Author: greg

Jenny Saville On Twombly Looking And Working

Via Wayne Bremser comes a shoutout to Cy Twombly’s Duchamp references, but not the ones I’d thought, and not where I’d expected it to come from.

In February 2024 Jenny Saville spoke on Twombly’s work and her connection to him at The Menil Collection. After acclimating to her regularly not mentioning the gallery she shared with Twombly, it turned out to be a fascinating talk, full of insights on painterly technique and reference and inspiration. Which, hold that thought.

At the moment cued above, though, Saville describes Twombly’s “banging together” of avant-garde modernism and the ancient world through “the Duchampian act of writing ‘APOLLO’ on a piece of paper or a canvas.” I’ll need to sit with it a minute, but I guess if anything can be a readymade, then so can the 4,000 years [sic] of human association with that word.

Saville’s illustrated discussion of Twombly is full of painterly details found in artists from Leonardo to Cézanne, and it feels rare to hear and see these references. Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve felt Twombly’s painting and mark-making has been considered alone, if not sui generis, or in the context of his poetic sources, and not so much in relation to art of the world/past. Not for Saville, though.

a youtube screenshot of two brushy, obscured blobs, as jenny saville would call them, details from cy twombly paintings, and a detail of a brushy, blurry, atmospheric painting by turner of a dark cloud dumping rain into a darker sea, with jenny saville to the right in a little inset box, from her feb 2024 lecture at the menil collection in houston
screenhsot of Jenny Saville discussing Cy Twombly and Turner in February 2024 at The Menil Collection

One artist she comes back to more than any other is Turner, and the juxtapositions of Turner’s and Twombly’s atmospheric and spatial and abstract pursuits are fascinating.

Most of the talk is a close look/walkalong of the Menil’s Twombly centerpiece, Untitled (Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor). But she ends with an expansive read of a blackboard painting [Untitled, 1971] filled with figure eights descending from left to right, and she didn’t mention Duchamp. And it still made sense.

Marion Barthelme Lecture: Jenny Saville on Cy Twombly [youtube, s/o @waynebremser]
Previously: Send More Twombly Duchamp Nudes

The Jamaican Astrophysicist Francis Williams

an 18th century portrait of francis williams, a Black Jamaican gentleman and Newtonian physicist in his study, with a landcape of Spanish Town in the window behind him. Williams wears a white wig and a blue and gold coat, and stands full length between his mahogany table and chair. there are globes on the table and floor, a wall of books, some identifiable by title for the first time, and newton's principia open on the table under his hand. a gold cord holding back a deep blue curtain turns out to be knotted in the orbit of halley's comet, which turns out to be visible at perigee in the dusk sky of the landscape. williams thus documented his observation and calculation of the comet's perigee, proving the newtonian model. the painting is at the v&a, and it is due for a major reinterpretation
William Williams, attr., Francis Williams, The Scholar of Jamaica, prob 1760, not c.1745, 66 x 50 cm, in the V&A

What an extraordinary piece of research, and an equally amazing finding.

For at least a century, an 18th century portrait in the V&A of a free, Black Jamaican man named Francis Williams was considered to be a racist caricature of Williams cosplaying as a gentleman. But after a team of experts and conservators imaged and studied the painting anew, Fara Dabhoiwala discovered Williams was demonstrating not only his rare mastery of then-new Newtonian astrophysics. He was documenting his observations and calculations of the first documented return in 1758 of Halley’s Comet, at a moment when he was one of the only people alive who’d known Newton and Halley at the time they’d first published their theories.

If this feels like a spoiler, you can still read Dabhoiwala’s account in the LRB to see how he pieced Williams’ history and the painting’s history together from the most hostile sources and the barest archival traces.

A Man of Parts and Learning: Francis Williams Gets His Due [lrb.co.uk via @caleb.crain.bsky.social]

The Sounds Of Man

As I try to manage my news intake, I have been rescued and refreshed by First Light Radio, artist Man Bartlett’s monthly music show on East Village Radio. It’s live on the third Friday of the month, from 8-10AM, and the archive is growing, but it’s still early, so it’s small. Fortunately, there is a whole discography to fall back into. I confess, I’ve never opened my cassette tapes of any of the Space On Earth recordings; I just use the mp3 technology.

