Month: June 2023

Ben Street posted this image of an extraordinary reverse painting on glass by Giacomo Ceruti, which is being offered via private sale at Christie’s. I’m sure if you ask them, they’ll tell you all about it, or you can read the extensive description at Sotheby’s which sold the painting in 2018, from the collection of Otto Nauman. [It went for $615,000, btw, twice the high estimate.]

This portrait is part of a group of four glass paintings, known in German, at least, as Hintglasmalerei (painting behind glass), in a collection in Brescia, where Ceruti worked in the early 18th century.

Beyond the fascinating technique—it had to be painted in reverse order, starting with highlights—and the way he left so much glass unpainted, and the rarity of it surviving at all, it just absolutely pops.

My bandwidth atm is sporadic, so I can’t do a all-out, tab-filling dive, but Ceruti’s other paintings do not inspire interest. Neither do most reverse glass paintings. The way this feels like neither of those is truly exceptional. Whether that’s a reason to spend half or a million dollars for it, I cannot say.

The similarity of this Rembrandt being protected from heavy rain leaking into a bucket right in front of it to David Hammons’ abstract paintings covered by used street tarps is immediate and gratifying to everyone who is familiar with this work.

Hammons showed these works for the first time at L&M Arts’ townhouse gallery in Manhattan in 2011. Most of the tarps were opaque, with only corners and edges of the madcap AbEx paintings peeking out underneath. One of the biggest, though [above], was covered in cloudy, still-translucent plastic that allowed the painting to be seen through a fleeting, new landscape of light reflecting on the draped plastic surface.

I found the image of it above Frances Richard’s Artforum review. Richard considered the works in relation to the history of postwar painting, while the Gemäldegalerie’s installation at once reaches back to the Renaissance of Rembrandt and projects forward to the institutional failings in response to the global climate emergency.

Contemplating Grubbs’ anxiety during what should have been a pleasant visit to the Rembrandt Room renewed Richard’s conclusion:

“An almost-palpably rustling audience—though who would care enough about this scene to observe it, and yet be so removed?—breached the building’s hushed solidity to watch us (critic, guard, staff, artist, collectors, historians, etc.) act our pantomime of ‘judgment’ and ‘value.’ Walking away down Seventy-eighth Street, I thought,’This is all a David Hammons.'”

And so did I.

Previously, related: Hammons All Around Us
Meanwhile, at the Ludwig: Untitled (After Isa Genzken), 2017

Truly one of the most baffling exhibitions I’ve ever seen. I’m not even sure if I saw it, and if it’s an exhibition.

Les Baux, a medieval hilltop fortress ruin in Provence, is hosting a retrospective of Piet Mondrian. The exhibition is comprised of several info panels scattered around the gardens approaching the fort. There is no original art, or anything even close; and no explanation for why Mondrian or why here.

It apparently took eleven people from the government’s attractions management contractor, Culturespaces, to decide to print Mondrian’s wikipedia page on enamel panels and plant them on the lawn.

Meanwhile, the site’s trebuchet demonstrations and crossbow gallery, operated by medieval cosplayers, have apparently been discontinued in favor of art-related content.

I’ve been thinking about painters and textiles lately. Here are some details of three Velázquez paintings of fabrics and Infanta Margarita.

The white dress with the cross hatch marks was made while he was working on Las Meninas. The blue one, made three years later, was one of the last two paintings Velázquez completed. That is apparently a fur muff in the Infanta’s left hand. TBH I read it as translucent, at least on top, with the silver trim of the dress extending under it, like it was a platter of tinted glass, and I was confounded by it. The pink one also has a vase of flowers, which is after the jump. 1654. Amazing.

The whole Degas bronze situation is annoying, and I thought I was done with it in 2010 when I wrote about reading about Norton Simon’s bulk purchase of the modèle bronzes, which had been forgotten in the foundry after being used to cast 1400 “authentic” bronzes. [The modèles were master bronzes cast from wax figures cast from gelatine molds made from Degas’ wax/clay/detritus originals. They were used to make the molds from which all the authorized, posthumous editions were cast. So all the authorized Degas bronzes are technically surmoulages, copies of copies, or molds of molds. Of molds.]

But then a set of plasters turned up in another foundry, and those were supposedly made from Degas’ figures before his death or immediately after. And now those plasters, or rather, the bronzes cast from them, are trying to elbow their way into the market as closer to Degas’ originals. Or whatever the bronze edition equivalent is. A letter to the editors of ARTNews claps back at an earlier article questioning the history and validity of the undocumented molds and casts. [It was written by art historian Patricia Failing, who has been publishing on Degas’ bronzes since 1979.]

This second batch of bronzes appeared in 2010, and has been the subject of scholarly and curatorial skepticism ever since. I was happy to sit this out until the guy complaining to ARTNews, the guy with the exclusive rights to market the unexplained batch, dissed the original batch like this: “Such second-generation bronzes, known as surmoulages, are not usually accepted in the art world. Why? Because casting a bronze from another bronze would be like making a photograph from another photograph—a generation of details would be lost.”

First off, these earlier bronzes have certainly been accepted by the art world—as the authorized products of Degas’ heirs. Their relationship to Degas’ intentions has been the subject of study and debate for a hundred years. But to diss them by saying they’re “like making a photograph from another photograph”? Don’t threaten me with a good time, buddy. I have been pulled off the sidelines and onto the field, for Team Surmoulages.

We Need To Talk About Purdue’s Newly Donated Degas Sculptures [artnews]
Letter to the Editor: What the ‘Inconsistencies’ Among Degas Bronze Casts Really Mean, According to a Sculpture Specialist [Who Sells Them] [artnews]
Previously: How To Make A Degas Bronze Modèle

I feel bad for dragging Alain into this, but I’m still trying to grapple with my own offhand comment—on a platform I am working to disengage from, about a column by a critic I avoid—which suddenly upended my perception of an artist I’ve actually liked. So rather than hash it out in a thread I’ll just end up deleting, I’m documenting it here and now.

When I first encountered Anselm Kiefer’s works, it was books, giant painted books, lead books, books with wings, and coming from a culture of metal books, I was taken in. The take on Kiefer then was his boldness in taking on the taboo subject of Germany’s Past.

By the time I saw Kiefers in person, though, it was 1993, he’d gone feral. His dealer Marian Goodman was left to exhibit a pile of paintings as they were found in his abandoned studio, along with a table full of ledger books the artist had been masturbating onto for twenty years. The gallery offered white library gloves to visitors who wanted to try unsticking the pages. So yeah, I guess there were signs that something was going on.

Even in this trauma-focused moment, childhood war trauma—for a German kid born in World War II—cannot be the sole explanation for the artist’s project, even if there were such a thing. But the phrase, “building toys from the rubble of his childhood home” suddenly feels expansive enough to snap a lifetime into focus. It’s a parameter that improves the fit of a model to the data that is Kiefer’s art. And yet it also feels like it’s not helping the work, just the opposite. I guess the best case scenario is Kiefer works toward a little more self-awareness and inner peace, and maybe the rest of us don’t have to have so much bombastic Kiefer works in our lives.