I am slow, but the Ellsworth Kelly print that’s the first lot in Roy and Dorothy Lichtenstein’s estate sale is even smaller than the smallest Kelly prints.Blue Curve, 1999, is just 8 x 6 inches. It was made as a benefit print for the Archives of American Art in a big edition, 220+38AP, so aggregated surface area-wise, it’s probably right in the middle.
Kelly was honored with a medal the AAA’s benefit gala in October 1999, which coincided with an exhibit of items from the artist’s archives in the Archives Gallery. The AAA had a gallery in the lobby of 1285 6th Avenue, the UBS Building with the Scott Burton street furniture.
Louise Lawler, Untitled (Warhol/Lichtenstein), 1991, 6 x 8 in cibachrome mounted at 20 x 16 inches, ed. 1/100, a holiday treat to “Roy + Dorothy!”, which will be sold at Bonhams
The house of Roy and Dorothy Lichtenstein has been emptied into the online showroom of Bonhams, where everything will sell this month. There are so many things that have a bit of excitement because they were the Lichtensteins’, like some rugs, chairs, dishware, books, but come on.
But then there’s their Louise Lawler, a small photo, inscribed on the back: “Roy + Dorothy! M.C. + H.N.Y., L.L.” The edition number is 1/100, and it suddenly made me wish I’d been in the top 100 on Lawler’s Christmas card list in 1991.
According to its entry in the Roy Lichtenstein Catalogue Raisonné, that drawing, Xmas Ornament, 1963, was likely a gift from the artist to Emily & Burton Tremaine. Between 1973 and 1976, it rolled through six dealers, collectors, and auction houses before finding someone who wanted to keep it. Until November 1991, anyway, when Lawler photographed it at Sotheby’s. In those short weeks, did it all just come together with that euphoric satisfaction of finding the perfect gift for someone? Of course, she also did kind of plant a stake by declaring an edition of 100.
But maybe they weren’t all Christmas gifts after all. Marion Lambert’s AP2/10, with a new title, Mao and Ornament, and an impossible date of 1990/91 on the label, came from Metro Pictures. It was sold in 2021 to benefit charity. Ed. 40/100 was acquired from Metro Pictures in 1993. It didn’t sell in 2023 in Cincinnati. So plenty more out there for you, let this one go by, if not unnoticed, at least unbidden. I will take it for $10.
William H. Johnson, Self-Portrait, 1923-26, oil on canvas, 29 3/4 x 23 3/4 in., collection SAAM
William H. Johnson left South Carolina for New York when he was 17, and began studying painting at the National Academy of Design. He painted this self-portrait in his early 20s, giving himself lighter skin than in later portraits.
William H. Johnson, Midnight Sun, Lofoten, 1937, oil on burlap, 41 5/8 x 59 1/8 in., collection SAAM
He went to Europe in 1926 to study modernism, married Danish artist Holcha Krake, and spent a decade working, showing, and traveling in Scandinavia. He painted several extraordinary, expressionistic views of Lofoten, Norway. These landscapes and his European-era figure paintings feel like they could have evolved from Soutine, or Hartley.
William H. Johnson, Breakdown with Flat Tire, 1940-41, oil on plywood, 34 1/8 x 37 1/2 in., collection SAAM
Johnson returned to NYC with Krake in 1938, and began painting in an African American vernacular mode that feels as close to Horace Pippin as to Picasso. After Krake’s death from cancer in 1944, Johnson moved back to Denmark, making American and African American history paintings for a while, but a mental health crisis led to his return to the States, the end of painting, and hospitalization until his death in 1970.
The Harmon Foundation was established by a white real estate developer named William Harmon to collect, promote, and exhibit art by Black artists. There are some problematics in the Harmon Foundation’s story—they removed portraits of W.E.B. Dubois and Paul Robeson from exhibitions because of their communist sympathies, for example—and it’s not clear if Johnson’s reputation suffered from his association. It does feel like he’s been sort of stuck at one museum, though.
There’s a lot that doesn’t immediately make sense. But the most important thing—besides donating its large collection of art to HBCUs and the Smithsonian, and besides Johnson’s own work, of course—is that William Harmon created his foundation after years of pseudonymous philanthropy and non-predatory student loaning—under the name of an ancestor, Jedediah Tingle.
