Jonathan Richman’s Songs About Painters, Ranked

Note: I originally wrote a version of this in November 2015 on Tumblr. It’s been updated and fleshed out below.

A Jonathan Richman concert is a lecture. Not a stuffy, academic, pedantic one, but a cozy local library reading featuring a brilliant local oddball historian who can recite narratives with minimal notice and with only three or four zany but well-intentioned tangents. Or a reformed street poet’s arrival gala where the patrons, eager to justify their support, allow him the stage to improvise any kind of unorthodox story time he wishes. Or, you know, an actual guest lecture (or songwriting workshop or $85-per-ticket festival sit-down with David Remnick, etc.) he could deliver at BU, or New York’s Town Hall, or any number of smoky street corners or upholstered Uptown living rooms he’d alternately feel comfortable speaking at. That’s what Jonathan Richman does.

With his loose sport coat and professorial scruff, Richman entertains—especially when he’s spinning yarn on live TV about grooving in unconventional discos—but buried in his half-sung, jazz-inspired anecdotes about Vermeer and Italian-language party instructions are real lessons and the real life behind them. That’s why it’s fun to listen to his tunes about baseball greats and Boston locales and historic painters — you’ll learn something and you won’t even realize it. And even if you register it as learning as it’s happening, it’s with a sense of whimsy, like you’re a child and he’s a school-hired troubadour enlisted to help you learn your art greats. He’s written many songs about them, and they’re all genuine odes that capture each painter’s essence, but typically refracted through his own connections to them. That’s why they matter.

4. “Salvador Dali”

Key lyric: “He helped take me inside my dreamworld.”

“When I was 14 and depressed, Dali sent freedom to me,” Richman coos over a bossa nova-style rhythm in this 2004 song, and we’re off. While his odes to van Gogh and Vermeer are more about the works of art themselves, Dali’s gets an anecdotal treatment, and Richman proclaims that the surrealist artist’s work helped him connect to otherworldliness as a sad kid. “Dali opened doors for me,” he sings. And then the twisted dreamworld teased throughout the song finally blooms via a languid bass solo and some unsettling piano chords. Sneaky move: a diary entry dressed up as an ode to a waggish artist.

3. “No One Was Like Vermeer”

Key lyric: “These strange little paintings next to the others.”

This authentic 2008 work sketch of Jan Vermeer places the painter up against his contemporaries — “Back in the days of Rembrandt, back in the time of old Jan Steen / All of them giants of shadow and light, but no one was like Vermeer” — and crowns him the victor (the one with the “more modern color range”). Dutch baroque art usually scares the shit out of me with its eerie stillness and stark portraiture (“Vermeer sends a chill up your spine”), but there’s something undeniably stirring about it. So I feel Richman on this one: No one was like Vermeer, and that respect and admiration shines through here in easy language, like a hypothetical future where even invading aliens are wigged out by his paintings. The singer’s furious strums and spooky guitar trills do their best to match Vermeer’s creepiness stroke for stroke.

2. “Vincent van Gogh”

Key lyric: “He loved color and he let it show.”

This one is essentially Richman’s “Velvet Underground” with van Gogh swapped in for Lou Reed, both artists that shaped Richman’s own work. Bursting with color and vigor like the painter’s work springs from its frames on museum walls, this ’04 ode is a buoyant, jubilant characterization grounded in a fitting name-drop up front (Richman calls van Gogh “the most soulful painter since Jan Vermeer”) — but the history lesson stops there. The song brilliantly transitions from ebullient joy to sly minor-note picking in the middle, teasing the painter’s eventual mental deterioration and how it crept into his work. “You look at those last paintings and you’ll get kind of sad,” Richman sings, setting a template inverted by this year’s great Car Seat Headrest epic “Vincent,” where the narrator points out how van Gogh’s Sorrowing Old Man (At Eternity’s Gate) is Wikipedia’s image for major depressive disorder because, well, “it helps to describe it.” Even in his darkest depths, “he loved color and he let it show,” even when it was showing the world’s interior ugliness. Here, Richman captures every hue and swirl.

1. “Pablo Picasso”

Key lyric: “Pablo Picasso never got called an asshole. Not like you.”

OK, so this song isn’t really “about” Picasso any more than “Girlfriend” is about an actual female (idealization is dangerous). But that doesn’t make its concept any less absorbing: a sexually frustrated young man placing all his hang-ups on one of the most celebrated artists in modern history, because why not? “Some people try to pick up girls and get called assholes,” Richman seethes, “but this would never happen to Pablo Picasso.” Though historical records put him at 5-foot-4-inches (not 5-foot-3, as Richman does), Picasso’s prowess with women may have been less to celebrate than the young narrator here wishes for. “For me there are only two kinds of women, goddesses and doormats,” Picasso reportedly once told a young mistress. But Richman, 21 when he wrote the song, did know that — maybe that was precisely his endgame. Maybe he wanted to fuck women and paint them and then leave them hungry and broken (maybe that’s why Kanye West is so interested in the dude, too).

Then again, the narrator here blames himself as much as he spits venom at Picasso, and given his shout-out to Cézanne and Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts on the same album, it’s clear he spent a lot of time in galleries. He could’ve picked any work on the wall, any nude form study, and laid into whichever artist it was. The layers of potential misogyny here are made better by knowing that today, Richman is (at least publicly), all for gender equality and doesn’t seem interested in blaming anyone for his sexual preoccupations of decades past. He’s an affable fellow—traveling and performing and, yes, lecturing—and he just wants us all to love and be loved. That’s probably why he hasn’t played the song live since 1972. Perhaps not feeling like Pablo just got old.