"It is more difficult than ever for a theoretical Van Gogh to become an actual Van Gogh, a familiar reality for collectors of star 20th-century artists."

"More than a decade ago, foundations for Andy Warhol and Keith Haring, and the estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat, got out of the authentication business altogether. Keeping fakes from circulating is an important task but led to lawsuits that threatened their broader work."

From "Van Gogh or Faux? Weeding Out Fakes Is Starting to Take a Toll. Attributing a work to the artist generally requires authentication by the Van Gogh Museum, but lawsuits and an influx of requests have made it reassess that role" (NYT).

I like the idea of a "theoretical Van Gogh." (It makes me want to craft a joke about a vincentretical Van Gogh.) You can imagine how many people have tried to paint like van Gogh — either to pull off a fraud or just because they love Van Gogh. And here's this guy suing over something he bought cheap that would be worth many millions if it were a real Van Gogh.

He says: "I am sure that my painting is a real Van Gogh. The entire painting radiates van Gogh. Everyone who sees it only thinks of Van Gogh." But that would be the mark of a fake Van Gogh! How would you fake Van Gogh? You'd try to make the entire painting radiate Van Gogh. The curly colorful strokes, the petals and tree trunks, the little man in the field. Everyone who sees it would only think of Van Gogh!

A new chapter in The History of Ears.

I'm reading "From Van Gogh to Mike Tyson: a brief history of ears," a 2009 Guardian article, by Lucy Mangan.

Found after trying to think of a list of famous ears, a list to which Trump's ear will now take one of the top 2 spots. I think Van Gogh's ear still belongs in first place.

I'd thought of the ear Mike Tyson bit off but had forgotten whose ear it was. (It was Evander Holyfield's.)

I'd thought of a movie ear —

French Impressionism explained at long last: It was the air pollution.

From "Scientists confirm long held theory about what inspired Monet" (CNN).

I thought it was going to be cataracts, but, no... air pollution.

"In general, air pollution makes objects appear hazier, makes it harder to identify their edges, and gives the scene a whiter tint, because pollution reflects visible light of all wavelengths" [said Anna Lea Albright, a postdoctoral researcher for Le Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique at Sorbonne University].... 

The team looked for these two metrics, edge strength and whiteness, in the paintings — by converting them into mathematical representations based on brightness — and then compared the results with independent estimates of historical air pollution.

Don't you love it when something you thought was a human being's inspiration turns out to be an outside force, something that happened to him? It's especially demoralizing when it's some malady or misfortune.

"Why do you say that Degas has trouble getting a hard-on? Degas lives like a little notary and doesn’t like women..."

"... knowing that if he liked them and fucked them a lot he would become cerebrally ill and hopeless at painting. Degas’s painting is virile and impersonal precisely because he has resigned himself to being personally no more than a little notary, with a horror of riotous living."

Wrote Vincent Van Gogh in a letter, in 1888, quoted in "A Compulsive Perfectionist/The intensely private Edgar Degas reveals himself intermittently in his voluminous correspondence, in moments of unexpected self-awareness and candor" (NYRB). 

But the article is about Degas, not Van Gogh. We know Van Gogh is interesting. What about Degas? Okay, I scanned the article so you don't have to (and I even have a subscription to the NYRB). Here's a Degas quote for you:

"How can one chat with people like that? Let’s see, with a Jewish Belgian who is a naturalized Frenchman! It’s as if one wished to speak with a hyena, a boa. Such people do not belong to the same humanity as us."

"I was painting less and less, fearing that if I got going and found it difficult to stop, I might end up like Van Gogh, a troubled artist with a room crammed full of pictures."

"Plus, I resented having to stretch a canvas over a frame, and I never liked the smell of oils and turpentine. I had lost patience with painting... In the mid-1980s, the art world was still wallowing in German neo-expressionism—large paintings with raw, overdramatic brushwork—whereas I was drawn toward Dada’s countercultural tendencies... It was at this point that I put on my first solo exhibition, Old Shoes, Safe Sex... One solitary review in Artspeak described it as 'such a neo-Dadaist knockout... Duchamp would have enjoyed these tributes....'... Around this same time, a couple of pictures of mine were part of a group exhibition in the East Village. When the show closed, rather than take the pictures home with me, I just chucked them into a dumpster. Dumpsters are everywhere in the streets of New York City, and you could probably find a number of masterpieces in them. I must have moved about ten times during my years in New York, and artworks were the first things I threw away. I had pride in these works, of course, but once I’d finished them, my friendship with them had ended. I didn’t owe them and they didn’t owe me, and I would have been more embarrassed to see them again than I would have been to run into an old lover."

