Self Portrait Drawing

This is a slightly larger than life-sized self portrait that I've been fiddling with for some time. While I'm fairly satisfied with my neck and my hair, I'm just not thrilled with my eyes. Granted I posed with no make-up which doesn't help, but no matter what I did, they stayed lifeless and flat. For future portraits, I'm going to need to remedy whatever it is I'm doing wrong.

Self Portrait With Pony Tail, graphite on paper, 2010

Feelin' the Love

I'm having a 'Very Vincent Evening' tonight and pining away for some of my favorite paintings. If I ever won the lottery for hundreds of millions of dollars (though I'd first have to actually play), I know exactly what I'd do with that money. I would buy the very first Van Gogh that became available and then I would simply sit before it in perfect bliss until I breathed my last.

Butterflies and Poppies, 1890

Almond Tree in Blossom, 1888

The Hill of Montmartre with Stone Quarry, 1886

All photos courtesy of the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

Toulouse-Lautrec's Paris

Les Plastrons, 1900, Pablo Picasso

At the Cafe La Mie, about 1891, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

I try to like Toulouse-Lautrec, I really do. In fact, I think I like him a lot until I am actually in the presence of his work and then I realize all over again that I really am not very fond of him. Biographically he was an interesting person, as are most artists, but his work just doesn't thrill me. Sure it evokes very clearly the period in which it was created: the smell of the booze, sweat and cigarette smoke of the cabarets, the rowdy music, the bawdy women, but it also is repetitious as hell. All his women, and even his men, all look like one another with the same rather generic angular facial features, which drives me nuts. With the exception of one or two oils and mixed media works which are rather lovely, I just can't get into his work.

This general disdain didn't stop me from trying once again to like him when I went to see Café and Cabaret: Toulouse-Lautrec's Paris which is currently on display at the MFA. I was very excited about seeing the show, and was even really bummed out when I got sick with the flu and had to postpone my visit for a week. But then came the day when I finally walked into the gallery and...was instantly disappointed. Again. I was pleased though that the exhibit was padded with a few additional works by Steinlen and Vuillard, two of Lautrec's contemporaries and the latter of which I rather enjoy. I even thought I had hit paydirt when I discovered amidst all the ugly stuff one of Lautrec's works that I truly like: the moody and lovely "At the Café La Mie" but then even this was trumped by a very tiny early Picasso done in the style of Toulouse-Lautrec that I don't recall ever having seen before. At just 5 3/8 x 8 7/8, this piece was a teeny tiny slice of heaven and I was thrilled that the MFA had pulled it out of storage for this show. It was definitely worth the trip to have discovered this little beauty, and the funny thing is, I'm not really much of a Picasso fan either.

Photos courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston.

Vermeer and the Forgeries

The Milkmaid, Johannes Vermeer, c 1658

Christ at Emmaus, Han van Meegeren, 1937

What could possibly compel almost every art historian in the world, the greater part of the entire art-viewing public and the number one and number two Nazis to fall for the greatest art hoax in the history of art forgeries? Utter insanity clearly, as it is painfully obvious that the hideous painting portraying Christ and his disciples as neo-zombies is certainly not a Vermeer, nor is it anything even remotely close to being one. Yet, that is exactly what Han van Meegeren accomplished and in the process pocketed the modern day equivalent of tens of millions of dollars. And not only did he manage to hoodwink the art world once, but he did it six times in all, each new painting more horrid than the previous ones. Maybe Hitler and Goering didn't have a clue what a genuine Vermeer looked like, but certainly the dozens of experts in the field of 17th century Dutch masters did and yet they too swooned like school girls upon the "discovery" of these new heretofore unseen Vermeers. And why wasn't anyone suspicious that while it took nearly 300 years to find and verify a mere thirty-six known Vermeers, a staggering six new ones were discovered one after another in the course of just six?

Just how van Meegeren managed to accomplish this, his extraordinary talent at creating what appeared to virtually every expert, technologically speaking, to be a series of genuine 17th century paintings (and that passed all the scientific tests of the day), the dynamics of peer pressure, a collection of arrogant men with grotesquely enormous egos, and plain old fashioned crowd hysteria (the 17th century Dutch tulip mania, anyone?) is mesmerizing as hell. But despite all this, it still begs the very simple question: how the hell could anyone ever think this was created by the genius hand of Vermeer? van Meegeren may have been a brilliant strategist and forger, but the man was a lousy artist. Anyone can see this.

Alarming, fascinating, disturbing, and even very amusing too. And I now have a pretty fairly detailed idea of what it takes to become a successful master forger should I ever decide to quit my day job.

The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century, by Edward Dolnick, Harper Collins, 2008.