Gerhard Richter, Pane of Glass/Glasscheibe, aka Antelio Glas GR 876-5, 2002, glass and steel 95 x 100 cm, selling soon at Sotheby’s
Like a wind rattling the windows in their aging frames, a decent auction result can shake loose other Gerhard Richter Pane of Glass from their storage spaces.
With its dark steel banded frame, GR 876-5 seems completely different from the other [also retitled] Antelio Glas works, which only have tiny steel prongs, too small to sign and label. And all apparently too precarious to install and photograph anew. Truly, with the auction houses’ help, we’re gonna bring zombie gerhard-richter.com back online one scavenged jpg at a time.
Gerhard Richter, Grauer Spiegel, GR 766, 1992/2025, pigment on glass, 300 x 400 cm overall, selling at Sotheby’s
Meanwhile this whole four-panel mirror work from 1992 was refabricated last year under the artist’s direction, and now has a double-date. See it during Frieze Week, and lmk if those panels are each angled slightly like a set of shutters left slightly ajar.
Andy Warhol, Portraits of the 70s, signed six times, from the estate of Mrs. Beverly Chalfen Grossman, late of Minneapolis, selling at Freeman’s in Chicago
It hit me: David Whitney’s Andy Warhol’s Portraits of the 70s is a foundational text for a clearer, bleaker postwar art history. Bleaker than the one Robert Rosenblum thought he was writing when he compared the “upper-income virtuosity” of rainbow sherbet brushstrokes’ to the “lower-income austerity” of Brillo boxes and Most Wanted Men:
With Warhol’s gallery of contemporary faces, the decade of the 1970s high society is instantly captured. In this glittering realm, light and shadow are bleached out by the high wattage of spotlights; colors seem selected from the science-fiction rainbow invented by the likes of Baskin-Robbins, and brushstrokes offer an extravagant, upper-income virtuosity which appears to be quoting, for conspicuous consumption, a bravura tradition that extends from Hals through de Kooning. By comparison, the look of Warhol’s 1960s paintings was often of lower-income austerity and dreariness, of Brillo boxes and Campbell’s soup cans, of the faces of criminals, innocent victims, or remote superstars who could barely sparkle through the smeared newsprint. On more than one level, Warhol has wrapped up two decades for our social time capsule.
But that wasn’t the moment. It was 84 lots into the auction of her Chanel sweatshirts and It Bags where Mrs. Beverly Chalfen Grossman’s personalized copy of the Whitney catalogue appears. Warhol signed it on five different pages and the cover. I wondered why.
Brice Marden, Three Deliberate Greys for Jasper Johns, 1970, oil and beeswax on canvas, 183.2 x 382.8 cm overall, purchased in 1971 by the National Gallery of Canada
“In 1970, the minimalist painter Brice Marden painted a monumental canvas, Three Deliberate Greys for Jasper Johns, and called Johns to ask him if it was OK to use that title. Johns replied: ‘Sure, as long as the greys are deliberate.’”
Roberta Smith included it in her posthumous assessment of Marden’s legacy for the Times on August 14, 2023. But it originates from Smith’s sometimes colleague at the Times, Deborah Solomon, who, on August 10th, the day after Marden’s death, shared the story on a cursed social media site. Rather than link to it, I have copied it here:
Brice Marden once told me that when he painted his monumental canvas, “Three Deliberate Grays for Jasper Johns,” he phoned Johns to ask him if it was okay if he used that title. Johns replied, “Sure, as long as the grays are deliberate.” R.I.P. Brice.
Solomon is working on a biography of Johns, so I expect she has many more such stories saved, in classic Times writer’s fashion, for the book.
Installation view of Brice Marden’s Three Deliberate Greys for Jasper Johns [L] in Eight Contemporary Artists at MoMA, 1974, 📷: MoMA/Kate Keller
What strikes me is that when Marden was included as one of Eight Contemporary Artists at The Museum of Modern Art in 1974, Three Deliberate Greys for Jasper Johns was exhibited upside down. Or backwards, whichever is more applicable with a Marden. Or maybe you can install it either way, as long as it’s deliberate.
