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The only Magrittes I’ve been OK with have been the de Menils’; basically, I trusted their take on Surrealism that included some Magrittes. But otherwise, I’m not really interested.

Except that the other day, on the artist’s birthday, Michael Lobel tweeted this early painting, l’Esprit Comique, from 1928, and I was very glad to see it.

Which is all I can do at this point, because I haven’t found any good writing on Magritte’s work generally, or on these early cut paper motif works from 1928-30 specifically, to understand what the artist was up to.

So all I’m left with is seeing, which is fine. Though a couple of online captions describe these works as cut paper, I think it’s pretty clear that this is all paint. How it’s painted, though, remains a mystery from afar. The way that gorgeous gradient sky peeks through the paper cutouts makes me think of a stencil. Do the edges between the figure and the sky bear that out? Cut paper alone won’t cut it, though, as this 1930 collage-style mess from the Boijmans shows.

Those brushstrokes defining the ground are worth the attention all themselves. Another work in this cut paper series, Annunciation (1930), at the Tate has a more elaborate rocky landscape with crisper contours; I like the simpler one better.

If I’m reading the captions right, this painting belongs to the Ulla and Heiner Pietzsch collection, which is on permanent loan to the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. So maybe I’ll just wait a bit for him to settle in, and ask Klaus about it.

Never has the phrase, “Nicht bei Bastian (Not with Bastian)” rung quite so poignantly as in the lot description for this Cy Twombly (sic) edition, which appeared (and did not sell?) at Dr. Andreas Sturie’s auction yesterday in Dusseldorf.

It is a portrait of the artist, in a thick double-breasted topcoat and a somewhat tight hat, serving contraposto while leaning on the heel of a copy of an ancient statue of Castor and Pollux. As he gazes out across the Bay of Naples from the Villa Comunale, the late afternoon sun kisses the cheeks of our three heroes. And it throws a shadow of a figure onto the statue’s base, likely the photographer, likely Lucio Amelio, the Neapolitan avantgardist art dealer in whose gallery Twombly staged back-to-back shows in the winter of 1974-75.

This print served as the exhibition poster for the second show, “Allusions (Bay of Napoli),” of works on paper referencing Orpheus, Dionysus and Narcissus. The artist signed and numbered 80 posters. Twombly always did have beautiful posters, and this one, and they seem to sell just fine as ephemera, so if Bastian doesn’t include them in the CR, NBD.

In 2016 the artist Max Renkel produced a small book titled, Cy Twombly’s Autobiography Hidden in My Collection, in which he rephotographed the portraits the artist chose to include in his many publications–and gallery announcements.

Twombly showed with Amelio seven times between 1972 and 1991, including the first exhibition in Italy dedicated to the artist’s sculptures, in 1979. He also dedicated a painting to Amelio, whose death from AIDS-related illness came in 1994. The painting, Untitled (1993), depicting funereal barges, was formative in the development of the boat motif that occupied the artist’s late work. In a note on a 2008 Tate Paper on Twombly and Rilke, Mary Jacobus wrote,  

Dedicating his funereal boat painting to the gallery owner Lucio Amelio, Twombly approximates lines from [George] Seferis Three Secret Poems, including: ‘Years ago you said, “fundamentally [essentially], I am a matter of light”’ (‘On a Ray of Winter Light’) and ‘The light is a pulse continually slower and slower [ever more slowly] / you think it is about to stop [as though about to stop]’

When it included the painting in the artist’s 1994 retrospective MoMA made no mention of Twombly’s association of the painting with Amelio. Neither was it mentioned on Wooster Street, where Gagosian Gallery debuted the massive, now boat-flecked painting Untitled (Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor), in coordination with the retrospective. Begun in 1972, the painting had hung unfinished in the artist’s Rome studio for two decades. Its title is a reference to a poem where a man travels home to see his brother, only to learn he’d died. The painting now hangs in the Twombly pavilion at the Menil.

“In retrospect, it seems astonishing that Jean-Paul and his daughters did not consider that the work might be authentic.” Ya think?

It is buck wild that in this, the 26th year of Antiques Roadshow USA, an original drawing by Albrecht Dürer would be sold at an estate sale for $30. I guess it was 2016, so only the 21st year? No matter. The point of this wild discovery, reported in The Art Newspaper, seems like a familiar one, like the Giotto in the kitchen, or the Caravaggio in the attic. And I salute the ability of the London dealer Agnews to pitch his Dürer to the Met and the Getty-for, oh I don’t know, how does $50 million sound?–in such an august publication. But there are some weird things about this discovery that make it clear this week’s report is not the definitive version of what happened.

Continue reading “New Dürer Drawing Just Dropped [Again]”

While the discourse grapples with the nuances of the relationship between the digital art object vs its token of ownership, the old art world is not letting the concept of authenticity rest.

Why, just yesterday, this object appeared for sale online at Christie’s Amsterdam. It is “an unsigned trial proof [sic]” of Gerhard Richter’s 1990 edition, Besetztes Haus (Squatters’ House), based on a similarly titled 1989 painting that depicts a then-well-known squat near the artist’s studio in Cologne.

The actual work, an offset print on 65x80cm card, was issued in an edition of rather specific composition, as the artist’s website documents it:

100 copies, signed in pencil, dated at bottom right, numbered at bottom left.
10 copies, signed in pencil, dated at bottom right, numbered in Roman numerals at bottom left.
10 trial proofs, signed in pencil, dated at bottom right, marked at bottom left: Probedruck or Druckprobe.
1 trial proof, signed in pencil, dated and marked on the image at top left: Druckprobe.
5 artist’s proofs, signed in pencil, dated at bottom right, marked at bottom right: a.p.

This sheet of paper, 49×70.5cm in size and still bearing the color bars and crop marks of the printer, is labeled on the side in an unidentified hand with “GardaPat 13” and “Farbe Fox Glanz,” references to paper and ink specs.

The “lot essay” is a single sentence: “We thank Hubertus Butin for the information he has kindly provided on this work.” What is that information? Did the editor of the Richter Editions catalogue raisonnée say that for an artist who painted color charts, and who deliberately uses commercial-grade printing methods, a salvaged print sample is as conceptually valid as an actually signed printer’s proof, for a third the price? Or that sure, why not, do you remember that one sheet from Dresden? Who knows? But apparently it is enough to know Butin’s seen this thing, because it already has a bid, and will sell for at least EUR3,000, plus fees.

Plus, of course, the Artists’ Resale Right royalty. If Richter accepts the 4% royalty for the sale of this work material scavenged from the printer’s floor, does that mean he recognizes it as an authentic work? Or will the real authentication only come if Richter adds the result to the sales tab on his site?

Lot 178: Gerhard Richter [?], Besetztes Haus (Squatters’ House) [sic], est. EUR3-5,000, auction ends 25 Nov 2021 [christies AMS]
Previously, very related: World’s Greatest Richter or World’s Greatest Non-Richter?

Writer and flaneur @CharlesFinch tweeted about seeing “this great and greatly weird” painting of New York, harbor, skyline and Statue of Liberty and all, at the Whitney Museum. Which is all the excuse I ever need to post about Stettheimer.

This particularly great one still sticks with me, too, from my first visit to the Gansevoort Whitney. As Andrew Russeth wrote at the time, they only actually acquired it in 2017. And it makes me think of another skyline Stettheimer painted a bit later, of the buildings of Columbus Circle circling a Christmas Tree in Central Park. That one’s at Yale.

New York – Liberty, 1918 [whitney.org]