MISSING ORIGINAL
Toxic Beach
Year: 2005
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: Unknown
Edition: Unique
Exhibition History
Crude Oils, London, 2003
After Jack Vettriano’s The Singing Butler
Jack Vettriano is a Scottish painter born in 1951 whose 1992 painting The Singing Butler became a best-selling image in Britain. Vettriano is a self-taught artist in drawing and perspective who manipulates paint in veiled glazes and meaningful shadows. His style has been compared to those of Hopper and Sickert, and his scudded beaches to those of Boudin. In many of his paintings, there is a hidden narrative, in enigmatic compositions, a starting point for dozens of short stories. However, the critiques are not favorable to his artistry to say the least… He has been described as a purveyor of “badly conceived soft porn” and a painter of “dim erotica”. Others have written the artist paints brainless erotica, with ‘popularity’ resting on cheap commercial reproductions of his paintings.
Despite those unfavorable critiques, The Singing Butler sold at auction in 2004 for GBP 744,800, which was the record at the time for any Scottish painting, and for any painting ever sold in Scotland. Reproductions of The Singing Butler make it the best-selling art print in the UK.
MISSING ORIGINAL
The work belongs to Banksy’s widely celebrated series, the “Crude Oils”. In these hijacked traditional oil paintings, the artist inserts his iconic stencil figures into Old Masters works. In doing so, he tackles relevant issues and formulates sharp social commentary through subversive humor. They’re both a reference to ideas of the “readymade” and artists like Marcel Duchamp, as well as to ideas of Pop Art around mass production and appropriation. Banksy has successfully placed these artworks into exhibitions of respected museums and art galleries around the world, including The Louvre, The Tate, The British Museum and New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