From "1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows" by Ai Weiwei. 

As someone who studied painting and made a lot of paintings, I completely identify with the line "I resented having to stretch a canvas over a frame," the dread of yourself in the future in a room crammed with your own unloved pictures, and the desire to trash them all quickly, and thank God for dumpsters.

ADDED: It's interesting that he wrote "I didn’t owe them and they didn’t owe me" and not "I didn’t own them and they didn’t own me." That is, he wrote something that was translated that way. Anyway, it's about relationships, not property.

"We wanted to evoke the local, from Van Gogh's Starry Night to the soaring rock clusters you find in the region.... The manner in which Van Gogh rendered Les Alpilles influenced the development of the exterior cladding of the building."

Said Frank Gehry, quoted in "Frank Gehry unveils The Tower, a stainless steel-clad arts building for Luma Arles" (Dezeen). Here's Gehry's new building:

Here's Van Gogh's rendering of Les Alpilles:

Did Gehry evoke Van Gogh to good effect?

Yes, beautiful!

Yes, decently enough.

No, it's kind of a miss for me.

No, it's atrocious.

 

pollcode.com free polls

ADDED: Gehry's Tower reminds me of the depiction of the Tower of Babel by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (from 1563):

 

POLL RESULTS:

"She likes jokes. She likes the one David Hockney told her once. It goes: 'The trouble with Van Gogh is if you tell him something it goes in one ear and stays there.'"

"She laughs again.... Maggi, I exclaim, you are smoking again! Didn't you give up five years ago? She says she did but last year, on her birthday, her large bronze sculpture of a rising wave was being erected, and it was fraught, and 'I thought: fuck it. It's my birthday. I'll smoke.'... She smokes with sensational gusto... I can't stand namby-pamby, take-it-or-leave-it smokers. I call them 'crap smokers' and Maggi is not a crap smoker.... 'I think I was once put forward to paint the Queen Mother but the word came back saying I was a bit risky, so it didn't happen.' Perhaps they thought you'd seduce her. 'She was very fond of gentlemen.' She could have painted Margaret Thatcher but didn't bother. Some big Conservative association wanted her to do it but she refused.... As a sculptor, Maggi's public works include her Charing Cross memorial to Oscar Wilde – it shows him rising from a sarcophagus.... Critics seem to loathe Oscar.... Would you have liked to have been a mother, Maggi? 'The thing of actually giving birth to this thing that's been inside you for nine months must be quite an event,' she says. 'And I've always said that if ever a painting was crying out in one room and a baby was crying out in another, I'm animal enough to go to the baby... it sounds corny but it's true... my works are my babies... '... Did your parents accept you being gay? 'My mother had a great problem with it... she hated saying the word lesbian, and I don't like it either. I prefer lesbionic or dyke....'" 

I'm reading "Maggi Hambling: 'I was put forward to paint the Queen Mother but the word came back saying I was a bit risky'/As a painter and sculptor, she’s an art-world legend – but as our intrepid interviewer discovers, Maggi Hambling's private life is every bit as colourful as her work" (The Independent). 

That's from 2010. I got there from Wikipedia, where I went because Hambling — whom I'd never heard of — is trending on Twitter this morning because....

"People Are Furious Over This New Statue of Pioneering Feminist Mary Wollstonecraft in London/The internet wishes she were a bit less nude" (ArtNetNew).

Genuine question: Why present Mary Wollstonecraft as naked?
I’ve seen many statues of male writers, rights activists and philosophers and I can’t remember any of them being bare-assed. https://t.co/CNUmBgzldD

— Aunty Malorie Blackman (@malorieblackman) November 10, 2020

Was Hambling's tribute to Oscar Wilde more respectful? He's rising out of a tomb.

"There has long been debate about which painting was van Gogh’s last work, because he tended not to date his paintings."

