Some Art Is As Ridiculed As The Mona Lisa

The hare was once boasting of his speed before the other animals. "I have never yet been beaten," said he, "when I put forth my full speed. I challenge anyone here to race with me."

The tortoise said quietly, "I accept your challenge."

"That is a good joke," said the hare. "I could dance around you all the way."

"Hold your boasting until you've beaten me," answered the tortoise. "Shall we race?"

So a course was fixed and a start was made. The hare darted almost out of sight at once, but soon stopped and, to show his contempt for the tortoise, lay down to have a nap. The tortoise plodded on and plodded on, and when the hare awoke from his nap, he saw the tortoise nearing the finish line, and he could not catch up in time to save the race. This is an adoption of Aesop’s Greek fables and features clearly in my mind.

This shamed the hare infront of all the animals who had gathered to witness the event and reminds of my first days of study at the university. Every so often we had to endure snide remarks and comments about the rigourous nature of Art and the fact that we were doomed for we “by the look of us” would not be able to survive it. This teaching assistant at the university who was for some reason fond of goading and bullying female students on a regular basis convincing us that the Fine Art Course was not for wimps and that we would never get the degree we had come seeking.

She was one of the few female who had made it and was at the time pursuing her Master’s Degree in there. She was an angel of death as it were. I’d dread my afternoons for that is when we always had our specialist’s lectures that she took. She would ridicule each and every artistic creation we produced and made it clear to each of us that she was going to make it next to impossible for us to complete our three years at the university. Looking back on those times I can only say she was a piece of work in its own right!

I am now learning that “ridicule” is a phenomenon that individuals resort to as a means of intimidating and bullying others. In the U.S., ridicule was used in the Revolutionary War, both to mock the British troops and to raise the morale of the American fighters. In WWII, domestic use of ridicule targeted Hitler, Mussolini and Hirohito. Nor is humiliation merely a Western conception. In pre-Islamic society in the Middle East, law breakers were often mutilated – either whipped or dismembered – as much for purposes of humiliation as pain. They became living symbols of what befell criminals in the community. Ridicule was also used as a weapon of war in both pre-Islamic and early Islamic society and poets were often assassinated because of their power to create and spread ridicule.

In nearly every aspect of society and across culture and time, ridicule works. Ridicule leverages the emotions and simplifies the complicated and takes on the powerful, in politics, business, law, entertainment, the media, literature, culture, sports and romance. Ridicule can tear down faster than the other side can rebuild. It can smash a theoretical or intellectual construct. Ridicule divides the enemy, damages its morale, and makes it less attractive to supporters and prospective recruits. The ridicule-armed warrior need not fix a physical sight on the target. Ridicule will find its own way to the targeted individual. To the enemy, being ridiculed means losing respect. It means losing influence. It means losing followers and repelling potential new backers.

The year 2010 marks 400 years since the death of famous artist and considered father of modern painting. An exhibition of Caravaggio's work at the Scuderie del Quirinale in Rome this year celebrating this 400th anniversary of his death attracted 580,000 visitors. He killed a man, brawled constantly, rowed with patrons and fled justice while revolutionizing painting with his chiaroscuro style. Now, as if to underline how dramatic Caravaggio's short life was, researchers say he may have quite literally died for his art. He was an artist ridiculed in his life.

The critics say he invented chiaroscuro, or dramatic shading never seen before. A lot is known about Caravaggio's studios, more than most of his contemporaries. They describe the dark walls and a hole in the ceiling (known because he was sued). A few people have made serious suggestions that optical projections were used, and as there are no known drawings, and no record he ever made one, the evidence is very strong indeed. His was art ridiculed.

No conventional historian has bothered to ask how these paintings were made. They think it is of little interest. It is of major interest to us now. The similarity to today's Photo Shop techniques is fascinating. His art ridiculed status is now a myth. This seems to make him a more interesting artist, not less. It accounts for the new kind of space he opened (like TV close-ups), it accounts for the dark walls and the hole in the ceiling. His bones are neither here nor there because of this – a minor event compared with the implications for our time of his new techniques.

