At this time in our nation’s history, I’d guess that about 3
million Americans or more now tell The U.S. Census Bureau, the IRS and the
world at large that they are artists. The folksong writer and performer Tom Paxton brilliantly
satirized the legal profession in 1984 with his song, “One Million
Lawyers.” Today he could confidently
write, “In ten years we're gonna have [10 million artists]. How much can a poor nation stand?” While the flood of lawyers streaming from the
law schools has undeniably wreaked havoc with our increasingly litigious daily
lives, the situation may be even more insidious with respect to artists.
Spurred on by the Internet’s siren call of easy money,
artists are multiplying like lemmings on a march to the sea of oblivion, despite
all the websites, blogs and “daily painter” blather. I was shocked to see that “The Artist’s
Magazine” in its March issue lists a mere 350-plus artist workshops in its
annual roundup. There must be three or
four times that many lurking hither and yon over every hill and dale.
This incredible expansion of a career path upon which the
survival of the human race is not exactly dependent is quite understandable in
21st Century America.
Everything useful is now made in China
or Mexico. Here we make such things as artists and
art.
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| Caravaggio,Judith Beheading Holofernes,1598-99 |
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| Dante Gabriel Rossetti, La Ghirlandata,1871-74 |
The mass migration of Americans into the art business was spurred
by a change in the attitude of women toward painting, which, until maybe around
1984, had been dominated since the dawn of civilization by robust
men like Caravaggio, Meissonier and George Bellows, or high aesthetic types
like Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Whistler and Aubrey Beardsley. I did not originate this forthcoming notion
about women and art. Philip S. Alfieri
did. Phil, who died in 2009 at the age
of 88, was a painter I got to know at The Art Students League, where he usually
hung out Monday through Saturday at lunchtime during the last 15 or so years of
his life. He was a short, stocky Italian-American,
with a bulldog countenance and an ego as big as all outdoors.
He was not a masterful painter, but he made his living
making paintings. He went to a Miami
art school after service in World War II and came to the League after already
having learned his trade better than his League instructors, by his own account. He boasted that while the other students were
dutifully painting from the model, he was in the back of the studio making
paintings that he could sell. He was a
good portrait sketch artist, and did a lot of work on the boardwalk in Atlantic
City during the 1950s.
He said he once sketched Dick Van Dyke backstage when Van Dyke was in “Bye,
Bye Birdie” on Broadway.
Clowns were his favorite subject. “Not clowns, harlequins,”
Phil would hotly interject, explaining that he drummed up elaborate costumes and
the clown makeup from his imagination after first painting the figure on canvas. I recall seeing a print of one of his “harlequin”
paintings on a wall at a Blimpie’s restaurant near the studio Phil maintained
for years in a longstanding artist’s building on the east edge of Union
Square. I ate
a lot of Blimpie’s submarine sandwiches, tuna salad with all the extras, after
my frequent shopping trips downtown for art supplies at Utrecht’s
on 4th Avenue or art books
at the Strand in the 1980s and 90s.
Phil also took photographs of female models, from which he
painted 30x40 inch canvases featuring these lightly clad models lolling around
in imaginary boudoirs, with imaginary flowers in imaginary vases, and similar
decorative make-believe. This way he
avoided challenges from those people who like to point out mistakes in
paintings made by those artists who like to paint every brick in a brick
wall. “Nobody’s going to know what the
things look like,” he would say. He
refused to show his paintings on the Internet because he was sure thieving
artists would steal his compositions. Good heavens, Phil, did you actually think
one artist would steal from another!?
A few of us regulars at the Saturday morning members-only
painting class at the League, after our exhilarating session working from the
live model, would repair to the cafeteria to wind down. Phil would be waiting for us to remind us of what
a great painter he was, and to repeat ad infinitum the details of the story of
his life. He joined us in painting once,
but he claimed the light was too poor, which it can be, and he never repeated
the experience.
One time another painter with a giant ego, down from Gloucester,
MA for the weekend, dropped by at
lunchtime. Sensing their shared
proclivities, they sat quite a ways apart to tell their respective stories. I had
a fervent wish that we could get the two of them in a room together on closed
circuit TV and see who came out on top.
But I have to say that those of us who were Phil’s audience were so
ego-challenged, that anything he said sounded like he was claiming to have brought
down the tablets from Mount Sinai. Give us a break, we groaned inwardly.
Phil sold quite a few of those 30x40 inch paintings in a Pennsylvania
gallery, but sales started to fall off about the same time he started to hang
around the League. He had figured out
the reason for the decline in his sales.
“When I started out, women bought my paintings,” he said. “Now, they want to paint their own.” He had first-hand experience with that in the
form of his wife, a dark-haired beauty from Eastern Europe,
whom he married somewhat late in life.
He said she became jealous of his painting career and begged him to
teach her how to paint. He did, and it
seemed to cause some tension in their marriage, which ended with her death from
cancer a number of years before his own.
So now everybody wants to be a painter, if they can’t get
into show business, that is. And it’s
not just the women. Men are chiming in
as well, young and old, including quite a few early retirement captains of
industry who can afford luxurious private studios, the hiring of private models
and the finest art supplies. These
latecomers to the art experience also help support the hundreds of enterprising
artists who entice them along on expensive vacation workshops to Tuscany, et
al, where they can sip fine wine and enjoy the scenery for a week or so,
without learning much about how to “find themselves” as painters, which used to
be considered a good thing.
Internet sideshows like Etsy and eBay make it seem that
selling art is easy. The activity in
this arena is feverish, with numerous workshops and blogs offering advice on
such matters as how to use photographs effectively to become a successful
“daily painter.” And it really doesn’t
matter whether your copy of the photograph is good or bad, or the subject
matter is beneath the trivial and banal, somebody somewhere will find some
charm in your “original work of art” and buy it. But the sign on the virtual front door seems
to read: “Serious artists who entertain thoughts of suicide if they get
rejected from a rigged juried exhibition need not apply.”
It strikes me as amusing that in the 1940s, “American
Artist” magazine actually had a monthly column of painting advice for amateur
painters. Can you imagine anyone today owning
up to being an “amateur painter?” As
soon as the first apple is painted, a website is created and Giclee prints are
put up for sale on the Internet. Oh,
Rembrandt, don’t you weep, don’t you moan.
You might have had to suffer for your art, but that’s not for us. We just want to have fun.