"Many people believe it was 'Wheatfield With Crows,' because Vincente Minnelli’s 1956 biopic 'Lust for Life' depicts van Gogh, played by Kirk Douglas, painting that work as he goes mad, just before killing himself. Andries Bonger, Theo van Gogh’s brother-in-law, who wrote down some of the events surrounding Vincent’s death, noted in a letter, 'The morning before his death, he had painted a forest scene, full of sun and life.' In 2012, the Van Gogh Museum published a paper... arguing that the letter referred to 'Tree Roots,' an unfinished painting in the museum’s collection. That claim has now largely been accepted by scholars. Because of the way light is depicted on the roots, [scholar Wouter] van der Veen says he believes that van Gogh was looking at his subject matter at the end of the afternoon, about 5 p.m. or 6 p.m. He says he thinks this means that van Gogh probably spent the entire day painting. Mr. van der Veen added that the new evidence challenged a theory put forward in 2011 by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith... They argued that van Gogh did not commit suicide, but may have gotten drunk and argued with two young boys, who then accidentally killed him, not far from the Auberge Ravoux.... 'Now that we know he was painting all day, there was even less time for that to happen,' Mr. van der Veen said. Mr. Naifeh responded that it would be impossible to time-stamp a painting based on the angle of the light. 'It’s not a photograph; it’s a painting.... The fact that he went out and painted all day, not just an average painting but a very important painting, indicates that he may not have been depressed... It was otherwise a productive normal day, and that runs counterintuitive to the idea that he might then go and kill himself.'"

DNYUZ reports.

Here's "Tree Roots":



What time of day do you think that looks like? A time that excludes time enough to get into a fatal argument?

How about the mood? Do you think it's more likely that the artist went directly from painting that to ending his own live or to getting into an argument with 2 young boys?

If "Tree Roots" was painted on the day Van Gogh received his gunshot wounds, it increases the likelihood that Van Gogh...

shot himself, intending to end his life.

got into an argument that led someone else to shoot him.

 

pollcode.com free polls

Under the heading "Reset," British Vogue — Vogue! — has a landscape — a landscape! — on its cover.

Yes, it's David Hockney. That's sort of like getting an important actress for a normal cover, a cover about feminine beauty and fashion. They're "resetting" to a landscape — a wheat field — the very landscape that inspired Vincent Van Gogh to blow his brains out?

The British Vogue Editor-in-Chief Edward Enninful explains (in the Independent). He says it "highlights that at the core of everything is our planet." And — referring to the coronavirus — "As the world rushes to find its feet again, we all need to be more mindful of the toll our previous pace of living took on nature."

You mean we ought to wake up from the trance you've worked so hard to put us under that has made us believe we must be ever searching for new and different clothes and paying lots of money for them?

Is that "mindful" enough?

Is it too late even to try to understand Joe Biden's calling a woman a "lying dog-faced pony soldier," or is this nothing but an absurd epitaph on a dead political campaign?

ADDED: Here's my reaction, and I have not looked at much of the commentary. I think Biden believes he's lovable, and he can kid in a silly way and people will know it's all in good fun. I don't know why he thinks he can swing around so freely when he's trying to gain the deep trust needed to be President, but I don't know why anyone pushing 80 thinks he can be President or why a grown man in politics thinks he can nuzzle and sniff at the hair of young girls other than to think he thinks he's Joe and everybody knows Joe. Joe is Joe.

That's all just pretty crazy but not all that different from Trump's confident barreling ahead, being himself. Maybe that just works. Many people get it. Some people. The only question is are there enough people who connect with that sort of thing. For Trump, there are. For Biden, maybe not, but what other path is there for Biden? Come on, people, get him — understand him the way he wants to be understood — as a fully competent, experienced politician who knows how to have fun with you lying dog-faced pony soldiers.

The only thing I'll add to that is I have and will have a special problem with "dog-faced" until Roseanne Barr is uncanceled. The greatest female comedian of all time was banished from her #1 TV show — had it snatched away and her brilliant character killed even after the actress was booted out — for the sin of comparing a woman to an animal. I was just looking at Joaquin Phoenix's Oscar speech, where he said, "I think that’s when we’re at our best: when we support each other. Not when we cancel each other out for our past mistakes."

BONUS: "Dog-faced" has its own entry in the (unlinkable) OED. The examples go back to 1607:

1607 E. Topsell Hist. Foure-footed Beastes 11 He describeth them to be blacke haird, Dog-faced, and like little men.
1663 J. Mayne tr. Lucian Part of Lucian 272 That ugly, Dogg faced Aegyptian...
2002 Vanity Fair (N.Y.) Oct. 332/1 Degas was not exaggerating when he revealed his dancers to have been a depressingly dog-faced bunch.

Here's that Vanity Fair article about Degas's unpleasant-looking ballerinas. Excerpt:

"[T]he expanded MoMA is making obvious efforts to reshape its image without going entirely off-brand — to tell the tale of what might be called Modernism Plus, with globalism and African-American art added...."