First Light Radio With Man, 3rd Friday, 8-10AM [eastvillageradio]
Man Bartlett [bandcamp]

The Lost Jasper Johns

As someone who spent more than two years tracking down the greatest lost Jasper Johns painting, you’d think I would have already identified all the other lost Johnses. But I had not.

Though the list of destroyed Johns works is certainly longer and more mysterious—the artist is famous for destroying things he made before 1954, and the fire in his Edisto Island, SC home in 1966 wiped out many works Johns kept for himself, including many early sketchbooks—there are not that many lost or missing Johns works. There are only four, and all date from 1955-64.

Besides the Flag (1955) inside Robert Rauschenberg’s combine, Short Circuit (also 1955), and the Figure 4 (1959), there is another number painting, Figure 2 (1963, P138), whose trail goes cold after entering Karl Ströher’s collection in Darmstadt.

black and white photo of jasper johns' lost 1964 painting titled gastro after the name of the bar owned by miyagaki shoichiro and his wife kiyo, which is printed on the round coaster affixed to the 5-inch square canvas by brushy blobs and drips of encaustic. one of four missing or lost paintings by jasper johns, it disappeared when gastro closed in 1988.
Jasper Johns, Gastro (CR P138, 1964, 5 x 5 in., encaustic and collage on canvas,

But the last one, and the second most interesting lost Johns, is called Gastro. It’s one of four paintings Johns made during his stay in Tokyo in the summer of 1964. It is an encaustic collage of a coaster from the Bar Gastro [バー ガストロ], which was a gift to the bar’s owners, Kiyo and Shōichirō Miyagaki. [宮垣 昭一郎,キヨ] .

a group of japanese men in suits and one woman seated in a rock walled bar in harajuku in 1967, celebrating the completion of takiguchi shuzo's proof of poetic experiments: 1927-1937. looks like quite a party
Miyagaki Shōichirō [top row, right corner] and gang at a 1967 launch party for Takiguchi Shūzō’s Poetic Experiments: 1927-1937, photo: Funaga Mitsutoshi via Keio U

Gastro was a hub of the Tokyo contemporary art community, and I assume it was in Ginza, near Johns’ temporary studio at the Artists Hall. It was decorated with artworks by regulars, who were known as the Gastro-ren「ガストロ連」, or Gastro-gang. Johns must have become an honorary member, and his little painting, just five inches square, remained in Gastro until Shōichirō’s death in 1988. According to the CR, the whereabouts of the entire Gastro-ren art hoard is unknown.

Given the prominence of Miyagaki and other Gastro-ren members like poet-critic Takiguchi Shūzō, I’m surprised some enterprising art historian hasn’t tracked everything down yet, but here we are.

Send Twombly Duchamp Nudes

a framed cy twombly work on paper, 30 x 40 inches, is a medium grey background with noticeable brushstrokes, and a cascade of figure eights and fragments thereof in white crayon, descending from the upper left to the lower right, the same direction as duchamp's nude descending a staircase, of which this was once considered a study, which would make it kind of figurative, which might explain why it was de-titled when it sold at sotheby's in nov 2024
Cy Twombly, apparently not titled Study after Duchamp: Nude Descending a Staircase after all, 1968, oil and crayon on paper, 30 x 40 in., sold yesterday by the estate of Lothar Schirmer at Sotheby’s

When it was published in the 1999 catalogue of his own collection, Cy Twombly’s publisher Lothar Schirmer listed the title of this amazing 1968 drawing, which he’d acquired directly from the artist in 1968, as Study after Duchamp: Nude Descending a Staircase.

marcel duchamp's nude descending a staircase tracks the cubist, overlapping, fractured motion of a human figure painted in beiges as it descends from upper left to lower right, against a darker brown background. at the philadelphia museum of art
Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase (N0. 2), 1912, collection Philadelphia Museum of Art via Sotheby’s

When Schirmer (RIP) sold it yesterday at Sotheby’s, however, it was listed only as Untitled. And whoever wrote the lot essay for the Twombly wanted to connect it to Duchamp’s painting so bad, they began the essay with a picture of it.

