“Good morning, Mr. Phelps. The painting you are looking at is a recent profile portrait of one Mary Jane Bo-Peep, an adorable performance artist who is actually a front for an international ring of narcotics-funded terrorists. Your mission, should you decide to accept it…”
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Personally, I think it has more lasting impact only partially shredded, as if it will always be being shredded. There is a feeling of perpetually ongoing disaster the way it turned out. A beautiful statement regardless.
At least the parts won’t get lost.
Where do you have it that Vermeer or el Greco died penniless?
And why pick them as examples?
I was just going off memory on two of my favorites (I’ll admit I’m better at categorizing/placing than specific history when it’s off the cuff). After a brief peek bac, Vermeer was in substantial debt and, unable to sell any of his work outside his hometown and having no students, he had to work as a broker for the works of other painters as well as an inn-keeper to provide for his wife and 11 children. He mortgaged his mother-in-law’s home against a modest loan to stay afloat and basically collapsed/died a year later (1675) due to stress after a bender. He was obscure for 150-ish years until he was ‘rediscovered’ in the 1800s. I was a bit off-base with El Greco, though-- he was over-leveraged, involved in some legal disputes over commission fees from multiple patrons, and had become accustomed to loose purse-strings as a way of life, but he apparently lived quite nicely up until the last couple of years when all that caught up with him. I remembered it differently but fair is fair.
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I must have seen 50 or so El Greco’s in Spain.
One day-glow saint after the next. They’re nice though.
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