Bacchus at the Seaside, 2009
Vandalized oil painting in artist’s frame, mounted on board
235×206 cm (90 3/4 x 81 1/8 inches)
Unique
Sotheby’s London: 7 March 2018
GBP 669,000
Exhibited
Banksy vs. Bristol Museum, Bristol Museum, Bristol, 2009
In Bacchus at the Seaside, Banksy engages a direct dialogue with art history via an unapologetic appropriation of Guido Reni’s 1621 masterpiece Bacchus and Ariadne (Los Angeles County Museum of Art). Banksy’s version is a sardonic take on Ovid’s myth – a canonical subject that has been repeated and re-invented in paint many times over, perhaps most famously by Titian, whose version can be seen in The National Gallery in London. In Banksy’s own incarnation, the Ovidian tale of Ariadne’s plight and Bacchus’s amorous advances barely registers with the viewer; rather, it is in the act of appropriation, defacement, and vandalism that Banksy makes his artistic statement.
Guido Reni, Bacchus and Ariadne
Oil on canvas, 1621
Oil on canvas, 1621
Employing an enlarged painted replica of Reni’s original, Banksy has cut out the faces of the two Ovidian protagonists and introduced a fluorescent traffic cone that, somewhat phallically, shields Bacchus’s genitals. The result is utterly indebted to British seaside humor – its bawdy postcards, kiss-me-quick hats, and arcade amusements. Monumental in scale and far bigger than the Renaissance original, the present work takes the form of a high-art ‘Head in the Hole’ or ‘Peep-through’ board. Readily found at seaside amusement parks, these painted boards typically depict faceless caricatures such as ‘Strong John’, ‘Thin Tim’, or ‘Big Bertha’, dressed in bathing suits and cavorting at the beach.
Having enlarged Reni’s original, introduced a seditiously positioned traffic cone, and removed the faces in the manner of a ‘Head in the Hole’ seaside board, Banksy downgrades and defaces the bourgeois conceit of classical painting in a manner that is entirely beholden to the legacy of Marcel Duchamp.
In 1919, Duchamp drew a moustache and goatee on a cheap postcard reproduction of the world’s most famous painting, Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. Titled, L.H.O.O.Q. this work launched an attack on traditional art and bourgeois taste. The salacious pun of the work’s titular acronym (when pronounced these letters sounds similar to the vulgar French expression ‘there is fire down below’) and Duchamp’s masculinization of classical female beauty poked fun at establishment ideals, particularly the bourgeois cult of Jocondisme that was rife during the early Twentieth Century.
Building on this controversial Dadaist legacy, Banksy ridicules the respected. Herein, traffic cones appear frequently and comically in his work. Undoubtedly inspired by the custom of defacing public statues by adorning them with traffic cone hats, Banksy uses these ubiquitous utilitarian objects to denigrate symbols of cultural refinement. As tremendously deployed in Bacchus at the Seaside Banksy is a master of surprising juxtapositions; using humor and art historical acumen Banksy undercuts the elite to elevate the proletarian.
Source: Sotheby’s
