In the latest Irving Sandler Essay in The Brooklyn Rail, artist Alexi Worth lays out a fascinating theory about the revulsion contemporary critics expressed about Manet’s Olympia when they first saw it at the Salon in 1865: they were confounded by Manet’s depiction of full frontal lighting. Worth extends his observation from a 1971 essay about the “lantern gaze,” in which Michel Foucault reads Manet’s paintings as lit from where the viewer—and before that, the painter—stood:
Why was frontal light invisible—or uninteresting—to scholars? One reason is simple: Manet himself never “authorized” the topic. A secretive artist, Manet left few records, and never said a word about his reliance on frontal light. But Manet’s silence is only half the explanation. Perhaps more important, frontal lighting just seems unremarkable. Familiar. Normal. All of us, scholars and non-scholars alike, are habituated to bright frontal light. We see it all around us: in the faces of fashion models and TV anchors, in images by Andy Warhol or Nan Goldin, or for that matter in any flash-lit photograph.
“You could say,” Worth goes on, “to put it too simply, that frontal lighting looks like early Manet.” I’ll try to remember this the next million times I can’t unsee the ring lights reflected in the eyes of every youtuber and influencer.
James Lee Byars, no title, no date, lacquered bronze, 5 x 10 1/2 x 9 1/2 in., image via Wright20
As I was thinking of ephemerality, handmade paper, and Japan, and artists who should have been asked to make an Art Kite for Lufthansa in the 1980s, who should drift into view but James Lee Byars.
And as I was looking to see if Byars ever made a kite, I stumbled upon this sculpture of lacquered bronze. It’s melon-sized, 10 x 9 inches, but only half that high, flattened, like a giant Junior Mint. In a sculptural oeuvre full of marble, gold leaf, handblown glass and giant spheres, it is not the most remarkable object.
But what a history. It has been around. It was in the collection of Robert Mapplethorpe. Then in 1989, while the AIDS crisis and rightwing attacks on the arts—and on Mapplethorpe—raged, it was sold at Christie’s by the artist’s estate. And it was acquired by the American Medical Association. What its existence was like at the AMA is a mystery. Was it in the president’s office? On a pedestal? In a nook? In a closet? What we can know, presumably, is that after a couple of decades, someone looked at this giant, bronze Junior Mint and decided the organization would rather have $10,000. So they sold it at Wright, the local auction house in Chicago—where it actually brought in $31,250. Which probably left them feeling pretty good about their decision. No word on it since.
There is a book. I did not know there is a book. I’ve visited the Felix Gonzalez-Torres show at the National Portrait Gallery & Archives of American Art multiple times and have written about it even more, and I did not know there was a book. I fixated on Felix’s “Untitled” text portrait in both its installed versions, and wondered how the Smithsonian’s curators made them, and I picked through the history of this and other text portraits, and wrote a whole-ass blog post about it, and I didn’t know there was a book.
Reader, there is a book, and it is literally about all of that. In Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Final Revenge (A Workbook), co-curators Josh T. Franco and Charlotte Ickes wrote a whole essay on their experience and process of creating the versions of “Untitled” they’ve showed. Along the way, they fill out many key aspects of Felix’s work, from its changing history to its changing present.
I guess I’ve never actually asked, but all this time I assumed that the books Jacob Kassay inserted his prisms into were all on an undisclosed reading list of some kind. An esoteric phenomenology syllabus, ex libris Alain Robbe Grillet, whatever, some kind of over-arching epistemology that may have been invisible on the scale of a lone volume, but that cohered in some way of the artist’s devising.
And that the glass prism was then crafted to fit precisely in a certain spot in the book—or at least in a certain volume—that, when you looked in, distorted and perhaps simultaneously revealed one piece of a larger informational puzzle.
Jacob Kassay, coin de verre & livre de bibliothèque, via Ross Art Studio
And now I wonder if I have it exactly backwards, and it’s the wedges that are the drivers. Kassay has donated a glass & library book sculpture to the upcoming Printed Matter benefit auction [less than four days left to bid!], and the winning bidder will receive, “a dummy book and wooden dummy wedge to be used only to procure the correct format of library book.” So maybe there are instructions of genre or title, but it sounds like the determining factor is “correct format”? Which you test with a dummy wedge and dummy book?
“The positions of the glass wedges inside the library books are necessarily temporary. The wedges don’t belong to any particular book but rather shift from book to book like a hermit crab, finding the other book that precisely fits it. This is why I chose to house them in library books – as a kind of format logic which focuses on their qualities as objects, rather than as texts with specific content.”