… any fans of Waterhouse out there? It is a tragedy, the way his work has been denigrated. While I don't think of John William Waterhouse (1849 – 1917) as being of the same calibre as Sargent or Bouguereau, he has shared their fate at the hands of critics. Keep in mind that he was painting at the same time period as the Pre-Raphaelites. Their work met a lot of criticism, but the classicists who were painting at the same time and who were members of the Raphaelite Association used more classical methods. After his death, his work strongly influenced (and continues to influence) many artists and genres.

Does he get a lot of attention in the art history books? Not really, but it has more to do with the fact that there were so many art styles and movements that occurred at the same time and soon after...impressionism, post-impressionism, expressionism, fauvism, cubism, etc. A lot of significant artists in the late 19th century and early 20th century get "buried" under Renoir, Monet, Van Gogh, Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso.

The Singing Butler, the Jack Vettriano painting - arguably Britain's most popular art image but loathed by critics - entered the financial territory occupied by the world's great contemporary artists when it sold at auction for £744,800. The image of a couple dancing on a windswept beach while a butler sings to them is Britain's most popular art poster, outselling Monet and Van Gogh. The huge price of £744,800 is fuelled by reproductions. The painting sells more than 1million copies, countless greeting cards and more than its fair share of mugs. When it was first sold in 1991, Vettriano received only £3,000 for it. Although he will not have profited from yesterday's sale, The Singing Butler earns him £250,000 a year in reproduction royalties.This an art ridiculed in a bygone era!

Artists themselves have ridiculed revered art of their preceding times. Leonardo Da Vinci's Mona Lisa is arguably the world's most famous and celebrated work of art and as such, it has been celebrated--and ridiculed--by world famous artists including Salvador Dali, Andy Warhol, Rene Magritte, Fernando Botero, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Banksy. To deface a work which was already hailed as one of the greatest achievements of Western art, to deflate Leonardo’s beautiful, decorous sitter to a low physical object, and to reduce the experience of seeing great art to a coarse voyeurism was calculated to offend all notions of art and aesthetic experience.

The Mona Lisa is an impressive painting, especially when you look at the pose of the portrait, a three-quarter view, along with the geometric shape of the subject, a pyramid shape, and the unusual background. What was most impressive is Leonardo's use of the sfumato technique, this is what makes the Mona Lisa the Mona Lisa. The technique creates a mysterious look. Although the Mona Lisa was admired, it took centuries to become what it is now -- and it all centers around a theft.

The Mona Lisa was stolen on August 21, 1911. It was as if someone just walked into the Louvre and took it right from the wall and walked right out. The press had a field day, and many jokes were made on behalf of Le Louvre. All of a sudden everyone knew about the Mona Lisa, and it headlined papers all over Europe. Then all went was quiet. The Mona Lisa was thought to be lost forever. Soon it was forgotten by pop culture. Three years later, an amazing thing happened -- she was found.

Turns out Vincenzo Peruggia, a Louvre employee, had stolen the painting. He walked out of the museum with the painting under his arm, hidden under his coat. This again awoke the media. If a lost painting was a sensation, the finding of it was an even bigger event. This time the Mona Lisa inspired countries around the world. This attention brought on by the theft and return of the painting caused people to take notice, especially details like the Mona Lisa's smile. Like many popular recording artists of today, the Mona Lisa went on a world tour.

The popularity of the Mona Lisa could have drifted away but it stayed. Why did it stay? Rich in symbolic importance, the Mona Lisa became the unofficial representation of the Fine Arts. Some would attack it, it was an art ridiculed and some would use it to validate their work.

Art styles have also not gone unscathed in facing this lethal weapon. Dadaism; the movement was a disorganized, international "movement" of disaffected, alienated, urban bohemians which emerged in the cynical aftermath of the international disaster of World War I. The effect of the war on artists and intellectuals was varied and complex. For Dada artists, it undermined all lofty public values and high ideals and encouraged a modern art which was even more aggressively hostile to conventional morality, respectable values, and all traditional notions of art, even modernist notions to the extent that they became orthodoxy. Dada made cynicism, anarchy, and rebellion into core values.

