One of the most famous and recognizable series of paintings in the entire world is one that does not come to mind when one thinks of high art. The painter, Cassius Marcellus Coolidge, began the series without, I think, realizing that it would be a series, in 1894. He later did some work for an advertising firm, Brown & Bigelow (which still exists today), involving paintings using anthropomorphic dogs for advertising calendars. Several of those were variations of the original 1894 theme, and thus the series was born, known now as Dogs Playing Poker. (There's a story that Coolidge actually liked cats much more than dogs, but thought that dogs seemed more the poker-playing type.) The 1894 painting, Poker Game, that started it all:
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If I recall correctly, my grandmother (who really loved card games) had a print of another in the series, usually known as A Waterloo (a 'waterloo' is a very large pot), although Coolidge's original title was Judge St. Bernard Wins on a Bluff:
In many ways, I think this is the best in the series. When I was younger, I never really appreciated the expressions on the dogs' faces at St. Bernard taking a huge pile of chips with a pair of deuces (I mostly just remember the collie), but they are great, especially the dog who had folded with a pair of Jacks. So goes the game of poker, in which anything might happen. The painting is actually a sequel to another painting, A Bold Bluff, in which we see Judge St. Bernard call with just the deuces and all the other dogs are looking suspiciously at him, trying to figure out how far he is bluffing. He just coolly stares them down.
Dogs Playing Poker is often classified as 'kitsch', but I'm not convinced that this is right. Kitsch, I've noted before, is the quasi-art of treating the art-work as wholly devoted to achieving an effect in the audience; it treats the end of the artwork as the whole point of the artistic making. This is not in the strictest sense possible, so kitsch attempts to cause an emotional effect by stereotyped and sometimes manipulative means; this is why kitsch is inferior to art in the proper sense. But, of course, having a work of art that has an effect in the audience is not necessarily kitsch; you don't do art in the proper sense just to get an effect, but that doesn't mean you don't aim for one at all.
The Dogs Playing Poker series are comic paintings that became popular due to their use in advertisement. They are therefore in some sense 'low brow'. But it would be absurd to assume that any of the three are in themselves evidence of kitsch. The Mona Lisa is not made kitsch by being so popular that people hang prints of it around the house or put it on shirts or use it in advertisements (even if some of the uses are definitely kitsch); Renaissance paintings are not kitsch just because they were done on patronage, often as part of public relations, to proclaim the value of this or that noble house. Card games are a historically common theme for paintings; Coolidge just did a comic version of the theme (most of his work is comic and has a surreal quality). There's no reason why comic material would make a painting any more kitsch than tragic material does. This is not to say, of course, that Dogs Playing Poker has not spawned a lot of kitsch; but any good painting does, because people like to try to capture the mood, the feel, of the original in all sorts of different contexts. Painting has a reputation for being a somewhat more humorless field of art than, say, poetry, and perhaps this is what is really behind treating the series itself as kitsch. But the paintings work on their own terms, and they meet the most basic test of taste: people like them and keep liking them for reasons that are due to their artistic elements. And if we did insist on regarding them as kitsch, that does not in itself mean that they aren't worth having in the world. Puns are not high humor, but we dismiss them at our peril; if the pun is pictorial, the same is true. Either way, sometimes one wins a grand pot with a low pair, and sometimes one enters the heavenly hall of immortal painters with Dogs Playing Poker.
