Srsly, we cannot call it a collection. The liquidation of the art accumulated by Albright College is an epic non-event. The most compelling things are the flat files. Unfortunately you have to wait till the random-ass contents of those files are cleared out before you can bid on them. A huge chunk of the 500+ lots are the leftovers, scraps, work product, random proofs, and even the cancellation prints of one random 70s print dealer. Scrolling Pook & Pook in a visual fugue of repeats of various prints sold one at a time lulls you for the desperation of the last lots, where prints are grouped in increasingly large, but unrelated, sets. And then, finally, the flat files. Three lots, six cabinets. It would have cost Albright College a dollar to store this stuff in the corner of one fired professor’s office. But honestly, what for? In a world less on fire, it might be useful to be outraged at the collapse of this little art outpost in a place most of us hadn’t heard of before clicking, but even the ARTnews report is like, “The real problem here is not the donor wishes; it’s that Pennsylvania just has too many colleges.”
But there is one masterpiece. And it must be saved. Oh, look. It has a bid. $100. So it WILL be saved. Something is right with the world after all. Me, I will not bid on it, because I already have one.
The sculpture by Bill Walton is here titled Saw Grass. It is a one inch-wide strip of lead folded into a little pile, with a single blade of grass pinched into the top. Walton did not date his work, but I bought mine in the 1990s from Larry Becker, who had a great little contemporary gallery in downtown Philadelphia. Becker and his wife Heidi showed Walton’s quiet, opulent little minimalist sculptures a couple of times while I was in grad school in Philadelphia.
This one was all I could afford, because it was an edition—I want to say it was an ed. 30, and that it cost me $100, 1/30th the price of Walton’s slightly larger, unique sculptures. It was sublime. Ignore the horrible wood bracket here. When Becker showed it, it was on a little shelf the size of a CD jewel case. When I told Larry I’d set mine on a little cinnabar lacquer snuff bottle stand I’d found in my landlady’s basement, he was not sure Walton would approve; Becker was kind of minimalism true believer like that. But it was sublime in my house, too. I really need to find another stand like that, and bring it out.
I am not confident about this title, Saw Grass. My memory of the label on the little archival cardboard case is that it was untitled, but maybe had the scientific name of the grass you could pick if you needed a replacement. It grew in the scruffy corners of Philadelphia, very easy to find, but just in case, Walton included a spare blade, in glassine, taped inside the lid. This auction makes no mention of any of that.
JTT handled Bill Walton’s work after he died. Their shows looked positively baroque by comparison, but still get to the essence of his exploration of turning, folding, stacking, producing a little object to carry on.
16 July 2025, Lot 407 | Bill Walton, Saw Grass, est. $2-300 [pookandpook]