Look, I absolutely get it. If I was an architect, or even an architectural designer, and my husband just bought the Whitney Museum, I’d be psyched, too.
And if he and his company was getting roasted for it, and people were freaking out over Marcel Breuer’s iconic brut luxe spaces being gutted and turned into a showroom for NFTs and Kelly bags, I could imagine giving him a pep talk when he came home.
I could not imagine, however, paying to promote my Instagram post praising his “vision and determination.”
And I would not say in a promoted Instagram post, “As someone who has an architectural practice that values and specializes in preservation, conservation, and restoration, I see so much value in this stunning acquisition.” Especially if my little studio had previously made fixtures for my husband’s company’s showroom above its East Hampton real estate office, and I wanted to get a piece of that sweet Breuer gut job.
Cy Twombly, Untitled (Gaeta), 1989, acrylic and tempera on paper mounted on panel, 80 x 58 5/8 in., exhibited in “Cy Twombly: In Beauty it is finished,” Spring 2018 at Gagosian 21st St.
@wernerherzoghaircut had reblogged this Cy Twombly onto my tumblr dash, and it was so ravishing I had to go back and look at the show it appeared in again.
In March-April 2018, Mark Francis organized a significant show of Twombyl works on paper at Gagosian’s 21st Street site in New York, titled “In Beauty it is finished: Drawings 1951-2008.” The title came from a text element in a work in the show.
Screenshot of Untitled (Gaeta) installed at Gagosian, Spring 2018, via gagosian.com
The thing about Untitled (Gaeta) is how much it looks like a painting here, but how clearly it was a drawing in real life. Or rather, a work on paper; it is a giant, proud sheet floating in a shadowbox frame.
Which feels relevant to the text Twombly inscribed, a fragment of a poem by Archilochus, as translated by Guy Davenport:
Sarah Sze explaining Slice (2023), a site-specific work in the her Timelapse exhibition at the Guggenheim, in an Art21 documentary. image: art21.org
I still have to see Sarah Sze’s exhibition at the Guggenheim, Timelapse. Watching Ian Forster’s Art21 interview/documentary of Sze explaining her work as she makes it does not make it easy to wait.
A couple of weeks ago, Sze talked to Ben Luke for The Art Newspaper’s podcast about her Artangel commission, Metronome, which is installed in a South London railway station waiting room. Because of the pandemic, the timing for these two major shows slid on top of each other.
For both exhibitions Sze has created streams of video or audio content that slip and loop in a seemingly non-repeating way, creating seemingly random confluences and juxtapositions. In Forster’s footage, we see Sze’s images, but don’t hear about them. In Luke’s we hear her talking about her sources, but don’t see them.
A poster from “Untitled,” 1993, the endless stack of free posters Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Christopher Wool first made for Printed Matter as a fundraising edition [!] is being sold a “Poster for an exhibition” and an “offset print” from “a so-called ‘Stack’-work” by Christopher Wool. It would be, I believe, Wool’s first and only Stack-work.
sogenannte “Stack”-Arbeit, hmm?
Gonzalez-Torres’ stack piece made with an image of Wool’s painting is, of course, in the Sammlung Hoffmann in Mitte. So if you lose the auction, maybe just head into town one weekend and pick up an uncreased copy.
Max Schumann, Threat Level, 2023, 14-color screen print with unique handpainted embellishments, ed. 100 for Printed Matter
In case you were wondering if there’s anything he can’t do or hasn’t done, the answer is not yet. Outgoing director of Printed Matter, Max Schumann has produced two prints for the upcoming Spring Benefit Bash. Each 14-color silk screened print of flower arrangements is embellished by handpainted blossoms.
The pictures fit well within Schumann’s own longstanding “outsider painting practice,” as PM puts it. Though titles notwithstanding, they do also feel like the brightest quadrant of “the dark energy at the heart of American politics, capitalism, and consumerism” that is the subject of Schumann’s critique.
The larger print, We Will Attack, is an edition of 35, and the smaller one, Threat Level, above, is an edition of 100. They both look great, but I posted Threat Level because the email drop for the prints had an animated GIF of it, toggling between the printed and embellished state, and it looked awesome. I ended up deciding not to serve a giant gif from my server, though, thanks. Some of us are even more not-for-profit than Printed Matter these days.
