Unfinished, Lost, Destroyed

a blurry 16mm film still of a crowd of pink people half dressed in pink, assembled atop a hexagonal platform draped with pink fabric and decorated around the edge with white, a sculpture of a birthday cake by claes and peggy oldenburg, who are on the cake with andy warhol and others, in a meadow of a farm in connecticut, shooting a film by jack smith. a thick wall of green trees is behind them. via callie angell and the jack smith archive, ultimately

In Summer 1963, amidst the scandals and arrests that marked the earliest screenings of Flaming Creatures, avant-garde filmmaker Jack Smith was already at work on his second movie, Normal Love. Andy Warhol, who’d just bought his first movie camera, was filming the first rolls of Sleep at his dealer Eleanor Ward’s rented farm in Old Lyme, Connecticut.

On the weekend of 11 August, Jack Smith and the cast of his new feature film-in-progress, Normal Love, also turned up [in Old Lyme]; they were there to film the Cake Sequence from Normal Love, in which the cast dances on top of a giant wooden birthday cake designed by Claes Oldenburg, which they constructed in a meadow on Ward’s property (figure 1). Warhol appeared in the Cake Sequence of Normal Love. that’s him on the right (figure 2), in the dark glasses; on the left, you can see poet Diane di Prima, in the turban, and Mario Montez to her right. And he also shot one of his very first films of this event, a four-minute silent color reel titled Andy Warhol Films Jack Smith Filming “Normal Love,” probably on the same day.

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Can’t Sleep, Red Chip

aaron paul screaming meme used incorrectly to say we didn't always have to say basel basel

It’s 4AM, and I can’t go back to sleep because I’m replaying Kate Brown and Annie Armstrong’s conversation about Red Chip Art in my head and screaming at every other word. We’re clearly in a blind people and a painted Banksy elephant situation, so let me add another set of hands.

Armstrong and artnet can have full credit/blame for the term. But if it’s going to be a thing that we have to reorder our discourse around now, like Zombie Abstraction and the Cursed Vibe, let’s at least acknowledge the bleak reality: Red Chip Art is bigger, older, uglier, and more problematic than the Cybertruck it’s parading in on. And the forces that propel it are more entrenched in the so-called art world than many people want to admit.

an elephant painted red with gold floral stenciling to match the wallpaper stands in a fake living room. the walls are hung with reworked paintings in elaborate frames. a white woman with a messy dark bob in a grey tank to and white trousers sits with her legs crossed on a chintz sofa, not looking at the elephant. the top of the back of a matching sofa runs along the bottom edge of the photo. from banksy explained, this was a 2006 pop-up exhibition in los angeles, which brad pitt and angelina jolie attended
The Elephant In The Room at “Barely Legal,” a 3-day warehouse popup in LA, image via Banksy Explained
Continue reading “Can’t Sleep, Red Chip”

Mondrian Green Cows

theo van doesburg's composition viii (the cow) is a landscape oriented painting of rectangles and squares of several colors on a white ground. a large yellow square centers the composition, while the black and red rectangles abutting each other in the lower right corner hint at the lowered head of a cow which gives the painting its name. and which makes the yellow square the side of the cow. in moma's collection
Theo van Doesburg, Composition VIII (The Cow), 1918, oil on canvas, 37.5 x 63.5 cm, via MoMA

For a 20th century art history class once, I had to make a version of a work in the style of another work, so I decided to remake Guernica in de Stijl. I’d been inspired by Theo van Doesburg’s 1918 painting, Composition VIII (The Cow), which teetered on the edge of recognizable representation and de Stijl-ian abstraction, but tbh, I got the idea for Guernica because my textbook only had a black & white image of the cow, so van Doesburg’s color was completely lost to me.

piet mondrian's painting of five cows in a lush green pasture behind a fence and framed by two trees in the foreground and a canopy of trees in the background is extremely brushy, even lyrical and borderline abstract, at least up close. otherwise it looks exactly like a sunny painting of cows in a field. selling at christie's paris in april 2025
Piet Mondrian, Vaces sur le pré, c. 1905, oil on canvas on board, 31 x 39 cm, via Christie’s Paris

