Jasper Johns, A Cartoon for Tanya, 1972, lithograph on Suzuki paper, 25 x 37 in., ed. 10+ 3AP +2PP + some other proofs, this ed. 3/10 was a gift of the Daytons to the Walker
A Cartoon for Tanya, 1972, is just what it says on the label, including a thought bubble, sightlines, and plot. Our main character is seen in profile, carefully transferring the image in his mind to the litho stone in front of him. The combination of sloppy abstraction, line drawing and body printing is incredible. Johns really did smash his face and roll his arms all over that stone.
It’s dedicated on the stone to Tanya Grosman, and it turns out it was only made in an edition of 10, plus some proofs. So this was very much a friends and family affair. Ed. 3/10 above went to the Daytons; ed. 4/10 went to the Ganzes; AP 1/3 stayed with ULAE until 1982, the year of Grosman’s death; AP 3/3 was dedicated to Leo; Zwirner had PP2/2, dedicated “to Jim,” which might be ULAE printer James V. Smith. And so on.
Among the inventory of trial proofs Johns donated to the National Gallery in 2008 is this thing, labeled a working proof, which Johns has drawn on with chalk, crayon, and pencil. Except it is also numbered, ed. 1/10, and signed, and both are crossed out. Which, did it get damaged, or misnumbered? Who knows? But Johns was not going to let a good print go to waste.
Jordan Wolfson, 8(L), 2026, Hand polished aluminum, aluminum spikes, digital UV substrate print on aluminum of an altered photograph of Felix Gonzalez-Torres by David Seidner with automotive clearcoat, 56 x 88 x 11 1/16 (lol) in., ed. 1+1AP, $275,000 at Gagosian
“An altered photograph of Felix Gonzalez-Torres?” What did he do?
David Seidner, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, 1994, published in Artforum (05/96), upside down
The coloring, the higher-resolution texture of the t-shirt, the wider crop, all could be considered “altering” a photograph. But the most obvious alteration is the orientation: Wolfson straightened Felix out.
Whether this is the extent of the alterations, the mundanity of rotating a photo originally published—and, presumably, taken—upside-down soon becomes normalized and almost invisible. It’s easy to imagine Seidner standing over the artist on a bed, and taking the photo as it ran. But if that was the photo’s original orientation and not an Artforum editor’s conceit, it’s an orientation that’s basically been erased, not only by Wolfson, but by everybody. Wolfson’s just the one who acknowledges it.
Kusama Infinity Nets the bigger, the earlier the better, unless they’re tiny and from the 2000s.
This pocket-sized, 5×7 acrylic and glitter painting from 2000 has been around, the secondary market equivalent of cigarettes in prison. But it still delivers.
Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Nets, 2002, 6×9 or so, acrylic on linen, sold in Milano in 2016
A few months before that, in November 2016, a similar, 6×9 Infinity Nets from 2002, with a little more facture and 100% less glitter sold at Sotheby’s in Milano.
Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Nets, 1999, 9×11 in or so, acrylic on linen, sold at Christie’s Paris in 2024
As dense and loopy as it is, I almost think this 9×11-inch 1999 Infinity Nets might be slightly too big for the category. Though it feels wrong to put a limit on Infinity.
It all reminds me that there are modular phases in Kusama’s practice, where she focused on manageably small things that can be realized in a day and built up. The first Kusama work I saw in person was a small wooden box stuffed with painted phalluses, pocket-related, if not pocket-sized.
The Infinity Nets has always been like that, though; every painting is part of an infinite whole. Some larger paintings have giornata traces that show where Kusama might have stopped working, or reloaded her paint. But these tiny ones, she didn’t stop for anything, just kept moving towards Infinity.
I had an hour to see some shows today, and here are some things I saw.
Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Unnatural Landscapes at Lisson is his ongoing series of Diorama photos in large-format prints and on folding screens. I mostly came to see the screens, which, the painted diorama backgrounds printed in color on the washi surface are especially confounding.
Some dates are old, some are new, one is double-dated, but none of it seems to relate to when a print was made, another example of Sugimoto’s “extraordinary ability to suspend both time and reality,” ig.
Jordan Wolfson, 8(L), 2026, Hand polished aluminum, aluminum spikes, digital UV substrate print on aluminum of an altered photograph of Felix Gonzalez-Torres by David Seidner with automotive clearcoat, 56 x 88 x 11 1/16 (lol) in., ed. 1+1AP, $275,000 at Gagosian
I really dislike the discourse of inevitability around this work, but I was glad to see that the UV prints are set flush with the aluminum surface. Still no idea why he dragged Felix into this.
Eric N. Mack, Hanging, L to R: Bodice Made Horizontal, 2025; Big If True, 2025-26 (the bluer one, btw); Body Rock, 2025; In My Imagination, There Is No Hesitation, 2020-26. On the floor: Bod, 2025. On the wall: In You, Not On You, 2026.