Danh Vo, We The People (detail), 2011-2016, 200 x 120 x 280 cm, at Galerie Chantal Crousel’s presentation at Art Basel
One problem with Christie’s selling the Fra Angelico after Basel is that as soon as my Fra Angelico Gofundme reached 10% I’d siphon it off to buy this gorgeous piece of Danh Vo’s We The People at Chantal Crousel’s booth. I’m only posting it because I assume it’s already been snapped up by someone in an earlier timezone.
Michael Lobel posted this cursed image on social media the other day.
While he was visiting Washington DC in 1976, Andy Warhol photographed Henry Kissinger accosting actress-turned-icon-turned-DC wife Elizabeth Taylor Warner, who was then married to Virginia Republican senator John Warner.
In 1976 Kissinger was Gerald Ford’s Secretary of State.
Guido di Piero, Fra Giovanni da Fiesole, posthumously known as Fra Angelico (Near Vicchio, circa 1395/1400-1455, Rome) The Crucifixion with the Virgin, Saint John the Baptist and the Magdalen at the Foot of the Cross tempera on gold-ground poplar panel, arched, the original engaged frame regilded 25.1/8 x 15 in. (59.7 x 34.2 cm.) Estimate: £4,000,000-6,000,000 at Christie’s London 6 July 2023
When I went to college I figured I wanted to be a banker, and since bankers collected art, I should study art history, to know what to collect. And so I studied Italian Renaissance painting. Which was fascinating and enthralling and transporting, but which is also the least collectible period of art imaginable. It’s even hard to see it in person.
So the idea of a 60cm tall painting by Fra Angelico being for sale is momentarily giving me pangs of regret for not sticking with banking. Anna Brady’s report on the Christie’s announcement has more detail about the painting, history, context, and scholarship than the Christie’s announcement itself, so that’s nice.
The painting of a crucifixion, dated roughly to 1419-1424, will be on view in New York from 10-14 June. Meanwhile, I’ve got about a month to scare up an extra £6 million. BRB.
NGL, it is wearying to keep wading into the legal minutiae, especially when it all feels like it’s missing what’s obvious. and. right. there. in. the. works. I guess it is literally just me. On the bright side, though, there’s a new deposition, which I am trying to get my hands on. Unlike the Cariou trial, only a very few pages have been excerpted so far, so no book. Yet. [Here’s a pdf of the filing, though, have fun.]
Anyway, point is, next week Phillips is selling a New Portrait that is new to me; it’s a poster? An edition? A takeaway? [Here it is on the floor, for drama.] Hard to say, frankly, but it is the Queen. And it came from Prince’s New Portraits show in London (at Gagosian’s Davies Street storefront) in 2015. Prince would make smaller proof editions for the Portrait subject, if they asked, and he did make variously sized Portraits later [see below], along with Instagram-related prints.
Installation shot of a gang of cash&carry-size New Portraits at Gagosian LA, 2020, via yt
The Queen Elizabeth portrait is an entire Prince joint, though. Like he did with his Family portfolio, Prince posted QEII’s coronation portrait to his own Instagram account, and started composing. The Brant Foundation must have had notifications turned on, to get their white power emoji in there within the four hours between posting and screenshotting.
It’s all long gone now, of course, like the Queen herself. This 22×15 inch poster, unsigned and unnumbered in an edition some places say is 500, others just don’t know, is the only artifact left to mark this historic Instagram moment.
Lot 171: Sturtevant, Oldenburg Store Objects, Bacon & Pat of Butter, 1967, being sold at Swann
I lost track of the Schwartzes selling Sturtevant’s Oldenburg Store Object, Pie Caseamidst the Pompon hype. It was one of the most prominent objects from Sturtevant’s April-til-June 1967 repetition of Oldenburg’s The Store, and it was being sold by some of the most important collectors of Sturtevant’s work. [Eugene organized the 1986 Sturtevant comeback show at White Columns that brought her work into the context of the appropriationist Pictures Generation.
