Rolf Harris: Celebrity artist (2005)
artdesigncafé | café library | Published 01 November 2009
This article first appeared in the art magazine Jamini, February 2005.
With some justice, Rolf Harris’s biographer Michael Heatley has called him "the most talented man in the world". The Daily Telegraph also dubbed him "a renaissance man". Harris is an internationally famous popular entertainer—musician, singer, recording artist, comedian, stage and radio performer, television presenter, writer (of songs and books)— and a visual artist. His art encompasses paintings, murals, cartoons, book illustrations, prints, woodcarving and stone polishing. While there are many pop and film stars who paint as a pastime, what is special about Harris is the way he has combined both art and performance.
Furthermore, Rolf Harris has used his career on British television to disseminate his own art, to encourage people to take up art and to appreciate major artists of the past. Television appearances account for the fact that a poll of 1,000 visitors to the 1992 London ArtMart exhibition revealed he was the best-known artist in Britain. He attracted 38 per cent of the vote, ahead of Constable at 23 per cent.
Of course, this does not mean that his art is taken seriously by Britain’s professional, modern art world, that is, by such figures as Tate director Sir Nicholas Serota, supercollector Charles Saatchi or the dealer Jay Jopling. Leading art critics employed by the broadsheet newspapers generally ignore Rolf Harris’s exhibitions and his arts television programmes and, when they do write about them, they attack them. This is because, compared to radical artists, Harris is traditional in terms of his medium, genres, subject matter and style. He has contributed nothing original to the development of art. Of course, the latter criticism implies a progressive conception of art in which revolutions in form and content periodically occur. Another ground of complaint is that he is not a trained art historian and therefore his commentaries on famous artists are simplistic.
At the same time, Rolf Harris’s work is exhibited in fine art galleries—most notably the Halcyon Galleries of Birmingham and London—and prints of his paintings are sold for around £300 each via numerous retail outlets. The Halcyon show in Birmingham (December 2000) was entitled "Relative Artistry" because it was a family affair featuring work by himself, his wife and daughter. Harris has his own website, which sells merchandise such as books, CDs, T-shirts, videos and prints. As early as 1956, he was exhibiting at the Summer Exhibition of the Royal Academy. He is the recipient of two British honours: the OBE and the MBE. Furthermore, in 2000, he was made an honorary member of the Royal Society of British Artists. During November and December 2002, a selection of his paintings simulating Monet, Vincent van Gogh, et al for the first and second series of the BBC1 television show Rolf on Art were exhibited at the National Gallery in London (albeit in a basement cafeteria). Evidently, some elements of the British art establishment regard him highly.
The financial value of his paintings is also rising: in September 2003, a collector paid £95,000 for Rolf Harris’s Flower Seller at the Elephant & Castle— a recently executed social realist/impressionistic canvas based on a colour photograph he took in the 1970s— which was exhibited at Harrods Gallery. Since the collector did not know who Harris was at the time, she judged the work on its aesthetic merits alone. Two landscapes by Harris were also sold at Harrods for £15,000 each.
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