Can we forgive a guy for being an asshole if that same asshole is also capable of creating works of staggering beauty or deep spiritual articulation?
Woody Allen – an artist with his fair share of questionable behavior – has pondered this quandary again and again in much of his post-80s work, and it’s a valid question.
It becomes even more dicey a proposition when the artist in question is not well-known or successful.
Jackson Pollock, for a prime example, was a verbally inarticulate falling-down alcoholic with severe anger issues who stopped painting completely in the last year of his life and whose self-destructive tendencies culminated in an auto accident that injured his girlfriend Ruth Kligman and took the life of Edith Metzger (who, unlike Pollock and fellow artist Kligman, doesn’t even merit a wiki-listing of her own).
But when you say “Pollock” most don’t think murderer straight away, and while some might think “drunk” or “angry artist,” front and center is the fact that he changed modern painting, modern art and the business of the business.
Chuck Connelly, meanwhile, based on “The Art of Failure,” almost certainly has more raw artistic talent than Pollock (despite his lack of innovative ability) but it’s hard to see that aspect around the bellowing, slobbering, chain-smoking blowhard he represents.
Connelly came up in the 1980s art boom with Baquiat and Schnabel, but apparently took a flame-thrower to every bridge in sight. He was the model for the volatile artist at the center of Martin Scorsese's segment in the trilogy "New York Stories" (which, in the interest of full-disclosure, was one of forces that led to my own teenage interest in art).
Now he lives in a big house cluttered with junk but filled with astonishing paintings -- reportedly more than 3,000 -- and yet he seems to be standing on a figurative runway with two flashlights furiously directing a stroke the size of a 757 toward the tarmac of his brain.
During the course of the 70-odd minute documentary, we see him make ugly scene after ugly scene (in public and alone), and alienate his wife, his patron and more than a few gallery owners and potential customers.
Desperate for cash but loath to compromise on the price of his work, he hatches a brilliant scheme for a comeback … and the resolution of that plan has to be seen to be believed, even if the movie seems to skimp on the full details in the end.
This is rough-going, and there’s a lot of cringe-inducing, angry posturing on Connelly’s part. But there’s also a lot of fantastic painting to see, particularly during a montage at the end that simply goes too quickly to fully enjoy.
I watched that sequence and felt that the works – dozens and then hundreds that fly by in a blur – are shortchanged by not being exhibited, or at least that they should be kept in a secure, climate-controlled environment.
Alas, they exist in neither circumstance. These pieces, which could offer integrity and artistic immortality to the man who made them, reside in the attic of the home of their creator, a chain-smoker frequently shown curled up in bed with a brainful of booze and a orange-tipped cigarette resting and sometimes forgotten between the knuckles of his hand.
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