Couple of thoughts...first of all, I realized I had made a pretty Freudian error in my last posting by saying that the young Brit Artists made me grit my "teach". Hmmm.

Freda, thanks so much for such gems! I'm still making notes of all you mentioned!

It often seems stange to me that one can never assume that the art and the artist contain the same beauty. There are a huge amount of real assholes amongst the great artists, as some of you noted. I often have trouble with this one, needing to make sure I don't throw out the art BECAUSE of the artist (I keep thinking of Wagner, though really Mozart is a better example for me, since I don't think I'd have cottoned to Wagner even if he hadn't been such an anti-Semite...Or Ezra Pound. All had nasty streaks so I've been informed, but all were capable of such sublime creative talent.)

And I think this is connected to the discussion going on about Picasso. Just because the man had it in him to churn out gobs and gobs of stuff, doesn't necessarily diminish his talent for me. I see it rather as a constant purging he had little control over. Having said that, was he aware that people would eagerly pick up his napkins that had a squiggle on it and sell them for a small fortune? Of course he was. But I would tend to think those squiggles as important a part of the body of his entire work as I would if I had access to Shakespeare's thrown out limericks (would that we had FOUND some of these!) He wasn't responsible for their being priced out of orbit...

..xx..e

(PS- Hey, Bobert! Find room somewhere on your walls for that Gauguin again soon!)

(PPS- And I have to confess to having had on my wall as a girl, copies of both Picasso's "The Old Guitarist" and Paul Keene's Big-Eyed Children. It was all part of Art's Rich Tapestry for me.)