Investing in art.

It is said that one of the best investments in a time of economic uncertainty is art. It is, and it requires knowledge, taste, courage and a certain approach.

First, it is strange to think of buying art in order to make money from it. If the work does not appeal to your soul, it has no value; and if it does, you would not want to sell it.

Let us look at a few of the most successful investors of the 20th century, Allan Funt, Luis Ferré, and Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Frederic Lord Leighton. Flaming June.

In 1963, Luis A. Ferré was buying art for the Museo de Arte in Ponce in Puerto Rico, which he had founded. On a stop in a gallery in Amsterdam, he found Flaming June abandoned in a corner. The owner said no one was interested in the painting because it was considered too old-fashioned for the time. But he added that if Ferré was interested in it, that he could have it for $10,000. A year or two before, on auction, it failed to sell for today’s equivalent of $840. Today it is (literally) priceless.

Andrew Lloyd-Webber has played the piano and sung songs with Mr Ferre’s art dealer, Carlos Conde. The composer  quoted as saying “I write music to buy art”, even offered Pounds 6 million for Flaming June in 1996. His offer wasn’t the only one, but they were all turned down. A story has it that he was offered a blank cheque by one keen buyer, and solemnly tore it up.

The secret is this. When Ferré saw the painting, he fell in love with it. His son relates that he had sleepless nights until his payment went through.

So, sadly, did Andrew Lloyd Webber. That same year of 1963, when he was 15, Webber first saw Flaming June in a Polish framing shop. The price was £50, which the youngster did not have.

Allan Funt’s story is similar. In 1965 the creator of Candid Camera was in London looking for a picture for his New York apartment. An art dealer asked Funt if he wanted to see a “picture by the worst painter who ever lived,” and the curious Funt, who held a B.A. in Fine Arts from Cornell University, was introduced to his first Lawrence Alma-Tadema, which he purchased on the spot.

The way I heard it, the price was £21, and when Funt queried this, the dealer told him that this was the price of the frame. Apparently at the time students at the London art schools enjoyed painting Pop Art images over these big frames (created by Alma Tadema himself). He asked the dealer to send him any works by the artist at an agreed price and by 1973 he owned 35 Alma Tademas. Sadly for this love story, he lost them all when his accountant robbed him in the eighties.

The most recent price for an Alma Tadema was $35,922,500 (2010).

The point is this. Buy only what you love. In fact buy that which you would never sell. That way you are making a brilliant investment for your children and your grand-children.

Red flag over Montmartre

The gardens of Montmartre, by Vincent van Gogh. 1886

During the 19th Century, when Montmartre resonated to the music of Offenbach and bathed in the colors of the Impressionists, it was not part of Paris. Montmartre was a separate municipality, a small village of vegetable gardens and windmills, some working, and some converted to places of entertainment.

When van Gogh painted this picture of Montmartre, fifteen years had passed since the glory and the tragedy and the infamy the village experienced in 1871.

In March 1871, with the Prussian armies still in France, the citizens of Paris rose up against the invaders. The National Guard defected from the surrendered French army and ran Paris as the Central Committee. The French Government, now based in Versailles, sent troops into Paris to disarm the citizens. This army refused to follow their orders and killed their own generals. The citizens of Paris elected a new municipal council, consisting of workers and intellectuals, and the Central Committee of the National Guard resigned.

From this point Paris was besieged and bombarded by the French Army, shooting captured communards. At the end of May the Versailles army entered Paris by the lightly protected Northern flank (then still held by Prussian forces).

The resistance was fierce and heroic, but futile. In the end the commander ordered a retreat to the hills of Montmartre, including a detachment of twenty-five women. They were soon overwhelmed  and the forces from Versailles spent 8 days massacring as many as 30 000 civilians.

Vegetable Garden, Montmartre. Van Gogh. 1887

Hardly recognizable today, this was the peaceful village of gardens, windmills, dancers, and Impressionists, but it is a story seldom told. Joy returned, joy flowing from beauty, but we need to recognize the courage and the strength of a generation of dreamers.

Around the time that van Gogh and Renoir were living in Montmartre, the French government began building work the Sacre Coeur at the top of the hill, apparently to atone for the massacre of fifteen years earlier, but from these paintings we are clearly still in a rural setting. The Moulin Rouge, made so famous by Toulouse Lautrec, only opened in 1898, and in the Boulevard de Clichy. All that it has in common with the windmills of Montmartre is its name.

My fantasy is stimulated by the real cancan, the real dancers, and the real windmill-nightclubs. These are the subject of my screenplay, Quadrille.

Edward Steichen. Photographer. Painter.

