Grayson’s Art Club is an online blog that discusses new discoveries in art. We are an online art forum that focuses on both famous artists and unknown artists who have recently been discovered and made world-famous.

The things we post about are not just recent discoveries, but also the sudden boom in interest for these previously uncared-about pieces of art.

We are interested in how many people discover the work of a particular artist, and how their reputation changes with the years. Grayson’s Art Club is about many artists whose works were recently discovered or rediscovered. They include: John Sargent, Philip de László, Margaret Bourke-White, Joseph Pennell, Nicolai Fechin, Giovanni Boldini, Prince Dmitri Wolkonsky, Maynard Dixon, Charles Sheeler and Paul Outerbridge.

There have been some great books written about these artists in the last few years – “Echoes of Silence” by Richard Kendall (for John Sargent) and “The Whole Truth” by Carol Troyen (for Margaret Bourke-White).

We also discuss other 20th century artists whose works were recently discovered or rediscovered:  Roy Lichtenstein – The Painter Behind Pop Art , Dodie Kaz

This blog is about art that was not discovered until the 20th and 21st centuries. All of these artists are, or will be, known as masters in a hundred years or less. This blog is also about the people who figured out their work was masterpieces, and who brought them to light.

Categories:

-Artists discovered in recent decades, but already considered masters

-Artists discovered in recent decades, still unknown (and perhaps unknowable)

-Artists whose work is still undiscovered

I was looking at the works of Grayson Perry and other artists who were discovered in recent years, and I started to think about how all this relates to my own situation, and what it says about art in general. I want to write and share my thoughts, but I do not want it to be too technical.

I will start with Grayson Perry, a British artist who is now regarded as one of the most important artists of his generation. He became famous since he won the Turner Prize in 2003.

Grayson Perry’s work explores class and gender roles. And he does this by using porcelain as a medium for his art work. The best example is his “pissing figures”, which are ceramic figures that urinate into ceramic toilets. These figures are usually male, female or transgender. They express his attitude towards traditional gender roles by making them obsolete, because they can both urinate and defecate into the same toilet.

Others works are also politically charged, such as his ceramics pieces portraying Margaret Thatcher as a man selling her handbags to rich women while standing on top of the poor people they have left homeless (a reference to Thatcher’s policies). His other works look at political issues such as racism, homophobia and social inequality through irony,

Art history is full of stories like this. In the old days, it was often hard to know who made a work of art, or even what period it was from. And it wasn’t until about 100 years ago that we started to think of artists as individuals with distinct personalities and creative visions. Instead, they were lumped in with all the other people doing similar kinds of work in similar kinds of settings—medieval painters were simply “the Bolognese school,” and Renaissance ones were “the Florentine school.”

Writing about art history used to require lots of training in things like iconography and technical analysis; you couldn’t just decide you liked a picture and start writing about it. So much for the idea that new technologies are always going to make writing obsolete.

As technology has made it easier to recognize individual creativity and even personality in art, the amount of writing about art has exploded, but we’re still seeing just the beginning of what’s possible.

I have always loved art, and have never wanted to leave it. I’ve stayed in art only because I found the gallery world an exciting place to be. But it’s not just my love of art that keeps me here. It’s also my love of the people who work in this field and the feeling that I can help them. That’s why I decided to start Grayson’s Art Club.

They were very upset about what happened, and for good reason. The implication was that they or their drug of choice were responsible for the theft, which is patently untrue. So I suggested we get together for a drink and talk about it.

I think this is a great idea, not just because it will do a lot of good for both artists and collectors by teaching them how to protect their work from theft and how to prevent it from happening again, but also because it gives me a chance to talk about art and play with ideas in my own head with people who have actually earned the right to hear them.

So come on out if you’re in NYC tomorrow night! Drinks are free, and Grayson’s will be serving up some delicious food too.*

*Not free.

Grayson Perry’s new exhibition is a turning point because it marks the climax of a certain kind of art that was becoming increasingly popular; a kind of art that no longer looks quite as new, but is still exciting to see.

The artists in this exhibition are all relatively young and their works may not yet be widely known, but they have already had enough exposure to provoke an emotional reaction in most people who look at them. Whether you love them or hate them, they have forced you to think about things that most of us would rather not think about.

They represent a trend which has been developing over the last couple of decades and which has since become so dominant that it has been almost impossible to avoid. This trend is sometimes described as “political” art or “protest” art, but this suggests that these artists are doing something entirely different from what almost every artist throughout history has done. In fact these new artists are continuing a long tradition that can be traced back to cave paintings and beyond. What is different about this particular tradition is the medium with which it is expressed. The old cave painters were not using oil paints and canvas, but it is hard to think how their motives would have been very different from those of today’s “political” artists.*

There was a team that uncovered the artist, Grayson Perry. He realized he was an artist when he was in his late teens when his mother told to him to clean his room and he started cleaning it with paints and brushes.

“I wasn’t really looking to be an artist, but I was looking to be a little bit different,” he said. “I thought this would show my mum that I was a bit different.”

Perry was born in 1960 as the youngest of six children. His father worked for the post office, and his mother stayed home.

The team discovered Perry’s art on display at the Hayward Gallery in London. They were able to find out about Perry by asking him questions about his childhood, which led them to realize that he had been a little bit different from other young people growing up in the 1960s.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/05/arts/design/the-art-life-grayson-perry-a-self-portrait.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0