Recreational Holidays

Poker in Fine Art - Does Such a Thing Exist?

Collecting Poker Art may be something that poker fans enjoy, and the industry is large enough churning out anything from Super Mario chip art to stylish monochrome photographs with titles such as No Chance and Gunslinger. However, most of it is primarily commercial products, with barely a chance to entice a connoisseur’s eye.

What the serious poker player - with an eye for the game’s complex aesthetics - may have a general interest in whenever he is not busy challenging a worthy rival is poker in art: but does good art exist which is significantly related to poker?

Worthwhile references to the game in art are rare, despite its immense popularity, and some admirers cherish them with the elite pride of the devotees of some wonderful esoteric practice. Mainly in modern compositions poker in music is featured, 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. Poker is referenced in many songs, but mostly a half-hearted solace is offered. Usually well meaning fans or poker pros that are not necessarily great with words or music are the composers of such songs.

The Card Party: Ballet in Three Deals, is the most significant poker-inspired artwork in music in which I am familiar. Music and visuals are ideally fused by its nature and was first danced by Balanchine’s American Ballet Ensemble. It is one of the rarer curiosities poker admirers might want to see, with music by Stravinsky, who enjoyed poker as a pastime. 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.

In film, poker tends to be criminally realistic (though not necessarily more accurate), from Cincinnati Kid to Rounders, with Edward Norton and Matt Damon. The last did moderately in the box office but has become a cult film precisely because of its decent depiction of the playing process. Three years earlier Martin Scorsese gave us a memorable sequence in Casino where a pair of con poker players are expertly detected and deprived of the ability to cheat in any near future by means of a hammer and De Niro’s efficient poker-face threats.

The author of this article plays poker online and receives Rakeback at Absolute Poker. He is also a contributer at Rakeback Solution.