"The first gallery, now labeled '19th Century Innovators,' is pretty much a painting hit parade — Cezanne’s 'Still Life with Apples' (1895-98), Rousseau’s 'The Sleeping Gypsy' (1897) and, straight ahead, van Gogh’s 'The Starry Night' (1889).... But to this familiar two-dimensional European world MoMA has introduced an American wild card: half a dozen nugget-like ceramic bowls and jugs by George Ohr (1857-1918), the self-proclaimed 'Mad Potter of Biloxi.'... The gallery [that is] a virtual Picasso shrine, with his 1907 'Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon' at the center, and related pictures ranged around it [includes]... a 1967 painting, acquired in 2016, by the African-American artist Faith Ringgold depicting an explosive interracial shootout. Titled 'American People Series #20: Die,' it speaks to 'Demoiselles' both in physical size and in visual violence. And just by being there it points up the problematic politics of a work like Picasso’s — with its fractured female bodies and colonialist appropriations — that is at the core of the collection. MoMA traditionalists will call the pairing sacrilegious; I call it a stroke of curatorial genius.... Multicultural is now marketable. To ignore it is to forfeit profit, not to mention critical credibility."

Writes Holland Cotter in "MoMA Reboots With ‘Modernism Plus’/If they moved Monet, don’t despair. There are stimulating ideas and unexpected talents at every turn, from Africa, Asia, South America, and African America. (And plenty of works by women.)" (NYT).

"That's a problem with awards that purport to honor a person's 'lifetime.'"

"They'd better check out the whole life before they give something like that. Rescinding shames the organization. By the way — for legal folks — did they rescind the offer before he accepted? Also, it's stupid to give a 'lifetime' award for someone who's associated with ONE song. I know there's at least one other Don McLean song, the one about Van Gogh (an artist who limited his domestic violence to his own body), but McLean isn't a 'lifetime' sort of achiever."

A comment I made over on Facebook, where my son John posted a link to "Lifetime Achievement Award Announced Then Rescinded For Don McLean" ("A lifetime achievement award has been offered — and rescinded — for 'American Pie' singer Don McLean.... McLean pleaded guilty to domestic violence assault, which was dismissed after he met the terms of a plea agreement").

"They've shot the potato in such lavish detail and lighting that it looks like a jewel. It also harks back to the famous The Potato Eaters by Van Gogh."

"If you pay attention, you see the beauty in the potato, a huge richness of colours in its skin. Each potato is different. These are portraits of individual potatoes. So, it's both still life and portrait photography."

"A game of brinkmanship began when the Musée d’Orsay here invited Julian Schnabel to choose paintings from its 19th-century collection to exhibit alongside his own works of art."

"At a certain moment the museum said: You can’t have this or that painting, so I said I can’t do it,' Mr. Schnabel said in a recent interview at the museum. 'I thought, if I can’t pick the paintings, there’s no reason for me to say that I picked the paintings.' The American artist and filmmaker, 66, had his eye on works by four artists in particular — Vincent van Gogh, Claude Monet, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Paul Cézanne — which the museum did not want to move from their usual places."

In the end, Schnabel got everything but the Cézanne for the show, described here, in the NYT.

The article doesn't say which Cézanne was so firmly unmoveable, and I don't think it's the Cézanne mentioned in this paragraph (which confused me):

The earliest of [Schnabel's] works in the show is the large-scale “Blue Nude with Sword” from 1979, the first figurative, as opposed to abstract, plate painting that Mr. Schnabel made. It hangs alongside Cézanne’s much smaller tableau “La Femme Étranglée” (“The Strangled Woman,” 1875-1876), with which it shares a similar red, white and blue palette.

I was struck that the NYT would allow such a blurry, distanced hint at violence against women in this article. Women are strangled, not just in the Cézanne painting...



... but in the newspaper that also, when it's in the mood, tells us about the women protesters who scream about our subordination. But in the museum, the men dominate as usual. Schnabel is a man with the power to compare himself to anyone he likes and he likes all men — Van Gogh, Monet, Toulouse-Lautrec, Cézanne.

But at least Schnabel's nude woman isn't strangled but wields a sword. No! Faked you out: Schnabel's "Blue Nude with a Sword" is a man:


What's he aiming that sword at? A curled up red dog? A pile of shit? I don't know, but why, with all those phallic symbols — the pillars, the sword — do we see no genitalia between his legs? Or is that the point — "Blue Nude Without Testicles"?