None of this matters at all, but I suddenly thought of van Doesburg’s cow because I just saw this sick, little Mondrian painting of cows, which is coming up for sale in Paris in the morning.

a detail of three cows painted by piet mondrian, black and white against the brushy green background of the pasture and forest, and each cow is a barely coherent composition of a couple of messy, loopy brushstrokes. one cow, on the left, in profile, is only white brushstrokes, and the green of the grass behind it, while the other two have a dab or two of black paint. a sloppy masterpiece of a detail, at christie's paris in april 2025
groene koeien: Piet Mondrian green cows, detail, via Christie’s Paris

And just look at those cows. I haven’t seen a cow that green since the van Doesburg on my first trip to MoMA. That one on the left is as green as it is white. But even more than that, just look at those brushstrokes that make up those cows. Mondrian stood at the threshold of an entirely other abstraction in 1905. What would have happened if he’d gone that way instead?

10 Apr 2025, Lot 330, Piet Mondrian, Vaches sur le pré, est. EUR80-120,000 [update: market chaos can’t hold back green cow lovers. it sold for EUR138,600] [christies]

REJOICE! OUR TIMES ARE INTOLERABLE.

an ebay seller photo of the cover of zg magazine no. 81v2, Future Dread, as it sits on a dinged up walnut stained tabletop. The magazine is actually a folded newsprint tabloid. ZG 81 are in white on black in the upper left corner, while no. 2, 75p, and future dread, the theme, are in white on the bottom. a mirrored image of a janus-faced nazi idol of some kind, a stern aryan profile of a a white man with full heil hitler lips, a sharp chin, and the bored out stare of a marble sculpture, is rendered as if in charcoal and outlined in red like it's the cover of time magazine instead.
An eBay seller’s image of ZG 81 No. 2, Future Dread

The theme of the second issue published in 1981 of Rosetta Brooks’ edgy British art & culture tabloid ZG, was “Future Dread.” Dan Graham wrote about the fascistic and authoritarian aspects of the spectacular media favored by artists of the Pictures Generation in an essay titled, “The End of Liberalism.” At the top of Jean Fisher’s profile of Jenny Holzer titled, “The Will to Act,” was a disclosure: that an uncredited text published as an advertisement in ZG‘s previous issue was “not, as some seem to have believed, a proclamation of an ultra-right or ultra-left organization, but was a text piece” of Holzer’s. [From her series, Inflammatory Essays (1979–82).]

This reveal was revealed to me by Alexander Bigman’s Pictures of the Past: Media, Memory, and the Specter of Fascism in Postmodern Art (2024, really, bookshop.org? backordered?) [where he cites ZG 3 & 4; I think they started over each year, and 1980 had two issues. While zine scholars sort that out, I’ll follow the cover and say it was 81-1, “Image Culture” and 81-2.] Anyway, Bigman’s citation also gives only the first and last lines of Holzer’s anonymous text: “REJOICE! OUR TIMES ARE INTOLERABLE…ONLY DIRE CIRCUMSTANCE CAN PRECIPITATE THE OVERTHROW OF OPPRESSORS” and “THE APOCALYPSE WILL BLOSSOM.” And reader, if it was just that I found Holzer’s essay, this post could’ve been a skeet.

But I found the Holzer on Lorde’s back.

Continue reading “REJOICE! OUR TIMES ARE INTOLERABLE.”

Cy Twombly Post-It Notes

a tight photograph of two pale yellow post-it notes on the edge of a white painted bookshelf, with a somewhat unruly stack of papers, and a curled open book or magazine in two stacks. there is a third post-it note cropped out to the left, illegible. the rectangular post-ot reads the soul we once had, in sprawling, loose, and not especially straight writing with a black pen. the right post-it is square, with the word remanence written twice in all caps, once above a bisecting line, where it kind of gets cramped toward the end, and once below it.
tacita dean photographed these post-it notes in the library slash bedroom of cy twombly in gaeta italy, in 2008. they were published in a cataloge in vienna in 2009 at mumok.
Tacita Dean, Gaeta, 2008, originally published in Cy Twombly: States of Mind, MUMOK 2009

Just thinking about Cy Twombly’s Post-it Notes this morning.

