In the mid Nineteen Eighties, the Amsterdam born painter Rob Scholte provoked a wide ranging Discussion in Art Criticism about the Value of Painting at a time everyone felt free to quote from Art History and Image Culture to their heart’s content. Scholte used, seemingly without any scruples,
The most Trivial Illustrations as well as unrivalled Iconic Works of Art as Visual Sources for his paintings. High Culture with its ‘Profundity’ and Low Culture with its ‘Superficiality’ were regarded Equally. Many people felt that the Démasqué of Painting was taking place before their eyes. Ten years later, the art historian Camiel van Winkel summed up Scholte as ‘a Personification of the Guile that characterizes the Art of the Nineteen Eighties’, albeit with ‘an artistic Integrity which, Beyond Good and Evil, was pushed to the limit: the artist drops all the Pretences of Creative Genius and openly shows and lays bare the Blank Sheet or the “Zero Degree” that proves to be hidden behind it’ (Camiel van Winkel, ‘1980’ in Cor Blok (edited by), Nederlandse kunst vanaf 1900, Utrecht 1994, p. 215).

Scholte not only proved capable of assimilating different visual ideas superbly, but was also able to orchestrate all the opinions about his work – for and against – as demonstrated in How to Star, an exhibition in Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam in 1988. The Exhibition was an Anthology of Five Years of his Work, accompanied by a catalogue with text made up exclusively of Quotations. Extracts from the 154 Art Reviews that discussed his work – a Cacophony of Pronouncements, Opinions and Interpretations – were cut and pasted at will to make a more or less coherent story about the alphabetically arranged groups of Works. The Art of Quotation was raised to a great height to make Scholte’s Star Shine.

Seen against this background, Illustration is a striking example of Scholte’s association with Stardom and the process of Quotation. It was part of his first international solo exhibition at Galerie Paul Maenz in Cologne which, under the title Mastercards, showed a Hotchpotch of Motifs, with the 175 x 175 cm square as the linking factor. Frontally in the painting there is a popular educational book from the second half of the Nineteenth Century, with a lavishly decorated front Cover Illustration and spine, placed in an indefinable space by a reflection and a shadow. But by standing it upright, enlarging it and placing it between Quotation Marks, Scholte turns Famous Boys and How They Became Great Men into an epitaph that puts Fame into perspective and emphasizes its Transience: an Ironic Postmodern Vanitas Still Life.

LvH