For nearly a month, the art world’s been abuzz with word of the purchase by the Qatari royal family of one of the five renditions of Cezanne’s Card Players for what is reported to be in excess of $250 million. This at least doubles the known record price for the purchase of a work of art. Reportedly the painting will be displayed in a public collection being developed by the Qatar Museums Authority. Although acquired by private treaty, it is rumoured that Christies had a hand in facilitating the purchase. Not surprising this, as the Qatari royal family has a strange and mystical relationship with the auction house: the executive director of the Qatar Museums Authority is former Christies chair Edward Dolman.
Although pundits have all described the work as iconic, citing the illustrated presence of any one of Cezanne’s Card Players in virtually every art history survey text, the fact of its inclusion either avoids or at best abbreviates any consideration of why it might be. It’s been a few years, but my own experience in a foundation course in art history began with an examination of the function the discipline serves, specifically to determine how an artwork came to be created, and why it looks the way it does. Within the context of material culture, art historians, using a variety of methodologies, attempt to achieve when considering a work of art a site of meaning. That Cezanne created five similar depictions of peasants playing cards in Aix-en-Provence would seem a prima facie argument for some considerable degree of significance, but anything associated with an art historical consideration of the work will now forever be occluded by the fact of its acquisition for a record setting amount of cash.
The fact of this is neither unique nor surprising. One wonders, for instance, the expense involved in the transportation by the Romans of huge Egyptian obelisks for display. Cultural swag, of course, in the same way that national art galleries to this very day serve less to showcase native born talent than to display the masterworks produced in distant and disparate- and declining- cultures. The work of Cezanne now on view in Qatar is no less unusual than Cleopatra’s Needle on the Thames Embankment in London. As many times as I’ve passed Cleopatra’s Needle on my way to Somerset House and the Courtauld Institute- itself an enormous repository of foreign art- I’ve never thought of the obelisk as anything other than an expression of 19th century British political, and concomitantly cultural, hegemony. As much as I enjoy visiting the National Gallery in Washington, I’m never there without knowledge that the leading lights responsible for its creation in the early years of the last century did so because they thought that it was something that was an appropriate accoutrement for the world power the United States had become.
Certainly, with its huge oil reserves Qatar’s rapid acquisition of the trappings of western culture is done because it can. Does its acquisition also portend a culture on the decline? Arguable, I suppose. For the immediate future, it seems a shame, though, that in the case of The Card Players, site of meaning will certainly be bound up with $5/gallon gasoline.