Bad Paintings by Great Artists.

[Marc]

Let's feel a little better about our work by posting indifferent paintings by famous artists. After all no one's perfect.

Salvador Dali. Portrait of Carmen Bordiu Franco.

 

[brianvds]

Vincent van Gogh - Young man with cornflower. Oil on canvas, 39 x 31 cm.

 

[Marc]

Oh, dear lord that can't be real!

 

[Marc]

Another Dali.

 

[Marc]

Supposedly Rembrandt. Maybe he's under the restoration somewhere.

 

[Marc]

Picasso, Femme Assise Pres d'une Fenetre 1932. Sold for over 44 million, but I feel is a bit of a fail. It seems to try and combine and resolve his curves of this period with the geometric vertical and horizonal line ups of Mondrian. Instead of a dynamic contrast, I think it just comes off as awkward.

 

[Bongo]

44 million! Not worth a penny more the $42 million

 

[Marc]

I was going to post one or two howlers by Balthus, but his stuff seems to be disappearing from the internet. Possibly mostly his nudes, but as I can't see what's gone I can't be sure. Picking a merely so so image from a self-taught artist when he did far worse feels a bit off, so no picture for this one.

 

[Marc]

Renoir. He seems to go a bit off with his later years with depiction of faces. Most clearly seen with the placement and angle of the eyes. This is a very bad example.

 

[Marc]

There are some paintings in our past we'd like to remove from history. "Oh God not that thing" If this Balthus painting was created by myself, I'd have liked to redo it in this fashion.

I'm imagining the model's hair is semi wet, so to keep in theme I'd have added a wrapped bath towel.

 

[Bongo]

Picasso, Femme Assise Pres d'une Fenetre 1932. Sold for over 44 million, but I feel is a bit of a fail. It seems to try and combine and resolve his curves of this period with the geometric vertical and horizonal line ups of Mondrian. Instead of a dynamic contrast, I think it just comes off as awkward.

View attachment 47896

Your 44million evaluation was 9 years old, the most recent price it sold for (3 years ago) at Christies was $103 million. Not a bad return

 

[brianvds]

There are some paintings in our past we'd like to remove from history. "Oh God not that thing" If this Balthus painting was created by myself, I'd have liked to redo it in this fashion.
View attachment 47938

I'm imagining the model's hair is semi wet, so to keep in theme I'd have added a wrapped bath towel.

Maybe we should go throw a bucket of paint over an oil rig in protest against it.

 

[Terri]

The Picasso is the least poorly wrought, in my opinion. It isn't much different stylistically than his other work of that period - it just looks like he abandoned it. All the initial sketch lines are visible, and there's no bold color buildup.

The van Gogh is so ghastly that it doesn't even look real.

#4 looks like.....Walt Disney...? Why would Dali waste his time on such a thing?

@Marc, re: the Renoir - agreed. The facial dimensions are way off, especially around the eyes. It's not totally fair to dig the garish flesh tones when on the internet.

 

[TK H-H]

Regarding the Dali. I assume it was Disney? He worked with Walt Disney on an animated film (Destino), though it wasn't completed during their time. So they had some relationship. Must have been painted around that time.

 

[Marc]

The last Dail does look like Walt Disney, but it's actually Colonel Jack Warner of Warner Brothers.

 

[brianvds]

The Picasso is the least poorly wrought, in my opinion. It isn't much different stylistically than his other work of that period - it just looks like he abandoned it. All the initial sketch lines are visible, and there's no bold color buildup.

As I recall, Picasso wasn't very orderly when it came to his output: sketches, half-finished pictures, abandoned projects, random scribbles - all of this would accumulate in his studio and house in disorderly manner. It was said that when his house got too full of stuff he'd just buy a new house instead of cleaning up.

And the problem is that nowadays, every single line he ever drew is sold as a masterpiece, irrespective of whether he himself would have considered it finished or any good at all.

Lesson to us all: periodically dig into your studio and burn stuff, or some end-of-the-day scribble you all forgot about might end up on an art message board, displayed as one of your really bad pieces.

The van Gogh is so ghastly that it doesn't even look real.

I'm one of those weirdoes who like Van Gogh's early, "dark" work much more than the stuff he eventually became famous for. The more one reads up about him, the more clear it becomes that he suffered from very severe mental illness, and alas, it increasingly influenced his work.

 

[Terri]

I'm one of those weirdoes who like Van Gogh's early, "dark" work much more than the stuff he eventually became famous for. The more one reads up about him, the more clear it becomes that he suffered from very severe mental illness, and alas, it increasingly influenced his work.

I haven't had a negative reaction to anything by Vincent until my eyes fell on this. A perverse kind of Tom Sawyer vibe that looks like something from the Theater of the Grotesque.

Agreed, it seems obvious that he suffered from some sort of mental illness. I've also read speculation about some sort of inner ear issue, but we'll never know. The only silver lining is that he was able to paint exactly what he saw. (Even this!)

Today he'd likely be so jacked up on drugs he couldn't lift a brush.