Andy Warhol, Little Electric Chair, 1964-65, oil and silkscreen on linen, 22 x 28 in., acquired by Cy Twombly and sold by his Foundation in 2014
The electric chair paintings are some of Warhol’s absolute best, but the little blue electric chair owned by Cy Twombly is a standout. The Christie’s lot description for the Twombly Foundation’s unloading of the painting extols this specific painting’s heavily inked contrast:
Housed for many years in the private collection of the artist Cy Twombly, it was this divergence between shadow and light that attracted the artist to this particular painting—an admiration bolstered by his understanding of chiaroscuro gained from his detailed study of Italian Renaissance painting undertaken during his time in his adopted homeland.
It’s been told and retold enough that even if you’ve somehow never heard it or seen its inspiration, it’s clear that several generations of artists ascribe to the Slant Step Theory of post-minimalist and conceptual sculpture: In 1965 William T. Wiley bought a plywood & linoleum stool with a steeply slanted seat at a Bay Area thrift shop. Installed in the studio of his student at UC Davis, Bruce Nauman, the Slant Step’s nonfunctional mystery and alluring form made it an aesthetic fetish object. It inspired at least two shows in the 1960s and several more since. It got passed around, stolen and rescued, surviving as an intentionally absurd teaching prompt until it entered the collection of UC Davis’s museum.
As far as I can tell, the first time it was publicly recognized as a stool for helping you squat on the toilet and take a better shit was only in 2014, well into the Squatty Potty era. Even so, it’s not clear that later showshave addressed this fundamental reinterpretation of an enigmatic totem as a highly specific, utilitarian, biological tool.
It reminds me of the novel-for-some-mundane-for-others theory of paleolithic tally sticks as lunar or menstrual calendars. And of Ursula K. Leguin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, where human experience can be understood through narratives other than violence and conflict, and motives other than competition, killing, or subjugation. The Slant Step Theory may be similarly narrow and incomplete. It’s not a mystery; it’s just you.
Bruce Nauman, Device to Hold a Box at a Slight Angle, 1966, fiberglass and polyester resin, 29 5/8 x 23 1/2 x 30 in., acquired by Cy Twombly in 1969, and sold by the Foundation in 2014
Nauman made Device to hold a box at a slight angle in 1966, with the Slant Step in his studio. It had already been shown twice before Philip Johnson’s partner David Whitney curated it into Nauman’s first show at Castelli in 1968. It went from there to documenta 4, and when it came back, Cy Twombly bought it, in 1969.
The Cy Twombly Foundation sold it in 2014. What happened to it in those 45 years? I don’t know of any photo of Twombly interiors in which Nauman’s Device appears. Did Twombly study it? Contemplate it? Respond to it? Store it away? If a revision of the Slant Step History of contemporary sculpture is in order, who knows what might be learned by tracing Twombly’s connections to and from this Nauman he kept for so long?
Look at it this way: if you were selling the biggest known lunar meteorite sphere in your auction, and you needed to show how much bigger it was than all the other lunar meteorites that have been ground down into spheres, would you photograph it next to a grapefruit you got at the Sotheby’s banana cart on York Avenue?
No, you absolutely would not. You would do exactly what Dr. Matthew Hoffarth is doing here, and so would I.
Dia has released a video about Walter de Maria and his work there. It’s specific in many interesting ways. If someone is polishing the top of Vertical Earth Kilometer in Kassel, we don’t hear about it, but there are interviews with the longtime caretakers of Dia’s permanent De Maria installations in the US: Bill Dilworth (New York Earth Room); Patti Dilworth (Broken Kilometer) and Robert Weathers (Lightning Field). Bill Dillworth died in December 2024, and the project is dedicated to his memory. [h/t Chris Nanos]
Related, somehow not previously: In 2023 Jeffrey Weiss wrote about the history, changes, and poetics of De Maria’s Earth Room after it had been removed, renovated, and remade. HVAC and new windows substantively changed the character of the work and the visitor’s sensory experience of it. But the implications extend far beyond questions of aroma, humidity, or ambient sound, toward permanence, aesthetic and the nature of the art experience.