Eric N. Mack, Pocket Watch & Chain [detail], 2025-26
This is a dyed, abraded element of a larger corner installation that reminds me of one of the paintings in Barnett Newman’s studio when he died, which Annalee cut up, then had a remorseful dream about, and got a conservator reassemble, and which David Diao made a version of.
I thought I’d go to the Tauba Auerbach show afterward, but I spent too long and not long enough in the Brice Marden show. It felt like there were some things missing, but ngl, it was mostly bangers, and lots of them.
Brice Marden, 4 (Bone), 1987-88, oil on linen, 84 x 60 in., collection Helen Marden at Gagosian
To go from what he was painting to these must have been an extraordinary experience.
Brice Marden, Round Rock, Tight Rock (4), detail, 2000-02, oil on linen, 75 x 107 in.
To get to the top of a mountain and see more peaks beyond, and then to scale them, too.
There are other details I loved. There are painting series I remember seeing during a studio visit. A couple of these loopy paintings felt a little drained. Then the two latest works, one sickly pink, Lingerie and Ridge, both 2022-23, felt like they were disintegrating.
It’s hard not to read a biographical narrative into these paintings when they so consistently put you right in the spot where Marden made them.
Cady Noland, Untitled, 2026, printed posters, 2 1/2 x 36 x 27 in., installed on a table next to Untitled, 2026, table, UV print on aluminum, sheriff’s badge in acrylic, 33 x 60 x 30 in., at Gagosian Davies St, London, 📷: a greg.org hero on the ground
The important news from Cady Noland’s new exhibition at Gagosian in London is that an edition of Oozewald has been stolen, and the artist wants it back.
According to the STACK OF WANTED POSTERS WHICH CONSTITUTE A WORK IN THE SHOW, ed. 3 of 4 of Oozewald (1989) was last seen in September 1995 at Paula Cooper Gallery. No information on the circumstances of its disappearance, the 31 years of silence about the theft, or whether the complications of broken provenance might affect the work’s authenticity.
There’s also an AP, but that’s not important now. The Stones’ edition went, I think, to Glenstone. Pinault has—or had—one; the M HKA Antwerp has one. So maybe the AP is important, as is the one that’s unaccounted for.
Cady Noland, Untitled, 2026, UV print on aluminum or aluminum and aluminum honeycomb, the whole installation is 108 x 121 15/16 in., which feels like the wall? The poster is 36 x 36 x 1/4 in., but the label is not 22 7/8 x 12 15/16 in., Gagosian Davies St., it looks more like 8 9/16 x 4 15/16 in.
In addition to a UV print-on-aluminum WANTED poster incorporated into the untitled table work next to the poster stack table, a wall-sized installation work at Davies Street includes UV prints of the poster on aluminum honeycomb panel, and a UV-on-aluminum print of the work’s original Paula Cooper label.
Oozewald is, according to its original label, 6 x 4 1/2 feet by 3/8 inches of aluminum with flag. Which does not include the bracket, or the Coca-cola drinking cup which was mentioned only on the sculpture’s appearance at MMK Frankfurt. In case you find a different Oozewald.
For any information, the poster says, contact OOZEWALD@CADYNOLAND.INFO
There is, the poster says, a reward, as if the work wasn’t enough.
a photo by G. Murray Levick of a fronting penguin, from the front of his book, via
“The first Adélie penguins arrived at the Ridley Beach rookery, Cape Adare, on October 13,” Dr. G. Murray Levick recorded in his observation diary in the Southern Summer of 1911. Levick was the staff surgeon-turned-zoologist on Robert Scott’s Terra Nova British Antarctic Expedition, one of six men who stayed to study the coast. His findings were published in 1914 as Antarctic Penguins: A Study of their Social Habits, which is available in its original, censored form on the Internet Archive.
In Levick’s introduction, he quotes the description of penguins made by Emil Racovitza, the Romanian zoologist on the Belgian Antarctic Expedition in 1897: “Imagine a little man, standing with two broad paddles instead of arms…Have this creature walk on his two feet, and give him at the same time a droll little waddle, and a pert movement of the head; you have before you something irresistibly attractive and comical.”
This kawaii anthropomorphization of penguins is inextricable from the severe moral language Levick used to describe the penguins’ sex-related behaviors, and the subsequent suppression of his observations for almost 100 years. Which is laid out in Chris Coates’ fascinating and disturbing bluesky thread. Levick called the behaviors “depraved,” “crimes,” and the aggressive, unpaired male penguins involved in most of it, “little knots of hooligans.”