One of the greatest photographers, and maybe the greatest photographer who ever lived, was Edward Steichen.

Steichen embraced the concept of accident and mistake as essential to the creation of beauty. He flirted with disaster. At one time he was comissioned to do a series of photographs of Rodin and his work. Here are the risks he took: He decided to photograph Rodinamong his plaster casts, he decided to shoot his pictures with available light from the windows of Rodin’s studio, he took the photographs at night by moonlight; he manipulated the plates during development; he risked not having another moonlit night to repeat his session.

The results, as I would expect, were magnificent.

But Steichen set out to be a painter, not a photographer. Here is one of his best paintings:

Steichen Self Portrait, 1901. Oil.

So why do we hardly ever see a painting by this exceptionally good painter?

Steichen followed the modern trends in his photography and his art. As fashion dictated, he dropped his romantic atmospheric approach in favour of geometrical abstractions. Then one day he just stopped painting and burned all the paintings in his studio. The story goes that he saw that his gardener copied one of his paintings with such skill and ease that he felt that painting was nonsense. By contrast his self-portrait could be copied by none but the most skilled of craftsmen.

In this early painting as in his early photographs, Steichen aims for a kind of a blurry, melting, mistiness… darks merging into darks, and lights merging into light. the photographers of the time called this “pictorial photography”, and it included such techniques as blurring his lenses with petroleum jelly and manipulating his negatives and prints in the darkroom.

Sadly, as cameras got better, photography became more mundane and matter-of-fact.

We seek out and we love the mystery in life, the mists, the shadows, the smoke, the rain. It is sad that in photography this was lost as equipment improved, but in painting, the artist’s vision remains, as ever, blurred and darkened, as if seen through tears.

Cornelius van Gogh, Boer Kommando.

A landscape by Frans Oerder

Vincent van Gogh had a younger brother, Cor.

Cornelius van Gogh moved to the Transvaal Republic in 1890 to work on the railway from Pretoria to Mozambique. When The Boer war broke out he joined as an ambulance driver. Cor was captured by the British, he fell ill and died in a field hospital in Brandfort in 1900. His grave is unmarked.

Serving in the Boer forces with him was one of Holland’s best artists. Frans Oerder came to the Transvaal in 1890, and worked on the same railway line as Cor van Gogh. In 1899 he joined the Boer forces as official war artist, and today many of his drawings and paintings are in South African museums.

After the war Oerder went back to Holland where he became one of the world’s most famous still life artists. He returned to South Africa until his death in 1944.

I have long had a fantasy of locating Cor van Gogh’s house in South Africa, and doing a careful search of it, attics and cellars. Imagine finding a painting by his brother Vincent! Or even a drawing, or a letter… But this is something that can only be done by many people, particularly the ones living in some of these old railway houses. If anybody should find such a treasure, please let me know!

Vincent died in 1890, the same year that Cor van Gogh and Frans Oerder moved to South Africa. Vincent was a great letter-writer, and his older brother Theo kept most of the ones he received. It seems to me more than just likely that he also wrote to Cornelius.

So get your Indiana Jones hats and start dusting off those old shoeboxes full of letters.

2010 in review

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads This blog is doing awesome!.

Crunchy numbers

The Leaning Tower of Pisa has 296 steps to reach the top. This blog was viewed about 1,200 times in 2010. If those were steps, it would have climbed the Leaning Tower of Pisa 4 times

 

In 2010, there were 4 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 23 posts. There were 7 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 4mb.

The busiest day of the year was March 2nd with 73 views. The most popular post that day was The sad story of Lady Jane Grey.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were artistvision.org, rynoswartdesign.createsend.com, mail.yahoo.com, en.wordpress.com, and student-loan-consilidation.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for ryno swart, ryno swart artist, paul delaroche, heuningbekkie, and ryno swart art.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

The sad story of Lady Jane Grey March 2010

2

About Ryno Swart December 2008

3

A damned decent wage. January 2010

4

Looking. February 2010

Heuningbekkie January 2009
1 comment

Ideal v. real

Do you idealise?

Inside every artist, there is an inner conflict between the ideal and the real. We either paint the ideal woman or this specific woman; the ideal horse or this specific horse; the ideal setting or this specific setting.

Any picture done from imagination is necessarily “ideal”, so it is essentially when we work from life, that the question of realism or idealisation arises. The artist paints a model in Victorian dress, relaxing in a chair. Right next to her, balanced on a box, is an electrical heater. Do you paint the heater, or ignore it?

