Gustave Caillebotte, le Chien Paul, c. 1886, 65 x 54 cm, selling as Lot 3 on 13 Oct 2023 at Christie’s London, with an estimate of GBP 400-600,000 [update: it did not sell yesterday.]
Not this one, anyway. That I actually like Caillebotte, and can recognize the brushy Impressionist goodness of this painting of his family’s dog, Paul, and yet have no FOMO about not being in London to see it, and don’t worry too much if I ever do, maybe just tells me that I really am not a dog painting person. I am a facsimile object person, and I’ve found that facsimile objects over 50-60cm or so just don’t quite work the same way. [Also, how could this have an estimate so much greater than Manet’s Minnay?]
Maybe if Caillebotte had just painted his bougie carpet. Even if this were his second best painting of a floor, the yawning gap between Nos. 1 and 2 kind of dulls that praise. Do you think he spent the next 11 years trying to reattain the heights of The Floor Scrapers?
Dan Hopewell turned up a 2017 thread on social media by Simone Odino about film writer Joe R. Frinzi, who noticed that the aliens in 2001: A Space Odyssey decorated the astronaut’s hotel room with a painting from Roger Moore’s room at Max Zorin’s château in the 1985 Bond movie, A View To A Kill. The idea of A View To A Kill existing in the 2001 universe is a lot to process. But given Clarke’s premise that they gleaned details of Earth from TV broadcasts, I guess we should have at least been aware of the possibility.
Detail of Christophe Huet’s 18th century monkey business paintings in the Petite Singerie at Château de Chantilly, image: Marc Walter via CdeC
A View To A Kill was filmed at the Château de Chantilly, whose most famous decorative paintings, in the Grande and Petite Singeries, are Christophe Huet’s 18th century wall paintings of monkeys dressed and carrying on as French aristocrats. Perhaps someone paint a version of the opening scene of 2001 in the style of Huet.
If Frinzi mentions the painting in his new book, Kubrick’s Monolith: The Art and Mystery of 2001: A Space Odyssey, I couldn’t find it in his just-dropped interview on the Kubrick Universe Podcast. They were operating on a different level of fandom entirely, tbqh.
A few hours later update: following up to a comment on tumblr by @brocatus about whether this was an intentional quote, I looked on IMDb. The Art Director for A View To A Kill was John Fenner, who also worked with Stanley Kubrick. He worked as a draftsman on The Shining (1980) and 2001 (1968, uncredited), and would go on to work as art director on Eyes Wide Shut.
Somewhere on social media in response to the Frinzi mention, someone Odino wrote that when he asked about the identity of the painting in the Hotel Room, Christiane Kubrick said she recalled MGM making it themselves “[MGM] might as well have made it themselves,” and she had no idea.* If Fenner didn’t make it, he surely would have recognized it, and would have been in a position to place it. Someone else pointed out that the studios for the two productions were different. Perhaps Fenner not only made the painting, but has it?
*Corrected the quote and credited Odino after he chimed in and clarified on social media.
On my first speedrun through the catalogue raisonné for Cy Twombly’s sculpture, I was interested to see some early lost sculptures I’d never seen discussed anywhere else. There was also an object described as a fragment of an early sculpture. And there were sections of damaged and rejected works, mostly unsatisfactory bronze casts.
5/7ths of the installation of Cy Twombly: Sculpture, 2011-2012 at MoMA
In 2010 MoMA went deep on Cy Twombly sculpture, purchasing five works and receiving two more as gifts. They all went on view the next year, after the artist’s death. On the far right, the Kravises have promised the earliest work, Untitled (Funerary Box for a Lime Green Python) (1954), and the Cy Twombly Foundation gave the sleekest, Untitled (1976), on the left.
Gotta admit, at the time, I did not pay it appropriate attention. In the rough, gestural, elemental, bricolaged world of Twombly sculptures, it definitely hangs back, looking sleek and a bit out of place.
It wasn’t until yesterday, in fact, that I realized there was another. In fact, there are fourteen, but that’s not important now. At some point in 1976, Twombly is sitting in Rome, and he decides to make sculptures again, for the first time in 17 years. Was he looking at the cardboard tubes he stores his drawings in, and he had an urge to stick one in the other, and paint the resulting column white, and then realized, “Oh wow, I’m making sculptures again?” Or was he jonesing to make a sculpture—after showing his 1950s sculptures for the first time in years—at the ICA in Philadelphia, and the closest material at hand was this bunch of tubes?