When Tacita Dean made her 2008 Gaeta photos from an exhibition catalogue essay into a gallery installation (2015), she printed this picture on one of the last giant sheets of Cibachrome paper. GAETA 2015 — fifty photographs, plus one, filled the south gallery of Dean’s Spring 2016 show at Marian Goodman Gallery.

a white gallery wall covered with a freely hung array of photographs by tacita dean, printed on various endangered photochemical papers, and mounted and framed in a variety of ways, all photos were taken in 2008 at cy twombly's house in gaeta, and picture closely observed details like books, post-it notes, the landscape of a tabletop, etc. as installed at marian goodman gallery in 2016.
Tacita Dean, GAETA 2015 — fifty photographs, plus one (detail), 2015, installation view from Marian Goodman Gallery, 2016

It’s also in the upper corner of the installation at Tacita Dean. Sigh, Sigh, Sigh, her show at the Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio in Rome in 2021-22.

a curved temporary wall sits toward the back of a seemingly low ceilinged exhibition space, sandwiched between concrete slab floors and a concrete beamed ceiling. the wall is filled with tacita dean photos of cy twombly's house in gaeta, printed in various sizes and formats, large and small, black and white, and in color, on a variety of endagered chemical photo papers. from the fondazione nicola del roscio, in 2021
installation view of Gaeta (2015) at Tacita Dean. Sigh, Sigh, Sigh at Fond. Nicola Del Roscio in 2021-22

The Art of Spectacle Is Long But It Bends Toward Fascism

a 1980s style thermal computer image is mostly dark blue and black, with an asymmetrical flare of red/orange/yellow in the center. thin skittles-green lines along the left and right edge confirm that this is not a digital image, but a painting of a digital image, 8 by 9 feet, and six inches thick, by jack goldstein, and it is for sale in april 2025 at phillips london, after having been flipped in october 2022 at lyon & trumbull.
Jack Goldstein, Untitled, 1988, 84 x 96 x 6 fat inches of hi-viz green stretcher bar, for sale at Phillips 4/10

At this point Jack Goldstein paintings should come with a trigger warning.

Seeing this 1988 painting at Phillips reminded me of Michael Connor’s 2013 Rhizome interview with Lorne Lanning, who’d been Goldstein’s assistant during this era. Goldstein was deeply interested in painting spectacular images like the computers that generated them, and Lanning, then just 20, figured out how. It involved mind-blowing amounts of pre-mixing, taping, and airbrushing, building up the painted surface into a topographical relief map of color layers.

Continue reading “The Art of Spectacle Is Long But It Bends Toward Fascism”

Johns Cicada On The Loose

With so much to worry about and so much to do about it These Days, sometimes you gotta just let some other things slide. Like until we get the rule of law back, and the government can’t just grab you off the street and yeet you to a jungle gulag with no recourse or due process, I’m gonna stop getting annoyed by people breaking up print portfolios and selling them for parts. Especially fundraising portfolios, which are sort of a grab bag to begin with.

a jasper johns cross hatch lithograph titled cicada is dominated by red, as several of the stones usually used for multiple overlapping colors were, in this case, used to print only shades of red. it's sick as hell tho, and the best print in a portfolio of eight snoozers, made in 1981 as a fundraiser for johns' foundation for contemporary performing arts. this copy is being sold without the rest of the portfolio at bonhams in april 2025
Jasper Johns, Cicada, 1981, lithograph, 35 x 26 in. sheet, ed. 41/50+11AP is at Bonhams LA tomorrow, 4/8

Besides, this Jasper Johns lithograph, Cicada, is absolutely the best work in the Eight Lithographs to Benefit the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, Inc. portfolio. I mean, the other fellas’ prints are nice, but this is the one that pops out.

Obviously it’s the red. Johns made a whole series of Cicada screenprints in 1979-81, in eight different color variations, starting with the crosshatch classic, red/yellow/blue. And in 1981, he also made two larger lithograph Cicada prints. All somehow have identical crosshatch patterning, with different text format along the bottom edge. In addition to the red on the red stone, I think the FCA portfolio Cicada swaps in red for the black crosshatches that give the print its structure. The result: a lot of red. I like it.

