The killing ground of kitsch
Part of this picture is from William Bouguereau’s 1888 painting “Printemps”. Can you guess which part?
Click on the image to see the original (nudity alert).
You can tell any artist his work is “garbage” and it won’t cut nearly as deeply as the descriptive “kitschy”. The adjective is a sabre to the gut.
Except for kitsch artists, of course, who giggle and hope you’ll run them through again. And again. Mark Ryden shares this glee; Dali probably didn’t mind so much in his later years, because he was still seen as an iconoclast regardless and, besides, he was making buckets of money in his pursuit of corniness.
But read the diatribes of the Art Renewal Centre and brace yourself for some unamused bristling, because “kitsch” continues to be the operative epithet in defining much of the 19th-century painting it worships, and in fact, the brightest star in its heaven,
William Bouguereau, is for many the poster boy of kitsch. This is a shame because it was actually the copyists who mimicked him that submerged the West in slovenly sentimentalty. See the rest.