While it contributed to the rise of Surrealism around 1921-23, Dada was implacably opposed to all rules, orthodoxies, and artistic movements. This tension led to a violent riot between Dadaists and Surrealists at the 1923 Dada-arts soirée held in Paris in 1923. The term Dada itself is revealing in so far as it was a nonsense term coined to describe a bohemian attack on all moral, social, and cultural norms, all notions of order and reason, all established hierarchies and values. Dada artists reveled in anarchic festivals, parades, and theatrical parties at Dada clubs and cafes. They spoofed everything important, including art itself, especially anything taken seriously as high art. Thus Marcel Duchamp drew a moustache on a reproduction of the Mona Lisa and signed it LHOOQ. Pronounced in French, this sounds like the French for “She has a good ass”.

Men and women see the world in essentially different ways, it is said, and this, for better or worse, is reflected in their art. Consequently, as the comments below - variously patronising, stereotyping, occasionally enlightened - reveal, it is only surprisingly recently that women artists have been taken with anything approaching seriousness.

"Art is very much alien to the mind of women, and cannot be accomplished without a great deal, which in women is usually very scarce."

Boccaccio, Italy, 1350s

"I consider women writers, lawyers and politicians as monsters and nothing but five-legged calves. The woman artist is merely ridiculous - but I am in favour of the female singer and dancer."

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, France, 1880s

"Though she [the painter Marie Laurencin] has masculine defects, she has every conceivable feminine quality. The greatest error of most women artists is that they try to surpass men, losing in the process their taste and charm. Laurencin is very different. She is aware of the deep differences that separate men and women - essential, ideal differences."

Guillaume Apollinaire, France, mid 1900s

"Perhaps in her disregard for logic, in her inconsistency and indifference to contradiction, lies the only feminine trait in the art of Suzanne Valadon, that most virile - and greatest - of all the women in painting."

Bernard Dorival, France, 1967

"No man could feel as Georgia O'Keeffe and utter himself in precisely such curves and colours; for in those curves and spots and prismatic colours there is the woman referring the universe to her own frame, her own balance; and rendering in her pictures of things her body's subconscious knowledge of itself."

Paul Rosenfeld, USA, 1920s

"Women can only create babies, say the scientists, but I say they can produce art - and Georgia O'Keeffe is the proof of it."

Alfred Stieglitz, USA, 1920s

"The men like to put me down as the best woman painter. I think I'm one of the best painters."

Georgia O'Keeffe, USA, 1920s

"Only men have the wings for art... This painting [by Lee Krasner] is so good you'd never know it was done by a woman."

Hans Hofmann, USA, 1950s

"I cannot be so many things. I cannot be something for everyone... Woman, beautiful, artist, wife, housekeeper, cook, sales lady, all these things. I cannot even be myself or know who I am."

Eva Hesse, USA, 1960s

"Women's liberation when applied to artists seems to me a naive concept. It raises issues which in this context are absurd. At this particular point in time artists who happen to be women need this particular form of hysteria like they need a hole in the head."

Bridget Riley, UK, 1960s

"If all the paintings ever painted by every woman from Sofonisba Anguissola to Gillian Ayres were thrown into the Atlantic, the history of art would not be a jot disrupted."

Brian Sewell, UK, 1991

The story of the artist who is condemned to neglect throughout his entire career, only to be acknowledged and hailed many years after his death, is now so familiar that it has become a cliche. Sadly, too many deserving artists experienced these fates toward the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries -- a period of great ferment in the history of European art. No artist of the period better exemplifies the vagaries of time and taste more vividly than the great French master, Paul Cezanne (1839-1906). All his working life the artist had to contend with the humiliation of being ridiculed as eccentric, naive, a crank and even a madman. The very vehemence of such attacks testify to the fact that Cezanne's work challenged and undermined the firmly established principal tenets of 19th century academic painting, at its most fundamental level.

