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It's wonderful that recent posts to the forum have been so passionate. However, I've noticed that many of the posts (both here and in the Lucien Freud threads) have lost site of some basics.
First, it doesn't matter whether or not a painter knows how to draw when their work is non-representational.
Museums frequently display work based on how it fits into historical art movements ... and, often, sidestep making judgements on the value of that work.
Criticizing the work of someone who paints with different objectives than you do doesn't necessarily mean you are slamming or don't understand the objectives of that painter's work.
With very few exceptions, even the best painters have greater and lesser works ... as well as a few failures that get away! For one thing, they tend to take chances. No matter who you are, if you take chances you're going to hit and miss at times. On the other hand, if you don't take chances your work will be pretty mundane.
There are many painters who are now considered to be among the greats that weren't given credit during their lifetime. There were also great painters who achieved great success during their lifetime. Extreme examples of these are Vincent VanGogh in the former case and Peter Paul Rubens in the latter. Time is the test of greatness; not contemporary opinion.
Who cares if a painter is an egotist or a madman? The wonderful thing about painting is that the work stands for itself.
While fine art and commercial art have different objectives, in the hands of a great artist, however, commercial art can be great. For instance, Degas created his ballet dancers simply because they sold ... and, who would dismiss Toulouse Lautrec posters as simply being commercial?
By the way, some members of this forum may be able to dismiss what I have to say because I used white lead when I began to paint with oils. In the mid-fifties, they still sold Dutch Boy white lead in cans and painters used it. To this day, I miss the wonderful qualities of working with white lead. Of course it was poisonous ... but so was turpentine (which I also used). Still, neither titanium white, zinc white, nor a combination of the two can replicate the qualities of white lead.
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