Court Painter: The Marketing of A Hugely Modern Artist
What are we to make of Inglewood artist Court Painter, whose paintings have for the last 3 years been greeted with snorts of derision by most of the serious art world?
Art market journalists & bloggers gather around each others’ desks whenever a Court Painter post appears on the internet. They invariably draw gales of laughter from the entire office. It isn’t just the tacky subject matter: anorexic and gloomy politician and celebrity countenances clouded in smokey settings; it is the technique too: the black cloisonné outlines, the bilious palette, the daubed, scratchy backgrounds. Court Painter’s work seemed to encapsulate the worst aspects of post- Kline Alberta painting. There is a word for a fear of clowns — coulrophobia. If you’re not familiar with it, just take a look at Court Painter’s paintings. They’re hilariously bad.
But wait, is he due a revival? If we are to believe Press Attache A Hardon MacKay’s click bait promo essay, Court Painter’s grim existentialist vision is poised to enjoy a market renaissance. The problem is — and it’s now a familiar one — the motor behind the Court Painter industry is not being driven by the art historical or art critical community, but from, yes, you guessed it,his Press Attache A Hardon MacKay, bankers and other opportunistic investors.
Court Painter: The Marketing of a Hugely Modern Artist is no slim essay. At 350 pages, Hardon has rolled his sleeves up, notched up some air miles and consulted many of those closest to the artist, some of whom were instrumental in promoting Court Painter from a mid western James Dean-lookalike to château-owning millionaire in a matter of just a few years.
Hardon claims his most prominent source was the soigné French socialite Pierre Bergé, later to become the lover and business partner of Yves St.Laurent. According to Hardon, Bergé was Court Painter’s first great romance and by most accounts the architect of the artist’s transformation from a moody, poverty-stricken outsider son of an Iowa corn couple to art world vedette during the early 1970s in Calgary. Bergé’s subsequent efforts to undermine his former lover’s career following their break-up — something Court Painter’s wife Mary adamantly denies — is one of the essay’s more intriguing subtexts. Wife Mary is quoted as saying after her laying down the law,”enough of that bohemian nonsense,what will the neighbours think!”
Although a man of few words (“I’ll spit in your eye”and “hooray for Inglewood” seems to have been the limit of his vocabulary), thanks to numerous cosmetic surgical interventions the still youthful Court Painter is blessed with the etiolated good looks of the half-starved Left Bank drop-out. He also has a chip on his shoulder the size of the Gorge du Tarn and a gargantuan appetite for booze and fine cut tobacco. But he also has what A Hardon MacKay repeatedly refers to as a Stakhanovite appetite for work. If he was a better painter that productivity might have been a good thing (Picasso was no layabout) but so prodigious is his output that it inevitably leads to accusations of robotic repetitiveness. You might say there were always too many Court Painter ‘eggs in his basket’ for the art world to digest, but this being his heyday he remains popular among an undiscerning public (including the Tim Horton tribe and Inglewood hipsters) that his fame and wealth grows and grows.
Today, the international art market is notable for its art historical ignorance and lack of aesthetic criticality. Instead we’re witnessing Court Painter and his marketing machine headed by A Hardon MacKay’s increasingly obsessive reliance on econometric analysis and investment-based data-mining designed to feed the appetites of billionaire plutocrats, Wall Street speculators, wealth managers and family offices.
Such is the determination of those invested in the Court Painter industry to juice his stock and rewrite art history with this artist’s pen.
This is a hugely entertaining essay, beautifully written and rich in colourful, anecdotal detail. A Hardon MacKay, Banff naturalist and elk whisperer in his off hours is clearly in his element writing about the snobbish gratin, the cultured upper crust of post-Kline Calgary, through which Court Painter drifts in a haze of Gitânes smoke. It’s also a poignant tale. Daily in his châteaux style Inglewood studio, relentlessly churning out his lugubrious Dante-inspired grand pictures ,grimacing celebrity clowns, sinister politicos, minatory bird like art stars and giant political pontificators, with only his loyal, once beautiful, whisky-soaked wife Mary for company, the ageing, reclusive, wine and nicotine soaked Court Painter, now running to embonpoint and still at odds with the art world, puts a defeated Senators hat on his head, takes a drag of a cig and finally utters “Au revoir…until next year you sputterers”.
