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.
Bouguereau is, of course, light-years away from the sort of garden gnomes and bookshelf knick-knacks now popularly associated with the word, the kind of stuff that the collector-oriented British website WorldOfKitsch.com rather feebly celebrates (”the world is littered with fine examples of kitsch”).
Definitions: trash, pretentious art, merely popular, vulgar, inferior, tawdry, tasteless, cheap, mass-marketed, knock-offs, trite, crass, mawkish, maudlin, in bad taste.
Munich art dealers, scraping from the dialectical kitschen (”to scrape up mud from the street”) were using the word in the 1870s to describe readily made pictures that had waiting buyers among Germany’s nouveau riche. This was art slapped together for hasty sales.
Fifty years later someone in an ivory tower butted out a cigarette in a Toby mug and a scholarly recasting of the term began. The “art theorists” – likely bored between decent wars and decent art movements – weighed in on porcelain pooches and paintings of fairies. With Hitler still embryonic, kitsch became the threat du jour, the bird flu of its time.
How the hell is Picasso going to make his Next Big Breakthrough, they demanded to know, if Joe Blow is still spending all his money on bucolic farmscapes?
Theodor Adorno got himself into a right Marxist stew over the market dictating culture’s progress. Hermann Broch fretted that kitsch was trampling all over the genuine truth in a misguided rush to perceived beauty.
In his essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch”, Clement Greenberg really got stuck in to Bouguereau and his ilk in the great European academies of the previous century. All those rules were for making art learnable by anyone, rather than the intuitive process it is, he lamented. By making sure we see nothing ugly in life, Milan Kundera added in “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”, kitsch merely scrubs reality’s toilet. And Picasso needs to poo.
Then came camp. Irony made kitsch safe again, though the mass of men, leading lives of quiet desperation, still had difficulty distinguishing between what was cool and what was just sadly inappropriate.
Pop art led the charge, the cannon dragged forward later by the likes of Italy’s Nuovi Nuovi movement, which grasped at garishness years before goth rock, and the unabashed sensualists, for whom beauty rules, and, bringing up the rear, the sentimentalists with their doe-eyed children, pooches playing poker, Elvis in velvet and hotrod murals.
And let’s not forget Thomas Kinkade, who bills himself as America’s “most collected living artist”, Jesus boosting his sales handsomely.
But kitsch comes from Hell. Hell, Michigan (population an astonishingly low 266), calls kitsch its “main export”.*
* Yes, I looked it up. A New Yorker called George Reeves (no relation to Superman) opened a distillery there in the late 1830s, and when someone asked him what he wanted to name the town that had fermented around it, he said, “[Hic!] I don’t care, you can name it Hell if you want to.” So they did.
I had a good laugh the first time I saw one of CM Coolidge’s paintings of dogs playing poker, and I still chuckle when they pop up. This is “His Station and Four Aces”, and it’s 103 years old.
I don’t think I’d pay much money for one, unlike the buyer at an auction last year who paid nearly $600,000 for two of them, “A Bold Bluff” and “Waterloo”. The auctioneer was expecting maybe $40,000.
Cassius Marcellus Coolidge (1844-1934) had no formal training at art, but did cartoons for his local newspaper and, according to Wikipedia, was the inventor of “comic foregrounds”, those life-size vignettes of the seaside or whatever with a hole cut in them for you to stick your head through and have your photo taken.
Coolidge did 16 oil paintings in 1903 of dogs in human poses for an advertising firm, nine of them involving a game of poker.
