Famous works of art - and how they got that way

397 Pages·2016·32.34 MB·English

by  Geronimus

Famous Works of Art—And How They
Got That Way
Famous Works of Art—And How They
Got That Way
John B. Nici
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD
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Copyright © 2015 by John B. Nici All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form
or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without
written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-
Publication Data Nici, John B.
Famous works of art—and how they got that way / John Nici.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4422-4954-7 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4422-4955-4 (ebook) 1. Masterpiece,
Artistic—Public opinion. 2. Art and society. I. Title.
N72.5.N53 2015
701'.03—dc23
2015008192
™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard
for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
To Carol Lewine and Bill Clark,
extraordinary scholars, masterful teachers
Contents
Contents
Foreword
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1: The Great Sphinx
Chapter 2: The Tomb of Tutankhamun
Chapter 3: The Parthenon Sculptures
Chapter 4: Apollo Belvedere
Chapter 5: Nike of Samothrace
Chapter 6: The Birth of Venus by Botticelli
Chapter 7: Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci
Chapter 8: Sistine Madonna by Raphael
Chapter 9: The Burial of Count Orgaz by El Greco
Chapter 10: Aristotle Contemplating a Bust of Homer by Rembrandt
Chapter 11: Washington Crossing the Delaware by Emanuel Leutze
Chapter 12: Luncheon on the Grass by Édouard Manet
Chapter 13: The Thinker by Auguste Rodin
Chapter 14: The Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh
Chapter 15: The Scream by Edvard Munch
Chapter 16: American Gothic by Grant Wood
Chapter 17: Migrant Mother by Dorothea Lange
Chapter 18: Guernica by Pablo Picasso
Chapter 19: Campbell’s Soup by Andy Warhol
Chapter 20: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial by Maya Lin
Notes
About the Author
Foreword
WHAT PRICE FAME?
“I
t’s a masterpiece,” “A signature work,” “A classic!” With ever greater
frequency, “masterpieces” seem to come down to us fully validated as such, but
who determines their rarified status? And, more important, how is it determined?
What, in fact, does the designation of a work of art as a masterpiece actually
mean? In contemporary usage, the definition trends toward a work of
exceptional quality, or the most virtuosic example, a magnum opus, by a
particular artist—a great artist, to be more exact.1 By implication, a masterpiece
—be it visual, literary, dramatic, musical—awes its audience with its sheer
genius, originality, and expressive power. In its modern conception, the
designation in effect becomes largely aesthetic, presupposing a lofty cultural
achievement. Yet it was hardly always thus.
The original meaning of “masterpiece” in a visual context was derived from
medieval artistic practice and, more specifically, the obligatory requirements of
guild membership. Having finished his or her training, a young or immigrant
artist could only gain entry into the artists’ guild by finishing and submitting a
test piece, a demonstration work that attested to its maker’s mastery of his or her
chosen craft. In a rather unusual demand of rigor, one especially protectionist
guild of painters and sculptors in late fifteenth-century Cracow is documented as
having required as many as three exemplars, posing different representational
challenges and thus testifying to the artist’s ability to conquer a wide range of
technical problems. Upon the work’s acceptance, the applicant’s status as a
journeyman or apprentice ended and that of full-fledged master began. The proof
was thus in the skill: the most critical requirement separating a successful craft-
masterpiece from a failing effort. On occasion, this very same precondition of
supreme quality and skill was exploited by the guilds not only to elevate the
socioeconomic status of a practitioner from artisan to artist or to protect the
consumer from flawed, inferior products but to use it as an exclusionary tactic,
foreclosing unwanted competition from foreigners within the local artistic
community by means of arbitrary or prohibitively strict assessment. Local
councils and individual patrons at times felt the stifling effects in their own right,
protesting that guild protectionism ran the risk of compromising trade and even
artistic innovation. By the mid-sixteenth century in Florence and the mid-
seventeenth century in Paris, guild control was sharply on the wane; in its place
arose the government-sanctioned academy. The requirement of a qualifying
masterpiece or “diploma work” for entry still persisted into the age of
academies, though in an increasingly more relaxed and pedagogical spirit.
To return to the present day, what one might call the “masterpiece effect” is
inextricably tied to currency, in both senses of the word: hard currency and the
currency of fame. This, too, was not always thus. Do we know the identity of the
makers of the Great Sphinx? Was the Mona Lisa ever delivered to its patron,
Francesco del Giocondo and his wife Lisa Gherardini—in fact, was Lisa’s
likeness even finished? (The answer on both counts is no.) And how many
masters now universally lauded for the masterpieces contained within the present
book’s covers were rejected during their own lifetimes? Many now-revered
names headline this otherwise surprising list, wearing, in their afterlife, their
former repudiation as a badge of honor. In the last two centuries alone, one need
only to recall the names of William Blake, Vincent van Gogh, Édouard Manet,
and Amedeo Modigliani in this regard.
Of the twenty highest known prices ever paid for paintings, all but two of
them (both late canvases by Van Gogh) sold post-1990 at auction or, more
commonly, in private sale, each and every one belongs to the usual late
nineteenth-to twentieth-century artistic suspects. Headlining the list are four Van
Goghs, four Picassos, two Warhols, two Klimts. All twenty works in question
are now valued at an inflation-adjusted price of $100 million or above. Claiming
the top perch is Paul Cézanne’s Card Players of 1892–1893, purchased by the
small, oil-rich state of Qatar in 2011 and valued at over a staggering $250
