I must have been 11 or 12 years old. To satisfy his legendary hyperactivity, my father undertook to sell “velvet paintings” to groups of clients whom he brought together in the evening in salons thanks to his numerous contacts.
He and I left with the trunk of the car filled with these “masterpieces” that a painter from Gatineau created in series in two styles: landscapes of rocks and naked women whose private parts were veiled.
This was my first contact with art. And also with the breasts pointing spectacularly towards the sky.
From memory, these paintings were sold between $12 and $16. My father, who had the patter of ten Willie Lamothes, made a pitch hell. He knew nothing about painting, but his talent as a storyteller took over.
As for his negotiating side, he was formidable. “If you take two landscapes from me, I’ll take $4 off the naked woman!” »
These memories came back to me when I learned that a painting by Bob Ross, who became famous in the 1980s and 1990s thanks to the show The Joy of Painting where he taught painting techniques, was going to be put up for auction.
This painter, whose hair was a work of art in itself, had no equal when it came to explaining how to create reflections in water or mist around trees.
Bob Ross, who died in 1995, is said to have created around 30,000 paintings during his career, including 1000 for his shows (he made three copies of the same painting at different stages for each episode). While a few works have been donated to the Smithsonian, several are kept in premises by his heirs.
So the Modern Artifact gallery (which sells works by Bob Dylan and Jeff Koons), located in Minneapolis, will auction the first painting (A Walk in the Woods) that Bob Ross made in 1983 for his show. The price set is… $9.85 million.
My first reaction was to burst out laughing. Then I started thinking…
Can this painting really be worth this price? What determines the value of a work? Can an artist’s value change over time? Would we have prejudices about the genre advocated by Bob Ross?
Personally, I wouldn’t pay $25 for a painting by this painter. It doesn’t speak to me. But I can well imagine that people love it. As I can understand that Bob Ross left his mark on “popular art” in his own way, especially by using a mass media, television.
But how can a gallery owner wake up one morning and decree that a painting (which belonged to a woman who bought it several years ago at an auction for the benefit of the PBS station which produced the first season of the painter’s show) is now worth 10 million?
I spoke with two Montreal gallery owners with different styles. Simon Blais described this sale as “ridiculous”, which for him is only a “smoking blow”. ” It does not work like that. It makes no sense. »
Michael Mensi, of Galerie MX, also shares this point of view. “It’s a marketing operation whose aim is to increase the value of Ross’s paintings. You can be sure that at the sale, there will be people who are there just to inflate the bids. »
Michael Mensi checked on a specialized platform how much Ross’s paintings are sold on average: between $8,000 and $12,000. Two “exceptional” works, however, found buyers for around $150,000.
So, I ask my question again: how do we establish the value of a work of art in a context where no one agrees on that of the Mona Lisa?
Michael Mensi admits that he himself sometimes has difficulty finding his way. As for Simon Blais, he prefers to rely on the historical and plastic interest of the work, its originality and the consensus that the artist’s approach achieves among specialists.
Ryan Nelson, the gallery owner behind the sale of the Bob Ross painting, argues that the artist is part of art history by surpassing Andy Warhol and Pablo Picasso as the most important artist searched on the internet.
Weak defense. Picasso and Warhol do not explain to us on video how to paint clouds.
I have often thought that what makes a work valuable is its pioneering role in the course of art. If the Automatists’ paintings sell for so much, it is because they were among the first to make abstraction in Quebec.
However, Bob Ross is far from being the first to paint landscapes as he did.
Art is today a vast market. The difficulty is to disentangle the lure of profit from the real value of an artist. Is the banana taped to the wall by artist Maurizio Cattelan really worth $120,000? Does Banksy’s self-destructed work deserve to have been sold for $31.3 million?
There are days when I come to think that these numbers which no longer mean anything are part of art itself. This surge in prices is so disproportionate that it has become a kind of artistic performance.
We would like to have clear and precise answers about art. He refuses to give them to us. This is precisely its reason for being.
While I wait to find out how much Bob Ross’s work will ultimately sell for, I am pleased to know that velvet paintings are now being offered for a few hundred dollars at flea markets.
My father would be proud! He who told his clients that it was going to increase in value one day.