8 Apr 2025, Lot 131, Jasper Johns, Cicada, 1981, est. $25-35,000 [update: unsold] [bonhams]

Riding Rail with Danez Smith & Jack Whitten

Just looking at the upcoming conversations in the Brooklyn Rail’s The New Social Environment series, and they are, as usual full of bangers. Me, I just booked into poet Danez Smith talking about their new book, Bluff, with Mananda Chaffa on Wednesday and a full-on roundtable on Jack Whitten with MoMA curator Michelle Kuo and assembled luminaries on Monday.

See the whole schedule and sign up for free. [brooklynrail.org]

I’m Not Afraid Of Correcting Mistakes

a dark, low-ceilinged gallery space with multiple rows of white steel columns cutting through it and a high gloss floor has at least five lightbox transparency artworks by donald moffett of photos overlaid with text on the left and back wall, but only the back wall is unobstructed enough to make out the content. and it is a white nude guy laying down who appears to be masturbating, with a blue background and a line of illegible white text. in the center foreground, spotlit from above, is a two foot high stack of red posters, which turned out to be a collaborative artwork between moffett and felix gonzalez-torres, which the latter later disavowed. moffett kept his text from the poster, though, which came from an earlier lightbox work. via the university of british columbia fine art gallery, found at the felix gonzalez torres foundation
installation view of Strange Ways: Here we come, Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Donald Moffett, at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Fine Art Gallery in November 1990, image via FG-T Fndn

Maybe it’s the passage of time, the advancement of discourse, the writing and thinking about it for so long, the engagement with the work and history of an artist who wrote so emphatically, that he’d always believed artists were allowed “to do whatever they please with their work.” Or maybe it’s the moment, when something I’ve seen and written about before looks different. And when something I’ve read a dozen times before finally sinks in, maybe because now I’ve had that same experience.

“I’m not afraid of making mistakes, I’m afraid of keeping them,” Felix Gonzalez Torres told Tim Rollins in 1993.

Andrea Rosen put that quote in context in her CR essay [pdf], and how Felix’s decision to not have a studio meant the first time he’d see a work realized was when he installed it in a gallery: “Putting the work in public immediately allowed him the opportunity to sense if he felt confident about his decisions. From time to time Felix would decide that he did not feel strongly enough about a piece to have it remain a work, even if it had already been exhibited.”

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“Untitled” (The Neverending Self-Portrait)

a single line of pale silver painted text runs along the top of the wall at the national portrait gallery, picked out by a carefully aligned row of accent lighting. in the right corner a single swag of a lightstring arcs out of frame. felix gonzalez-torres' 1989 self-portrait, "untitled", in one of two simultaneous installations in the exhibit hilariously and falsely criticized for queer erasure
“Untitled” (1989), paint on wall, with exceptional accent lighting, at the National Portrait Gallery

We were in the neighborhood, and so we went back to see the Felix Gonzalez-Torres exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. Which was the first time we spent time with “Untitled” (1989), a portrait work which appears twice, in two different configurations, in two different spots of the exhibition. [Technically, it’s in three spots: the work is owned by the Art Institute of Chicago, where it’s been on view since December 2023.]

In the show it felt impossible to do more than sense the differences between the two installations. It seemed that, in the absence of a subject named in parentheses, this was a portrait of the artist himself, but the variety of posthumous additions made it non-obvious. So we left with questions: How was this portrait adapted for this dual/triple version? Besides the title, how [else] was it different from the others? If it was indeed a self-portrait, how did this portrait practice come to be?

Helpfully, the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation collects documentation of each version as it is installed. As the first portrait [sic] that was, indeed, a self-portrait, which was in Andrea Rosen’s collection [The AIC got it in 2002], “Untitled” (1989) may be one of the most frequently exhibited; the documentation for [at least] 42 versions runs to 17 pages [pdf].