As an artist, I am concerned, even obsessed with two things, beauty and truth. Also I love working from life, as much as I do working from imagination. The question, as always, is what is truth? In the case of our Victorian model, there are two truths, documentary truth and narrative truth. When we tell a story, nobody is concerned with factual truth, rather, we look for a consistency, an inner and inescapable logic with a set of laws as inviolable as nature’s.

I love to paint a scene such as this both ways. In the one case the painting might be titled “the model”, and in the other, “reverie”. Both are equally valid, equally true.

Something interesting happened in antiquity. Greek art was always ideal. The concept was explored by Plato, who believed that apart from any real horse, there is also an ideal horse. This ideal horse is not the “perfect” horse, rather, it is the concept of horseness, donkeyness, nagness, and this is the way the Greek artist approached his subject, often not a man, but a god (Apollo), not a woman, but a goddess (Venus). By Roman times the world had become materialistic, and we see sculptures, not of gods, but of men, Ceasars, and senators. Ugly, ugly men, venal and power-seeking, much like our present day tycoons.

Realism tends toward photo-realism. Even artists who might not trace and copy photographs, aspire towards the perfect likeness of the material object. It values a shallow, brutal correctness above beauty. On the other hand, ideal art deals with concepts; concepts such as beauty, harmony, rhythm, musicality, luminosity, atmosphere. The danger is that it can turn its back on truth, and stoop to flatter its sitter. This, of course, is not idealist art, it is simple falsehood.

Beauty, Keats said, is truth; truth beauty.

The truth in a painting is in its rendering of light, of colour, of atmosphere; not of objects. This, when painting from life, so the cold photographic style of painting is always false, because it is without feeling, without sympathy; anaesthetised art, from the brutish art of Rome to the vicious flayings of Freud. And sympathetic contemplative work is always clothed in beauty, because founded in truth – nature seen through a temperament.

It is once we move away from copying the still life, or the landscape, or the figure, that all art is ideal, because it all is founded in the mind, in imagination or in memory. Its light is the light of consciousness.

The great artists found a good solution to working from nature: painting with the use of studies, pencil, watercolour, even oil studies. This is the method of Turner, of Sargent, of Degas, even Michelangelo. Beauty and truth are founded in the eye and in the contemplation of the beholder.

The sad story of Lady Jane Grey

She became queen of England at 16, and ruled for 9 days. Then she had to convert to Catholicism, or die. The choice was hers.

The execution of Lady Jane Grey

This picture was painted in 1834, by the French artist Paul Delaroche. (Click on the image to enlarge)

It was one of the most loved pictures in the Tate, until a flood in 1928 (coincidentally the time when Degas, Monet, Waterhouse, Gerome, and other great artists died in oblivion, many of them having stopped painting in despair).

The ‘damaged’ painting was rolled up and put into the cellars not to be seen until 1973, when it was found – surprise! – in perfect condition.

It has since been moved to the National Gallery, where it is regarded as the most popular picture, often surrounded by crowds of admirers, and on 24 February, it became the centerpiece of a major exhibition of his life’s work, including sketches and studies for this picture.

It is interesting that Modernist critics, even today, refuse to enjoy the picture. Here are a few quotes:

‘Cecil Gould, the Keeper of the Gallery who first put the painting back on show, wrote in 1975 that Delaroche “is regarded, when the 20th century thinks of him at all, as something of a charlatan who merits his present obscurity”.’

And: ‘Delaroche… has falsified the historical account the better to appeal to his contemporaries. Lady Jane Grey… was in fact executed out of doors… She could not have worn a white satin dress of nineteenth-century cut with a whalebone corset, and her hair would have been tucked up, not streaming down over her shoulders.’

All debatable, but this is a picture, a work of art, which needs to be judged in artistic terms, not documentary. Imagine discussing Guernica along these lines.

Paul Delaroche has been restored to his rightful place; but like Lady Jane Grey, Modern academics still demand that artists convert to the Modern Manner or perish. The choice is ours.

Looking.

It was really cold on the vaporetto going home.

I must have been tired. Leaning against the railing, I regarded a young woman in a grey cloche cap. Nothing remarkable, she was standing on the other side of the cabin; a lovely sense of peace, her eyes shaded by the rim of her cap. Regarded.. observed, contemplated, rather.

She was saying something, and then repeated it; and suddenly, belatedly, I awoke from my deep reverie. I was contemplating her as a painting, and she was talking to me, soundlessly… what are you doing?

The Victorian artist Albert Moore painted exactly this experience. In his picture, Dreamers, he shows not 3 girls, but one girl, observed, as he leads us in the contemplation of her restfulness.