[later that day update]: @octavio-world’s post adds new context: the Dilworths both left/retired in 2023, after the renovation/alteration, and were replaced by a rotation of minimum wage workers. So while extolling both the primacy of the physical experience of De Maria’s works, and listening to the singular people who have experienced it, that connection was broken. I mean, yay oral history, but that feels like an important thing to have omitted from the story, especially when it makes it sound like a memento mori and not a corporate/conservatorial decision.
[update: I’d had the Dilworths’ name spelled right, then I changed it after doublechecking a quote, and seeing it spelled wrong in the video captions. I’ve changed it back. Dia could do the same. Thanks for the correction.]
There’s a lot going on in the July/August issue of The Brooklyn Rail. A bunch of people respond to Bob Nickas’ obituary/autopsy of the contemporary, which has apparently been dead art walking lo, these 25 years.
I think Rhea Anastas’ argument is useful, that the frame of the contemporary, and the art industry and auction and product trends associated with it have obscured the view of the art in our midst.
Bernardo Daddi, The Virgin Mary with Saints Thomas Aquinas and Paul (det.), ca. 1335, Getty Museum. [L] prior to the Getty’s acquisition; [R] after the Getty’s removal of the baby, via The Brooklyn Rail
In her fascinating and sobering Irving Sandler Essay, conservator Annika Svendsen Finne looks at a controversial 1993 acquisition by the Getty of a 14th century gold ground painting of the Madonna by Bernardo Daddi, “contingent upon the removal of a large painted baby from the work’s surface, which had been added by a later artist.”
Svendsen Finne looks back across the mere decades since the baby’s erasure; at the reflections of the conservators involved; at other contemporary examples of the genre; and the interpretive advances of art historians since, and wonders if maybe the Getty should have slowed their roll, and recognized the constraints of context of their own decisions.
Look, the 21st century’s been rough on everyone, including art. It does sound like it’d be better, though, if we just step back for a minute before throwing it all out. A minute, or a generation, whichever.
At one point in my life I decided instead of just normal engraved stationery, I wanted a watermark. So I went to Mrs John L. Strong, and sat down with Mrs Lewis. Mrs John L. Strong has its own watermark, so surely they would know a paper mill that could accommodate my plan, I suggested. Mrs Lewis explained very tactfully, in as positive and genteel a way as possible, that no. Mrs Strong would certainly be able to help design a beautiful paper that evoked the subtlety of a watermark. I was glad to hear it, that we would be able to produce a paper with a watermark.
She said, “What part of ‘no’ did you not understand?” only it was the Vanderbilts’ stationer on Madison, so it came out like, “It’s interesting when two people have a conversation about the same thing, how they understand it differently.”
Zooming in, zooming in, where is the Twombly watermark on these CODES prints at Yvon Lambert
The point is, yesterday I read that in 1996, not so far from the time I was pursuing my watermark, Yvon Lambert published On Kawara’s CODES in an edition of 150 “on 180gr/m2 pure rag paper made especially for the book by the Moulin de Fleurac* and watermarked by Cy Twombly.” And I realized I’d been doing it wrong. But to know how wrong, I needed to figure out wtf is going on with why Cy Twombly is making and watermark paper for On Kawara.
He did not, and it was not. The listing for CODESin the Bibliothèques de Paris clarifies: “Chaque feuille porte la signature d’Yvon Lambert en filigrane (réalisé par Cy Twombly)” So the watermark is Lambert’s, as written by Twombly.
And Twombly also made his bookplate. So far I can find images of neither. But we do have two versions, four years apart, of Twombly’s ex libris for Dr. Reiner Speck, courtesy of Dr. Speck’s show of Twomblyphemera at Maison d’Art.
Cy Twombly Ex Libris draft, 1974, and Ex Libris, 1978, ed. 1000? via Maison d’Art’s catalogue for Fragments of an Adoration
Do I need to check the prints CR to get a full bookplate inventory? Is a watermark a print, a drawing, or a sculpture?
*Lambert’s choice of mill for his small batch watermark paper is instructive. He did not ask Arches. Though Moulin de Fleurac sounds prized, specific, and ancient, it only started in the 1970s.