And now the image of distorted texts is replaced by roaming wedges, ever in search of a new book—or at least ready to trade up if the fit is right.
the white veined marble and light grey granite façade of Gordon Bunshaft’s Beinecke Library, 1963, image: Lauren Manning via Vermont Danby Marble
Also, I found this comment from Kassay’s glass fabricator, that the wedges are “inspired by the façade of the Beinecke Library at Yale.” which, I assume is a reference, not to the translucent marble, but to the beveled granite lattice that holds it. Maybe I should just ask.
Robert Rauschenberg, Sky House II, screenprint on silk collage, bamboo, 372 x 248 cm, image via ig/RRF Sky House I, meanwhile, Rauschenberg kept for himself, according to former assistant Thomas Buehler
Robert Rauschenberg’s genius in making a 20×10-foot Art Kite was in understanding the opportunity while ignoring the assignment. Because the opportunity was to make two Art Kites, and have your Art Kites fly in the “vernissage in the sky” at an Art Kite Festival held amidst the blossoming sakura on the grounds of Himeji Castle. While the assignment was to promote Lufthansa.
And for the first 461 pages, I thought the show was about how flying and art are the same glorious expression of human freedom: “The world tour of the Art Kites is sponsored by Lufhansa” [p.462]
Obviously, it was more than that, but also just that. The Art Kites Project was sponsored by Lufthansa and organized by Dr. Paul Eubel, director of the Goethe Institute Osaka, which commissioned 100 artists from around the white world and Japan to create Japanese-style kites in 1987. The kites would fly once in Japan, on April 1 & 2, 1989, and once in Europe, on April 21 & 22, 1990, go on tour for three five years, to 21 museums in Japan (8), Europe (12), and Canada (1), before being auctioned off.
Cady Noland? Untitled, 1994, 15 ½ x 13 x 2 in., screenprint on aluminum panel, Christie’s says it’s signed twice, but without a statement from the artist, can we really even know?
Sam McKinniss, Joe Santos, Class Passing, 2006, 29 1/4 x 39 1/4 in.,
I’ve been wanting some Sam McKinniss painting in my life, and I did not see the show he just had in LA. So I looked through the auction internet, and found this great, odd, early painting of actor Joe Santos? Is that what I’m seeing? A 2006 painting of Joe Santos looking like an Instagram Birkinfluencer? Did it really sell at the Auction Barn last August for just $900? Was everyone at the beach? WTF is happening?
Only when I was looking for the backstory, and looking at the back of the painting, did I realize it had actually sold once before, in 2015. For $1800, also in Random, Connecticut. The first seller had the invoice and McKinniss’s CV and artist statement in a folder taped to the hanger wire. Very responsible.
Which is all fine. But in 2006 Sam was still an undergrad, finishing his BFA at the University of Hartford. His first solo show, at the Charter Oak Cultural Center in Hartford, was only in 2007. It was titled, Portraits. What else was in this show? Is it in the new book?
[a bit later after ordering the book update]: It might be in the book. In a conversation with Natasha Stagg, McKinniss explains that he used to take photos of “people in his life” that he would turn into paintings “in a diaristic way, not dissimilar to examples set by Nan Goldin, Jack Pierson, or Mark Morrisroe, the Boston School.” This practice extended into the mid-2010s, while it’s not so clear when McKinniss began painting from iconically found paintings. So maybe we should be more awed at an early, incredibly deep cut publicity photo of young actor Joe Santos in a regional production of Brideshead Revisited, than a glamor shot of one of McKinniss’s classmates doing Insurance Executive Realness.
Lowell Nesbitt, Alex Katz’s Studio – 72, 1972, oil, 65 x 95 in., somehow didn’t sell in 2015 OR 2016?
Nine feet wide? This painting by Lowell Nesbitt of Alex Katz’s studio is an absolute unit. And look at that floor. That wall. That blank canvas. Those chairs. OK, maybe not the chairs so much, but actually, yes, the chairs, too. Like so many of Nesbitt’s paintings, it’s odd, slightly off, and beautiful. And the kind of thing that could hang a Sam McKinniss painting next to.
Phillips has other wider views, but the whole point here, I think, is the very shallow, rounded bevel on the undersides, and then not painting the very thin edge. Beautiful.
Here it is in situ. Uh oh, don’t look at that. Because now you realize there’s another one, that you can’t get. Also, did the stylist really pull all the glasses off the shelf for this photo? Also, is the floor reflecting onto the ceiling, or is this some kind of 4th floor of 101 Spring St-style plane matching? Also, need me some Superleggera chairs.
