A Short Guide to Bad Painting

If you have never heard about the “Bad Painting”, you are certainly familiar with some of its famous representative people’s works. The name of Jean-Michel Basquiat must indeed be familiar to you, especially since the retrospective that the musée d’art moderne de Paris gave him during Spring 2011.

What are the characteristics of “Bad Painting”? The “Bad Painting”, which saw its beginnings in the 70s, is a spontaneous artistic movement born with the questioning of old styles (at that time the conceptual art or minimalism) and the provocation against the all-powerful good taste. However, Bad Painting became a well-known artistic movement only in 1978 when the art critic and auctioneer Marcia Tucker brought an exhibition project of the same name at the New Museum of Contemporary Art of New York.

What is saying behind “Bad Painting” is a set of works whose workmanship is very “crude” but also eminently expressive. Marcia Tucker appeared to be fascinated by the facility the movement artists had to reject all the conformist attitudes about art and old artistic styles, whereas some people thought that this was a bunch of botched and humdrum works, not much interesting, aesthetically and technically speaking.

Deeply-rooted in their time and age, all the emblematical movement artists but Jean-Michel Basquiat, Julian Schnabel, Kenny Scharf, Neil Jenney or also Joan Brown… are inspired by street codes and its modes of expression: graffiti, stencil, billposting…Their influences are as hispanic as afro-americans and their imagination are based on urban and popular culture.

This “bad painting”, put down by representatives of artistic academicism and intellectualism, has won its recognition for the last few years, notably in the early 2000s, when Jean-Michel Basquiat ‘s works of art received a strong success, some of which were sold more than $10 million. Other “Bad Painting” artists (Malcom Morley, Kenny Scharf pr David Salle) have sold theirs between several dozens and several hundreds of thousands of dollars.