Bob Ross, An Alpine Lake Under A Pink & Blue Sky, 1981, oil on canvas, 24 x 18 in., selling at Bonhams
Granted, I’ve never looked, but I have never seen an actual Bob Ross painting for sale. I thought they were all locked up in some corporate vault. Well, there are two on the loose, and now they’re being auctioned at Bonhams. This one has that iconic palette knife mountain flanked by happy trees; the other one’s asymmetrical, and snowy, with a cabin.
Oh wow, there are actually five at Bonhams in two different sales. The two above are from a private collection. Three other paintings—twofrom Ross’s TV show, and one from a book—are being sold by the company with proceeds to benefit American Public Television.
Gerhard Richter, Color Chase One and Color Chase Two, installed at 270 Park Avenue, image via JPMC
A review of Gerhard Richter’s 2023 show at Zwirner was built on a decade-old anecdote where the reviewer’s non-art savvy date dismissed his art for looking “like something that would be in the lobby of a bank.”
Zwirner presented that show as Richter’s last paintings. Which, last squeegee paintings, maybe, but we now know Zwirner had to know there were more paintings in the queue. He had to have known of the commission for Richter to make at least two more massive paintings—for the lobby of a bank. Not just any bank, though, or any lobby: JP Morgan Chase’s menacing, new giga-headquarters at 270 Park Avenue. Color Chase One and Color Chase Two, jagged compositions of enamel on interlocking aluminum panels, recently unveiled with no creation date, were not a quick project.
Gerhard Richter, 4900 Farben, Version XI, 2007, 196 enamel on aluminum on dibond panels, 680 x 680 cm, installation view via the Fondation Louis Vuitton
Andrew Russeth saw a connection to Richter’s color chart paintings, and I’d zoom in on the mega-chart, 4900 Farben/4900 Colours (2007) whose 196 reconfigurable aluminum panels match the Chase works in scale, material, process, and corporate sponsorship [It was made for LVMH.] I’d even guess that 93yo Richter began these works à la Matisse, by cutting up reproductions of 4900 Colours and rearranging the shards. [This project, these works, could be the subject of a show, or a book. 4900 Colors has its own micro-site. But since the dawn of the Zwirner era, Richter’s once exhaustive website looks like it stopped trying to keep up.]
Anyway, Andrew Russeth not incorrectly judged the Chase paintings to be “punchy, pleasantly awkward, and ultimately forgettable: perfect corporate-lobby art.” To which Richter trueheads can only respond, “Hell, yeah!” Lobby art is actually an entire subcategory of Richter’s work.
cy trombly drawings paintings sculpture, detail from the princeton town topics, nov. 7, 1953
This weekend I heard from George Lyle, who has been researching one of the least known aspects of Cy Twombly’s early career: a 1953 “retrospective” of “drawings, paintings & sculpture” at The Little Gallery in Princeton, NJ.
Twombly’s two-artist show with Robert Rauschenberg at Stable Gallery in New York opened at almost the same time, in the fall of 1953, and was extensively documented and reviewed—mostly negatively, but at least people noticed. The Princeton show, meanwhile, left almost no trace, except for a couple of letters at the AAA, in the papers of Larom “Larry” Munson, the fresh Princeton grad who ran The Little Gallery with his wife.
page 13 of the nov. 8, 1953 issue of the princeton town topics, with the little gallery’s ad for a cy trombly exhibition
But Lyle found advertisements for the show in the Princeton Town Topics, a free weekly newspaper, in both the Nov. 8 and 15, 1953. Which is interesting because the Twombly Foundation lists the show as ending on Nov. 7. What’s more interesting, of course, is that the ad misspelled Twombly’s name, two weeks in a row.
[next morning update: turns out the ads for the weeks preceding Trombly’s show are for picture framing, and encouraging folks to order their Christmas cards, so however embedded in the cultural life of Princeton, I’m gonna guess The Little Gallery was not much involved in the heated discourse of the Manhattan art village.]
