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| More than 110 artists competing during a timed “facsimile match” in Dafen, China on Thursday, May 18, 2006 |
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Ilya Repin, Portrait of the Art Critic Vladimir Stasov,
1883, Oil on Canvas, 74x60 cm, Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia
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(Left) John Singer Sargent, Head of Aesop, Copy after Velázquez,1879,
Oil on Canvas, 18 1/4 by 14 5/8 in., Ackland Art Museum, The University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill. (Right) Diego Velázquez (1599-1660),
Aesop (Detail), 1640, Oil on Canvas, 179x94 cm, The Prado, Madrid
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Since signing up with Etsy, the online marketing website for artists and artisans, I have neglected this occasional blog of mine, which was initiated to serve as a personal catharsis and nothing more -- and maybe even a lot less.
In the short time I have authored this blog, I have very
much enjoyed entertaining myself by writing some irreverent rants about the
current state of the art business for representational painters and retelling
some stories about painters from the past.
But now that I have my very own virtual fine art gallery on Etsy and
have fully accepted the digital marketplace, I might just as well write a
little bit about my own painting activity to accompany my usual subject matter. In case you are curious, here’s the link to my Etsy gallery: https://www.etsy.com/shop/RobertHoldenFineArt
Meanwhile, though, I recently read a blog post regarding
the copying of paintings, and it got me to thinking about this time-honored
practice, which I believe I wrote about in an earlier post, but I don’t have a
search function for this blog so it’s not so easy for me to check. At any rate, artists at the beginning of
their careers have always copied the paintings of great artists to try to learn
something about technique or simply to honor one of their favorite painters. I
copied a few paintings from prints years ago and sold a couple of them through
happenstance, my sales rep. I never
copied directly from a painting in a museum though. I try to
avoid crowds of tourists looking over my shoulder when I am
painting.
You don’t really learn much about the process of painting by
copying a great painter’s work.
Rembrandt will not be holding your brushes when you are facing the real
thing and your canvas is blank. But you
can rejoice in confirming the greatness of a painter you admire when you
closely examine one of his paintings and intuit how right everything seems to
be in contrast to your own abysmal efforts. I once copied a print of Ruben’s great allegorical
painting The Meeting of Marie de' Medici and Henry IV at Lyon
and it enabled me to fully appreciate the powerful design of this masterpiece.
As I believe I wrote in an earlier post, the Impressionist Renoir,
whose early paintings I really admire, didn’t think much about the practice of
copying paintings, even though he drew inspiration from the works of a number
of Italian Renaissance and French artists hanging in The Louvre. He had this to say about copying: “Go and see what others have produced, but
never copy anything except nature. You would be trying to enter into a
temperament that is not yours and nothing that you would do would have any
character.” I think he is absolutely
right about that.
I knew a painter who had a sideline business copying
paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art some years ago. Charlie’s copies of the Old Masters were good
enough to attract buyers, but he wasn’t very good at painting from life, as we
witnessed the few times he painted with us at the Saturday open painting class
for members of The Art Students League. I’ve also known a couple of very good painters
in their own right who copied paintings at the Met to make a little extra
money. One of them scored the storefront window of a major portrait broker in New York City with his excellent copy of a Sargent portrait.
But most copyists can’t possibly gain any significant
practical benefit from their labor, no matter how diligently they experiment
with the presumed colors used by the great artist, because they just peck away
for days to get a superficially exact copy of a painting that may have been completed
in two or three hours with a simple palette and a skilled brush
handling technique that is beyond the copyist’s ability to imitate. Better to follow the example of Sargent, who
dashed off some very impressive copies of Velazquez in his own bravura style to
study the underlying structure he observed in his idol’s work.
On the other hand, the general public unfortunately has a huge
appetite for soulless copies of paintings of famous artists. Art factories have been around for quite some
time in the United States
and other countries as adjuncts to the home-decorating industry. But the most egregious manifestation of the
business of copying paintings can be found in the fertile, nearly tropical
climate of South China’s Guangdong
Province. Within the past 20 years, Chinese
entrepreneurs in that province have taken this business of copying paintings to
incredibly outrageous levels of marketing, thus furthering the cultural
debasement of this once-great civilization, which in past centuries contributed
so much beauty to the world of high aesthetics.