Hiroshi Sugimoto, Trees, 2022, pigment print on rice paper, two eight-panel screens, 71 3/8 x 686 5/8 in. overall? 57 feet? Astronomy missions have been destroyed by imperial/metric confusion like this. how about 181.3 x 686.6 cm, Fraenkel Gallery?
The thing with screens, as with Hiroshi Sugimoto, is that there’s never enough. And so it goes with Hiroshi Sugimoto screens.
I thought I got at least a sense of Sugimoto’s engagement with the byōbu form, of the arc. But there’s more. Fraenkel Gallery has a portfolio with eight examples of what they call photographic screens, mostly from 2021-2. Most are landscapes. One, Lightning Fields, is composed from an earlier series. And one is both. Pine Trees, which was inspired by a screen, finally became a screen itself. Though it seems that the original six-photo compositions have been transformed to eight-panel screens. I’m sure it’s glorious, even if it is only 686 cm instead of 686 inches.
But that’s not where this started, or picked up. While looking for video of the 2001 Sugimoto-produced Noh performance at Dia, I found #NohClimaxSeries, eight video shorts Sugimoto produced with the Japan Foundation in 2022. Sugimoto was initially stuck, then remained in Japan for the first three years of COVID. And eight videos of one- or two-performer scenes from various Noh plays staged on the grounds or in the empty halls of Himeji Castle feel like a pandemic production.
Screenshot of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Ebira from Noh Climax, 2022, with the artist’s 2014 screen, 《月下紅白梅図》via Japan Foundation/youtube
Sugimoto’s concept was the Noh version of a classical music period performance: “I have always dreamed of seeing the premodern world. A time when people danced in natural settings and played natural, unamplified music under natural light. Electricity has robbed the performing arts of their original spirit.” Performers in antique costumes and masks from his own collection followed a traditional program of plays keyed to the time of day, and performed in natural light. The first one I clicked had a 2014 screen by Hiroshi Sugimoto, Purple and White Plum Blossoms under Moonlight.
Cady Noland, Untitled, 1991, screenprint in artist’s frame, 40 x 32 1/8 in., selling at Native, BRU
How is it that the estimates on the Pannier Collection in Brussels are all so freaking low? Don’t they know that might attract extra attention and interest in the extremely on point Cady Noland screenprint with the perfect juxtaposition of Patricia Hearst images that the Panniers bought at FIAC from Paula Cooper?
Installation view of Noh Such Thing As Time, a performance of Yashima daiji, Oct 3, 2001 at Dia, stage, warōsoku lighting, and photo backdrops by Hiroshi Sugimoto, image via sugimotohiroshi.com [update: ok now I have questions because 蝋燭能, “candle noh,” is a thing, but those candle holders are not the traditional stage floor lights, which look like little paper cones of frites. Is there really only one photo of this event?]
Tickets for Naohiko Umewaka’s performance at Dia 25 years ago today of Zeami’s classic 14th century Noh drama, Yashima, with lighting, stage, and set by Hiroshi Sugimoto, went on sale September 12, 2001. I was not in the mood then, and the punny title, Noh Such Thing As Time, didn’t help. Also something about the two monumental, multipanel photos of pine trees did not sit right with me then or since. I did not like the book. So despite my absolute transfiguration by his 1995 Time Exposed (Buddha Series), it took me a while to accommodate Sugimoto’s explorations of traditional Japanese art and culture into my understanding of his practice.
Hiroshi Sugimoto, Pine Trees, 2001, six-panel silver gelatin prints, I think, via sugimotohiroshi
Hasegawa Tōhaku, Pine Forest, Momoyama era (c. 1590), pair of six-panel byōbu, ink on paper, each 157 x 386 cm, National Treasures in the collection of the Tokyo National Museum
Sugimoto explains his Pine Trees photos, in Japanese artistic terms, as copies of Pine Forest, a pair of 16th century six-panel screens by Hasegawa Tōhaku at the Tokyo National Museum, which are revered as national treasures. Maybe he felt creating photos for a classical traditional context like Noh required this more explicit referential framework. But these are not copies. If only because Sugimoto’s rather stuffed composition–he photographed trees singly or in pairs, I think, on the grounds of the Imperial Palace, and then aligned them in contiguous scenes—lacks the power of Hasegawa’s emptiness.