Yayoi Kusama, Untitled blouse, 1968, acrylic on cotton, 32 1/4 x 48 in., selling at Rago Arts
There’s rare, and there’s actually rare, and this, I think, is the latter. Yayoi Kusama’s version of her fashion career is almost certainly a fantasy: that in the 1960s she sold a collection of clothing to Bloomingdale’s as part of her overarching artistic mission to cover the universe with polka dots.
What’s real, though, is that she made several pieces of clothing, including for herself. And, it turns out, including for some lady who’s selling her Kusama top at Rago this month:
The garment was commissioned by the husband of the present owner, who asked Kusama if she might make a dress for his wife. The fabric was selected by the dress’s owner, who was fitted personally by Kusama, who did not use a pattern. “The design was entirely [Kusama’s], she recalls, “created while she was deeply absorbed in the process. She asked for little input and never measured or drafted. The painting was done by hand, while we were there. Kusama used bright pink and blue acrylic paint in her recognizable, organic forms.”
It’s actually kind of incredible, as a story and an art object. It’s covered, not with the polka dots Kusama was painting on everyone in 1968, but with her Infinity Net motif, which she’d begun a full decade earlier. It’s also kind of weird, though, because the Infinity Net loops are painted around the neck and hem of the blouse in a decorative way, as if they were lace or embroidery. Which might undercut the Infinity Net concept, while making for a very pretty top.
Fashion-wise, or in terms of what goes on the body, I do think Kusama’s most important model is herself. The way she has systematically photographed herself alongside, in front of, and as a part of her artworks is worth a show, a book, and a PhD. And it’d put some deeper historical context around the art alien obāsan persona that led to her emergence as a global icon.
Rirkrit Tiravanija, untitled 2025, 2025, photogravure, McNamara walnut frame, engraved glass by Phung Vo, installation photo at Chantal Crousel by Jiayun Deng
In 1968 in Addis Ababa, Rirkrit Tiravanija’s father took a photo of the young artist and his sister. As Christopher Wierling’s press release text explains, Rirkrit Tiravanija has used the photo in his work at least twice: for self-portrait (1993), and untitled 1968 (Mr. Spock) (1968/1998). The latter was actually/also the title of a 2023 exhibition in Hamburg surveying Tiravanija’s long collaboration with Klosterfelde Edition. Of the homemade Spock ears, Wierling writes, “Spock was the only extraterrestrial crew member aboard the Starship USS Enterprise—he is described as half-human, half-Vulcan—and it’s precisely his pointy ears that signify his otherness. The artist would later cheekily refer to those pieces he made from modelling clay at age six or seven, as his first sculpture.”
[Update: There is another. Tiravanija made an edition of the photo as untitled (silver Mr. Spock) (1968) in My Kid Could Do That, a 2017 fundraising exhibit of artists’ childhood work. AND THERE WAS A T-SHIRT.]
Rirkrit Tiravanija, untitled (silver Mr. Spock) t-shirt, 2017-18, for Assembly NY X ProjectArt via Garmentory
Tiravanija presents the photo again, as untitled 2025 (2025), in his current show at Chantal Crousel in Paris is titled, IN ALIENS WE TRUST. It is a collaboration of sorts with Danh Vo. He “added elements.” Tiravanija’s photogravure is framed in “McNamara walnut wood,” from trees planted by the US Defense Secretary who drove the Vietnam War, Robert McNamara, which Vo obtained from his son Craig McNamara. The glazing is engraved with the show’s title, IN ALIENS WE TRUST, in the calligraphic script of Phung Vo, Danh’s father.
We all try to live in the present, making more or less sense of the world created by those who came before us. But I honestly do not know what to make of this work. Maybe I should have had my dad write this blog post instead.
Wolfgang Tillmans, Chisenhale Edition, 2011, laser print floated in custom box, ed. 44/100+50AP? I can’t tell via 100 Artists for Gaza
100 Artists For Gaza has launched an online auction to raise money to support Médecins san Frontieres’ activities in Gaza. Most of the work is small and, so far, very affordable.
[indistinctly signed] DeLamarre, 19th c., 9 1/2 x 13 3/4 in., being sold 17 Nov 2025 at Dreweatt’s
Fear not, from now on no auctioneer or dealer will ever forget to mention that in May 2023, one of an innumerable supply of Jacques Barthélémy DeLamarre paintings of a shivering, shaved-ass little lion dog, sold for $279,400.