The Natural History Museum printed Levick’s findings as a separate, four-page pamphlet, Sexual habits of the Adélie penguin, in 1915. But the 100 reported copies were not published, and only two are known to survive. One turned up in the NHM Library and was published and analyzed for its historical, cultural, and scientific implications, in 2012. Levick’s observation of a complete mating and fledging cycle of Adélie penguins remains unequaled, and the behaviors he reported have all been observed and analyzed in less shocked terms since.
Gerhard Richter, Flasche mit Apfel, Bottle with Apple, 2026, “fine art print mounted between dibond and perspex,” 83 x 62 cm, ed. 25+5AP, via David Zwirner
In 1988 Gerhard Richter made three paintings after a still life photo of a bottle and apple, which is on the same sheet of Atlas as his portrait of his daughter Betty. The Flasche mit Apfel paintings are all the same size, and seem to vary only a little in overall light intensity and the shape of their shadows.
In 2003, Richter made some digital Lambda print proofs of Flasche mit Apfel GR 663-2, facemounted on acrylic, for an edition. But according to the 2017 Phillips auction listing where one of the proofs didn’t sell, “No edition was produced.”
Until now. Maybe? Maybe it’s the improvement of digital printing technology, or the nostalgia of seeing one of the paintings in the massive Richter retrospective last year at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, qui sait, pas moi, but Richter has finally made that edition. Sort of.
David Zwirner is previewing a “Fine Art Print” mounted between Dibond and Perspex at Art Basel Paris. Which sounds like the language of the HENI-era Facsimile Objects, which were rebranded as prints. But instead of 500, there are only 25 of these Flasche mit Apfel, plus five AP. Whether those include the four proofs made in 2003, whether they’re even of the same painting, whether they’re signed or just numbered, and whether a taxonomical consolidation is underway in Richter’s oeuvre, are all questions whose answers might be found in a few days, at the Grand Palais, or by reaching out to your handler at Zwirner.
An undated photo mislabeled as “War Art” on eBay, but which was, in fact, a photo of the JFK memorial wreath sculpted by Louis Féron, acquired by Oak Spring Garden Foundation, via Ploughshares
An absolutely fascinating story about a lost JFK memorial sculpture unfolded in 2022-24 at the otherwise serene enclave of the Oak Spring Garden Foundation, the former estate of Bunny Mellon.
It seems to have unfolded twice, or at least to be recounted twice. So far. And I am enthralled by both accounts, which art historian Andrew Wasserman just laid before me. Except now I must repent of some of my judgments of Mrs. Paul Mellon, or at least allow her more grace.
Jordan Wolfson, 13 (L), 2026, hand-polished aluminum, aluminum spikes, digital UV substrate print on aluminum of a f’ing Renoir he credited in the ingredients even tho it’s public domain, automotive clearcoat, 53 x 88 x 11 1/8 in., ed. 1+1AP, 📷: Owen Conway for Gagosian, obv
“— the Chanel punk jacket spikes Virginie Viard wore in the photo Karl Lagerfeld took in 2011 for his and Caroline Roitfeld’s The Little Black Jacket Book, which was used in most of the stories this week about Viard getting fired by the Wertheimers after 30 years? Yes, yes they are.”
Karl Lagerfeld, “Virginie Viard, Chanel Studio Director,” 2011, styled by Caroline Roitfeld
Actually, no, ofc, Roitfeld’s are just off the rack punk spikes, but it did seem weird that it’s happened twice.
I can just imagine the 83-year-old architect now, in 1969, pushing aside the many staffers at his firm who have been working for three years on the many details of what would be Mies’s largest—and last—corporate commission: the 1.3 million square-foot office tower for IBM’s Chicago headquarters, and saying, “No, no, that wall-mounted console is not quite right. Leave it to me. I will design it if it’s the last thing I do”
And then he died, and it was. And when the building was actually built three years later, there this console was.
The Auction (2025), as installed in STY, Nicole Eisenman’s 2025-26 show at 52 Walker
One of the monumental paintings in STY, Nicole Eisenman’s show at 52 Walker last winter was The Auction (2025), in which an artist stood by in a crowded salesroom as a black-robed auctioneer and a sieg heiling bidder faced off over the artist’s work. It was acquired by MoMA. A couple of weeks ago, she told Julia Halperin that The Auction “was partly inspired by collectors’ threats to sell her work at a moment when the art market was being deployed as judge and jury of her actions.” Some dealers and collectors criticized Eisenman and other artists in 2023 for signing an open letter calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, which has since been obliterated in an ongoing genocide, without originally noting Israelis had been killed in the October 7 attacks.
Nicole Eisenman, I.D.F. In a Cage, In a Swamp, 2024, Mixed media on paper, 8 1/2 x 11 in, donated by the artist to benefit the Drawing Center
As Eisenman explained to Shiv Kotecha after STY closed, “My project has always really been about looking at the world and all the abhorrent politics going on in it, seeing how that experience lands emotionally, and then assigning a kind of symbolic language to those feelings. Once you find the symbolic language for the feeling that this shitstorm is producing in you, you’ve got your painting.”
