We all know that modern “art” is mostly crap. As the great critic Robert Hughes said of the ridiculously overrated graffiti artist, Jean-Michel Basquiat, “In a saner culture than this one, the 20-year-old Basquiat might have gone off to four years of boot camp in art school, learned some real drawing abilities […] and in general, acquired some of the disciplines and skills without which good art cannot be made”.
Alas, ours is no longer a sane, or even a serious culture. So little so that many university fine arts courses are dispensing altogether with such footling stuff as life drawing, the foundational skill of visual art, let alone any sort of actual drawing or painting at all.
Thus, a centuries-old tradition of hard-won discipline and training has been overthrown. Even the great masters of modernism, after all, learned to draw well before going all-out. Picasso spent most of his early life, from about nine until 16, undergoing a rigorous training in drawing and painting, before breaking out into primitivism and cubism in his 20s.
Even with all that training, though, the greatest masters could still have their bad days. Yes, even Picasso.
There is no denying his immense genius across a career spanning decades. But then there’s this travesty. The body is awkwardly drawn, with “feet like a monkey” as American novelist Gertrude Stein put it.
And that’s probably the least disturbing thing about it.
Going back before Picasso, the Renaissance masters painted, drew and sculpted some of the most beautiful depictions of the human figure ever to grace a gallery. Even the great Michelangelo, though, had something of a problem with women. Perhaps it was the artist’s homosexuality, but a great many of his female figures look exactly like the muscular, perfectly proportioned males he was famous for — only minus dicks and with boobs tacked on.
But if Michelangelo had problems with women, many more Renaissance artists churned out really, really weird depictions of babies.
The Italian painting above is an absolute classic of weird babies surrounding a stressed and over-wrought Madonna. It reminds me of myself during school summer holidays. Feast your eyes on those faces – and why is everyone wearing lipstick?
Thanks to the overwhelming religious themes of Renaissance art, especially Madonnas and children, there’s no end to these repulsive babies.
This is a monster mini-man and I cannot stop staring at him! Check out the tiny right shoulder of the Virgin and compare it with the enormous girth of her left arm ending in those chunky mangled fingers. And look into her eyes – she cannot believe she birthed this creature. Oh Mary, neither can I.
In more modern times, artists became less devoted to religious themes and more obsessed with themselves, especially their states of mind. Hence, Edvard Munch produced perhaps the most famous depiction of existential despair, The Scream. “Scream” is indeed the reaction, though, when confronted with Munch’s portrait of his neighbour’s Angry Dog.
Munch apparently had a long running dispute with his neighbor, the owner of this dog, and hated it. Edvard, we can tell.
Daily Art Magazine
Moving ahead to modern times, animals are still getting a raw artistic deal. Columbian artist Fernando Botero is instantly recognisable for his rotund, balloon-like human figures. What is whimsical and charming when it comes to humans, though, becomes yet more nightmare fuel when applied to animals.
Then there are those who, because they’re consummate masters of one art, apparently fancy themselves Jacks of all artistic trades. We get musicians trying to act, actors trying to be writers, and writers trying to be artists. When Bob Dylan turned his hand to painting, he was apparently so chuffed with his Self Portrait, that he turned it into an album cover.
He really shouldn’t have. No, really: he shouldn’t have.
The great pity of it is that, if his work currently on display in a UK private gallery is anything to go by, Dylan actually, eventually, got pretty good at painting.
Still, there’s a reason he’s renowned for his music and lyrics and not his art.