Rachel Harrison, Hotdog Dog, 2011, aluminum and urethane, 22 5/8 in. tall, about as tall as a Dingo or small Saluki, ed. 15+3AP, selling 17 Jul 2025 at Phillips
I’m reluctant to be a dog painting person, but I have no problem being a dog sculpture person. As long as it’s Rachel Harrison’s Hotdog Dog, a 2011 edition in, of all things, cast aluminum. Conservators are smiling.
There is one coming up at Kenny Schachter’s latest binge & purge auctions, this time at Sotheby’s.
On Kawara, Codes, 1996, three code works in screenprint, letterpress, and braille, with a text by Jacques Roubaud, published in an edition of 150 by Yvon Lambert on paper made with a watermark comprising Lambert’s name as written by Cy Twombly, which feels like an entirely other blog post about to spiral out of the first caption
In the 2015 Guggenheim catalogue for On Kawara — Silence curator Anne Wheeler wrote that there were eight Code drawings: three made of hash marks in colored pencil; two typed texts of extremely large and small numbers; two pictograms; and a poem printed in braille.
Duncan McLaren counts nine Code works: there are actually four Code hashmark drawings, with varying titles. But then he says there are eight, because two pictograms are the same. Except the two pictograms McLaren references seem to be just two sides of one of the pictograms Wheeler mentioned, in a catalogue; the other was a poster in a window. And he notes that braille is only a mystery if you don’t know braille. Honestly, I’m taking braille and pictograms off my Code list.
1965 photo of On Kawara’s studio, with unfamiliar subjects painted in a now-familiar way, plus at least four encoded text works, all destroyed, apparently. (via the Guggenheim’s 2015 exhibition catalogue)
And I’m adding back the Date painting-style, graphically encoded paintings Kawara made in 1965, before starting the Date paintings, which he destroyed. The surviving Code works begin in 1965, and cluster in the 1960s. But except for a 1996 artist book, most of Kawara’s Code works were unpublished and almost entirely unconsidered until his Guggenheim retrospective in 2015. One filled sixteen pages and the cover of a massive, major 1996 catalogue, and yet seems to have gone unacknowledged. In 2015 Ben Slyngstad, a gallery guide at the Guggenheim, deciphered Kawara’s last Code drawing, Voice from Moon (2011), which turned out to be the transcript of the July 20, 1969 moon landing. Unaware of Slyngstad’s achievement, McLaren also deciphered it in 2022, and identified the source of the title and the transcript as the front page of the NY Times.
Duncan McLaren work in progress deciphering On Kawara’s Voice from Moon (2011)
Which is all prelude to the mindboggling realization that in 2024 McLaren, Anders Delbom, and Tommy Wrede deciphered all but one of On Kawara’s surviving Code works. McLaren’s account of the deciphering extends over seven parts, and it is quite a journey, and it ends with a call for help in cracking the last Code. Which is the first, but first:
The hashmark drawings—one of which, Les Lettres d’Amour/ Love Letters (1965), was also reproduced as a seven-page screenprint in the Codes (1996) artist edition—end up being straightforward enough susbtitution ciphers, where a pair of colored hashes represents a letter from the Roman alphabet.
One drawing, Traveler’s Song, or Traveler no Uta (1965) turned out to be a partially translated Japanese folk song, with the mix of English and romanized Japanese lyrics complicating typical pattern/frequency recognition.
On Kawara, Whole and Parts, 1996, les Presses du Reel edition, with No Title, a typed work of encoded text on the cover, photo via Duncan McLaren
The two large number Code works, include Eight Quintillion… (1969), six pages of typed out numbers, and No Title (1996?), in which each typed out number corresponds to a sentence or line? And thus the constituent digits substitute for letters. Kawara gave a clue to the [most unlikeliest] source of the 1969 text in a rare 1970 interview. Fortunately the same cipher key was used for the sprawling 1990 text, too.
The last Code work to decode is the earliest, Code, or Colored Cryptogram (1965), in the collection of the National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo. The hashmarks appear to encode Japanese phonetic syllables. And as the surprise at what McLaren and his collab have accomplished wears off, it’s replaced by surprise that they haven’t cracked the Japanese code, too. I mean, come on, it’s been a year!
