greg.org

In her 1995 biography of Florine Stettheimer Barbara Bloemink identifies everyone the artist put in this painting of a painting unveiling, based on guests whose presence at such soirées had been recorded somewhere. I don’t have my copy of Bloemink’s book handy, but my guess is the sources were the correspondence and journals of Florine and Ettie Stettheimer at Yale’s Beinecke Library, which transferred the painting to the Art Gallery in 2019.

According to Bloemink, the two guys contemplating the painting in the lower left are sculptor Gaston Lachaise and cubist evangelist painter Albert Gleizes. Ettie Stettheimer is in green in the upper left, sitting next to poet Isabel Lachaise, the sculptor’s wife and muse. Painter/sculptor Maurice Sterne is standing behind them. Sterne’s wife Mabel Dodge, a friend of Gertrude and Leo Stein with a giant villa in Florence and a downtown Manhattan salon, who was part of the founding of artist colonies in Provincetown and Taos, is not pictured. But that’s Leo Stein on the pouf, next to playwright and Carl van Vechten squeeze Avery Hopwood on the ottoman. Florine Stettheimer herself is sitting on the sofa at right between Madame Juliette Gleizes and an unknown figure in harlequin pants.

Everyone’s accounted for so far, but Bloemink identified the dark-skinned figure in a black suit at the top center of the picture, sitting in front of the nude self-portrait Stettheimer never exhibited publicly in her lifetime—nor was it included in the posthumous show Marcel Duchamp organized for her at MoMA in 1946, although this painting was—as “Hindu poet Sankar.” Sankar, whose only mentions I can find are related to this painting, but it seems pretty clear the reason they were invited was to keep the painting from getting censored on Tumblr. So who even is Hindu poet Sankar, and what have they done? Literally every online mention of them tries to sound like of course, they know who Hindu poet Sankar is, but if you don’t know, they’re not going to tell you.

Anyway, Sankar looks a little uncomfortable, not to say out of place—no, stay right there, Sankar, don’t move, I’ll get you a drink. This is a family blog.

[At least it’s not just me update: In a 2017 paper [pdf] on the interrelation between Carrie Stettheimer’s well-known doll house models and, respectively, Ettie’s writing and Florine’s painting, D]uke art historian Annabel Wharton notes that, even after enlisting the help of Asian Studies colleagues, she was unable to further identify “Hindu poet Sankar.” According to Wharton, Bloemink learned of the Sankar ID from a 1991 conversation with Yale’s longtime bibliographer and curator Donald Gallup [who died in 2000]. Gallup helped acquire and process Gertrude Stein’s papers, too, so he was familiar with the modernist milieu. Maybe the answer lies somewhere in the library.]

While it is sort of shocking to see a 49-year-old Marcel Duchamp dressed like an art handling street urchin as he leans against his masterpiece in its original home, this is exactly how I always picture the owner of that home—and that masterpiece—Katherine S. Dreier: a genial and traditional patron, just chilling with her amazing artist friends and their work.

But Dreier made work, too. Her 1918 Abstract Portrait of Marcel Duchamp is up at MoMA at the moment. And a 1940-41 painting, Explosion, is on view at Yale, which also holds Dreiers as part of the Société Anonyme collection. But she’s discussed and remembered much more as a collector and patron, and what discussions I can find about Dreier’s work are locked up in old, undigitized tomes.

Though painted more than a decade later, Zwei Welten (Two Worlds), donated to Yale in 1941, seems to depict similar forms in similar space. In Paris, Duchamp’s brother Jacques Villon adapted Zwei Welten as a lithograph. Dreier had an abstract language she liked, I guess. Before that, there was a chapel mural of Jesus, so she had range. Or rather, she had a journey.

Things are on the move now, too. This painting, Spinning Wheel (1920-26), ambiguously dated but specifically titled, was acquired by an alum in 2015, who donated it to Yale in 2020. Dreier’s was not a precisionist abstraction.

The most intriguing Dreier painting is the one we can’t see. A negative exists in Yale’s collection—dated 1941, with no known prints—for a photo of a[nother] portrait of Duchamp, which is provocatively labeled, “her missing painting.” I would very much like to see it.

[next morning update: eagle-eyed hero Bryan Hilley remembered seeing an image of this missing Duchamp portrait in the 2006 YUP catalogue of the Société Anonyme edited by Jennifer Gross. It was apparently five feet tall, and the date was 1918, sot the 1941 date above must be for the photo of it by Joe Schiff.]

I just cannot stop thinking about this painting.

It is by fashion illustrator and creative director Joe Eula, and it’s huge, maybe the biggest work of his I’ve ever seen—because I’ve never been able to find images of the giant Eiffel Tower scrim he painted on the fly for the Battle of Versailles in 1973 after discovering the backdrops he’d made used inches instead of centimeters, and so they didn’t fit.