For Cezanne the precision of one point perspective or the illusionary potential of light and shade to suggest form, were of secondary importance. Rather, he wanted to convey as strongly as possible the emotional impact of his "sensations" before Nature. He was not content simply to imitate the natural world. Although that may sound like a fine distinction, it did nevertheless, prove decisive. With total dedication and a steely determination, the artist pursued his ideas ruthlessly and in the process forged a radically new visual vocabulary. This new type of painting cleared the way for succeeding generations of artists -- most notably the Cubism of Picasso and Braque -- and ultimately abstract painting itself.

When the Nazis came to power in 1933 Klee was classified as a "degenerate artist," suspended from teaching, ridiculed in the newspapers and harassed at home by the police; at year's end he moved with his family back to the safety of Bern. In 1935 he suffered the first symptoms of systemic scleroderma (a painful autoimmune disease that hardens the skin, joints and organs); the disease worsened over the next two years, and Klee traveled as far as Montana (USA) seeking a cure.

As his health worsened, the political climate in Europe became more menacing, and he failed to obtain Swiss citizenship, he sank into despondency and his painting nearly ceased. However, in the summer of 1937 he was able to resume work, and his output increased to over 1,200 items in 1939 alone. But this was not his final flowering. Across Klee's total output of nearly 9,000 pieces of works, it is somewhat unusual to find watercolors that are simply painted on paper. Klee was an extraordinary technical innovator, and much of his focus was on creating new grounds or supports that would give his paintings unusual qualities of texture and color.

Andrew Wyeth contemporary realist painter (1917 – 2009) came to represent middle-class values and ideals that modernism claimed to reject, so that arguments about his work extended beyond painting to societal splits along class, geographical and educational lines. One art historian, in response to a 1977 survey in Art News magazine about the most underrated and overrated artists of the century, nominated Wyeth for both categories.

Wyeth gave America a prim and flinty view of Puritan rectitude, starchily sentimental, through parched gray and brown pictures of spooky frame houses, desiccated fields, deserted beaches, circling buzzards and craggy-faced New Englanders. A virtual Rorschach test for American culture during the better part of the last century, Wyeth split public opinion as vigorously as, and probably even more so than, any other American painter including the other modern Andy, Warhol, whose milieu was as urban as Wyeth’s was rural.

Art critics mostly heaped abuse on his work, saying he gave realism a bad name. Supporters said he spoke to the silent majority who jammed his exhibitions. “In today’s scrambled-egg school of art, Wyeth stands out as a wild-eyed radical,” one journalist wrote in 1963, speaking for the masses. “For the people he paints wear their noses in the usual place, and the weathered barns and bare-limbed trees in his starkly simple landscapes are more real than reality.”

Feininger (1871- 1956), an American who led a German life, was not emigrating but returning to his native country, driven from Germany by the political and cultural intimidation that had arrived after Hitler came to power in 1933. Shortly after Feininger left, the Nazis seized 378 of the works that had made him one of the most famous artists in Germany, singling out some of them for ridicule in an exhibition of ''degenerate art'' in Munich. Leonell Charles Feininger (he changed the spelling as an artist) was born into a family of musicians in New York City in 1871. His mother, Elizabeth Lutz Feininger, was a singer and pianist, and his father, Karl (or Charles) Feininger, was a classical violinist whose own father had fled Germany for the American South after the failure of the 1848 revolution. Leo, as he was called, was steered by his parents toward a career in music, which played an important role in his art.

When you can get among people and make fun of them and they make fun of us it is a humanizing thing, so it keeps people who are different from each other and different from ourselves, it keeps them from being viewed as nonhuman. Once they start acting funny we relate to them as fellow humans. Ridicule is thus not a lethal weapon; it is a binding factor and it is a fact of life. Ridicule is in a form of publicity and often drives artists to fame.