The other day I tweeted
“I'm expecting
Scott Warmuth to tell us on whose photographs Bob Dylan has based his New Orleans Series paintings." I wasn't joking, and of course he and others already
have come up with some of the pictures behind Dylan's. He tells me it was Tara-Jane Hulligan Zuk, a Liverpool-based Dylan fan, who spotted this Leonard Freed photo of a boy and a blind man used by Dylan:
Dylan, of course, hadn't sat around in a New Orleans courtyard for hours painting the scene in front of him either. Indeed:
Scott Warmuth found that old postcard image back on January 20 (2013) when the Dylan paintings were first glimpsed online. He tells me that Anneke Derksen, a Dylan fan from Antwerp, found other postcards, including this:
Something like same argument might apply as over the Asia Series. The fact that Dylan's paintings are of other people's scenes may or may not make all this smell funny - other artists have followed much the same method - but it does seem sad. Here is someone whose generous creativity changed the times with a highly personal, hands-on plunge into the maelstrom of America, and who is now making millions of dollars essentially by copying other people's work. How much more you could admire that courtyard painting if Bob Dylan
had sat there for hours to achieve it.
The publicity for the New Orleans Series doesn't quite make the same spurious claim as with the Asia Series, that Dylan painted from life itself:
The 71-year-old star, whose works already hang in various European art galleries, came to inaugurate the exhibition himself earlier this week. “Each work is a fragment of a bigger story and each image is halfway between dream and memory," said a spokesperson for Milan City Hall, which is organising the show. It said the paintings were based on photographic images and had “a strange atmosphere of suspense" with their stories of love and violence. [from Art Daily]
Yet while it states very clearly that the paintings are based on photographs, and the rest of the wording can't be pinned on Dylan himself, there is a specious sort of semi-claim here, isn't there?
“Halfway between dream and memory?" Whose?
