Unknown Artist - Nude Female - Recent Ceramic Casting - An Example of Artistic Appropriation?

 

Once again, the hollow halls of eBay USA has burped up a little “I stole that!” gem. As any serious art collector can tell you, you can find “beauty” in the strangest, least costly, and most unlikely of places. I have no idea who created this small ceramic sculpture of a female nude but it hit two bells in my belfry. First of all it contained a certain gentle beauty of a female nude in the not so familiar form of an unmarked ceramic and somewhere in my old memory it had all of the attributes of an artistic appropriation. It brought back memories of my time in Art School when I learned that artistic expression did not really depend upon the unique genius and imagination of the artist (it helps) but in reality relied up the ability of an artist to “appropriate” an image and turn that reinterpretation into something “unique” to that artist. In other words, artistic expression builds upon the past. I have an original drawing by New Orleans artist George Dureau (1930-2014) in my collection. In researching the artist and his works, I was amused to find that every time Robert Mapplethorpe visited his studio in New Orleans, George would literally hide his latest drawings and paintings because if Mapplethorpe saw them the exact images would invariably end up in one of Mapplethorpe's newest works! Any art historian will gladly admit that Pablo Picasso was the biggest beg, borrow, and steal artist of the 20th Century. If the image or idea wasn’t nailed down, Picasso would “appropriate it", reinvent it, and produce it in one of his own works! Much to my surprise, artistic appropriation is a time honored tradition in art circles. Appropriation Art refers to the utilization of existing objects or imagery with almost no alteration. In the art world artistic appropriation refers to the correct adoption, borrowing, recycling, or sampling of any human-made cultural imagery (think Marcel Duchamp).

Okay, but how does this particular ceramic figure of a female nude fit in with “Artistic Appropriation?” I searched the halls of my memory when suddenly a recollection of a painting by Sir George Clausen, RA. titled “Youth Mourning” (1916) came to mind. The pose had been slightly altered but the over all feeling of the work was definitely on target. Did the creator of this small ceramic work expound upon his or her visualization of Clausen’s original work? Who knows? But the similarity is just too obvious to not make that assumption.

 

 

                                  Sir George Clausen RA: Self Portrait

Clausen created the original painting in 1916 in honor of his young daughter upon hearing the news of the death of her fiance on the battlefields of France in World War I. Here is Clausen's painting of grief: