AS MUCH AS WE LIKE the idea of a "brother-and-sisterhood of art," it has essentially been about competition. That is for the good, for competition can evoke excellence. It can also reveal the calculation, even the underbelly, of the art world and some of its most famous practitioners.
This darker side of competition has been especially so in modern painting and photography, which is saying something, since artists have competed with a vengeance since the Greeks and the Renaissance.
Three modern examples are instructive. We begin with Picasso and Matisse. As is well known, Picasso broke the mold with his oversized painting Les Demoiselles d' Avignon (1907). It took the insular art circles of Paris by storm. Begun as a painting of prostitutes, Picasso revised it several times, ending with an intentionally "ugly" portrayal of naked women whose faces were like African masks. Be that as it may, the composition was exceptional.
Matisse was bothered that Picasso had one-upped him, so he set out to compete. In that same year, 1907, he produced his large painting of The Blue Nude, and in a similar vein, portrayed the "ugly" side of the female: bulbous, cartoonish, and done mostly in blacks and blues.
Decades later, one critic would called this trend in paintings of women "bad boy painting," and it was to rear its head once again around 1950.
This was the ongoing tit for tat between the French painter Jean Dubuffet and the Dutch American painter Willem de Kooning. Dubuffet started the fight, apparently. He was doing a series of neo-expressionist paintings of women, known today as Corps de Dame, intentionally shocking and ugly and done in thick, messy swabs of paint. He would coin the term “art brut” (aka “outsider art) for such works, and after his first showing in New York in 1947, he expanded on the women paintings.
De Kooning, known as a “painter’s painter” in New York, soon was feeling eclipsed by the Dubuffet effect. So he launched into his full-fledged series of "women" paintings (1950-53), large with slashing brush strokes and horrific, big-eyed faces with rictus mouths. Even the colors, often tainted with smudgy blacks, were off note.
As one friendly critic noted, these paintings were "hell bent to shock." To put a good spin on them, critics have since described them as both "exalting and degrading" the female. The viewer can decide. Either way, they were a calculated response to Dubuffet. It was competition for attention.
A final example is among the so-called "picture artists" on the cusp of 1990, in particular Jeff Koons and Cindy Sherman. They both were charging ahead in the New York art scene, and that's when Koons decided to advance his career with some controversy. The result, beginning in 1989, was a series of outsized photographs of him and his Italian porn star wife having sex. The series was titled Made in Heaven.
Cindy Sherman, a photographer whose seminal work has been described as the "one frame movie," noticed. She felt outdone. To respond, and keep her rank in the avant-garde, she unveiled a 1992 photo series called Sex Pictures, using prosthetic limbs and mannequins to portray women, often dismembered and contorted. And she got the desired effect—she was in the news again, hoping to eclipse the cagey, market-savvy Koons.
Again, competition. Everyone has different tastes in art, and it is well known that artists have always tried to shock their way to notoriety. At the same time, some of the famous competitions in art reveal a darker side, a kind of combination of ego, greed for attention at any cost, and as they say now in politics, "taking the low road" rather than the high road.
But shock sells, at least to self-described avant-gardists. The kind of artists we have been talking about could not rest on their laurels. Celebration of past work was not enough. In all three cases, the answer was to violate a norm, cross a line. The goal was to outdo the other.
It was not as philosophical as we might think, though. It was pure attention-getting. Another old saying comes to mind: "I don't care what they say about me, just so they spell my name correctly." This always has been one road to prominence in the art world, but clearly, in our time, the raps are off. Art usually deemed lewd and ugly, even gory, is one way to best your art world rival.