Because Twombly made at least four of these cardboard tube sculptures, of varying heights and diameters. Sometimes he really stuck it in there, and it was 50 inches tall. Sometimes he’d just put in the tip, like the MoMA example, which is the tallest, at 76 inches. To keep it real, he stuck them on the floor.
Jean-Michel Basquiat, Future Sciences Versus The Man, 1982, practically never before seen, at Christie’s this month
“We don’t have any literature that says he made the painting for Off-White. But we know a little bit about Basquiat. We know his family. We did an exhibition of his work at the Louis Vuitton Foundation a few years back. We know he loved New York, and that he loved luxury and he loved sneakers. My guess is that the off-white painting is not by chance. The color is so specific that it has to be some kind of homage,” Alexandre Arnault will be telling us in a couple of weeks.
update: sold for GBP 10.43m to who knows? Josh Baer, probably?
I’ve been thinking about Barbara Chase-Riboud a lot the last few years, and not just because of her recent surge in exhibitions and attention. She was the subject of some of Carrie Mae Weems’ most insightful comments in a talk at the National Gallery which I kept returning to over and over during the political tumult of the previous administration. It was the Diamonstein-Spielvogel Lecture in September 2015, and it’s both soothing and electric.
Lot 205: Barbara Chase-Riboud, Gold articulated ring, ed. 2/8, est. $3-5000 [update: sold for $17,640], 18 oct 2023 at Rago
Anyway, point is, holy moley, Barbara Chase-Riboud made jewelry-sized objects? I had no idea. There is no date on the gold, articulated ring, which looks like the shell-like elements are meant to cascade down the back of your hand. It comes with a copy of the Philadelphia Museum’s 2013 exhibition of BCR’s Malcolm X Steles, though, so maybe that’s a hint. [OTOH, the 2016 listing of another example from the edition at Christie’s has Chase-Riboud’s dates wrong, and includes a random image of a different ring. So maybe not authoritative.]
Lot 218: Barbara Chase-Riboud, Silver Brooch, c. 1972, 8×3 in., est. $3-5,000 [update: sold for USD 10,710], 18 Oct 2023 via Rago
Meanwhile the silver brooch, which hovers over a sheaf of loosely looped chains, and feels like some of Chase-Riboud’s sculptures, was published in the April 1972 issue of Craft Horizons. A copy of the magazine is included in the lot.
[next day update: Indeed, around 1972. In her 2019 Oral History with the Archives of American Art, Chase-Riboud explains that a jeweler, Gennari, approached her to make some pieces. “For me, the jewels were not jewelry at all; they were simply very small sculptures,” she said.]
The pieces come from the collection of Acey Wolgin, who, with her husband Bill, was a collector of post-war art. They lived in Philadelphia, and their collection is coming up for sale at Rago Arts in a couple of weeks.
From the jump, the experience of encountering a Sturtevant is different from almost all other artworks. The moment of recognition, of loading up your assumptions and expectations of an artist’s work, of anticipating a certain kind of engagement is the same, until the instant it isn’t. Sturtevant’s work triggers a recognition, and then it thwarts it. When you realize a work is by Sturtevant, you consider how close she has gotten to the artist you thought it was by; then you start marking differences. You may also start to reflect on your upended expectations, and to question the systems that produced them.
July 2023 installation view of Sturtevant’s Gonzalez-Torres Untitled (Blue Placebo), 2004, at the Whitney, via Scott Rothkopf’s IG
And by you, I mean me. And the Sturtevant work that has been confounding me for months is Gonzalez-Torres Untitled (Blue Placebo). The 2004 sculpture is a repetition of “Untitled” (Blue Placebo), a 1991 pour of blue cellophane-wrapped candy. The Sturtevant was acquired by the Whitney Museum in 2016, and it went on view for the first time this summer in “Inheritance,” an expansive collection exhibition about legacy and lineage curated by Rujeko Hockley.
As far as I can tell, Sturtevant only made one candy pour. It was shown at least twice in the artist’s lifetime, and this is the second time since her death. How does it work? What does it do? How does a museum handle it? Is there a certificate?