And until we can somehow find proof otherwise, despite the absence of any evidence to support it, they’ll similarly never not mention that this dog, «parfois dit Pompon [sometimes called Pompon]», was a purported favorite of Marie Antoinette.
At some point I’ll have to reckon with the fact I made a facsimile object of a facsimile object. In the mean time, I guess I’ll just keep blogging every Pompon I see.
The world’s going to hell. I’ve got a deadline piece I’m stuck on. And my Google Voice number is set to expire unless I use it. So there’s no better time to put out a call for you to call in and share a bit of art-related writing or text that’s sticking with you right now.
When I first tried this exercise last spring, I thought it’d be a great way to find amazing or thought-provoking writing people have been saving up. But I also found it a good way to share something as I came across it, just placing a quick call, and leaving a voicemail. So.
Call the greg.org voicemail at 34-SOUVENIR (347-688-3647) and leave a message with: * your name or handle [optional], * you reading one brief art-related text [e.g., a sentence or two, 200 hundred or so words, a paragraph max, not a whole thing] * the writer and source.
You can quote yourself, and if you’re sitting on a gold mine of great texts, you can call more than once, but please keep it to one quote per call. And no slop, bots or twitter.
When I get enough recordings, I’ll compile them into one mixtape and put it out here. So your recording may be used [unless it’s hateful or absolutely sucks, obv, editor’s call], but any other info goes nowhere and nothing is done with it.
Call 34-SOUVENIR today, tonight, whenever you read something good.
In addition to the softcover debut of The Second Deposition of Richard Prince, the Stay Frosty event this weekend will also feature readings of several excerpts from the deposition, beginning at 1PM tomorrow, Friday, 10/24.
The excerpts vary in subject, but all are juicy, whether gossiply, legally, or art historically. They run from 5-10 pages, and participants will be able to choose to read the part of either the artist or the lawyers. I hope SAG/AFTRA has some waivers for this kind of thing, because I want to hear your best Richard Prince.
Screenshot of Maxwell Graham’s IG post from Oct 2022 showing Cameron Rowland’s Replacement, 2025, the Martinique flag, installed over the entrance to the Palais de Tokyo
Sometimes the institutional implications of Cameron Rowland’s work takes years, decades, even centuries to manifest. And sometimes it takes less than a day.
a screenshot of Maxwell Graham’s Oct 23 instagram post showing no flag, not Martinique, not France, over the entrance of the Palais de Tokyo
As documented by their dealer Maxwell Graham on IG, Rowland’s work, Replacement (2025), replaced the French flag with the flag of Martinique on the Palais de Tokyo, as part of ECHO DELAY REVERB: art americain, pensées francophones, which opened yesterday. Today the flag was removed. A wall text reads, “Palais de Tokyo has determined that Cameron Rowland’s artwork, Replacement, could be considered illegal. As a result it is no longer included in the exhibition.”
A couple of quick thoughts: the French says it is, “n’est donc plus presentée dans l’exposition,” which, yes it’s no longer being presented. But the work—which now involves an apparently unprompted, anticipatory determination and removal—might still be part of the show.
Google Streetview image from November 2022 showing the Palais de Tokyo’s French flag as it was typically installed
In the absence of more information, the rest of my ruminations aren’t worth typing out. Rowland’s work typically unleashes cascades of thought by surrounding objects with profound depths of historical and contextual information. So maybe they’re trying out silence, gaps, and nondisclosure.
Until we know more, I’m left toggling between exasperation at a Palais obeying in advance, and envy for a state bureaucratic apparatus sufficiently powerful to hold institutional operations within the rule of a law.
[After some reportage later update]: Ian points to le Quotidien de l’Art’s reporting, which finds that the Palais sought a legal opinion from the Ministry of the Interior, which found that public institutions must maintain political neutrality and not fly non-French flags. Rowland, meanwhile, found lawyers arguing that the official flag of a French departement is not non-French. And that Palestinian flags flying over French city halls draw fines, while Ukrainian flags seem fine.
