WINDOW WASHING—PABLO PICASSO AND RENE LALIQUE
The windows at Capitola are being washed by a window washing company. They wash the three floors of windows with long poles with brushes on the end through which water is sprayed. After that they come inside and wash the windows from the inside. To do this I have to move everything away from the windows and pile everything in the middle of the room.
So while away from my desk with a view of both the rock cliff carved by the river over eons and a view of the French Broad River itself and the town of Marshall on the other side with hills rising above it I decided to see what the new AI addition to my iPhone can tell me about a ceramic plaque said to be designed and executed by Picasso that I inherited from my mother and a shallow glass bowl that I bought at a thrift outlet at Highland Farms where my mother lived her last 20 years.
I joke about the Picasso being my only Picasso and have assumed that since it was stamped out in lots of 500, probably as a money maker for Picasso, that it probably cost my mother no more than $100 on some trip to France and wasn’t worth much more now. But the image of Jaqueline, his second wife, on the plaque was listed on Christie’s as having sold to someone for about $11,500.
Then I looked at the shallow glass bowl with a design of fluorescent cicadas on the bottom. No one wanted this at Highland Farms, probably put off by the cicadas, so I and Kathe bought it for $10, because we liked it. It is, I think, designed by Rene Lalique, an Art Deco glass and jewelry artist from about 1900. AI identified an identical bowl sold for $5600.
At first I was delighted and thought I was rich. But then I began to wonder. First of all, who knows what I would actually get for either one. But secondly, when the Picasso is placed on a shelf beside a wooden horse that Kathe and I bought at a Christmas sale in New Delhi in 1972 it is the wooden horse that touches me more deeply. I think, although the horse is falling apart, that it is beautiful. But it touches me more deeply because it is more personal and takes me back to a wonderful year that my family spent in India where Kathe took pottery lessons from Minni Singh in the shade of neem trees in south Delhi. Kathe’s pottery is also worth much more to me than a Lalique and yet I’d be lucky to get $10 for one of her pieces.
So the issue that both of these pieces and the boxes by Joyce Blunt that I bought one Friday and the things that touch me in a personal way is that the high dollar value depends both on the renown of the artist, not how much it touches me. And what touches me deeply may have no dollar value at all. I think of Van Gogh who painted endlessly because he loved to paint and sold only one of his paintings because they had no dollar value. Now they do. But I have a painting on my wall by a friend, Dusty Benedict, who painted in response to a trip we took to India together 30 years ago. I love it and if I exchanged it for a Van Gogh would think that I was trading my soul away.
So this tempers my first delight in thinking that I bought a $5600 Lalique for $10 when, although I like the Lalique and bought it because I liked it, I like it less than Kathe’s $10 bowl and it is worth less to me. I bought it because I liked it for itself. I didn’t know it was a Lalique. I still don’t know. If it was made by someone else it is probably worth $10. If it is a fake Lalique, a copy, then it is probably not worth much more. If it is by chance a real Lalique it is worth a fortune. But how much I like it shouldn’t depend on any of those possibilities. The pleasure I get by looking at it depends upon how much it touches me and all three possibilities should touch me in the same way.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 