, and had extended the roof to make a covered patio as well.
That created a large blank wall on the patio side.
Mom gridded the newspaper photo and the wall, and we proceeded to paint-by-number the whole thing.
Our finished work then became a story in the paper.
Recursion in real-life is kind of surreal.
I tried to find the story in my hometown paper’s archives, and couldn’t, but I did find this little note of nostalgia from the fall in which I started college.
“A unique system of serving customers in their cars will be the main feature of the Burger Train Drive-in, which opens after a A&W Root Beer drive-in at that location was destroyed by the April 17 tornado. A small enclosed train will deliver orders to the cars.”
I worked there the next summer, and vowed never to be a car-hop again.
The trains were pretty cool, though.
Thanks, Neo, for the early Picasso links. The Blue Period shows signs of the depressive and distorted nature of his Cubist paintings, and I didn’t like it; but there is a perfectly lovely “Maternité” in the Rose Period.
Picasso made a “present” to the City of Chicago: a huge hideous sculpture which is now on the plaza outside City Hall. The jury is still out re whether or not he intended it as an F-you to the city.
Nothing. He was a bad man whose art, after a certain point, consisted of grotesques.
Many people find totally abstract art a bridge too far. However, with Pollock, I’ve noticed it helps to see the painting in person – the size of the painting and the thickness and intricacy of the paint.
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I’ve seen the paintings in person. They belong in woodchippers.
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One of the client populations which should be completely deprived of public money at all levels is the arts fraternity. If we had conscientious college boards, many and perhaps most studio art programs would be shut down and their faculty put out on the curb.
I probably have told this story before, but, if so, not lately.
Back in the 1990s Discovery magazine was losing its reliability as a science magazine and becoming a “popular science fad” magazine.
They had a mag with a cover piece titled, “Animal Artists”.
Apparently they found about a half dozen “talented animals” who created modern “works of art”, or so it was claimed. I don’t recall too much of it — one was an elephant, one was an ape of some kind, and there was probably another, different ape. I forget what the others were, offhand.
The piece culminated when they took the pieces “created” by the animals and, without explaining their source of origination, requested an analysis from a number of art appraisers/experts.
For the most part, they were relatively positive.
The author of the piece took this to make the argument that, perhaps, the animals had talent.
It never seemed to occur to them — not for a moment — that it was, perhaps, much more a commentary on the quality of Modern Art than that it had anything to do with the “artistic talent” of animals…
LMAO. SMH.
I will also note. My late mother was doing estate appraisals in the 90s. Her primary client was usually attorneys wanting to get valuations for insurance purposes, and she was known for being honest and fairly reliable in the local (Palm Beach FL area) legal community.
She would sometimes be called upon to get an appraisal value for an art piece. She did not tend to make the appraisal for something like that, but had art appraisers who she relied upon for the job, who she then gave a fee to, and included their appraisal in her summary for the estate.
She noted that one of the more common responses/complaints was the estate owner going, “Oh, no, that can’t be right. I paid twice that for that piece.” Again, LMAO.
BTW, I am not a particular fan of anything unrepresentational (Dali is more of a surrealist, so… he’s OK, though my own favorite piece of his is actually not surrealist and is, in fact, about as representational as it gets… I believe it is titled “Unfinished Self Portrait”. Can’t find it despite searches, because Copyright, and you know, any image of Dali’s is worth thousands to anyone who displays it… y’know. :-/
Essentially, it was available in various mall art places in the 80s, as a print, and clearly hasn’t made enough money, yet…. Plus, sometime in the last 5-odd years, every single search engine on the planet has become largely useless.
It’s pretty much a picture of dali, looking across his canvas at a mirror, and he’s painted pretty much the entire thing except the face in the canvas. And it’s just… odd. There’s something akilter in it, and it’s not clear what, it just makes part of you go… “wait, what?” and you don’t even know what it is you’re responding to. Took me multiple stops at that art shop over a while at that mall.
Finally, I figured it out — the part “unfinished” was the part that you would think would have been done first, not last. 😀
Anyway, that’s my favorite Dali, not his melty stuff.
My own innate preferences tend to run to the representational. The documentary film “Tim’s Vermeer” is a fascinating one, to me.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3089388/
It is, literally, about trying to figure out exactly how it is that Vermeer did his amazingly photographic art in an era long before cameras. Right down to the way the colors interact.
But I have to say — Ed Harris’s passion piece, a biography, about Jackson Pollock, is also an interesting enough film. One of the key things Harris did manage with it is to actually get all the different pieces from Pollock’s breakout 40s show into one place, and he has the camera walk around and through them, as though you are, personally, in the gallery at the time.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0183659
And I will ack, in this scene, if no other, you do get the feel for what Pollock was about, and how his creations are not just merely “paint spatters”, but more than that. I came away appreciating that some elements of non-representational art are worthy of respect, even if they have limited appeal and, I personally find, limited value.
I recommend both these films are worth checking out, both offer interesting views into the art world — Vermeer did some amazing stuff in his time, and, yes, Pollock was not trivial, either.
Note that I did see both in the theater — not sure how much that can affect the experience, if you’ve got a small viewing setup. They both do work well “writ large”, because… visual art, right?
Art Deco:
I would not expect that you would appreciate a Pollock even in person. Nor would a great many people. It’s not my cup of tea either. But for me, seeing them in person makes me understand better the work that went into them and why some people might think highly of them.
R2L:
Oligonicella: did you spend your $50 gains, or frame them?
Other art supplies. And probably lunch.
huxley:
Can you not find some satisfying aesthetic to some abstract art??
Nope. To me, abstract art is essentially what I see as practice pieces. They ring no chimes for me.
Must we?
We must. 🙂
AesopFan:
I never bought a Picasso but I have painted one.
Not even when he was cranking out lithos like an old-school mimeograph and selling them at cut rates?
Many times I’ve heard the theory that modern art is actually a money laundering scheme.
Makes more sense than most ‘modern’ art!
And whatever became of the soi disant ‘Salvator Mundi’ by Da Vinci that sold for half a billion and hasn’t been seen since?
Kinda makes you wonder…
@ Molly Brown > “Many times I’ve heard the theory that modern art is actually a money laundering scheme.”
Some of it certainly is.
https://redstate.com/bonchie/2024/01/09/new-hunter-bidens-art-dealer-testifies-reveals-white-house-scheme-to-protect-the-presidents-son-n2168498
No way the Bidens are unique here.
I also doubt that only modern art is involved in being the pretext for transferring large sums of money from Person A to Person B without raising red flags.
However, that’s not the same as saying some (or any) of the famous (actual) artists themselves were/are in on the laundering, just that their work lends itself to that kind of scam.