Struck down by the flu that is making its way through the community like a juicy rumour. I chose not to attend Monday’s screening of The King’s Speech. I’m part of the group, the Friends of Cinema, that puts on the movies and I was excited at the prospect that a film we chose months ago was likely to pack the theatre. It did, of course, which came as no great surprise because the reviews have been excellent and it leads the Oscar nominations list.
Coincidentally, I had already been thinking of what draws people to art, so I began to wonder why so many people would go this particular film when we offer a range of movies chosen to appeal to as wide an audience as possible. Why would people go to The King’s Speech and not the others in the series? There are many reasons, no doubt, but I’m sure one of the main ones is that the movie has been validated by reviewers and the award nominations.
On the weekend I started to read a book about an Dutch art forger who fooled experts and, more dangerously, Nazi invaders of Holland in the Second World War, by producing works by Johannes Vermeer, whose most famous picture is Girl with a Pearl Earring (also a movie title that drew close to a full house when Friends of the Cinema brought it in several years ago). Then, while nearly 200 viewers were enjoying The King’s Speech, I stayed at home with my sniffles and watched a documentary called Who the #$&% is Jackson Pollock?
The documentary told the story of a middle-aged female truck driver in the U.S. who purchased an abstract painting at a second hand store and then was later told that it might be a work by Jackson Pollock. The tale that unfolded was a clash between the art world and forensic evidence. A fingerprint on the back of the canvas matches others that are likely Pollock’s. And still many art experts, including renowned “fakebuster” Thomas Hoving, who once headed the Metropolitan Museum of Art, were unconvinced. Without provenance, or credible history of its travels between the artist and current owner, they said, they had no reason to reassess their judgment.
The popularity of The King’s Speech and many art works has a connection, in my mind at least. While few could fail to be deeply moved when standing in front of, for instance, Michelangelo’s Pieta or David, the same is not necessarily the case with the sort of painting Pollock produced. Few would look at the Italian masterpieces and say, “I could have done that.” Those words have likely been used by many who stood in front of the huge paint-splattered canvases produced by a mentally ill alcoholic. Are the paintings more impressive, though, because we are told they are Pollock’s? Probably, I’d say. I have stood in the National Gallery of Canada and felt strangely and surprisingly moved by Barnett Newman’s Voice of Fire, which features a single red stripe bisecting a huge blue canvas. But I had some previous knowledge about the painting and perhaps I simply wanted to like it.
Expectations have a great influence on how we react or respond to anything, I suppose. A recommendation of music from someone we respect is likely to get a closer listen than it might otherwise. If one of my artist friends talks glowingly about another artist or particular piece of work, I suspect that I’m going to have a predilection to see it in a similar light. When Hans van Meeghren was forging Vermeers, he was giving Dutch people something they really, really wanted: more paintings by one of their own, someone who had worked in relatively obscurity and whose creations were considered of minor importance until more than a century after he had died.
In the end, van Meeghren’s works were discredited as much by their lack of provenance than their quality. Pollock’s painting, still not accepted as original by many experts, has received an offer of $9 million (which the owner turned down), at least in part because the fingerprint offers at least some provenance. The King’s Speech, undoubtedly a fine movie, has a provenance created by critics and Academy Award nominations. Is it a better movie than Seraphine, which attracted about a third of the audience a couple of years ago? Or than the splendid documentary on David Suzuki that kept me thinking for days after it ran last month? I wonder.
Lorne Eckersley is the publisher of the Creston Valley Advance.