But the size only underscores the wtf-ness of the subject: these are life-sized monkeys at the bar, and lounging in the club chair under a disco ball [?] in the country house next to what looks like a roaring fire? And those monkeys, according to Doyle, the auction house that sold this painting in 2006, those “abstract monkey figures represent Bobby Short, Elsa Peretti, Mrs. Glenn Bernbaum and Joe Eula.”

Bobby Short, we know, of course. In fact, his friendship with my family, and the presences of Eula’s poster of him in my mom’s basement, was the first Google search that led me to this monkey business. [Turns out the original sketch for that poster sold at Doyle, too, for not much at all. I really wish I’d known. You out there? HMU!]

Of course, Short was friends with everybody, including Eula—who, like Elsa Peretti, was extremely close with Halston—and [Mr.] Glenn Bernbaum. Short might have been the only Black person who could regularly get a table at Bernbaum’s restaurant, Mortimer’s. But though I did a spit take and a doublecheck after seeing this painting, there very much was no Mrs. Glenn Bernbaum.

Bernbaum’s meanness, snobbishness, racism, alcoholism, and anti-Semitism, along with Short’s relentless, performative, anti-sensual charm, all stem from the same thing: the ingrained personal discomfort at the precarity of being gay and Jewish or Black among the ruling class of a systemically racist and homophobic society.

The Doyle auction included 42 lots of Eula material, which makes me think they were from his collection. Nothing else sheds any light on this painting, though. Was it a weekend visit of friends to Eula’s house in Hurley, NY? The late date, 1996, was not long before Bernbaum died. Eula died in 2004, and Short in 2005. Short’s own estate auction at Christie’s included large amounts of African art and furniture, as well as racist artifacts from the US Jim Crow era of his youth; I think he had a not-unsophisticated view of the implications of his closest friends depicting him—and them!—as monkeys, even if today it fees like All Monkeys Matter.

But where did this painting live? Who saw it? How did it come about? Did Glenn Bernbaum actually have quiet, goofy weekends with friends where he could just be? Elsa Peretti, the last monkey standing, died in 2021, so the chance for a firsthand account is gone. [few minutes later update: Perhaps Cathy Horyn, who wrote the book on Eula in 2014, and hung out at his Hurley house, knows something about this monkey painting business.]

The Danby Quarry in Vermont provided the marble for the Jefferson Memorial; the US Supreme Court Building; the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale; and the seating on the third redesign of the Jacob Javitz Plaza in lower Manhattan after the destruction in 1989 of Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc. Also in 1989, four 9-inch thick blocks of Danby were used to make this, the second Marble Armchair in an edition of three, by Scott Burton.

Just look at it, I feel like it should be a million dollars, before reinforcing your floor.

Lot 144: Scott Burton, Marble Armchair, est. $20-30,000, at Rago Arts on 15 Mar 2023 [update: sold for $52,920.] [ragoarts.com]

A two-artist show, “Calder/Tuttle: Tentative,” just closed at Pace LA today. Richard Tuttle made sculptural and spatial responses, or recontextualizations, to a series of works by Alexander Calder. I’d first seen someone criticizing it, but to look at the installation shots, I’d say it’s a fresh and interesting way to see both artists’ work.

The Calders are nice enough, but the one above, Little Mobile for Table’s Edge, is exceptional, a mobile that sits like a stabile. Tuttle’s response?—Solution? Proposition? Alteration? Companion? I am undecided what the word should be. In this too-brief video, Alexander Rower calls them vessels, while Tuttle calls them pavilions or frames, none of which apply here.

Tuttle took the mobile off the table’s edge and put it on a sculptural plinth, with a Q*bert-friendly corner of square blocks. As the show’s press release explains, “On a formal level, Tuttle explores enactments of verticality and horizontality—as well as plays of light and shadow—in Calder’s work,” as he focuses “on the space discovered in the mobiles.”

Richard Tuttle enactment [?] with Calder mobile, as installed at Pace LA.

I assume whoever is buying one is buying both, if they can. If you, too, missed it, no sweat; there will be a book.

A companion presentation of Tuttle objects—works of and on paper—made in response to Calder and his work’s context ran concurrently at David Kordansky.

[next day update]: roaming through the Calder Foundation’s archive, it appears that this was the first of only two or three mobiles Calder made with this type of hanging-off-the-table dynamic. Orange Under Table is a much larger mobile from 1949, now in the collection of the MCA Chicago. Meanwhile, the tiny 1948 work, Toadstool With Feather, hangs a counterbalanced feather off the edge of a toadstool disc balanced at its center, putting the “table” element itself in motion. Scrolling through Calder’s oeuvre, it becomes clear that he used or revisited some mobile dynamics often. This is not one of them. I wonder why.

Calder/Tuttle: Tentative closed at Pace LA today, 25 Feb 2023 [pacegallery]
Calder/Tuttle: Tentative also closed at Kordansky today [davidkordanskygallery]