Hiroshi Sugimoto, Pine Trees in Coffin of Light, 2009, Bennesse House Park, via sugimotohiroshi
But it’s the reference to screens as a medium of scale and space that feels fruitful, with more potential, frankly, than the hyper-tastefully melodramatic 2009 installation of Pine Trees in Naoshima, Coffin of Light, which feels like the Minimalist language Sugimoto explored so richly with his Seascapes hit a decorative dead end. [There’s a whole Sugimoto Gallery on Naoshima now, designed by the artist, which I mention—along with this whole post, frankly—because DC is about to get another node in the Unified Sugimoto-verse when the Hirshhorn’s redesigned sculpture garden and Mall tunnel entrance open in a few days.]
Hiroshi Sugimoto, Wisteria of the Kasuga Grand Shrine, 2022, pigment print on rice paper on six-panel byōbu, 200.7 x 518.2 x 41.9 cm, ed. 3, installation view via Fraenkel Gallery
Now about the screens. Sugimoto has now produced at least three monumental photographic editions, pigment printed on rice paper, as six-panel folding screens. He showed two of them at Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco in 2023. [Next morning update: there’s at least nine, a whole medium.] The dimensions would indicate that they’re intended to be shown standing free on a ground, not extended flat on a wall. The accordion shape echoes in the best way—though the direction of the reference is probably the opposite—the leporello foldout artist book, Sea of Buddha. [By now I guess I’ll note that fine, the Noh Time Like the Present or whatever book was also accordion-style.]
Hiroshi Sugimoto, Pine Trees spread in NOH Such Thing as Time, 2001, this copy at Ursus Books
The one above, of the Kasuga Taisha (Grand Shrine) in Nara, was also shown at the shrine museum in 2021-2, alongside an exhibition of Shintō relics and artifacts curated by Sugimoto. The exhibition marked the journey of the spirit of the shrine to a newly dedicated Shintō shrine on Sugimoto’s oceanview Enoura Observatory in Kanagawa.
In his explorations of time, Sugimoto’s architectural and material paths usually end up at the antique or the archaic, if not the downright prehistoric. He was and always has been an admirer and collector of artifacts, but he’s been making objects and structures not for the now, but for the far future as discovered ruins. Maybe this weaving of his practice into the centuries-old traditions of Japan is, like his embrace of the explicitly spiritual, part of his attempt to, if not necessarily be remembered, then to at least leave a trace.
Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, Dec. 1937, pochoir on collotype with stamp, 13 7/8 x 7 7/8 in. including the signed stamp, which is absolutely part of the work, not a margin, via Christie’s
Warhol bought this 1937 print edition of Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 from Duchamp’s estate, and in 2000, someone bought it from Warhol’s foundation. Now they’re selling it.
Duchamp began with Nude Descending a Staircase to make hand-colored prints of his earlier paintings for inclusion in the retrospective album project he was working on, which became la Bôite-en-Valise. It’s not clear how many loosies like this he made, but I expect Warhol only bought the one.
@chrissantamaria just posted this 1991 work, Santa Fe Cloud, which is at Jonathan Novak in Los Angeles. Artsy lists just one dimension for the work, 15 5/8 x 16 5/8 inches, but that turns out to be the fat shoplifter prevention frame. The painting itself is only 9 1/8 x 10 1/4 inches.
What other clouds or tiny landscapes did he make? Who knows? The cakes crowded so much out for so long, I feel like surprise is going to be the default setting for Thiebaud for a while.
Well, almost all. I was highkey surprised that David Hammons’ African American Flag (1990) was A) in the collection, and B) not being sold with everything else. But reading Peter Simon’s quote above, I guess he just couldn’t bear to part with it.
