Dali House

Rik Pavlescak, the founder of the Collect Dali Yahoo Group, came up with an interesting analogy toward the end of a lively recent discussion among the members about copyright. He cited a 2006 article by Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam on the debate over Roy Lichtenstein’s use of comic-book panels in his pop art.

Beam in turn pointed to the website of David Barsalou, who was then teaching art at the High School of Commerce in Springfield, Massachusetts. On Deconstructing Roy Lichtenstein, Barsalou stacks more than 100 paintings by the artist next to their original comic images. He also published a book with the same title.

Even better are Barsalou’s Flickr pages, which have a lot of well-sourced background information and biographies and photos of the original comic artists, placing credit where it duly belongs.

Barsalou’s efforts demolish the common belief that Lichtenstein created entirely new images based on the look of 1950s and ’60s comics. Even the cartoons’ balloon captions were often scalped intact.

“He tried to make it seem as though he was making major compositional changes in his work, but he wasn’t,” Beam quotes Barsalou as saying. “The critics are of one mind that he made major changes, but if you look at the work, he copied them almost verbatim. Only a few were original.”

Lichtenstein Foundation executive director Jack Cowart argued that “the panels were changed in scale, colour, treatment and in their implications” and Roy never made an “exact copy”.

Amusingly, the foundation’s website can’t be visited unless you first click to agree that you won’t violate the copyright within, and the warning is illustrated with Lichtenstein’s “Grrrrrrrrrrr!!”, a painting of an angry dog that came directly from a comic strip drawn by Joe Kubert. See the rest.

Georgia O’Keeffe: “Untitled (Blue-headed Indian Doll)”, 1935

Playwright Robert Patrick, ex of New York, now of Los Angeles, commented not long ago on Dali House’s post about Georgia O’Keeffe, one of the artists who appears in his drama “The Beaux Arts Ball”, staged at the Big Apple’s Theater for the New City in 1983.

The photos on this page come from Robert’s Facebook page.

Here’s Georgia with model Gigi playing Marilyn Monroe.

Set in the ladies’ lounge at the Beaux Arts Ball in Paris and encompassing in one go the years 1904 to circa 1962, the play was populated by well-known women of the arts.

“It was a custom at the ball for the artists’ wives, mistresses and models to dress in their men’s styles,” Robert explains.

The curtain rises to find the women in an uproar because Picasso’s model, Jolie, has made a scene because he was paying so much attention to Gertrude Stein.

“Compassionate Mme Seurat and stern Mme Dufy, the rulers of artistic society, disagree over whether to expel Jolie from their company.

“Nervous Mme Matisse and shocked Mrs NC Wyeth side with Mme Dufy, artists Mary Cassatt and Suzanne Valadon support Mme Seurat. Brancusi’s ambitious model, Constance, and Duchamp’s discarded male model, Rose, observe wryly.

Above, Missuses Seurat, Wyeth and Cassatt. See the rest.

Happy Halloween from Edvard Munch and his “Vampire”, from 1894. Actually, Munch didn’t think he was painting a scene from Bram Stoker. He told his pal Adolf Paul, who’d just dropped in to his Berlin studio, to kneel down next to his red-haired model and rest his head against her. She bent down and pressed her lips to his neck.

Munch titled the finished piece “Love and Pain”, because it was about love’s power struggle, and it was one of his series on love (”The Voice” and “The Kiss” being others) that he was compiling for his sweeping “Frieze of Life” masterwork.

But when he showed this one in public, the Polish poet Stansilaw Przybyszeski, an anarchist and, some thought, an occultist, swore he saw a vampire.

“A broken man,” he reckoned, “rolling about in the bottomless pit, weakly, powerlessly, rejoicing in the fact that he can roll about as weakly as a stone … He cannot free himself from the pain, and the woman will always be sitting there, forever biting with a thousand vipers’ tongues.”

Whew!

They were keen in those days on stories about unleashed female libido. Munch came up with something a little more genteel, though the colours are rather titillating.

It’s “just a woman kissing a man on the neck”, he insisted, and when it went on show as part of “The Frieze of Life” in 1918, he called it “A Woman Kissing the Back of a Man’s Neck”. But the public wanted a vampire, and that’s inevitably what they got.

He did four versions. One is in Gothenburg’s Museum of Art, two others at the Munch-Museet in Olso, and this one stayed in private hands. Sotheby’s is selling it on Monday as part of its Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale in New York. How much? That’s probably the scariest part — the catalogue simply says prospective buyers can ask.

THIS JUST IN: Munch’s “Vampire” sold for $38 million. Yes, gulp!

Next, a really horror story, having to do with Andy Warhol’s “Dracula” from 1981, not to be confused with “Andy Warhol’s Dracula”, his oddball 1974 film. Who’s the bloke at the bottom right? His model, as seen in Andy’s Polaroid snap.

Now, according to the Federal Vampire and Zombie Agency, a unit of the US government formed in 1868 by President Ulysses S Grant to combat the scourge of vampirism flooding America with the influx of European immigrants (300,000 by the turn of that century), Warhol wasn’t shot by Valerie Solanis on June 3, 1968. No, not at all. See the rest.

Despite the smog, red tide, cheating at fireworks, fake ethnic minorities, a perfect child lip-synching, Spielberg’s absence and the blood of millions of Burmese and Africans on the wrong side of the Chinese payroll, Beijing put on a pretty good show with the Olympics, I thought.

The one Chinese out of three billion who may not have enjoyed the fortnight is Zhang Hongtu, whose painting “Bird’s Nest, in the Cubist Style” was blocked from exhibition at the German Embassy in the Chinese capital and from its planned reproduction in Chinese Vogue. It was “too political”, as opposed to “not pretty enough”, like the little girl who really did sing the anthem at the Games’ opening ceremony.

Zhang’s depiction of the National Stadium includes bits of the Bird’s Nest structure, the words “Sacred Olympic Torch”, “One World, One Dream” and “Family, Joy, Happiness” in Chinese, the numeral “8″ and, uh-oh, the words “Tibet” and “human right” in English.

Well, I mean, no wonder.

So Zhang and his painting sat out the Games back home in New York, where the Gansu native has lived since 1982. By way of compensation he’s got Sotheby’s “Contemporary Art Asia” auction coming up in the Big Apple on September 17, and a pair of his “traditional Chinese landscapes” rendered in the styles of Van Gogh and Cézanne are expected to bring as much as $60,000 each. See the rest.

There’s a whole lot of people in Beijing at the moment, even more than usual, and, while Hu’s definitely on first, it’s still Mao at bat in the minds of millions. So here’s the Graceless Helmsman as recast by Shi Xinning in 2005.

“Mona Lisa” (yes, that’s the title, and evidently it is black and white) was up for sale at Sotheby’s London last month for a mere £50,000 or thereabouts. Shi was looking to get twice that for five times the celebrities with his “The Beatles”, shown below, from the same year.

These were part of the 39-year-old’s “Utopian Stories” series begun in 2000, Western icons colonising the once-shy China.

“I almost always work with a staging of completely incompatible props and scenery,” Shi has said. “I am not interested in Mao Tse-tung as a real person. Today, Mao is still an icon in China. He is omnipresent.”

In London too. Right about the same time in the same city, Sotheby’s was flogging a posh bonfire’s worth of Andy Warhol collectibles. There was yer Michael Jackson and yer Ted Turner, yer Judy Garland, yer Skull and even an “oxydation painting” — piss and acrylic on canvas, £70,000 please. See the rest.