So much going on - my head is about to explode and I’m about to drop from exhaustion; but Art needs to live too.  I had several meetings today, including Meeting with Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg at FutureNow, this evening and having Lunch with Sebastian Wenzel - aka WebAnalyticsBook.  I got to see the Eisenberg’s Art Collection, including a Chagall, but am too tired to go into detail right now.

And tonight I also wrote a post on Webmetricsguru about how Web Analytics Reporting is like adding touches to a painting, inspired by Gary Angel’s most recent post in SemAngel.

And that’s when it hit me (well, I knew it all along) that everything we add to a painting either contributes to it, or takes away from it - it’s either one or the other (consider something that neither adds or takes away from the painting - a negative) - same thing that Gary Angel was saying about Web Analytics Reporting.

And at the end of the day, you like a painting, or you don’t; you like a work of art, or you don’t. 

And here’s a picture by Paul Cezanne, the same one I put on WebMetricsGuru - to illustrate the point that Cezanne considered every brushstroke, individually, as something that added, or took away from his “concept”, or ideation of the painting.

 

 
Cezanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire , 1900, Oil on canvas, 78 x 99 cm (31 x 39 in); Hermitage, St. Petersburg

And now, I’m ready to collapse and get a couple of hours of sleep before tomorrow’s grind.

Been looking at David Galenston’s two books - thinking I’ll purchase the latest book called Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity.   Got interested in David W. Galenson after reading a review of his ideas in the New York Times today.  

In The Art of Pricing Great Art, the writer, Mr. Leonhardt, expresses the following:

“The mysterious part of the current mania lies in figuring out what exactly makes a piece of art worth $30 million instead of, say, $1 million. Not even people who make their living selling art claim to have much of a definition of great art. In fact, they’re proud not to have one. “That’s where the market becomes magical,” Tobias Meyer, Sotheby’s chief auctioneer, told me.”

In my www.webmetricsguru.com blog - I use with metrics to solve a business need (some times I make my own metrics - you have to be creative - you know); a theory explaining value of a work of art would appeal to someone with my values and way of thinking.

There’s a lot of good stuff in the Leonhardt article so I’ll quote from it quite a bit, then comment at the end.

“…..he began collecting data on the sale price of works by Warhol, Jackson Pollock and other American artists, and he discovered a pattern. Most of them produced their most valuable work either very early in their career, like Warhol, or very late, like Pollock. When he expanded his research to European painters, he found the same pattern.

Not only that, but the two groups tended to approach art, and to talk about it, in strikingly different ways. The young geniuses, like Gauguin, Picasso and Van Gogh, were conceptual innovators whose paintings broke sharply from previous work. They typically had a precise goal in mind when they started a piece and didn’t need long to finish it. “Above all, don’t sweat over a painting,” Gauguin once told a friend. “A great sentiment can be rendered immediately.”

The late bloomers, on the other hand, arrived at their innovations gradually, through trial and error, making their major contributions late in life. They painted the same subject again and again, experimenting on the canvas, often reluctant to say that a painting was finished. Consider that Cézanne, who did his most valuable and celebrated work in his 60s, signed few of his paintings.

Mr. Galenson has extended the theory to novelists, poets and beyond, arguing that most creative people fall on one end or the other of the spectrum, and he has earned a fair bit of attention. Malcolm Gladwell, in a speech at Columbia University, described “Old Masters and Young Geniuses,” which Mr. Galenson published this year, as “a really wonderful book.” Wired magazine recently profiled him under the headline, “What Kind of Genius Are You?”

Maybe few artists are exactly one type or the other - I believe there is polarity in just about everything - including creativity.

“……If you look through the prices from the current auction season, or walk through any major museum, you can’t help but notice that Mr. Galenson is onto something. When a still life that Cézanne painted at the age of 56, for instance, fetched $37 million at Sotheby’s last week, art experts cited the rarity of Cézanne still lifes. The next night at Christie’s, another Cézanne still life — one painted when he was 34 — sold for just $1.1 million. “

I don’t find that surprising - Cezanne’s late still lifes are much more “unique” than his earlier work - when he was struggling to find himself and his style.  While Cezanne’s early work is notable - yet he had he not evolved his later style and revolutionized art.  Had Paul Cezanne painted his early still lifes, then died all of a sudden, before doing his later work - we’d probably not know he existed today - he’d never become that well known for his early work.