Or, perhaps, your drawing. The small work Eisenman donated to the Drawing Center benefit auction seems like it emerged from the eye of the shitstorm she experienced. IDF in a Cage, in a Swamp (2024) is a printout of a news photo of an IDF tank in Northern Gaza, overpainted up to its turret with a dark blue swamp, and overdrawn in pen with a perspectival cage. The work and the other works at auction, “The World is the Work,” just went on view today.
In addition to the 52 Walker show earlier this year, which is part of the Zwirner organization, Eisenman just opened a show at Sadie Coles in London. Though many artists’ galleries share credit for donating their works to the Drawing Center auction, Eisenman’s is solely “courtesy of the artist.”
Christopher Wool & Richard Prince, My Act, 1987-88, primer and alkyd on paper, 44 1/2 x 34 1/2 in., selling at Sotheby’s Paris
I was gonna say this is buy one get one free, but with this estimate for a work on paper, it definitely feels like you’re paying for both a Richard Prince AND a Christopher Wool. Kinda cool, though, ngl.
There is no skull in Dürer’s Melancholia, although one might have been expected. But this great thing, blind as a stone, closed as a tomb, this geometrical block which seems to have allen into the engraving like a meteor, as a speculation of the most abstract intellect into the midst of what should have been a place of life and confidence, is surely the nearest thing to a death’s head, to a skull. And it induced Alberto to perceive in his own geometrical form, first conceived, who knows, as an innocent abstraction, this head which may be either living or dead, this token of presence but assailed by nothingness, which was increasingly to obsess his mind, exploring like a modern Hamlet, the eternal mystery.
On the same page of Minotaure in 1934, like another apparition on the same dark night pierced by a single moonbeam, there was, moreover, a sculpture that is now, explicitly a skull like poor Yorick’s: the Man’s Head—gender specified, although there is nothing but sexless bone and empty sockets—to be known later as Cubist or Cubical Head.
Obviously, quoting Yves Bonnefoy is never something to be undertaken lightly, but the occasion absolutely demands it.
Giacometti’s Man’s Head (Cubist Head) and Nocturnal Pavilion (The Cube) in Minotaure no. 5, 12 May 1934, as reproduced in Yves Bonnefoy’s Giacometti (Flammarion, 1991)
This is not about The Cube, which Georges Didi-Huberman addressed, and which has been addressed here before. It is not about The Cube, except it is. Because in the pangs of realizing Cube, and grappling with abstraction, Giacometti, Bonnefoy writes, also saw Cube as a head, a skull. Or saw that there was a skull inside it, waiting to be excised. The other apparition caught in Minotaure‘s moonbeam.
Alberto Giacometti, Tête-crâne (AGD 4814), 1934, plaster with insular coating for molding, 7 1/4 x 8 x 9 1/4 in., slightly bigger than all the rest, I think, selling at Sotheby’s Paris
.A Head Skull, or Tête-crâne, is coming up for sale in Paris during Art Basel. has been in the family of a friend of Giacometti’s since 1935. It was exhibited once—”probably”—in 1946, though let’s be real, auction house research is not what it used to be. Every publication or illustration of Tête-crâne listed is of “another version.” Which, how many are there? The Fondation Giacometti has one, and lists this one and two more, all in plaster. They do not seem to mention the plaster at The Met. Or the one the Kravises have promised to MoMA. Or the terra cotta at the Pompidou. Or the marble at the Nasher. Or the bronze in Bonnefoy, which may be the one promised to LACMA? But you get the idea:
The museums have enough; this one belongs in my house.
Gerhard Richter, Pane of Glass/Glasscheibe, aka Antelio Glas GR 876-5, 2002, glass and steel 95 x 100 cm, selling soon at Sotheby’s
Like a wind rattling the windows in their aging frames, a decent auction result can shake loose other Gerhard Richter Pane of Glass from their storage spaces.
With its dark steel banded frame, GR 876-5 seems completely different from the other [also retitled] Antelio Glas works, which only have tiny steel prongs, too small to sign and label. And all apparently too precarious to install and photograph anew. Truly, with the auction houses’ help, we’re gonna bring zombie gerhard-richter.com back online one scavenged jpg at a time.
Gerhard Richter, Grauer Spiegel, GR 766, 1992/2025, pigment on glass, 300 x 400 cm overall, selling at Sotheby’s
Meanwhile this whole four-panel mirror work from 1992 was refabricated last year under the artist’s direction, and now has a double-date. See it during Frieze Week, and lmk if those panels are each angled slightly like a set of shutters left slightly ajar.
