A portrait of supermodel
Kate Moss painted by artist Lucien Freud is expected to fetch
$6.65 million at auction next month, though it will probably
bring more. Freud shot from the top tier to superstardom
when he painted the official Jubilee portrait of QE
II. Freud is a British subject but not a sycophant. Witness
the dark, complex, rather threatening portrait he painted
of his sovereign. She looked like someone you would not want
to meet in a dark alley -- or tunnel. Moss, who learned
that Freud wanted to paint her by reading it in a magazine,
sat for the work in 2002 while she was pregnant with Lila
Grace, her first child. A friend and I were discussing
this over a lunch of grilled prawns and saffron rice, and
she asked, "How do contemporary artists make it into the
big money? And are the prices worth it?" Good questions.
She then mentioned three other heavy-hitting artists who
pull in the megabucks: Cy Twombly, Brice Marden, and Richard
Serra.
 Lucien
Freud is the son of Sigmund, the father of psychoanalysis,
which, as much as anything else, defined the twentieth century.
He put new words like subconscious and superego into our vocabulary,
and was a recognizable world figure. Naturally,
Lucien had all the connections, but also the talent.
He inherited his father's fascination with the human psyche,
but rather than talking to prone patients on couches, he paints
portraits. Once he labored six months to get his wife's eyes
right in a sketch. You meet one of his portraits and you don't
forget it.
What about aspiring artists
whose fathers, unlike Sigmund Freud, were butchers, bakers,
and candlestick makers? If these artists keep working, will
someone discover them sipping a soda like the movie star Lana
Turner? Not likely. Today one has an art career played like
a game of chess. The kingmakers, of course, are the
dealers and the museum directors, but it doesn't hurt to have
a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant or a Guggenheim to join
the faculty of a prominent art school or university with an
exceptional department. Having a curator
at a significant museum or art center like Detroit's DIA (www.dia.org) give
you a show helps, too.
 Not to say that breakaways
don't exist. Jean-Michel Basquiat, the spectacularly talented
African American who became famous through his lyrical
and powerful graffiti, literally turned into an art star by
roaming around Harlem with cans of spray paint, to say nothing
of talent. Robert Rauschenberg, probably the dean
of American artists, lived on the streets of New York for awhile,
creating montages of found objects. One of Rauschenberg's first
and most famous works, "Monogram" (1959), consisted of a stuffed
angora goat, a tire, a police barrier, the heel of a shoe,
a tennis ball, and paint. I remember talking to the
abstract expressionist pioneer Clyfford Still,
an admirer of Rauschenberg, who said, "He does it, he makes
art, even with that bottle of Jack Daniels by his side, but
most artists today are careerists and whores who chew the shoestrings
of the downtown dealers. Money is their God, and that
goes double for (the late) Mark Rothko. Great art ultimately
comes from who you are. The true work of art is but a shadow
of the divine perfection."
 At
another party I chatted with the white-clad, soft spoken Tom
Wolfe. A Southern gentleman with an almost shy manner, he seemed
the opposite of his words. He said, "Today drugs and sex are
so plentiful they don't work as tools to get ahead. You have
to express the moment." I brought up Jung, who said great art
expressed the collective unconscious of a civilization, and
Wolfe agreed, adding that he didn't get into "because." "If
you start to say 'because,' you get into art jargon," he added. Wolfe
likes Cy Twombly, a particularly handsome painter and my favorite
among the Twombly-Marden-Serra trio. Twombly could
sketch brilliantly as a child, but he credits his life choice
to a horror of having to work as a stockbroker or an accountant
in an office. He wanted a free and creative life and calls
the defining moment in his career as the day he met Robert
Rauschenberg in New York. Robert said Cy had the talent
and urged him to study at Black Mountain College near Ashville,
North Carolina, the fertile crescent of artists at the
time. Twombly's style began when he worked as an army
cryptologist, which reinforced his love of linear pattern.
After his military stint, he painted in New York, sculpted
in Rome, moved toward a more literal use of text and numbers,
and then developed a vocabulary of strokes and carvings inspired
by mythology, poetry, and classic history. He plays out the
contradictions he feels, the anxieties and dilemmas, in images
that are often sexually charged, always beautiful, combining
grace and intelligence. He made it to the big-time: solo
exhibitions at New York's Museum of Modern Art and the Musee
d'Arte Moderne, Paris, a prize at the Venice Biennale -- you
get the idea. His prices zoomed. A great artist affects
eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops. Do I
think Twombly is one of these? Yes, though his prices have
little to do with it. They don't buy eternity. Take novelists.
Two of them, Mary Higgins Clark and Margaret Atwood both make
the big money, but only Atwood is likely to survive. It's the
same with artists. The modern art world's getting a good shakeout
at midlevel while prices of "masters" like Picasso soar.
 Brice Marden's work
has a specific vocabulary with its often joyful imagery,
like a cat playing with a string. He paints
feelings, forms, does not feel the job of an artist is to
see things as they really are; if he did, he would cease
to be an artist. He studied art at Boston University
and then got a degree in architecture from Yale that influenced
his painting, primarily his use of muted tones
and preoccupation with geometric format. He had his first
show at Bykart Gallery in New York, then became an assistant
to -- guess who? Robert Rauschenberg. The great artist influenced
the aspiring one, as he had so many others before. Rauschenberg
had a unique track record of international stature, generous
mentorship of the young, reaching out to help other artists
better their situation. I don't know of any artist who's
done that as much as he did. In time Marden exhibited
at Documenta in Kassel, Germany, which shot him to international
stardom. Since then, his work has evolved without losing
touch with its roots. He feels he can't always reach the
image in his mind, so even if the abstract rendition of it
is not quite there, a work gets to the point where he can
leave it.
 Richard
Serra was
born in San Francisco, and one can immediately see
he's legit as an artist and a person. His constructivist sculptures
have great power and are madly in demand right now. However,
whether he's considered a top tier artist in future generations
is, in my opinion, problematic, because he lives in the shadow
of David Smith, the giant of constructivist sculpture. But
despite the overpowering presence of Smith, Serra's gotten
more than his share of attention, especially when he created
the perhaps overly massive outdoor steel sculpture
for Manhattan titled Tilted Arc in 1981. After
its installation, people hated it so much and launched
such protests that it was removed, and in doing so, destroyed.
However, Serra had his defenders, and the controversy,
his prices quadrupled. He deserved his success, having
trained at the highest levels-- literature graduate of
the University of California at Berkeley, art
at Yale, then in Paris and Florence on a Fulbright
grant. As a young man, Richard Serra worked in steel
mills to support himself, and much of the
raw intensity of his work derives from that experience combined
with his magnetic masculinity. While he works on a
piece, he can feel when he begins to love it, and experiences
a slow comprehension. What counts most to him is finding new
ways to recreate ideas in sculpture on his own terms. He can
say things with sculpture that he can't say any other way,
things he has no words for. It is this direct emotional truth
in his work that I believe accounts for his huge success.
All
of the artists I've
discussed are the real thing, but who am I to say? Andre Malraux
described art critics this way: "The dogs bark but the caravan
moves along." True, but in the twentieth century, the artists
who made it had the full backing of the critics, people who
had learned from their mistake at the Salon d'Autumne where
they called Matisse and friends "fauves," wild beasts. Still,
even the best "barking dogs" can't tell you for sure who
will still be hot in 2099.
|
|