million. The painting is the most starkly spare of five known versions of the
same subject, the other four housed in distinguished museum collections. More
recently, in 2013, Jeff Koons’s jumbo-sized, stainless steel Balloon Dog from
the artist’s Celebration series, perhaps the best known of Koons’s playful yet
heavily marketed creations, sold at auction for over $58 million, the record for
any living artist. The clothing line H&M, which sponsored Koons’s recent show
at the Whitney Museum, soon launched a handbag emblazoned with the Balloon
Dog, priced at $49.50. Giant images of the glossy canine immediately graced the
façade of the newly opened flagship H&M on Fifth Avenue and Forty-Eighth
Street.
Johannes Vermeer was one old master who may have stood to use some
Koonsian commercial savvy. Held in the highest regard in his lifetime, as he is
today, the great Sphinx of Delft dwelt in relative obscurity until his rediscovery
in the late nineteenth century. Nor was his end a happy one. A year and a half
after Vermeer’s sudden death at the age of forty-three in the winter of 1675,
Catharina Bolnes, his widow and mother of their eleven children (ten of them
still minors at the time), petitioned for bankruptcy. She claimed that her husband
was not only unable to sell any of his own paintings during the “ruinous and
protracted war”—a reference to the French invasion of the Dutch Republic in
1672—but that the painter-dealer was also “left sitting with the paintings of
other masters” for which he had failed to find buyers. Ultimately, Vermeer
plunged into a state of “such decay and decadence,” according to Catharina’s sad
account, and had taken his money troubles “so to heart,” that “he had fallen into
a frenzy, [and] in a day and a half he had gone from being healthy to being
dead.”2
Bankruptcy likewise haunted Rembrandt’s final years. Despite the
Amsterdam master’s financial success not only as an artist but also teacher and
art dealer (like Vermeer to follow), his penchant for lavish living forced him to
declare bankruptcy in 1656. Even Rembrandt’s earnings from a subsequent
auction—his remarkable collection of art and antiquities boasting objects
ranging from ancient sculpture to Far Eastern art and arms and armor—and the
sale of his house proved insufficient to pay off his mounting debts. Despite his
dire financial troubles, it was in his late period that Rembrandt produced some of
his most profoundly moving works, including Bathsheba (Louvre, Paris, 1654);
Jacob Blessing the Sons of Joseph (Staatliche Gemäldegalerie, Kassel, 1656); a
Lear-like self-portrait (Frick Collection, New York, 1658); and The Jewish Bride
(Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, 1665–1669).
Certainly, artists and their publics rarely, if ever, ignored matters of finance
altogether—to think so would be naive. Still, in the case of art’s makers, the
exceptions are often still more revealing than the rule.
According to the Latin writer Pliny the Elder (AD 23–79) in his Natural
History, the legendary painter Zeuxis of Heracleia, upon reaching the height of
his wealth and fame, freely gave away some of his works as he deemed them to
be beyond any price. One such example was a scene of the Infant Hercules
Strangling the Serpent, an image of the most pleasurable terror, which he
presented to the people of Agrigentum. Alas, not a single one of his paintings
now survives, living on only in their ancient written descriptions and praise. Two
millennia after Zeuxis, the genial fifteenth-century Florentine sculptor Donatello
was said by the artist-biographer Giorgio Vasari to have been so unconcerned
with the trappings of fame that he returned to Cosimo de’ Medici the powerful
banker-patron’s lavish gift of a scarlet cloak, cap, and doublet, having worn
them but once . . . in great discomfort, at that. The same Donatello is said
(perhaps apocryphally) to have kept a basket filled with money suspended from
the ceiling of his studio, in case his young assistants were in need of some petty
cash. Little wonder that Vasari constantly referred to the sculptor informally as
“Donato,” the corresponding verb “donato” meaning “that which is freely given”
(from donare, “to give”). Unlike his great hero Donatello, Michelangelo was
nothing if not concerned with fame, honor, and wealth. The “Divine One” rarely
gave his drawings away, but when he did, he gifted them to admired friends and
platonic beloveds. Other sheets he gave away to struggling pupils, thus
generously sharing with them technical secrets of the trade—or at times, one
suspects, providing them with a ready source of income. In his own words, these
meticulously finished presentation drawings were made “for love rather than
duty.” The alleged chestfulls of drawings that remained in Michelangelo’s
possession at the close of his long life, the master requested to be burned upon
his death, so as to hide from prying eyes the labor behind the final tour de force
pictorial solutions—solutions beyond all but the most elevated understanding
and, one might imagine Michelangelo claiming, above all price.
How then did pre-and early modern artists, in particular, not only survive, but
profit from their labors? Why did some works fetch princely sums while others,
of the same scale and subject matter, bring only modest pay? And who decided
the value of an artist’s efforts? Who determines the value today, both in critical
legacy and in price? It certainly bears noting that fame long eluded a number of
artists now widely feted, the subject of numerous publications and exhibitions
and the headliners of lucrative auction sales. Lest one forget, the likes of Piero
della Francesca, Sandro Botticelli, Caravaggio, and Gianlorenzo Bernini all fell
into relative obscurity until well into the nineteenth century, when their
reputations at last were revived. The latter pair of baroque masters was
excoriated in the Age of Enlightenment for what their critics perceived as their
excess and figural deformities, as the exponents of a new classically inspired
aesthetic sought to purge art of playful exuberance, illusionistic devices, high
emotion, and licentious freedom by returning to a simple, noble style of restraint,
rooted in the lessons of antiquity. Darkness also long engulfed El Greco, by and
large until his rediscovery by the French and English romantics (Théophile