| 1° The current slump seems to me
be an immediate function of the general business crisis. It was inevitable that painting (object of primary intellectual necessity) was very strongly affected by the slowdown in transactions.
It must also be said that the same
effects would have occurred, yesterday, today or tomorrow, even if the crisis was not widespread. The agio has taken hold of the paint market and it is there that the main cause of the fall in values ??on the Stock Exchange (I mean the Hôtel des Ventes) should be sought.
Indeed, there can only be one
limited number of collectors likely to pay for paintings exceeding a certain figure; whether it be a hundred thousand francs or a million, the moment will always come when the "ceiling" will be reached. At this moment, only the scarcity of supply could allow prices to be maintained, and this is not possible for living painters who are still producing, and sometimes overproducing.
If we imagine who there is by
the world one hundred works from Raphael to
sell, we can say that they
would not all reach the 22 million that were recently donated for a painting by this great master.
2° It is possible that the campaign
said against "Living Art" has also had
an influence on the reduction of certain
paintings, but I believe more in coincidence than real action; for if, truly well conducted, it could have had effects on certain productions inflated by the Merchants without the general consent of the artists, its very excess and its injustice for some real painters, would have made it all the more ineffective in that it did not offer satisfactory replacement values.
3° I see no plausible reason
to proclaim: "Painting is dying,
painting is dead! »
The number of great painters, or
even valuable painters, has everything
fairly limited summer time: at times
the most fruitful, we can among
the first to count four or five
per century, and a hundred among the others, which seems to me very estimable.
Our French 19th century confirms
pretty much these numbers; we belong too much to the 20th century to judge well, trust him.
The cult of painting (object of primary intellectual necessity) will always be served by its priests, followed by its faithful. The 5th, 6th and 7th Arts, while waiting for the 8th, 9th and 10th, not aiming at the same goals, cannot supplant it.
Let painters work, let them have faith. and leave it to the gods!
|