I don't hold that a painting must be beautiful to be great. But I also think that great paintings are far more often beautiful than not. Moreover, I find it difficult to think that really ugly paintings are great ones.
There are always a few exceptions, but not the ones of women by Pablo Picasso and Willem de Kooning featured here. The art world seems to disagree with me because the Picassos auctioned for many tens of millions of dollars, and the de Koonings aren't worth chicken feed either.
First, two Picasso paintings -- the first, a portrait of one woman, the second showing women. Then two de Koonings in the same sequence.
An auction sale report is here.
A report for this painting of a bordello is here.
As the numeral implies, de Kooning painted a series dealing with women.
Picasso's paintings are more structured than de Kooning's, the Algiers being almost cheerful.
Borderline ugly, I'd call it. The Dora Maar is just plain awful so far as I'm concerned, though I'll credit Picasso for doing a reasonably good job on the kitten. I find the de Koonings simply horrible. His apologists would praise the emotion and artistic action seen in his brushwork. A lot of emotion does not guarantee a painting's greatness. Here, ugliness rules.
3 comments:
Amen.
The Women of Algiers is not ugly to me because it is so much about colors and shapes. It maybe expresses the chaos and cacophony of a street market or something similar. But then there is the differently rendered woman on the left, looking like a Queen in a deck of playing cards. But the other one and the de Kooning seem like they are expressing a love/hate attitude to women, maybe a sort of Freudian unconscious mother/women based deep seated resentment of the sex the artist is also sexually attracted to. Or something.
There is a story that once Picasso was walking along a back alley in the suburbs of Paris when he was set upon by a thug, who beat him black and blue. Eventually, smashed up and bloodied, Picasso picked himself up and staggered to the nearest police station to report the incident. The police captain asked Picasso to describe his assailant. Picasso said, “I am an artist. I shall draw him for you.” So, provided with various coloured pens and a sheet of paper, he set about drawing the thug. And ever since, the police in Paris have been on the lookout for a man with both eyes on one side of his box-shaped head, with a grotesquely deformed midriff, an odd number of fingers on his mishapen hands, legs of unequal length and a complexion of purples, yellows and greens. The thug has never been apprehended, and this file remains open…
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