Collector and longtime MoMA trustee Barbara Jakobson died at 92. She was a sharp, funny, insightful hoot. I got to know her a bit when I became co-chair of the successor to the Junior Council, which she’d led back in the day. But that’s not important now.
I also knew her as one of Jasper Johns’s earliest collectors. Writer and Johns biographer Deborah Solomon posted the news of Barbara’s passing on instagram, alongside some magnificent photos. Like the oddly shaped blank ghost on the wall after Jakobson sold a massive Frank Stella. And this photo of Barbara posing with what looks like her and her then-husband John’s first Johns. They purchased Alphabet new, in 1959. She got it in the divorce.
Johns only made one Alphabet painting. Solomon said he decided there were too many variables, and it felt chaotic, so he stuck with numbers.
In 1989 Jakobson sold Alphabet it at Christie’s [for $3.52m]. It has since found its way, through the Edlis Neesons, to the Art Institute of Chicago. So what’s this? A copy Barbara had made when she sold it. And so now there were two.
This is a whole, underappreciated category of copies I love: replicas or replacements made for owners of the work. Or former or soon-to-be-former owners.
After selling them, Hubert de Givenchy and his partner Philippe Venet remade their Giacometti tables. And their Picassos. And their Miro. And their Leger. Or maybe they just replaced the Miro with a “homemade” Leger? Architectural Digest’s story not quite clear.
As part of the settlement to donate it to the Nelson Atkins Museum, super-reclusive copper heiress Huguette Clark got a copy of a Degas that had been stolen from her by a servant, and later acquired by the H&R Block guy.
Isabelle Dufresne’s Large Flowers was so big, (7 x 13 ft) she had to hang it vertically in her living room. Visiting with a collector friend, I asked if he thought she’d ever sell her Warhol. He replied with a laugh that she already had, and that the Flowers were the replacement.
I can’t find it now, but I swear I just read [or heard?] about auction houses offering to make reproductions of works to win consignments.
And very specifically, though in a sub-category of its own, the small size and dense composition of Jakobson’s Johns Alphabet reminds me of Small Numbers in Color, a tiny painting Johns made for himself in 1959 before the larger Numbers in Color (1958-59) was shipped off to the Albright Knox.
What to make of the unparalleled aspects of these replicas? Their connection to ownership, and their function as literal replacement of the original? Whatever the experience was of living with the work, for the owners themselves, these copies seem to be [close] enough. Which feels wild: that a fresh copy can effectively replace everything except the market value.
Solomon proposed the question of which Alphabet was in the photo, and I have to assume that it’s what she calls the “cheap copy.” But. Every stroke looks like Johns’s original, which, on a painting like this, is no mean feat. Perhaps it’s a photo-based reproduction. I guess my point here is, I’d love to see it.