Now, it turns out that Malcolm Gladwell (the same Malcolm Gladwell who I heard at Webmasterworld Pubcon X in Boston, earlier this year) has come to Galenson’s defense and spoke about Galenson’s theory in February at Columbia.   I read Malcolm Gladwell’s Age Before Beauty all the way through and it’s great!

Read the rest of this entry »

What a show!  Perhaps the best Art Show in a museum that I have seen in the last 10 years, Cézanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant-Garde @ The Metropolitan Museum of Art is the best show in NY right now - if you like Post Impressionist and early 20th Century Art.   This Vollard show took the unusual step of focusing on the Art Dealer, Ambroise Vollard, who must have had uncanny taste as it’s largely due to his patronage that many of the most well known artists at the turn of century survived, rather than the artists he collected. 

And while Vollard was a dealer, after all, and profited handsomely on his early purchases of Cezanne’s work (which are noted in the show notes), it’s also clear that, without Vollard, and the insight he showed in collecting the work of artists largely unknown at the time, modern art would have taken a much different course.   It’s also true that if your going to make a fortune on Art - your better off starting by collecting unknown artists whose works you can buy cheaply and resell at a much higher price….a strategy that Ambroise Vollard used often - and sometimes it did seem like he might have profited more than he needed to.   And even as you have Vollard pegged, he keeps certain works because he really did enjoy them, for his own personal collection - and these he would not sell.

And what a Collection!   This show rivals the Barnes Collection and perhaps surpasses Barnes in breadth.  To be clear, most of the paintings in this show were not owned by Vollard when he died; they were paintings that he owned or showed in his galleries at some point …that’s why they are in the show.

Here’s a link to the Exhibition Catalog and I’ll discuss the paintings that most touched me - but it’s hard since most of the show touched me…. but I’ll focus on the top 10 for me.

The Basket of Apples has long been one of my very favorite Cezanne!  It’s also one I may never have personally stood in front of before.  I used to own an Abrams book on Cezanne that had this painting on the cover - I have admired this Cezanne for over 30 years.    I don’t know how to describe my feelings for Cezanne.  My paining sensibilities are much, much different - yet Cezanne influences me more than any other artist - and for most of my life, has been the strongest influence on my thinking about art and what it is and should be.  Cezanne’s paintings are a recreation of nature - not copying - he constructs.

Boy in a Red Waistcoat - a painting I admired for some time also.

Van Gogh’s portrait of Dr. Félix Rey   has an interesting story - I think it was given to the family of Dr. Ray and used at one time to fix a chicken coop - until Gauguin tracked it down and rescued the painting.  It’s a masterpiece but it’s also easy to see why Van Gogh was even separate from other artists of his time - who thought he was crazy.   Today, we can accept Van Gogh as someone who belongs to that time - but many were unprepared for his directness.   Time is the true leveler …. time reveals all ….. today we know Van Gogh’s greatness - but it might have been hard to accept him in his own time.

Gauguin’s large painting Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? is considered one of his masterpieces - and probably his largest painting.   Gauguin’s success with  Ambroise Vollard was not as much as he’d have hoped - and many of his works did not sell - leaving Gauguin to sell off some of his personal collection of post impressionists just to make ends meet.  For the last years of his life, Vollard had Gauguin on a monthly stipend and took possession of a certain number of his paintings in return for the stipend.

I think Gauguin’s work is more subtle than some of the others in the show - it probably did not immediately catch on and find an audience like Cezanne’s did, for example.   Both Gauguin and Van Gogh did not have much success selling their work via Vollard (and Van Gogh was already dead, but his Sister in Law had most of his works and sent them to Vollard to be shown in two shows the dealer set up in 1895 and 1897 I believe).

There was a version of Van Gogh’s Starry Night over a river - I think this painting was perhaps, the strongest, in the show - I could not break away from it …it was so powerful -

      

Every painting in the show was a masterpiece and yet - this painting - I could not walk away from.  I could not take my eyes off of it - this is Art.  You can not explain it - and certainly I can see why Van Gogh was not accepted in his lifetime - even among his own fellow painters, in many cases - and yet the the pure life force of the river- of the night - is in this painting. 

How else can I explain that which can not be explained?