Alexandra Nechita, petite Picasso

March 3, 2003 4:18 PM

Faces of Happiness. Geometric Look. Irreplaceable. Meet "this rarest of child prodigies," Romanian-born artist Alexandra Nechita. An abstract cubist who took the art world by storm at age 8, she now has over 300 striking paintings to her credit.
posted by mediareport (16 comments total)

Hallmark? How fitting. The work is neither striking nor challenging.

It looks like stuff you might see on, say, oh, Hallmark cards.
posted by Ayn Marx at 4:37 PM on March 3, 2003

Heh.
posted by mediareport at 4:39 PM on March 3, 2003

Man, an 8 year-old child coulda paint--oh, right.
posted by zpousman at 5:04 PM on March 3, 2003

Just to clarify things, she's 18 years old. This looks like the, er, 'hallmark' of stuff Studio Art AP students in High School would do.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 5:04 PM on March 3, 2003

Actually to me it looks like something Salvador Dali would paint if he were a cubist.

This might not be High Art, but it is pretty skilled use of color and design considering her age. I've seen worse hanging in decent galleries.
posted by konolia at 5:09 PM on March 3, 2003

It looks like stuff you might see on, say, oh, Hallmark cards.

Well, I suppose... if Hallmark opened up a shop next to Shakespeare & Co. on the Left Bank in the '20s. When you care enough... to send the very best to your drunken painter friends in Montparnasse. And the cards could be filled with little poems that ripped off James Joyce. ("You asked if I would marry you and I must confess / yes I said yes I will yes!")

I'm generally not too hot for contemporary cubist-influenced work in general (I tend to find they have an air of gimmickry, rather than solid technique), but that's just my personal tastes. The fact that Nechita is so young, though, is striking -- she seems to have a confidence with color and composition that I do find unusual for her age.
posted by scody at 5:10 PM on March 3, 2003

And she also had a cameo in the hit sitcom Boy Meets World
posted by LimePi at 5:50 PM on March 3, 2003

I like her work, aside from the fact that she is young. It's impressive that she has this grasp on compostion so early, but she deserves credit artistically aside from the timing.

LimePi: Great catch! That's awesome.
posted by lazaruslong at 6:10 PM on March 3, 2003

The art world is such an interesting place.
I wonder who her managment is.
posted by Leonard at 6:15 PM on March 3, 2003

I think she's the first child prodigy I've heard of in the visual arts. Of course there're children who pick up the violin or piano and have a bizarre aptitude, and of course there's those freakish gymnast kiddies. But painting? That's odd.

Now, all we have to do is introduce her to the last 80 years. Heh. Wouldn't that be cool if she were a conceptual art prodigy? Like, if she started making political allegories out of diapers and feces as a toddler?
posted by RJ Reynolds at 6:16 PM on March 3, 2003

Skilled, yes. Also totally derivative. Maybe when she grows up she'll find her own style, preferably one that hasn't already been worked over and pretty well exhausted.
posted by gordian knot at 6:32 PM on March 3, 2003

She's 17, gordian knot (she'll be 18 in August); just give her a bit of time. I don't know *that* many teenagers, after all, who "derive" their art from Chagall and Picasso. Her eye for color and composition is great already, and the playfulness sure does bode well.
posted by mediareport at 7:00 PM on March 3, 2003

Last Saturday I went to an "exhibit" of artwork by a second-grade class at a local school. The teacher had taken the trouble to put all the crayon drawings, finger paintings, and collages in nice frames. The artwork was beautiful. My friend commented "there's a Van Gogh, there's a Miro, there's a Calder." It reminded me of the line from Six Degrees of Separation, where the kindergarten teacher says that the way to get masterpieces out of five year olds is take the painting away from them at just the right moment.

That said, I thought these paintings and lithographs were beautiful, even if they did seem a little like Shakespearean sonnets written in the 20th century.
posted by alms at 7:30 PM on March 3, 2003

A lot of people will buy her art because she is so young and could potentially be big later in life makeing her earlier work go up in value. Plus her stuff is pretty and would look good hanging on the wall. Plus she is prolific generating her own marketplace. And she has a good story, it all adds up to a complete package.

The notion that great artists only come along during revolutionary change is a mistake just like not every great scientist is Einstein or every great programmer is Linus. You can be a great artist working within an existing medium so to say she is copying others work is as rediculous as saying the Rolling Stones is just a blues band rip-off.
posted by stbalbach at 5:36 AM on March 4, 2003

I don't think the fact that she is beautiful hurts her chances much. Would she be getting this much press if she were autistic?
posted by rotifer at 11:15 AM on March 4, 2003

In other cubist news, Gene Ray recently awarded himself the "Doctorate of Cubicism".
posted by eddydamascene at 7:01 PM on March 6, 2003