The kicker, though not recognized as such, is that the Palais agreed to let Rowland’s flag be installed for one day, for photographic and “performatif” purposes, “afin d’éviter d’être légalement tenu de réimprimer le catalogue de l’exposition. [in order to avoid being legally required to reprint the exhibition catalogue.]” I expect that Rowland demanded this, and if their work was excluded from the show, the Palais would be misrepresenting their involvement, and using their name and work in a misleading way. If so, Rowland seems to have rope-a-doped the Palais to make their work’s point for them.
Eva Hesse photographed by Harper’s Bazaar’s Hermann Landshoff in her Bowery studio, 1968-69
After the immediate bafflement of whatever Eva Hesse is covered with, I find my eye rushing to the isolated, geometric certainty of Robert Smithson’s untitled ziggurat sculpture. And only then does it head to the cluttered table, filled with items obscuring a painted grid, which turns out to be a gift from Hesse’s friend, Sol Lewitt.
Anna M. Chave made a close read of the objects, works, studies, and models on the table in her 1996 book, Three Artists (Three Women): Modernism and the Art of Hesse, Krasner, and O’Keeffe. I’m gonna be real, right now I’m here for the table itself, and mostly for the table it replaced.
Installation view of Sol Lewitt’s Table Piece with Three Cubes, 1964, since destroyed, at Kaymar Gallery, published in Irrational Judgments
In 1967, Hesse made Washer Table out of a low-slung, plywood table that had been given to her by Lewitt. It began as part of a Lewitt table/sculpture he made for a group show in 1964. After that show—curated by Dan Flavin—Lewitt tried it in another sculpture, then cut it down to coffee table height and gave it to Hesse. She, in turn, covered its grid-painted surface with thousands of rubber washers and a sheet of glass, and gave it back.
It’s recognized as one of Hesse’s first sculptural objects now, and one of the first to use rubber, but Hesse herself considered the placement of around 5,700 washers to be a form of drawing. Lewitt explained to art historian Kirsten Swenson that Hesse “only used the surface of the table as a drawing surface before returning it to me.”
Eva Hesse’s Washer Table, 1967, in a 1968 photo of Sol Lewitt’s studio from the Lewitt Archive, as published in 2015 in Irrational Judgments by Kirsten Swenson
The timeline is not clear here, but the table sure is. Swenson opens her 2015 book, Irrational Judgments: Eva Hesse, Sol Lewitt, and 1960s New York, with this 1968 snapshot of Washer Table being used as a table in Lewitt’s Hester St. studio. It, too, is covered with studies, models, objets, tchotchkes, an ashtray arranged, as Swenson puts it, “as if fixed to points on an invisible grid.”
2011 installation view of Washer Table in Eva Hesse & Sol Lewitt at Craig Starr Gallery
Eva Hesse, Washer Table, 1967, 8 1/2 x 49 1/2 x 49 1/2 in., rubber washers, painted wood, metal, silver gelatin print in the Eva Hesse Archive, Allen Art Collection, Oberlin College
Among the Eva Hesse Archive at Oberlin’s Allen Art Museum [donated by Hesse’s sister Helen Hesse Charash] is the best photo of Washer Table. Where it looks even less painted than in Lewitt’s studio. In fact, it looks downright unpainted. Lewitt had already painted or stripped it at least twice, and some time after 1968, it seems someone painted it again.
Gerhard Richter, Wolken (rosa), 2025 and Wolken (blau), 2025, 200 x 300 cm, facemounted on Diasec chromogenic print on aluminum, ed. 12+3AP, via David Zwirner, via @mentaltimetraveller
Imagine owning one of the 1970 Cloudstriptychs that Richter decides to make fifteen more of. Do you get one? In Paris? From David Zwirner?
Richter’s expansive body of editioned works has consistently allowed the artist to experiment with the production of visual facsimiles and the iterative translation and interplay of mediums.
…
These editions are monumental objects in their own right: chromogenic prints face-mounted to an acrylic surface and on aluminum panels, each created on the same scale as the painted triptychs. To make these works, Richter photographed the original oil paintings and altered the colors of the resulting image—thus investigating the existence of a subjective visual reality that somehow exceeds the bounds of real-world perception. Through this process of recursive image transformation across mediums and domains both analog and digital, Richter approaches a new kind of abstraction that radically collapses the distinctions between painting, photography, and the printed image.