This is the normal mode of regard in the studio, removed but connected, and most likely what happened in his case is that he had been painting his model for several minutes, when suddenly he became aware that her eyes were on him… very disconcerting. This, I believe, was the inspiration for this lovely picture.

I shook my head, and waved my hand over my eyes. Sorry, I was in a complete dreamstate… Thankfully she wasn’t offended, and I resisted the urge to explain that I was an artist, lost in contemplation.

A damned decent wage.

Giambattista Tiepolo had everything.
So much so that his sister left him out of her will. “He has everything,” she is reputed to have said.

Talent, skills, imagination, charm; there was no end to it, and he met with early and great success. But his greatest moment came with a commission from the Carmelite Brotherhood in Venice.

In my house I have only one poster, and it is of this painting. I saw it on my first visit to Venice, at the Scuola dei Carmini. At that time I spoke not a word of Italian, but I managed to persuade the woman at the door to find me a poster of it. There are about 12 great paintings of Tiepolo in the Scuola, but this one stood. And today in the language school I found a book on 18th Century Venetian painting. I looked up Tiepolo, and this is what I found.

The Carmelite monks were onto a good thing. The Virgin Mary had appeared to one of their order in Cambridge (yes, Cambridge) and handed him two small pieces of cloth, attached to a long narrow strip, probably meant to be worn like a necklace. This, they thought, would be a good subject for a painting, and Tiepolo agreed with them.

He produced a painting of otherwordly majesty; of beauty overwhelming. The poor holy man is treated with dignity but in clearly worldly, even earthy, tones. And before him, a scene of such beauty, such luminosity of colour and light, that is unimaginable. Except to Gianbattista Tiepolo. He saw this vision. In fact he is the one ever truly to see this vision. It has only ever lived in one place; in his mind. And now, thank be to God, in this masterpiece of light and joy.

Tiepolo did not put the cloth in the hands of the Virgin. Instead he delegated its passing down to one of the angels who support her in the clouds. In spite of this, the painting, on unveiling, was greeted with applause. And more.

The gift of this piece of cloth was a shortened time in purgatory and a place in heaven on the first Saturday after death, “or as soon as possible.” (…read the small print!) So awed were the monks on seeing this painting, which, even at this time, was regarded as his greatest work, that they made him the gift of membership of their brotherhood, and incidentally a smooth road to heaven. Now that, is a decent wage for a decent piece of work.

The thing is, that Tiepolo, although no angel (look at those figures in the clouds!) had no need of a special dispensation. He had already seen the glory, known the glory of heaven, he was the one to be sainted. San Tiepolo… It has a ring, doesn’t it?

One bit of success escaped him. He was never highly regarded in France or in England, and we’ll say nothing about America. But there was one young American who saw his work every day, an artist whose work reflects the glorious viscosities and luminosities of the master, one man who can be described at the disciple of Giambattista Tiepolo. His name was John Singer Sargent.

Heuningbekkie

Today, on Christmas Day, I went for a walk and, once again, I saw an old friend. High on a thorn bush, but at eye level, singing her little lungs out, was pretty grey heuningbekkie.

Heuningbekkie

The hummingbird is the animal representative of the bringer of sweetness, as is the artist. It is our role to find the sweetness in nature, often among the thorns, and to harvest it for its joy, releasing it as song or as a painting.

In American Indian Culture it is known as a totem animal. Your totem animal is you. It cannot be lucky to meet it; nor unlucky. It is simply a pointer from nature; this is who you are, these are your strengths, this is your nature.

It was around three years ago that the hummingbird entered my life, in the strangest way. I was feeling very cynical about Christmas, and the way we celebrate. Then a few days before Christmas, we found a hummingbird perched on our Christmas tree, in the position of the angel. Twice she came to me, first on a Christmas tree, and again on Christmas day. How unsubtle do I have to be, she says, before you get my message? I did not mention this in my blog at the time, for brevity, but I was worried about how she would get out of the house without flying into the glass of the windows. I needn’t have worried. She flew up to the glass, hovered a few centimeter or two in front of it, and navigated sideways until she found the open window.

This is the way the book, Medicine cards, refers to the hummingbird:

“If Hummingbird is your personal medicine, you love life and its joys. Your presence brings joy to others… You know instinctively where beauty resides and, near or far, you journey to your ideal… Hummingbird will no doubt give you a flash of spirit, darting here, there, and everywhere… Beauty is the target, and Hummingbird’s mission is to spread joy or to be destroyed.”

To read again, “You know instinctively where beauty resides and, near or far, you journey to your ideal… “, four days before setting out for Venice on a pilgrimage of beauty, this is very strange. Nice, yes, but rather awesome.