According to various Internet sources, as many as 5,000
artists work at copying paintings for the global art market every day in one
art “sweatshop” in Dafen, one of 10 artist-villages in Guangdong
Province. This enterprise reportedly produced 50,000
paintings in a month and a half for Walmart.
It is said that artists in these art factories have produced 60 percent of the world’s paintings by
slavishly copying just about every painting that was ever painted by a
well-known artist in days gone by. The
village exports about five million paintings every year! The fastest workers can copy 30 paintings a
day! I would be mortified to learn that these
speed merchants are able to accurately copy detailed photographic images of Rembrandts
and Vermeers at that rate! But if they are
copying Picasso, Matisse or Jackson Pollock, then I suppose it’s quite possible
to achieve such numbers. On second thought, exactly copying one of Pollock's random "drip paintings" might be impossible. One reason some painters are proud of their bold, somewhat sloppy and accidental alla prima approach to realism is that it is harder to make an exact copy of their work.
The image at the top of this post is a photograph showing
more than 110 artists competing during a timed “facsimile match” in Dafen on Thursday, May 18, 2006. They are copying a photograph of Ilya Repin’s
1883 portrait of the art critic Vladimir Stasov.
Many of these copyists are artists who have been well-trained in the
rigid art academies of China,
which are modeled on the art academies established in Russia
by the great Repin and his fellow Realist painters in the late 19th
Century. In my humble opinion, these copyists are
disgracing the memory of this great artist by mechanically copying, as fast as
they can and for eventual export to the global market, no doubt, a photograph
of this painting, which Repin created when he was in full stride at the age of 39
after years of honing his craft with all his heart and soul. Repin would not be amused.
By the way, there are so many online images of this Repin
portrait -- and they all look exactly alike -- that I have no idea whether they
are all the same official photograph of the original painting in the Russian
Museum in St. Petersburg or whether some are exact photographic copies on
canvas of the official photograph of the original painting and were produced at one of
those Chinese painting factories. When I
last visited Google, there were 139 images of Repin’s portrait of Stasov
on 139 individual websites. I’m not
about to click on every one to see if I can spot any “facsimiles.” I think the one I've chosen to reproduce is the one I found on
one of the Wiki websites, which claims its image of the Repin
portrait “is a faithful photographic reproduction of a two-dimensional public
domain work of art.” With my post, Google now has at least 140
images of this painting.
If you have access to a good printer, couldn’t
you just download one of those images and print it on high-quality, canvas-textured
paper yourself? Digital printing can
reproduce the smallest details of a high-resolution digital photograph of a
painting far more accurately than any painter can. Still, it’s probably cheaper to buy a Chinese
knock-off. A nice frame for your print
would probably cost more than the whole package from China.
And finally, at least as far as I am presently concerned,
maybe I shouldn’t get so upset about this business of copying paintings for the
global art market. Painters have always cited
music and art as the two essential ingredients for a happy life. The works of Mozart and other great composers
are readily available on recordings and live performances for all the world to enjoy. Maybe there really is nothing
wrong with copying the works of great painters so they can be enjoyed by
everyone in the privacy of their own homes, not just by those who are friends
of the rich guys who own the Rembrandts.
I’m not convinced, however.
Serious music is performed seriously with loving care by serious
musicians who rehearse long and hard before the performance so they can
properly display and venerate the genius of Mozart. Despite all the “attention to detail” claims
on the websites of these art sweatshops, somehow I don’t think a half-hour copy
of a Rembrandt painting from a photograph that is destined for Walmart and
made by kids right out of art school in assembly line fashion is in the same
league. I could be wrong. Maybe that’s all the high art we can stomach.
Look at all those daily painters in America
slavishly copying photographs to create 6x6 in. paintings of teacups, strawberries and puppy dogs for the global market! Now that Walmart copy of an Old Master painting produced in a Chinese art sweatshop from a digital photograph doesn’t seem so shameful, does it?