And they said, “Untitled also pays homage to art historical forerunners and their attempt to capture movement in space and time,” without naming Duchamp. And then they quoted Suzanne Delehanty,

Like shadows of Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, figure eights, frequent personages in Twombly’s cosmos of signs, borrowed perhaps from the mathematical symbol for infinity, multiply, recede and climb through the surface of a 1968 oil and crayon on paper to express, as does the 1912 nude, an abstraction of motion in space-time.

trying to call Twombly’s symbols and signs personages without surrendering their status as abstract marks. [Delehanty’s text is cited as coming from the collected writings on Twombly edited by Nicola del Roscio in 2002, which elides its origin as a catalogue text for Twombly’s 1975 show at the ICA in Philadelphia, the city of Duchampian love.]

Discussing this and a couple of other related works on paper in his catalogue for Twombly’s 1994 MoMA retrospective catalogue, Kirk Varnedoe mentioned Duchamp exactly once, before going on at length about the Futurists:

That language of flow and fracture draws directly on the early modern fascination with the “cinematic” decomposition of forms in motion, in Duchamp (Nude Descending a Staircase,1912) and most notably among Italian Futurist artists, particularly Giacomo Balla.

It feels like a confluence of aversions: to figuration, to referencing other artists’ work, or to referencing Duchamp’s works specifically, but it feels acute in the detitling of this particular drawing. Looking at Duchamp’s painting had an impact on Twombly’s most significant body of work, which he apparently referenced many times. And Twombly went to great lengths to make sure his work was permanently installed down the hall from Duchamp’s. I, for one, would love to see something more on this connection than a passing namecheck.

The Laramie Branding Project

I found myself driving through Laramie, Wyoming today, and wondered what the memorial legacy of Matthew Shepard was. tl;dr: basically nothing.

Ten years after his murder, the University of Wyoming put a plaque with Shepard’s name and dates on a park bench, like he’d donated a hundred dollars to the alumni fund.

As for the site where he was beaten, tied up, and left to die, “Residents of this neighborhood have been especially anxious to bury the past and even petitioned local government to change the street names in order to confuse pilgrims to the murder site.”

The most prominent marker remains the town’s name itself.

Hysterical Obedience

James Bridle responds to the Schelling Architecture Foundation’s rescinding of an award because of Bridle’s public support of a cultural boycott of Israeli institutions that support genocide.

Getting Hannah Arendt quoted back at you should be a wakeup call for Germans, but I guess not yet.

Germany is far from alone in this situation. The far right, and the denial of genocide that accompanies it, are on the march everywhere. But the logic of Strike Germany is simple: if it is illegal in Germany to call for cultural change in Israel, then it becomes necessary to call for cultural change in Germany itself. Late enough to be ashamed, but never too late, I sign my name.

James Bridle: ‘The Denial of Genocide Is on the March Everywhere’ [artreview]

Al Ordover’s Johns’s The Figure 8

a 10 by 8 inch painting of the figure eight in messily blended black, grey, and white, without a distinct background or foreground object, but an overall abstract painting that also happens to depict a figure 8, was made in 1959 by jasper johns, and is being sold in november 2024 at sothebys
Jasper Johns, The Figure 8, 1959, 10 x 8 in., oil on canvas, [NOT?] being sold 20 Nov 2024 at Sotheby’s

In 1960, Leo Castelli’s gallery director Ivan Karp estimated that there were no more than fifteen people seriously collecting contemporary art. One of them was Al Ordover, who was one of the first people Karp took to Warhol’s studio.

Ordover bought this amazing little 1959 Jasper Johns painting, The Figure 8, from Castelli. One minute it’s obviously an 8, and the next it feels like it barely holds the 8 together.

Its only public exhibition was a December 1959 fundraising exhibition to benefit painter Nell Blaine, who had contracted polio during a summer trip to Mykonos. [Since vaccines are in the news, Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine was introduced in 1955, and was still in early distribution stages in 1959. Blaine’s paralysis left her in a wheelchair for life and unable to paint for several years.]