“Should we throw it away or give it to Albright?” A canceled Mark Tobey etching plate and four cancellation prints, being put up for sale at Pook^2 by Albright College
Srsly, we cannot call it a collection. The liquidation of the art accumulated by Albright College is an epic non-event. The most compelling things are the flat files. Unfortunately you have to wait till the random-ass contents of those files are cleared out before you can bid on them. A huge chunk of the 500+ lots are the leftovers, scraps, work product, random proofs, and even the cancellation prints of one random 70s print dealer. Scrolling Pook & Pook in a visual fugue of repeats of various prints sold one at a time lulls you for the desperation of the last lots, where prints are grouped in increasingly large, but unrelated, sets. And then, finally, the flat files. Three lots, six cabinets. It would have cost Albright College a dollar to store this stuff in the corner of one fired professor’s office. But honestly, what for? In a world less on fire, it might be useful to be outraged at the collapse of this little art outpost in a place most of us hadn’t heard of before clicking, but even the ARTnews report is like, “The real problem here is not the donor wishes; it’s that Pennsylvania just has too many colleges.”
But there is one masterpiece. And it must be saved. Oh, look. It has a bid. $100. So it WILL be saved. Something is right with the world after all. Me, I will not bid on it, because I already have one.
Vija Celmins, Japanese Book, 2007-10, oil on canvas, 18 x 12.5 in., via matthew marks
When Vija Celmins spoke to Tyler Green in 2013 about her painting Japanese Book (2007-10), she called it “an object and a painting, but with a much closer relationship than I had in the 60’s, which was obviously a painting of an object.”
Which is kind of wild because the thing that immediately registered on seeing this painting at the Met Breuer in 2019 was how clearly it was a painting of an object. Unlike Celmins’ paintings of sand, stars, or waves, Japanese Book does not fill the entire canvas. It sits in a space, with depth and shadows—like a book on a scanner bed—and with its extraordinary, textured, indigo cover. Painted.
Celmins’ works are so often paintings of photographs, which are objects in their own way, and maybe that’s what she was referring to from the 60s, when she’d paint clippings, or envelopes, alone or in stacks. Japanese Book‘s a painting of a surface, an object, so not an image. She told Tyler, in discussing Shell (2009-10), “that kind of surface that’s very, very fractured with small areas make it kind of retinally engaging and physically engaging.”
Vija Celmins, Vase, 2017-18, oil on canvas, 18 x 13 in., via matthew marks
Which she would go on to paint, literally, in Vase (2017-18), also at the Met. The craquelure surface of a Korean celadon vase fills the canvas. But with the shadowy corner that seems to map the curved form of the vase, the object-painting relationship is even closer. Yet this scale of detail requires magnification; this is, again, I think, a painting of an image, if not a photo.
[a few minutes later update]: Sal Randolph shouted out The Stars, the extraordinary artist book Celmins created with Eliot Weinberger in 2005 for the MoMA Library Council. One of Celmins’ three etchings in the book is on the book: a 10 1/2 x 17 inch depiction of the entire cover of the Japanese book.
The Stars, 2005, published in a limited ed of 130+20AP, a deluxe edition of 26+7 artist copies, and a facsimile edition for the masses, via MoMA Library Council
I was going to say the four-plate etching was a facsimile, but I don’t know that is the case. Also, there is a facsimile edition of the book, which is widely and affordably available. The signed limited edition of 130 went to the Library Council and various institutions, who are not big flippers. The deluxe edition, which includes an additional loose copy of one of the bound etchings, does turn up.
If it took Celmins three years to make a painting of this book cover, I think it’s safe to assume the etching was made from a photographic reproduction.
There are many poor choices involved here, but one straightup mistake I made was not skipping the first fifteen minutes of this video, which was so insipid it left me unable to keep watching the actual event for more than nine months. Nine months of this thing sitting in my tabs, paralyzing me like a wireless fence whenever I’d get too close or it started autoplaying.
Well, the world is in a state where listening to the experiences of George W. Bush’s three art teachers is officially a less-worse option than [gestures around] all this. And that’s what the questions, the anecdotes, the uncomfortable pauses, were all about: what was it like meeting and interacting with Bush?