I am an unwavering admirer of Richter’s investigations of the photo copy. But I am pretty sure that this process of recursive image transformation radically enhances, not collapses, the distinctions between painting, photography, and the printed image. And if I had one of those Wolken triptychs I would definitely get a matching full-scale edition to prove it.
Installation view of Untitled (Figure with backpack), 2020; Writings 1973-1983 on Works 1969-1979 by Michael Asher and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, 2016; Self portrait at 31, 2023; It is a luxury to be understood, 2022; High School Moon, 2025; and Comme des Garçons F/W 1983: Gloves, Skirts, Quilted Big Coats (Performance ephemera), 2018– , at Society
A Chinese Paint Mill rendering of a watercolor seen and lost at a Korean flea market. A meticulous bootleg of Michael Asher’s collected writings. A multiyear collab to reverse engineer a 1983 Commes des Garçons sweater from runway photos.
Installation view of Tools for Kogetsudai/Moon Viewing Platform, 2019; and How is Art History Made? by Seth Siegelaub, 2025, all works by Christian Alborz Oldham at Society
A woodworker’s interpretation of the scrapers used to tend 500-year-old sand sculptures in a Kyoto temple garden. A new edition of Seth Siegelaub’s Kunsthalle Basel poster, “How is Art History Made?” now with Japanese text, domestically printed to dodge prohibitive tariffs. A 200,000-word florilegium of accumulated texts and banned tumblrs.
The press release [pdf] describes each object in Christian Alborz Oldham’s show at Society in Portland as “a double: bootleg, replication, edition, pair.” They also represent Oldham’s individual and collective efforts to pull objects lost to memory, distance, and time, into the discourse of the present. They index the difference between a physical object and an image, a reference, or an idea. How is art history made? The answer is different now because these works exist and will be in the world.
Olafur Eliasson, Big Stone, 1995, 100 x 100 cm, c-print on aluminum, ed. 3/3, selling 22-23 Oct 2025 at Bukowski’s [update: sold for SEK30000 hammer, plus 25% buyer’s premium and 5% droit de suite =39K]
I’ve never quite figured out these early Olafur Eliasson photos of agates. They’re from 1995. The first one I saw, in 2007, was called Big Stone. So’s the one selling this week in Stockholm.
They feel like paintings, found abstraction, which is not abstract at all. And for that matter, not found, either. Agates only look like this when they’re cut open and polished.
They feel like part of Eliasson’s exploration of photography, something aside or before he developed his photo series based on taxonomies and moving through the landscape.
Olafur Eliasson, Petrun’s Garden Series, 1994, image via olafureliasson.net
Or maybe it developed alongside. One of the first photo grid/series was already done: Petrun’s Garden Series, 1994, is a 20-image documentation [sic] of a visit to an apparently famous-in-Iceland private museum of a rock collection. In his 2004 exhibition essay, Matt Drutt noted that Olafur took pictures in walkthrough snapshot mode, and visited with his father, also a rock collector.
Are these large photos details of Petrun’s rocks? Or Olafur’s dad’s? Is there unacknowledged indexical or autobiographical content here? Or a deeper backstory connecting these sumptuous photos to Olafur’s earlier paintings? So far the only thing for sure is they are what they say they are: big stone pictures.
Installation view, Olafur Eliasson, Stenserie, 1993, Stalke Galleri, with seven c-prints on aluminum, image via olafureliasson.net
[Next morning update]: I was stymied by not being able to find references I remembered being on Eliasson’s site. But this morning I found the 1993 Stalke Gallery show Stenserie, Stone Series, which is considered his first photo series. The 1995 date must be the printed/realized date for later numbers in the edition. It sounds like there were originally seven images in the series, and in 2005, there was a(nother?) series of eight.
![a detail of a yellowed newspaper from nov 8, 1953, the princeton town topics, showing an ad for a cy trombly exhibition at the little gallery, in between ads for clothing [top] and used rugs [below]](https://greg.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/trombly-1953-princeton-ad-det-1024x870.jpg)
