Paul Cezanne Les Baigneurs Grande Planche Essay

Paul Cezanne Les Baigneurs Grande Planche - Essay Example Rich people bought rich people's art, while the rest f us bought posters or nothing. The prospect f walking into a gallery and talking to the owner intimidated me, and I also took it for granted that the era was long past when someone like me could afford to buy anything worth having. What changed my mind was the Internet. In the late 90's, print dealers across the country began launching websites on which they advertised their wares, and some even posted the prices. I was already teaching myself about prints: works published in multiple copies that cost only a fraction f the price f a painting by the same artist, thus putting them within reach f art lovers f comparatively modest means. Now I began to consider the possibility f buying them. What separates a limited-edition print from a museum poster or a "framed reproduction" is that the former, unlike the latter, is largely or entirely handmade, is produced in small quantities, and is (usually) signed and numbered by the artist, who creates it with the technical assistance f printers familiar with the particular medium in which he is working. No honest collector will deny that this last feature, the signature, is part f the appeal; but to buy a mediocre lithograph simply because it is signed by Joan Mir or Marc Chagall is only a baby step up from collecting autographs. The best printmakers, from Rembrandt and Drer to Avery and Frankenthaler, have always been drawn to the medium for its own sake, and their prints are worth having not merely in lieu f a more expensive painting but because they are fully realized creations in themselves. (House 369-376) Anyone who doubts this need only look at a copy f Piazza Rotunda, a limited-edition aquatint by William Bailey that I bought directly from Crown Point Press in San Francisco, never having seen anything other than a thumbnail reproduction. It is a still life f a miscellaneous assortment f eggs and kitchenware arranged on a circular tabletop in a shallow, strangely empty room. When I opened the package and saw the piece "in the flesh" for the first time, I actually gasped, stunned by its subdued intensity and fineness f line. Unlike a poster, Piazza Rotunda has a subtly textured, three-dimensional surface, created by the impressing f the etched plate into the thick paper on which the image is printed. Even if it were unsigned, I would have wanted to own it simply because f the way it looks. In fact, that is the only good reason to buy a work f art: so that you can look at it every day, as often as you want. (McPherson 400-401) But what could I afford that I would want to look at every day Two f my well-to-do acquaintances are serious collectors, and knowing them nearly caused me to quit before I got started. To the aspiring collector f modest means, few things are more demoralizing than the spectacle f a Park Avenue living room whose contents include some twenty-odd canvases by a half-dozen important painters. I knew I would have to cut my aesthetic coat to fit my financial cloth. Once again, though, luck was with me. I had always loved American modernism in all its myriad manifestations. From F. Scott Fitzgerald and Aaron Copland to Louis Armstrong and Fred Astaire, our best artists have spoken in the crisply empirical, immediately accessible tone f voice now