Continue reading ““Untitled” (The Neverending Self-Portrait)”

Twombly Cinematic Universe

this sally mann photo of cy twombly's studio is from 2011, probably. a densely calligraphed white on deep blue painting sits in a thick, old carved giltwood frame on a dark easel, next to a work table cluttered with mail, books, posters, acrylic paint jars, and a five-tiered square wedding cake of a twombly sculpture made out of white boxes with what looks like a caketopper-like figure in a chair, but is probably a blob of plaster-soaked rag. on one of the plinths of the sculpture rests a black an dwhite polaroid photo. two thin stalk-like sculpture elemtns rise behind the table, and the whole scene is blown out and backlit by the light coming through the thin accordion style blinds in the background. sally mann is a professional photographer so this is an artistic choice. it's not like she was going to tell twombly to relight or restage his studio. we're lucky to have this
Sally Mann photo of Cy Twombly’s Lexington Studio from Remembered Light

Looked through Remembered Light: Cy Twombly in Lexington, Sally Mann’s 2016 book of photos of Twombly’s places, for the first time the other day, and saw this. A perfect little painting in a fat, baroque giltwood frame in his cluttered storefront studio.

But this is not just any perfect painting. [I don’t actually know what painting it is, tbh.] I just know it was a major plot [sic] in Tacita Dean’s 2011 film, Edwin Parker.

a 12yo detail of a screenshot from tacita dean's 2011 film edwin parker is the interior of twombly's cluttered studio, where twombly, his back to the camera and wearing a camel colored corduroy jacket, is standing in front of a red green orange and black swagged painting which he's trying to reset in an old, carved giltwood frame sitting on an easel. A white guy in workwear and a baseball hat, twombly's driver and local assistant in lexington virginia whose name is literally butch, like, butch is his name, is standing to the left, not quite helping, but trying to be ready to help with some tape or whatever. a yellow measuring stick has been inserted behind the painting to wedge it into the frame, by nicola del roscio, twombly's companion or whatever, who understood that on the easel, there was nothing holding the painting in place.

Maybe plot is a little strong. In her quiet, attentive film Dean doesn’t follow Twombly around so much as just be where he is, and observe. And for most of the film, he’s in this little studio. The first action or narrative drama, such as it is, involves a painting that has fallen out of this picture frame, and Twombly tries to fix it. The two men with him—first, Butch, his local assistant, and then Nicola Del Roscio—alternately hover and jump in to help with tape and a tape measure.

a screenshot from tacita dean's 2011 film edwin parker which shows twombly's storefront studio after the three men have gone outside, on their way to lunch. the jury-rigged painting with the tape measure sticking out is in the center right middle ground. the clutter of a table, with books and boxes and bags and the tiny head of a porcelain frog from a yard sale are out of focus in the lower foreground. a couple of white painted sculptures or sculptures in progress stick up like lone buildings in this messy skyline. the pleated accordion shades probably bought at walmart are down, the light is better than sally mann's photo, at least stereotypically better.
detail of a screenshot from Tacita Dean’s Edwin Parker, 2011

When I had a review copy of Edwin Parker like ten years ago, I got kind of fixated on this painting, wondering what it was, where it was, and taking grainy screencaps so that I could track it down.

When the Hirshhorn was wrapped in his giant curtained scrim, the swag and slightly lurid colors made me worry Twombly’s painting was by Nicholas Party. When I was making Facsimile Objects about inaccessible Dürers in German museums, I wondered if it was the freely painted verso of something more mundane.

a google streetview screenshot of the back of a durer painting in the state museum in karlsruhe, germany, which is mounted on a white pedestal in a black and gold edged frame. the back of the painted panel is swirling red green pink blue, pale yellow, interpreted as a slice of agate, and I forget what's on the front. some devotional image of jesus [love him, don't get me wrong, but not the point rn] the gallery floor dominates the image; it is strip wood. the walls are pale grey with a dark grey stone baseboard. google streetview cruft and ui elements abound obv
gsv of a Dürer in Karlsruhe, via

Later in the film, Del Roscio is holding the blue & white painting up top, flipping it around, as Twombly says it’ll fit in the frame. It looks like it’s related to the series of paintings Twombly made for the Louvre in 2008, as part of his ceiling deal.

a woman in a black hijab walks with her phone outstretched, presumably filming or photographing as she walk along a series of cy twombly paintings on the white wall of the louvre abu dhabi. the paintings are vertical, larger than human scale, in deep dark blue with loose, thick gestural calligraphic loops and rows of marks in white. the nine paintings were bought by the louvre for the louvre abu dhabi, and then the louvre in paris had twombly make a blue ceiling mural for them. the image originally comes from cnn
installation view of Cy Twombly’s Untitled I–IX, 2008, at the Louvre Abu Dhabi, screenshot via CNN

So the plot, such as it is, involves the swapping out of one painting for another. Technically, this climax does not happen in Edwin Parker; Del Roscio is only shown setting the little painting carefully against the wall.

