"Benefits Superviser Sleeping" by Luecuan Freud

In 2008 “Benefits Supervisor Sleeping” by Lucien Freud fetched 33.6 million dollars at Christies Auction House in New York City.  This was a new record for a price paid for a living artist’s work.  It was bought by Roman Abramovich who is ranked the 4th richest man in Russia and the 50th in the world.  He is a self-made man of questionable business practices who today is perhaps most well known for owning the Chelsea Football Team.  In that same year he set another art world record when he bought Francis Bacon’s “Triptych” for 86.3 million dollars, the most ever paid for a post-war work of art.  These purchases were most likely bought to help promote his new gallery that he and a partner opened in Moscow, a very smart marketing move.

Is it the shock value of having a morbidly obese women commanding center stage in the canvas that grabs people’s imagination.  Is it the ’800 pound gorilla in the room’ mentality that rivets our attention and obliterates everything else from our view when it/she is present?  Is it the fact that Lucien Freud is Sigmund’s grandson? Is it that Lucien is no doubt a very painterly and accomplished artist?  I say it is all of the above.  I also say that in this person’s, artist’s, and dealer’s opinion, it is not worth 33.6 million dollars.  It is fitting that Mr. Abramovich also set a record for Francis Bacon who also specialized in the grotesque.

Please take note:  I greatly admire both of these artists, especially Francis Bacon who was an innovator of the highest order, so don’t misconstrue any of my comments as a rebuke of their talent.  What I am exploring in this article is how and when did our ideal of beauty, or perhaps better stated, what we covet visually above all else, become something perverted and grotesque.  Today, for most major collectors and museum curators there is a third factor to their adoration quotient:  The more they don’t understand what the artist is trying to convey the more they covet it.

"After Cézanne" by Lucien Freud

I could rationalize the high price that Mr. Freud’s work commands if he had started a new school of art as Bacon had, or if he had been an originator.  But he wasn’t.  “After Cezanne” which he produced in 1999-2000 is so reminiscent of Philip Pearlstein’s work, who had originated this style of nude genre in the 1960s, that it almost borders on  plagiarism …except for the fact that Pearlstein did and does it so much better.  But unfortunately for Pearlstein, his work is done so well that it almost seems pretty and we must keep in mind that the uglier it is the more money it commands.  “After Cezanne” was bought by the National Gallery of Australia for 7.4 million.

For most artists who like myself would rather paint images of beauty this whole ‘grotesque esthetic’ can put us at a tremendous disadvantage.  For us the world is full of enough carnage and injustice and what we want to provide our viewers is a respite from all that, a place to escape in these dire times.  For this we are punished and relegated to the dustpan of culturati.  This is the inside circle, a very small handful of players who control the art world.  Yes, my friends, there are literally only a dozen people out there who determine the tastes and opinions of the art world and dictate to the rest of us what we are suppose to appreciate and desire as ‘fine art.’  I could name them but I don’t want to burn any bridges.

"2 Models" by Philip Pearlstein

I was recently commissioned to do a four by ten foot painting for a collector of mine who wanted me to do one a scene of Giverny.  After 600 hours I produced “Weeping Willow Serenade.”  In a painting as intricate as this every turn of a leaf can affect the composition.  If a clump of waterlilies become too over powering or attention grabbing it would have the effect of pulling down the whole.  Every stroke and nuance is calculated to sweep the viewers eyes gently across the canvas enjoying each and every detail on its own merit but without distracting it from the appreciation of another.  It’s a tightrope dance that is very difficult to pull off.  And no offense to Lucien, but it takes a whole lot more brain cells to organize this sort of composition than placing the focal point of your painting in the middle of a couch in the middle of a room in the middle of your canvas!  For all this beauty that I created that took infinitely more synapse charges than Lucien sparked I got a measly 33,000 dollars, which is exactly one-tenth of one percent what his work fetched.

"Weeping Willow Serenade" by JB Berkow To see a larger image of this painting go to www.rosettastonefineart.com

I bring this up, not as a complaint, but more as an example of how far we have drifted from what we once cherished as our visual ideal.  Maybe it is a reflection of the times or maybe it’s the exact opposite, and it is the arts that is helping to shape times we now live in.  In the mid 1970s I remember when Truman Capote’s novel, “In Cold Blood,” was made into a movie and shown on television in a prime time slot at nine in the evening.  I was outraged and wrote a letter to the Washington Post editor complaining about this sort of violence being brought into our homes at such an early hour.  How quaint that seems now.  Today we have the most violent programing imaginable being run all day long on television, video games that teach our youth to become impervious to the consequences of violence, and an epidemic of bullying and hate crimes.

Maybe if we watched less violent programing, if the news would cover more stories of good endeavors and not relegate it to once a year around Thanksgiving, if we went to museums that were not afraid to defy the dictates of a dozen jaded art aristocrats and exhibited more esthetically beautiful work, maybe we could get our society back to one that valued compassion towards our fellow human beings.  Maybe we would be more civil to one another.  Maybe there would be less bullying.  Maybe Congress would compromise more and respect the fact that everyone is entitled to their own opinion and that if a person’s opinion doesn’t concur with their own it doesn’t mean that that person is a traitor or will go to hell.

We have to start respecting each other and relearn what it means to be considerate and polite to one another.  This will take reeducating ourselves to a forgotten set of values and sensibilities.   Perhaps one important part of that process is to learn to appreciate beauty all over again.