Are you enjoying the Gender Studies at Althouse this morning?

"Don't I have a right to express my opinion?!"

I love this line and line delivery. It's Kirk Douglas as Vincent Van Gogh in "Lust for Life." Vincent has been living with his brother Theo for 6 months and disrupting the household. Theo has just said "When people come to the house you insult them." I think if you watch this clip with someone else, the 2 of you will find many hilarious opportunities to exclaim "Don't I have a right to express my opinion?!" in the style of Kirk Douglas.

At the Drinker's Café...

... be convivial.

And think about shopping through the Althouse Portal to Amazon.

"Geeze. Don't take a moment to rest in your farming or some jerk will come along and call you an ox."

Wrote Freeman Hunt in the post about the 1898 poem, "The Man with the Hoe," which was based on a Millet painting of a farmer resting, leaning against his hoe. The poet, Edwin Markham did indeed look at the painting of a man and see an ox — well, a brother to an ox:

Who made him dead to rapture and despair,
A thing that grieves not and that never hopes.
Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox?

The meaning is in the eye of the beholder. I thought of Vincent Van Gogh's response to Millet:

In 1885 Van Gogh described the painting of peasants as the most essential contribution to modern art. He described the works of Millet and Breton of religious significance, "something on high."... He held laborers up to a high standard of how dedicatedly he should approach painting, "One must undertake with confidence, with a certain assurance that one is doing a reasonable thing, like the farmer who drives his plow... (one who) drags the harrow behind himself. If one hasn't a horse, one is one's own horse." Referring to painting of peasants Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo: "How shall I ever manage to paint what I love so much?"

If one hasn't a horse, one is one's own horse... but it is something on high.

Van Gogh Museum says of Millet's influence on Van Gogh: "Millet's paintings, with their unprecedented depictions of peasants and their labors, mark a turning point in 19th-century art. Before Millet, peasant figures were just one of many elements in picturesque or nostalgic scenes. In Millet's work, individual men and women became heroic and real. 

Van Gogh made many copies of Millet paintings — "not copying pure and simple" but "translating into another language, the one of colors, the impressions of chiaroscuro and white and black." Here is one original and "copy," "The Sower":



Van Gogh explained: "One does not expect to get from life what one has already learned it cannot give; rather, one begins to see more clearly that life is a kind of sowing time, and the harvest is not yet here."

Comparing Markham and Van Gogh — both looking at the image of a peasant — I thought of — forgive me — Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump looking at the off-coast (off-cast) Americans. She saw seeing deplorables and he saw the foundation of greatness.

Grasshoppers in the news.

1. "Dead grasshopper discovered in Vincent van Gogh painting.... Curators at the Nelson-Atkins museum of art in Kansas City said they discovered the dead insect in one of its star paintings, Vincent van Gogh’s Olive Trees.... 'Looking at the painting with the microscope ... I came across the teeny-tiny body of a grasshopper submerged in the paint, so it occurred in the wet paint back in 1889. We can connect it to Van Gogh painting outside, so we think of him battling the elements, dealing with the wind, the bugs, and then he’s got this wet canvas that he’s got to traipse back to his studio through the fields."

2. "Grasshoppers feasting on Southeast Arizona crops, gardens. Walking through fields on a farm near Cascabel as it teemed with grasshoppers was like 'parting the Red Sea.'... After the strong 2016 monsoon season, more grasshoppers survived and were able to lay their eggs in pods in the ground when winter arrived, usually between 20 and 200 eggs depending on the species... 'I keep thinking the cold weather will take them down,' Cardona said. 'They’re still here.'"

CC http://www.birdphotos.com

3. "Grasshopper Cannabis Kiosks Make a Splash at the [National Cannabis Industry Association] Show.... The Grasshopper product line includes a Self-Service Kiosk that can efficiently dispense up to 60 unique SKU's via a large high-definition touchscreen display menu - making it a powerful tool for dispensaries to promote and sell their most popular products, including flower, concentrates, accessories and vaporizers."

"Over a hundred painters came together from all over the world to make this animated film about Vincent van Gogh...."

This is an excellent little video about the technique that went into making "Loving Vincent."

At the Tiny House Café...

... you can talk about whatever you want.

The photograph is one step back from last night's "Slap Dash Café."* Here's 2 steps back...



... reminding us all once again: Don't get too close to the genius.

_____________________

* Where Big Mike said: "Looks like a part of a Van Gogh, but the technique isn't right." Which just goes to show: You can't figure it out from the details. As they say: The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.