Why none of the history or context of this painting, as opposed to Johns’ use of numbers as a form/subject generally, is in Sotheby’s lot text, is a mystery to me. But with generalities, unrelated quotes, hyperbole, and a single jpeg are how six-figure paintings are sold these days, I guess. [update: OR NOT.]

20 Nov 2024, Lot 34 : Jasper Johns, The Figure 8, 1959, est. $3-4m [sothebys]

Marsden Hartley, Fig Tree, 1926-27

a painting of a leafless gray fig tree against a dark sky and red and dark ground, the branches curving all over the place, crossing themselves, like a brice marden painting from the 1990s, except it was painted in 1926 by marsden hartley. image is from the 2003 retrospective of hartley's work at the wadworth atheneum in hartford ct
janky screenshot of Marsden Hartley, Fig Tree, 1926-27, 24 x 20 1/2 in., as reproduced in the exhibition catalogue for the Wadsworth Atheneum’s 2003 Hartley retrospective.

Marsden Hartley moved from Vence to Aix-en-Provence in 1926, at the invitation of the Kuntzes, and set to working in Cezanne’s old studio.

According to the chronology in Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser’s 2003 retrospective, which originated at the Wadsworth Atheneum, this is when Hartley began working on Fig Tree.

The Google Books preview does not include the text about Fig Tree, but earlier texts seem to date it earlier, to 1924, when Hartley was in New Mexico. I will need to find out more about this buck wild painting, which seems to have nothing to do with channeling Cezanne.

Marsden Hartley’s White Yucca for Arlie Kuntz

a painting of a stalk of white yucca blossoms against a bright blue background, brushy, by marsden hartley
Marsden Hartley, White Yucca (Memorial to Charles Kuntz), 1928-29, 31 3/4 x 25 3/4 in., selling today at Sotheby’s

After meeting him on the street in St Paul de Vence, Adelaide and Arlie Kuntz befriended Marsden Hartley and persuaded him to move to Aix-en-Provence with them in 1926. For the spring and summer of 1927, they painted together in Cezanne’s old studio, which was surrounded by flowering white yucca plants.

In 1928, Kuntz, 30, was killed in a motorcycle accident before ever having a public show of his work. For the remainder of Hartley’s life, Adelaide remained a significant patron of Hartley’s work, and some time around 1933, Hartley asked his dealer to get this painting to her.

In 2014, the Greenville County Museum of Art and Driscoll Babcock Gallery organized a two-artist show of Kuntz and Hartley, with works acquired from Kuntz’s daughter’s estate. She had long since sold off White Yucca. And Driscoll let his domain name expire.

[update: there were two other Hartley flower paintings at Sotheby’s today: some roses, and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller’s Pansies—not sure who that’s a portrait of.]

19 Nov 2024, Lot 550: Marsden Hartley, White Yucca, est. $80-120,000, sold for $114,000 [sothebys]

Wants vs Needs

the cover of Gregor Stemmrich's Robert Rauschenberg's Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953), Modernism, Literalism, Postmodernism is off white with blue text, like a museum wall label, above an empty gold but not metallic rectangle that might allude to the work discussed within for 1,028 pages
Gregor Stemmrich’s Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953), Modernism, Literalism, Postmodernism, 2023, from Hatje Cantz

I was like, this is it, I am going to finish Gregor Stemmrich’s 1,028-page monument of a book on Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing on this plane, and I put it in the bag.

And I ended up bingeing all six hours of the BBC Pride & Prejudice instead.

Isa Genzken Ur-World Receiver

isa genzken sculpture, weltampfanger, 1982, is a readymade, a panasonic rf-9000 shortwave radio in black and silver, with dials and buttons and two antennas, on a white pedestal of the same width, installed on a mezzanine in the white cube style gallery of the kunstmuseum basel in 2020. photo julian salinas
Isa Genzken, Weltempfänger, 1982, installed at Kunstmuseum Basel in 2020, Photo: Julian Salinas, © ProLitteris, Zurich, via contemporaryartswitzerland

Isa Genzken’s first Weltempfänger/World Receiver, from 1982, is a readymade, a National Panasonic RF-9000 (SWL) shortwave listener. It is seen above, without the cover, installed at the Kunstmuseum Basel in 2020, as part of an exhibition of Genzken’s work from 1973 to 1983 [which the museum does not document hardly at all on their own site].

