Author: greg

The Judd Foundation has filed a copyright and trademark lawsuit against Kim Kardashian and Clemens Design, LA, for claiming in a video that tables and chairs in Kardashian’s office are the works of Donald Judd. Zachary Small broke the story for the NY Times:

“It is simply not true that Clements Design commissioned imitation Donald Judd tables,” wrote [Kardashian’s] lawyer, John Ulin, to the foundation, adding that the wood type and overall proportions were different. “They are different tables with different designs.”

But the foundation pointed to an invoice from Clements Design in which it described the furniture as “in the style of Donald Judd” and included an image owned by the Judd Foundation of the authentic dining set.

Indeed, the furniture Kardashian had copied, examples of which are at the Arena at Chinati and in the 2nd floor of 101 Spring Street, are made of 2-by pine board, which determines the dimensions. The copies are in plywood, which is not one of the 13 wood options for the authentic table.

Like with Gwyneth with her fake Ruth Asawas, it really makes you wonder why people don’t just spend the few hundred thousand dollars to get the real thing.

[UPDATE: It’s because then she couldn’t use Judd’s name and designs for her own marketing clout. She literally cited Judd alongside collaborator/partner/employees Rick Owen & his wife Michele and Vanessa Beecroft, and then claimed her knockoffs were real. If it had been real Judd furniture, purchased through the same gallery, Salon94, where she got her Rick Owens, she would have had to agree to not use Judd’s names or objects in ad, promo, or marketing. If she’d accepted the foundation’s offer to replace the fakes with real furniture *at a discount* she couldn’t have used her office—explicitly designed to look like Chinati—for her content. Which defeats her entire point.]

[UPDATE: Obviously I need someone who downloaded the video—oh hey it’s on the Internet Archive, thanks, Chris!—before it went private to send it to me. Also, why is the case—2:24-cv-02496, in the California Central District—not on PACER? Oh nvm, it is now. Perfect screenshots added.]

Recently: Thank you for your silver service, Donald Judd X Puiforcat

It is amazing that a painting like this can be out there for 120 years, and just turn up one day at Christie’s or whatever. But that’s what happened. André Derain, then 25, made this portrait of his friends Henri Matisse and Etienne Terrus, a local artist, on the beach in Collioure the summer they invented what came to be called Fauvism.

Derain presumably gave it to Terrus—it has remained in the family of his sister until now—and so it was not included in the works he and Matisse took back to Paris, and showed to much sensation and acclaim at the Salon d’Automne. It has never been publicly exhibited or published, and except for one biographer’s mention in the 1950s, was left out of the art historical record.

But a very similar, slightly smaller Derain portrait of Matisse alone, at the same table, even wearing the same fit, has been in the Philadelphia Museum’s collection since 1952.

Christie’s sold a previously unknown Matisse from Terrus’s collection last fall, a small “proto-Fauvist” depiction of the Jardins de Luxembourg from 1902. And Terrus was the original owner of a small Collioure landscape by Matisse that had gone through the Wildensteins to Christie’s to Edgar Bronfman—and back to Christie’s in 2014. So it feels like someone should have known about this—and maybe they did. But they nevertheless sat in a safe for sixty years.

Otherwise the only marvel greater than the painting itself is how two agencies are ready to claim copyright on them both, 119 years after they were made, and 70 years after their maker’s death.

Rediscovered: A Fauvist Portrait by André Derain of Henri Matisse and Fellow Artist Etienne Terrus [christie’s online magazine]
9 Apr 2024, Lot 12: André Derain, Matisse et Ferrus, 1905, est. EUR2-3m [update: sold for EUR3.19m] [christies]
Previously, not related, 2018: Etienne Terrus Museum discovers more than half its collection are fakes [guardian]

In 1971 sheriffs removed Brancusi’s Muse from the Guggenheim Museum, executing a 1969 court order that granted the sculpture to watch manufacturer Arde Bulova’s widow Ileana. Beginning in 1958, Mrs Bulova spent eleven years disputing her husband’s will, in which he left Muse to the museum. The couple had separated in 1955, soon after Ileana bid on Muse at Sotheby’s Parke Bernet—and Arde had paid for it. She successfully contended it was her property. Present at the seizure, Ileana told the New York Times she turned down a $200,000 offer from the Guggenheim, and would consider renting it to museums for a cut of the box office.

In 1981 Bulova sold Muse to Upper East Side art dealer Andrew Crispo for $800,000. His offer to flip it back to the museum was rejected. In the Fall of 1984 Crispo and a young security guard at Crispo’s gallery, Bernard Le Garos, lured a 28yo Canadian bartender to the gallery where they, along with three other men, bound, tortured, and sexually assaulted him for six hours.

That victim only came forward in the Spring of 1985, when he saw Le Garos on television, after his arrest for the murder of a 26yo Norwegian model and student named Eigil Dag Vesti. In February, Crispo and Le Garos had picked up Vesti, and while he was bound and masked, Le Garos shot him in the back of the head. They burned his body and abandoned it in the woods in Rockland County.

In the Fall of 1985, after Crispo pleaded guilty to tax evasion, the Guggenheim reacquired Muse from his creditors for $2 million. In December 1985, on the occasion of the sculpture’s return to public view, Guggenheim director Thomas M. Messer told Grace Glueck of the New York Times, “Obviously, it was very traumatic to have one of our central pieces removed from the museum under the guns of the deputy sheriffs and over our dead bodies.”

In 1955 the Guggenheim had also been given a plaster version of Muse by Walt Kuhn, who acquired it from the 1913 Armory Show, which he helped organize. Reporting in 1985, Glueck was under the impression that the Guggenheim still owned that sculpture. But it turns out they had sold it privately to Harold Diamond in 1979, the year his 15-year-old son Mike co-founded a hardcore band called the Young Aborigines, and two years before they kicked out their drummer for being a girl and changed their name to the Beastie Boys. In November 1986, four days after License to Ill [original title: Don’t Be A F****t] was released, Muse turned up at Christie’s.

Though Le Garos said he’d murdered Vesti on Crispo’s orders, Crispo was never charged in the death. Though Le Garos corroborated the gallery assault victim’s account and pleaded guilty to kidnapping and torture, Crispo claimed it was all consensual, and was acquitted in 1988. Thanks to David Platzker, I learned today that Crispo died in February 2024, three weeks after Carl Andre.

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Demian Diné Yazhi’s work in the Whitney Biennial, titled we must stop imagining apocalypse/genocide+we must imagine liberation, flashes nine lines of revolutionary poetry out the window toward the Hudson River. When it blinks off, letters scattered across the three-part sculpture remain illuminated to spell “free palestine.”

Shoutout to Zach Feuer, who pointed it out to Annie Armstrong, whose Artnet report tipped off Zachary Small, who asked the curators about it, which was the first they’d heard of it.