Bart van der Leck: The Drinker, 1919
Or should that be ‘re Hirst’? There’s a certain ritual quality to how often Damien is accused of plagiarism: do his medicine cabinets copy Joseph Cornell’s Pharmacy, his gem-encrusted skull Stephen Gregory, his spin paintings Walter Robinson, his spots Thomas Downing, his use of razors Lene Bladbjerg, his collaging of butterflies Jean Dubuffet and his arrangement of them into stained glass window styles Lori Precious? There’s also the more general case of John LeKay, who knew Hirst in New York in the early nineties, gave him a scientific catalogue on which several of his works are based, and claims Hirst’s crucified animals and more were lifted from his own work. Still, these might have been more a matter of surfing the same zeitgeist. Now, when few think Hirst is on the crest of the wave, there’s an interesting comparison to be made between his latest ‘new direction’ and a 1919 painting I saw last week in Amsterdam. Hirst’s jocular Mickey, in which a famous mouse can be spotted, riffs on a classic pop subject and just raised a meritorious £900,000 for Kids Company at a charity auction. Bart van der Leck’s comparable face may seem a little light-hearted for a man who co-founded De Stijl with Mondrian and van Doesburg in 1917, but he soon fell out with the rigorous theosophist and started to use his vocabulary of geometric forms to representational ends.
Damien Hirst: Mickey, 2014
Most days art Critic Paul Carey-Kent spends hours on the train, traveling between his home in Southampton and his day job in Surrey. Could he, we asked, jot down whatever came into his head?