Whether that makes Mann’s photo a spoiler, a sequel, or just a post-credits teaser, I cannot say. All I know is now I have two little paintings to track down.

Cy Twombly Worked-On Paper

a screenshot of a photo of a clear plastic box filled with tiny balls of rolled up paper, sitting on its lid in a featureless ground, a 1953 sculpture by cy twombly, as published in katie nesin's 2014 book, cy twombly's things, the original photo taken by nicola del roscio himself, amazingly, for the cy twombly foundation
Twombly, Get me some tissue: Cy Twombly, Untitled, 1953, paper balls in plastic box, tape, 1 7/8 x 3 1/4 x 2 5/8 in., as published in Katie Nesin’s Cy Twombly’s Things (2014, Yale Univ. Press), photo: Nicola Del Roscio himself [!]

A lot of Twombly tabs open, as is the custom. After watching Art Institute curator Katie Nesin’s lecture about it, I checked out her 2014 book, Cy Twombly’s Things, an art historical close read of the artist’s sculptures.

Nesin examines at great length Twombly’s practice of painting his sculptures. It’s something Twombly referenced in one of his few artist statements, and which curators addressed, too. I know what they all mean, I really do, and so do you, but it is really hard to read statements coming straight outta Lexington like, “The reality of whiteness may exist in the duality of sensation (as the multiple anxiety of desire and fear). Whiteness can be the classic sttae of the intellect, or a neo-romantic idea of remembrance—or as the symbolic whiteness of Mallarmé. The exact implication may never be analyzed, but in that it persists as the landscape of my actions, it must imply more than mere selection.” And Kirk Varnedoe talking about “the increasing self-consciousness of his commitment to white,” and Nesin concluding “it is white’s susceptibility to contamination that remains the point,” in 2025 and think it all stays neatly contained in the art box.

Anywho, that’s a dissertation for another day. I mention it because Nesin traces the development of Twombly’s practice of painting his sculptures white with a picture of one of the few, early sculptures he didn’t paint white. Untitled (1953) is white on the inside. It’s a tiny plastic box filled with little rolled up balls of paper. Nesin argues that it’s also “derivative” because its size and nature refer to the scatole personali, the little fetish boxes, objects, and constructions Robert Rauschenberg showed in their two-person show in Florence in mid-March. [In a sharp detour from whiteness, Twombly showed geometric tapestries he constructed from textiles he bought in Tangier.] Which, yes, I see the connection.

robert rauschenberg's 1953 work Untitled Paper Painting was an 18 x 14 x 4 inch glass display case with a thin beveled wood base, filled with crumpled tissue paper that cy twombly said came from shoe boxes, sitting on a rough wood floor against a black background. the photo is from the rauschenberg foundation, the sculpture is lost or destroyed. perhaps by twombly tearing it up into little balls and putting it in his own box, who knows
Robert Rauschenberg, Untitled (paper painting), 1953, 18x14x4 in., shoe box tissue paper, glass, wood base. lost or destroyed, or maybe rolled up into little balls in Twombly’s pocket

But there is a closer reference in 1953. In the then-couple’s Fulton Street studio, Robert Rauschenberg filled a glass case with tissue paper from shoe boxes and called it a paper painting. Did Twombly take some of Rauschenberg’s tissues and make them into balls he could keep in his pants? Did they make their his & his tissue boxes together? Whose personal fetish are we talking about, actually? While it’s impossible to say for sure who came first, it does seem likely these two came together.

Etel Adnan’s Language of Painting

a small etel adnan gouache painting of a dark red sphere, shaded in darker red and black along the lower and right edge to give it volume, in an unevenly watery square of light greens, in the center of an otherwise blank sheet of 10.5 by 14 inch paper, dated from the 1960s and signed Adnan in the lower left corner, it on view at galerie lelong in nyc until april 5, 2025
Etel Adnan, Untitled (c. 1960s), Ink and gouache on paper. 10 ⅝ x 14 in., via Galerie Lelong

First things first, Galerie Lelong’s exhibition of Etel Adnan’s works on paper is on view for two more days, so get going.