Glenn Ligon, Condition Report, 2000, screenprint on iris print, sheet: 31 7/8 x 21 5/8, the Bon à tirer for the edition of 20, plus one AP [plus 6 more AP and 2PP -g.o], selling at Christie’s London 20 Oct 2026
A while back I tried to track down all the editions of one of Glenn Ligon’s greatest prints—one of his greatest works to date—the 2000 diptych, Condition Report. It really felt like they were all in museums or otherwise as unobtainable as the 1988 painting they’re based on, Untitled (I Am A Man), Ligon’s first text painting, which is in the National Gallery.
This is the Bon à tirer, the proof that got the final approval to print the edition. Which is wild because Christie’s says the only declared proof was one AP. But there were actually 7 APs, and 2 printer’s proofs, in addition to the 20. Besides that anomaly, there is no indication of how it came to be owned by British clothing company founder Peter Simon. But this point, I think it’s best to just buy it, and sort out the details later, when it’s in your hot little hands.
2005 replica of The Golden Plates made by Stephen Pratt for the 200th anniversary of Joseph Smith’s birth, photographed at the LDS Museum of Church History and Art, via wikipedia
The news that a vast nuclear-powered AI data center being proposed for 9,000 acres of public land in eastern Utah comes cloaked in Mormon language feels like the latter days. In June, Project Beehive debuted a small test version of its modular nuclear reactor, which it calls Ward 250. The flaky startup behind Project Beehive has applied to build 456 wards, producing 9.6 gigawatts of electricity, equivalent to the peak summer electrical capacity of the entire state. This semantic strategy serves to ease public perception of the proposal, and to lowkey blunt public criticism. It’s the localized cultural equivalent of Meta introducing its AI surveillance tool with a kawaii mascot, backed by Palmer Luckey and Palantir’s CTO.
Expo ’74 Mormon Pavilion architectural model postcard, scan via visitexpo74
When @peterhuestis joked about the reactors’ containment structure being the Golden Plates, though, I had an epiphany, if not a straight up vision. Now I want everything built in Utah, from the grifter nuclear reactor farms and grifter data centers, from the stripmalls and dirty soda drive-thrus, to my mid-mountain ski house in Alta, to honor the state’s Mormon vernacular architectural heritage by being shaped like the Golden Plates.
Sol LeWitt, From the Upper Left and Right Corners Toward the Center of the Page. R 324, 3/29/1975, torn orange paper, 50 x 50 cm, via NativeSol LeWitt, From the Midpoint of the Left and a Point Halfway Between the Mid Point of the Left Side and Upper Left Corner Towards the Center of the Page. R327, 3/29/1975, torn orange paper, 50 x 50 cm, via NativeSol LeWitt, From the Midpoint of the Left and Right Sides Toward the Center of the Page. R329, 3/29/1975, torn orange paper, 50 x 50 cm, via Native
I’m not sure who’s going harder here: Sol LeWitt for his 1975 show of serially torn orange paper in the House of Orange’s own backyard in Amsterdam; Art and Project, the gallery which had been a fiery nexus of conceptual art for decades, and whose gallery exhibitions were complemented by the Art and Project Bulletin, a groundbreaking publication that became its own art and exhibition platform; Robert and Suzanne Pannier, the Belgian collectors who spent decades in the relentless pursuit of domestically scaled conceptual perfection.
The tears on the Panniers’ LeWitts look almost like creases, and the verso shows no tears at all, only a second title and signature. So LeWitt mounted them. One tear on the MoMA work actually looks like a tear, though, and seems to reveal a backing board tinted orange. On all of them, LeWitt’s pencil crosshairs mark the center of the sheet, the unreached target of every tear.
The Panniers’ LeWitts are being sold at Native in Brussels next month, and honestly, if you buy more than zero but less than all three, what are you even doing? Better to stay out of someone more serious’s way.
New Openings Against Old Surfaces focuses on Matta-Clark’s artist book practice, and its emergence from the 1972 exhibition at 112 Greene St where Walls Paper first incarnations appeared. Matta-Clark first showed his photos of exposed interior walls on newsprint, “in long newsprint strips from ceiling to floor, and a version offered in tall stacks that one could freely take and hang at home.” The sliced book version followed in 1973.