Installation view from Coming Attractions: The John Waters Collection, a 2022-23 exhibition of promised gifts at the Baltimore Museum of Art
Yesterday Eric Doeringer posted his discovery of his bootleg Damien Hirst spot painting among the works John Waters has promised to the Baltimore Museum of Art. It was on view at the museum in 2022-23 in a selection—curated by Catherine Opie and Jack Pierson—from nearly 400 works from Waters’ collection. It hung next to a Warhol Jackie-style grid of Jonbenet Ramsay portraits by Eric Luken. While being perfect objects on their own terms, these two works help situate Waters in the place, moment, and discourse of art. For the Doeringer, that was on the mean streets of early 2000s Chelsea. For the Luken, that was probably an emerging art fair. [His only show (so far?) was with Joel Mesler & Daniel Hug’s short-lived LA gallery that rode the 2000s art fair wave.]
Speaking of short-lived collabs you never hear about, Waters also has the best/only thing you can really collect from one of the greatest artworks of the 20th century: a flyer made by Jonas Mekas for the world premiere of EMPIRE (1964), by Andy Warhol and John Palmer.
If you think I’m leading with all this to head off criticism that I’ve become a one-topic fanblog, you’re only partially not wrong. Because this is all stuff I found along the way while trying to get a legible image of the work beneath Doeringer’s painting, which is a scrap of paper on which Cy Twombly wrote his address.
Eileen Gray’s Hermès mailbox, replicated by Hermès in 2018 for E-1027, here seen in a print donated by photographer Manuel Bougot to Artcurial’s June 2019 auction for Association Cap Moderne
I don’t know how I can be thirty years and a week into a fairly fervent admiration of Eileen Gray and only be finding out now that her original mailbox at E-1027 was made out of an Hermès saddle bag. And that in 2018 Hermès made a replacement, which I must have walked past multiple times, without knowing—was it actually even there? Yes, there it is in Iwan Baan’s photo.
Hermès boîte aux lettres unique [sic], a 2018 replica of Eileen Gray’s original 1929 design, also fabricated by/from Hermès, created in an edition of two. image via Artcurial
But now I have une question. Because the English auction listing said this is “replicating precisely the one made by Eileen Gray from a Hermès saddle-bag in 1929 for E1027,” while the French text says it was made from “à partir d’une selle Hermès,” which, I understand selle to be a saddle. So far I can find no info about the original mailbox at all, much less what Hermès product Gray might have chopped up to make it.
The c. 1929 photo of the boîte published in Jean Badovici’s own architecture magazine does indeed look just like the Hermès replica. According to Peter Adam, Gray put the hole in the box and a mirror in the window so you could check the mail from bed. But my limited mind cannot conceive how it is reworked from a bag, and not just made to Gray’s design from saddle leather. Does the original still exist to have been replicated? Are there some archives that need diving into to solve this mystery? Because now that I know it existed, I can’t figure out why, at this point, it’s not a mailbox, a bag, or both..
Important Cabinet and Headboard in Eileen Gray’s Paris apartment, circa 1930? if Pinterest is to be trusted, and frankly, half the reason for this blog post is to make sure there’s another non-Pinterest version of this photo out there.
If you put the phrase, “Important Headboard” in the subject line, you will absolutelyhave my attention. And if it involves Eileen Gray, and it’s her own furniture, and there turns out to be some specific photodocumentation, all the better.
These are not fine cabinetry made by the ebenistes to Versailles. They’re painted wood. But while Gray did design some extremely refined pieces on commission, or for her store, Jean Desert, the furniture Gray was making for herself around 1930 all looked like this: utilitarian to an extreme.
The cabinet’s pivoting drawers, and the headboard’s built-in switches and cantilevered nightstand are all features of furniture Gray made at E-1027. The cantilevered night table actually looks identical to the one she put on a divan in Jean Badovici’s studio apartment in Paris in 1930. So she was working from a repertoire of ideas—and parts.
MoMA 1980 installation photo by Mali Olatunji showing, I think, the translucent four-panel screen from Eileen Gray’s apartment, plus a very matchy little cabinet
Part of me was bummed that these two pieces were split up when they came up for sale in 2023, though the headboard does seem pretty specific. And they had been on different, intersecting paths since leaving rue Bonaparte. But then I think the screen in the window of Gray’s apartment, which I think was in the MoMA show, seems to have already gone its separate way, too; so maybe it’s too much energy to worry about keeping the ensemble together. I would absolutely love to see someone spend $250-450,000 on these two pieces, though, and make the sickest, authentic monastery cell on the Left Bank, just fueled by IYKYK energy. Even Eileen Gray knew not everything had to be eighteen coats of hand-pumiced lacquer.
