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Art and money, big money, are in the headlines. "The Scream" by Edvard Munch sold at auction for $119.9 million earlier this month, setting a record for the most expensive artwork sold at auction. Makes all our work look like we are selling them for mere pocket change.
This outrageous price would be news enough but I uncovered some startling facts about the artwork. I am wondering if the mysterious buyer, via phone, got what he thought he was paying for.
You see there are actually 4 versions of "The Scream." The Munch Museum in Oslo owns a pastel as well as a painted version, while the National Gallery of Norway holds the earliest painting, dated 1893. But the one auctioned at Sotheby's was best described as a crayon or pastel drawing, not a painting at all, on board.
This information was easy to find online, but one wonders if the buyer who bid via phone realized he was buying a sketch in crayon on board. The art market has been all a twitter about this monumental amount with an art expert even denouncing "The Scream" sale as "a freak show." With the ever-increasing wealth of high-end art collectors, the price of art will continue to skyrocket but this sale seems, well, crazy. Who knows where this madness will end.
More interesting information on this subject is available in a recent article in the Los Angeles Times "Art Prices Reflect Income Inequality" and a related study about "Art and Money."
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Editor's Note: You can view Sharon's original post here.
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Now, we who *paint* in pastel are celebrating the fact that a pastel did bring in such a record sum, as it shows clearly that a pastel painting is as good as any other medium. One reason for the misconceptions around drawing and painting comes from the form of the pastel sticks -- they look like crayons, children draw with crayons, therefore the pastel sticks are crayons. However, that assumption is not all there is to it.
Pastels are mostly pure pigment with a weak binder (if needed). Instead of having the pigment in a loose powdery form, they are moistened and kneaded, then rolled into a handy shape. The pastel artist -- painter! -- uses these "pigment ingots" directly on the surface of their ground.
This is very far from a child's crayon, which is mostly wax and other substances. Likewise, it is also different from dyed chalk.
As you can draw with oils and the tip of a brush, you can paint with pastels. As pastels do not contain any substance that ages (while oils crack, yellow, get brittle), a pastel painting which is 500 years old looks as if it has just been taken from the artist's easel.
It is very well known that there exists 4 versions of The Scream. Is this version a sketch, a painting, or a drawing? It is not a drawing as the board is covered with pigment, but to me it hovers between a painting and a sketch. It is a linear painting, and the pigment sticks are used on their tips, not on their sides where a stroke is more brush-like. Linearity was all the rage in Much's circles. In my more realist eyes, it is not a particularly good painting, but it does have a great emotional impact, and numberless people have said "it is just how I feel sometimes". That is powerful.
And as we know, the artist's skill has nothing to do with how much a work costs, it is only the brand Munch that matters.