My art week
My best achievement this week was working out what a NFT (non fungible token) is.
It’s basically a piece of digital art which you can own by a token but anyone can view.
It’s leading exponent Beeple achieved $69m for Yesterday’s in auction the other week.
I have 3 main reservations. Who wants to view art on their computer? There is no secondary market.
There is resource called Artnet which gives you the sales history of most pictures but its too early for NFTs.
Third, I don’t think it’s much good resembling more a video game than a work of art. US$69m is an awful lot of money for something which might prove to be a passing fad.
In our Tuesday art class we studied English art between the Wars.
Its mentor and inspiration was not a dealer, collector, patron or critic – but Henry Tonks at the Slade.
The list of luminaries that passed through the Slade at the turn of the nineteenth/twentieth century was more more than impressive: Stanley Spencer, Paul Nash, Augustus John, Dora Harrington and David Bomberg.
A particular favourite of mine was one who was not at the Slade as he was born in Munich Germany: Walter Richard Sickert.
His Ennui ranks highly in my fantasy of paintings I would like to possess but whether it is a warm interior in the style of Vuillard, a Camden Town nude, or a streetscape in Dieppe – here is a master at work.
On Thursday we studied French landscapists and the Barbizon School of realists.
Those French landscapists like Poussin, Claude and Court don’t float my boat.
Of the realists my favourite is Gustave Courbet.
I am drawn to a paradoxical personality who was a radical from a rich family happy to paint for wealthy patrons.
We studed in some depth The Painter’s Studio. Courbet is centre stage with those he disliked like Napoleon III to the picture’s left and his patrons Alfred Bruyas and good friend Charles Baudelaire to the right.
There is much to savour in a Courbet picture.
Finally, I finished Laura Cumming’s The Vanishing Man – In pursuit of Velazquez.
This is the true story of John Snare, a Reading bookseller and stationer of the 1850s, who acquired a Velazquez at an auction at Radley Hall, Oxford which ended up destroying him.
He exhibited it in Edinburgh where The Trustees of the Earl of Fife pursued him in the courts for its theft. He absconded to the States and set up business in Broadway, New York as a printer.
Laura Cumming is not a natural story teller with a tendency to wordiness and digression into the life and works of Velazquez.
It was hard work not helped by postage stamp illustrations of Velazquez works .