Brooklyn woodworker Joel blogged about seeing the Gray furniture at Christie’s, saying: “The pieces are very practical, made out of very prosaic materials, and are pretty poorly made. Exactly what a practical designer living on a budget might want for herself! For me they seem right out of Ikea, albeit with maybe a few more curves. And that idea is way advanced for it’s time.” Metaphorical curves, maybe, and not really on a budget, but yeah, Gray was doing this before Ingvar Kamprad was even a Nazi, much less a furniture titan.
it’s an Important Headboard or no headboard at all for Eileen Gray. she wanted no unimportant headboards in her Paris apartment image via sothebys
I take back what I said about the hand-pumiced lacquer. Earlier in 2023 Sotheby’s sold an Important Pair of Screens, also from Gray’s apartment, from an Important New York Collection. By the 70s she’d remodeled, settling into her all-lacquer phase, with a Transat Chair, and what looks, ngl, like a very precarious rolling stool and step situation. We should be amazed she lived so long and so well. So did she put the Important Headboard in storage, or did someone buy her used furniture along the way?
Anyway, now I want to find out about the Not Important Enough To Have A Credit Or Any Info Online About It Painting above her bed, which looks like a throwback to her E-1027 days.
Her emphasis was on the ordinariness of the people involved, and the seeming smallness of their actions, even though they faced real, dangerous consequences. This is all the more important now as we ourselves are confronted with choices to do the next right thing without assurance of the impact. [the YouTube channel that posted video of the speech could not be more random, and its nascent virality is leading it to be reuploaded, so I’ll watch to keep the most authoritative version here.]
The star of the “one if by land, two if by sea” story is Paul Revere, but Cox Richardson gives full attention to his collaborators, John Pulling, Jr. and Robert Newman, who had access to the Old North Church and who actually lit the lanterns. [As a keyholder for the church, Newman was arrested the next morning, and Pulling bounced to Nantucket.]
Actually, it’s because it’s been polished so much that it looks like that. Paul Revere, Jr. Bowl, 1768, silver, 5 1/2 in high, 11 in. diameter, collection MFA Boston
The seeming insignificance of a particular action of resistance was on my mind when Liz Deschenes posted a picture of the Sons of Liberty Bowl on instagram today. Conceptually, at least, I’m a Paul Revere engravingfan, but I confess, I’d never given the Sons of Liberty Bowl much thought. And despite what the MFA Boston says, if you had asked me to tell you the nation’s third “most cherished historical treasures after the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution,” I would never in a million years have said the little punchbowl Paul Revere made for his friends.
But we are in different times, and have a different relationship to tyranny than we did even a few months ago. And it has been worth giving the bowl a new, closer look.
Albert van Spiers watercolor frontispiece for Agneta Block, 17¼ x 12 5/8 in. when it was sold at Christie’s in 2004, but since it’s been mounted, it’s 19 x 13 1/2 in. at Arader Galleries
Speaking of pioneering 17th century Dutch naturalist and pineapple cultivator Agneta Block, this extraordinary watercolor with Block’s family crest and her medallion portrait was a painted for her by Albert van Spiers.
Based on the inscription, it’s thought to be the frontispiece for a collection of botanical illustrations Block commissioned from Johanna Helena Heroldt, who was the daughter of another botanical illustrator Block supported, Maria Sibylla Merian. At least 126 illustrations by Heroldt in three groups could be connected to the project for Block, who had one of the largest collections of exotic and rare flowers and plants in Europe.
Jean-Baptiste Oudry, Ananas dans un pot, 1733, oil on canvas, 130 x 98 cm, collection Chateau de Versailles
In 1733 Jean-Baptiste Oudry, 47, had been a painter to Louis XV for several years. He had a studio in the Tuileries and an apartment in the Louvre. He kept very busy being on call, painting whatever the king wanted painted. He painted the king’s hunt, both the action and his dogs and daily catch; he painted the exotic animals in the king’s menagerie. While cranking out paintings on demand for the king, he was also named chief designer for the king’s tapestry manufactory at Beauvais, and for the factory at Gobelins. And some time probably toward the end of the year, he painted a portrait of the first pineapple grown in Europe France*. [whoo boy updates below]
