In their blog posts this morning, Mei and Poy talked about their interests in arts such as music and literature, and Joyce is pursuing studies in dance. I've never studied art, but like many, I'm interested in it, and am particularly fond of Picasso, who I think is the greatest of all modern artists, and whose name appeared in a
BBC News story title yesterday.
According to
"Picasso 'national treasure' seized by French customs," a Spanish citizen has been prevented by his own government from taking a Picasso painting he owns to his own homes in London and Switzerland, with French officials recently seizing the painting, which a Spanish court has "declared a 'historical heritage asset of exceptional importance'"(2015).
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Picasso, P. (1906).
Head of a Young Woman. |
Although I've admired Picasso's work for decades, finding almost everything he did to have great artistic value, I wasn't actually familiar with the painting that the fuss is about, and it is an early work, which doesn't seem to me the best that Picasso created in his extremely productive long live.
Head of a Young Woman isn't going to join the other Picasso works that I've printed out or got in larger format from calendars to decorate my walls with. My cheap copies don't do justice to the originals, but I don't have any spare hundreds of millions of dollars to buy the ones I really love. And even a small, half-decent copy can convey some of what makes Picasso so great.
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Van Gogh, V. (1889).
Ward in the Hospital at Arles. |
On the topic of great art, the picture on page 165 of
Quest 2 is also a fairly famous painting, whose style I thought some might recognise and use as supporting evidence. Van Gogh's original is in full colour, and the association with him, and the actual subject (the topic) of the painting seem to me to support its choice as an image for the opening page of a chapter whose topic is abnormal psychology, just as its title is "Abnormal Psychology." But you didn't have to be an art expert familiar with
Ward in the Hospital at Arles to give a strong answer to the question. In fact, a few people do make good use of the blurry impressionist style to support their main idea about this topic.
When I read the article, I did also have a response more directly related to its content: I think the Spanish legal system is wrong to stop the painting's legal owner from taking it wherever he wants to. If he wants to use it to decorate his home in London or in Switzerland, he should be free to do that. I agree that it's a national treasure, but it's also the private property of the owner. If the Spanish are so desperate to keep it in Spain, they should offer him a fair price, or a very high price, perhaps $50 million dollars, and hope he agrees to sell it them. Then they can keep it in Spain in a public museum for the Spanish people to enjoy. I don't think that something being a national treasure is a good reason for governments to interfere with how citizens use their personal property. What do you think? Do you agree with the owner or with the Culture Minister and the courts and laws of Spain?
Picasso 'national treasure' seized by French customs. (2015, August 4).
BBC News. Retrieved from
http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-33775337
If you look at the URL (the link) to this blog post, it reveals that my original title was very different. But as I wrote, my responses led to a post that was so very inappropriate that I thought I should change the title from "Modern art and the rebirth of a culture" to the new one, ""Lessons from modern art."
ReplyDeleteI did have a response that suggested the first title, but other things came to mind as I was writing, which is perfectly OK in response writing: I didn't spend ten or fifteen, or even five, minutes planning before I started writing - I think it was about 50 seconds planning, so it's no surprise that the final blog post is not what I'd planned in those 50 seconds or so.