real artists cannot be wealthy?

by picasso

Posted to Utterances on 2003-07-16 08:24:00

Parent message is 485630
wow. that sucks. Someone should tell that to all of wealthy artists out there that are making quality work and making a living as well.

picasso’s estate was estimated to be around $750 milion when he passed. this includes, his works and his personal wealth. he left no will but did wish for many of the paintings he owned (Cezanne, Matisse, Renoir) to be given to the Louvre.



From The Online Picasso Project:
(written in 1973)


Picasso’s wealth created a flamboyant archetype of success that has affected every creative life for the worse, though nobody expects to be as rich as Picasso. Not even the conspicuous earners of the past, like Rubens or Titian, made that kind of money. Thus out of the production of one year, 1969-70, he exhibited 167 oils and 45 drawings; in all, the gross market value of that fragment of his output was probably about $15 million, and the value of Picasso’s whole estate has been guessed at $750 million or more. Although Picasso had long since parted with it, his Nude Woman of 1910 recently fetched a reported $1.1 million from the National Gallery. That is believed to be the highest price yet paid for a Picasso and a clue to future price tags.

By 1940 Picasso was the most famous artist in the world; by 1970 he had become the most famous artist that ever lived, in the sense that more people had heard of him than ever heard the name, let alone saw the work, of Michelangelo and Cezanne while they were alive. The effect of this on him can only be guessed at. The engine an artist deploys against the world is necessarily himself, and within it are some delicate mechanisms that must be protected. In the work obsessions of his last years, he was possessively tended by the last of the seven major women in his life, Jacqueline Roque, 47, whom he married in 1961. The old man made his final dive into the preclassical past, becoming more than ever the inaccessible Triton or satyr, Homo Mediterraneus padded in nymphs; that myth was his official interface with an insatiable and by now meaningless public, and the work went on behind it.

Now that Picasso is dead, his life achieves a fleeting equality with the massive profile of the work. Whatever the verdicts on Picasso’s achievement may be (there could be no single judgment on his stupendous diversity), his life was epic. Who in our time has lived so fully and with such demonic intensity? There are no candidates. “Painting,” he once observed, “is stronger than me; it makes me do what it wants.” There is no way to guess on whom, if anyone, Picasso’s now homeless dybbuk may next descend.

Total Works:

The total output of Picasso’s artistic career has been given different estimates: “50,000 works of art, including 1,885 paintings; 1,228 sculptures; 2,880 ceramics; 18,095 engravings; 6,112 lithographs; and approximately 12,000 drawings, as well as numerous linocuts, tapestries, and rugs, not to mention his letters, poetry and plays.” (Selfridge 1994, 102) … [or] … “1,885 paintings; 1,228 sculptures; 7,089 drawings; 30,000 prints (engravings, lithographs, etc); 3,222 ceramics; 150 sketchbooks … With the addition of his personal wealth, his legacy was estimated on his death at an unbelieavable 1,252,673,200 francs. ” (Robinson 1999, 10; cf. also Habarta 2000, 77)