I’ve been listening to Kaelen Wilson-Goldie’s interview about Adnan on Bulaq, the podcast of Ursula Lindsey and M Lynx Qualey (ArabLit editor), and right around 24:00 Wilson-Goldie turns the question back to her book-centric hosts, to ask what they think the complicatedly multilingual Adnan meant by her statement that she “painted in Arabic.”

I would love to know more of the context in which she first said that. Wilson-Goldie, Lindsey, and Qualey talk about Adnan’s shifts from writing in French to English as her perspective and contact with French and US colonialism changed. But also how her return to Lebanon in the 1970s included a mutual embrace with the new Arabic poetry communities of the day.

I can absolutely see the appeal of a painting language that did not carry with it the political baggage, while also making an affirmative assertion of solidarity. Or maybe that characterizing painting as a language separate from the ones she used for writing helped justify it, or at least made it make sense within/alongside her multi-faceted, text-based practice. Or maybe it just gave her the psychological and linguistic space she needed for a personal expression. I’m trying to think of many novelist/poets who were also recognized for their painting, but ngl, my head is not primed for unfettered rumination on poetry today [noon]. Wonder why.

In any case, I feel like I have to rethink my understanding of Adnan’s work a bit precisely because I’d always read it—or seen it presented— as being an Arabic-inflected modernism being subsumed into the larger modernist project. And I have to consider that that could be just how it looks from my perspective in the distended belly of that empire.

[listened to the end of the podcast update: OK, so Adnan had various complex takes on what it meant, and why she did not, in fact, learn Arabic. And I wonder what it means that this was the language she analogized to her painting.]

Etel Adnan on Paper: 1961-2021 runs through Apr 5, 2025 [galerielelong]
Bulaq | Etel Adnan: ‘I write what I see, paint what I am’ [sowt/bulaq]
Whoops, missed Etel Adnan centenary show at White Cube [whitecube]
ArtSeen | Ann McCoy on Etel Adnan [brooklynrail]

Heading To Bassano, Wish You Were Here

the back of a postcard from cy twombly to reiner speck where the message section is filled by a scribbly swirl of orange and black crayon, partly obscuring the florida peninsula logo but leaving the caption of the photo on the recto about depicting a startlingly beautiful florida sunset intact. AIRMAIL across the top and Speck's name and address on the right are written in Twombly's distinctive hand, which is all the signature you need, I guess. via maison d'art
The startlingly beautiful hues of a tropical Florida Sunset are depicted here in all their splendor and completeness that Cy Twombly didn’t need to add anything, not even his signature, via Maison d’Art

It’s the little differences. Where Marcel Duchamp’s letters to his collector friend Katherine Dreier are all, “shipping is $34, please send me $34,” Cy Twombly’s letters to his collector friend Reiner Speck are like, “we await you in the summer castle.” I have read the Twombly correspondence with noted urologist and Proust expert Herr Dr. Reiner Speck in the catalogue for Maison d’Art’s current exhibition, and here’s the expanded tl;dr:

Continue reading “Heading To Bassano, Wish You Were Here”

Ellsworth & Kelly & Lorenzetti & Kubrick

tiger is a 1953  painting in five panels by ellsworth kelly, that forms a large square. the top quarter of the painting comprises three panels, yellow,  pink and orange. the bottom 3/4 is two panels, white and black. A demarcation line at about 60% of the width of the work leaves the yellow and white panels to be the widest. this painting is in the collection of the national gallery of art, and has not been exhibited since 2023, when it disappeared midway through the kelly exhibition at glenstone. have any news? hmu
Have you seen me? Ellsworth Kelly, Tiger, 1953, oil on five canvases, collection, NGA

I was listening to a recording of Ellsworth Kelly’s 1999 Elson Lecture at the National Gallery of Art, and I have some questions. Some could probably be answered by a video of the lecture—more of a conversation, with curator Marla Prather—or with a review of Kelly literature I don’t have.

Continue reading “Ellsworth & Kelly & Lorenzetti & Kubrick”