Does Poker Exist in Fine Art?
Poker fans may enjoy collecting Poker Art, and there is a large enough industry churning out anything from Super Mario chip art to stylish monochrome photographs with titles such as Gunslinger and No Chance. Most of it, however, is primarily commercial products, with little or no nuance to entice the eye of a connoisseur.
A general interest for the serious poker player, with an eye for the game’s complex aesthetics, may be poker in when he is not busy challenging a worthy rival art. Does good art which is significantly related to poker exist?
Worthwhile references to the game in art are rare despite its immense popularity. With the elite pride of the devotees of some wonderful esoteric practice, they are cherished by some admirers. To my knowledge, poker in music features mainly in modern compositions, but for its expression in sound there does not seem to be much possibility. Video usually accompanies the more successful efforts, and these are restricted to MTV clips. References to poker in songs can be found although these being composed by well meaning fans or even by poker pros that are not that great with words or music, are offered with mostly half-heated solace.
The most significant poker-inspired artwork in music I am familiar with, and one which by its nature ideally fuses music with visuals, is The Card Party: Ballet in Three Deals, first danced by Balanchine’s American Ballet Ensemble. Music by Stravinsky, who enjoyed poker as pastime, it is one of the rarer curiosities poker admirers might want to see, though it is more fanciful than accurate in representing the process of playing cards.
Dogs Playing Poker by Cassius Coolidge is one of the most obvious examples in painting form. There was an order for nineteen commercially oriented paintings using anthropomorphized dogs and these were only part of the order. Nowadays, the general concept of cigar-smoking canines around a table in a dim-lit club that is more iconic than the original paintings.
Many works of art, in fact, tend to stylize poker and card games in general, blending them with fantastic themes. Alice in Wonderland would be the most obvious example. Alexander Pushkin’s The Queen of Spades is one of his most famous stories. It depicts a player who heard about a card trick from a friend and is desperate to learn it. The story begins as realism and culminates as a sort of card-game horror. An old woman guarding the secret is threatened by the man who desperate to learn the secret, threatens her with an unloaded pistol which unintentionally causes the woman to die from fear. Her corpse glares at him after opening its eyes at the funeral, then at home he is visited by her ghost which tells the secret. In the first game the man’s possessions are double. While playing another game the man knowingly holds an ace but appears to have played a queen causing him to lose everything. After being committed to an asylum in room seventeen he raves, “Three, seven, ace! Three, seven, queen. There is a BAFTA-nominated 1949 fantasy horror adaptation of the story by Thorold Dickinson for the film buffs.
Though not necessarily more accurate, poker tends to be criminally realistic in film, from Cincinnati Kid to Rounders with Edward Norton and Matt Damon. Rounders did moderately in the box office but because of its decent depiction of the playing process it has become a cult film. Martin Scorsese gave us a memorable sequence in Casino, three years earlier, where by means of a hammer and De Niro’s poker-face threats a young pair of con poker players are expertly detected and deprived to cheat in any near future.
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