Accession Number
2008/1.160.2

Title
Crocodile Tears: Buried Treasure (De Chirico V)

Artist(s)
Douglas Huebler

Object Creation Date
1990

Medium & Support
acrylic on canvas

Dimensions
40 15/16 in x 29 in x 1 1/4 in (103.98 cm x 73.66 cm x 3.18 cm)

Credit Line
Museum purchase made possible by the W. Hawkins Ferry Fund

Label copy
March 28, 2009
Crocodile Tears: Buried Treasure (De Chirico V) is part of a series of works combining comic strips, paintings aping the styles of famous artists, and extracts from Huebler’s open-ended work Variable Piece #70: Global, his quixotic attempt “to photographically document the existence of everyone alive.”
The protagonists are often artists hemmed in by the economic and stylistic structures of the art world: Dana and Palmer, the characters featured in this episode, forge paintings by De Chirico, Picasso, and Magritte, among others, for an unscrupulous dealer who sells them as newly discovered originals. The paintings are never exact reproductions of historical paintings. Instead they are immediately recognizable as fakes, intended to critique the notion of a “signature style.”
Crocodile Tears reflects, in large part, Huebler’s disgust at how avant-garde artistic movements are often reduced to mere styles, drained of their critical power and simply “lined up in the fashion parade of art as yet another example of avant-garde style,” one more product to be marketed and consumed.

Subject matter
This work is part of Huebler's Buried Treasure series. This series is part of a body of work Huebler created in relation to a screenplay he completed in 1981. That work featured storylines describing the more criminal aspects of an art market focused almost completely on comercial gain. In this specific painting, Huebler depicts a montage of elements directly cited from or reminiscent of iconic paintings of the Italian Metaphysical School of painting, 1913-20. Forms of Renaissance architecture, perspective space, and sculptural objects are arranged in a surrealistic dream space.

Physical Description
This painting is an abstract landscape scene with a grey building in the background against a dark blue sky.  There are multi-colored blocks, a red ball and a silver coil scattered in the middle of the image.  The ground is broken up into patches of grey, red, purple, and yellow. A wall-ike structure is included on the left side of the image, casting a shadow to its left and a canvas with a painting on it faces the viewer on the right. The bottom of the image is a block of lavender color with white text reading "Pittura Metafisica."

Primary Object Classification
Painting

Primary Object Type
landscape

Collection Area
Modern and Contemporary

Rights
If you are interested in using an image for a publication, please visit http://umma.umich.edu/request-image for more information and to fill out the online Image Rights and Reproductions Request Form.

Keywords
Metaphysical (modern Italian fine arts style and movement)
Surrealism
Surrealist
copies (derivative objects)
landscapes (representations)
modern and contemporary art
painting