It was preceded by a series of works, large and small, that appropriated magazine advertisements for high-end audio equipment. And it was a precursor, if not the model, for the Weltempfängeren made out of concrete, which Genzken showed in 1986. Though I don’t know how that processed; it was beyond the scope of the Basel show, and is not detailed in Lisa Lee’s 2017 book, Sculpture as World Receiver.

It is also, on its own, perhaps the most highly considered SWL ever made, and the vintage radio and listening community are consistent in their praise and appreciation of it.

As for my own process, it is laid out here. I had considered making a readymade Genzken Weltempfänger would be easier than making a concrete Genzken Weltempfänger. And while that may still be true, it would also be hella more expensive.

Isa Genzken at Kunstmuseum Basel, 2020-21 [contemporaryartswitzerland]

Better Read It Yourself: Burton on Brâncuși

a black and white installation photo of scott burton's exhibition of brancusi sculptures at the museum of modern art in 1989 depicts the entrance of the exhibit, where a thick pedestal sculpture by burton in the shape of a squared off, inverted u has two brancusi bird sculptures, removed from their original bases. beyond is a gallery with more brancusis; on the wall near the entrance are two small brochure holders, also created by burton. the distinctive thick grey and white grain of cesar pelli's moma circulation spaces is making me wish we could turn back the clock, but then I remember 1989, and maybe it's not a wistfulness for the past that makes me want to reverse time, but the dread of the immediate future. anyway, photo credit by mali olatunji
this installation photo by Mali Olatunji shows Scott Burton’s base/table/sculpture for these two sculptures by Constantin Brancusi, as well as, I believe, his brochure holders. image: moma.org

Looking for something with which to stay busy or distracted, I decided to record a reading of the brochure for Scott Burton’s 1989 Artist’s Choice exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, in which Burton rather boldly reconsidered the bases and pedestals of Constantin Brancusi’s sculptures.

The kicker for anyone who got to the end of the mp3 was to be the last paragraph on the back of the brochure, where it explained that Burton installed some of Brancusi’s Birds on pedestal tables of his own design, and also created seating and brochure holders for the exhibition.

Well, between the untraceable static that appeared in the tracks with the computer-generated voice, my attempts to re-record the tainted sections by reading them myself in a breathy ASMR-style voice, and the jarring editing process in an app I really don’t like, and finally the way these two voices only serve to compound anxiety rather than alleviate it, I’m shelving the whole thing.

Read Burton’s brochure yourself. You shouldn’t need me to tell you It’s been on MoMA’s website since like 2017. Anyway, what I’d rather hear is Anne Umland’s take on this exhibit, which she organized while an assistant to Kirk Varnedoe.

Artist’s Choice | Burton on Brâncuși, Apr 7 – July 4, 1989 [moma]

Nahunta: Mi Gente

david simonton's black and white photo of a white painted wood door with an intact glass window left ajar on what seems to be the screened in rear or side porch of a worn, possibly abandoned clapboard house. the screen netting sags between slats on the left, the worn off paint on the right, some lumber and dirt and light debris on the porch floor, and a couple of laundry lines suspended across the space up top. taken, simonton says, between 1993 and 2011, in nahunta, nc
David Simonton, Nahunta, Wayne County, NC, photo: davidsimonton.com via @thephotoregistry

I learned of David Simonton’s photographs of a disappearing North Carolina on tumblr, where I noticed the caption of this picture first , “Nahunta, Wayne County, NC” and the details of the image second.

Because we have some people from there, a ways back. And when a name like Mozingo turns up in Nahunta in your family history, it sticks in your mind.

And now I want to make Nahunta: Mi Gente t-shirts, which me and maybe like one cousin would appreciate.

Or maybe I need to make a new visit. Maybe the Nahunta Pork Center is just the most front-facing participant of a larger hardworking community of pork processors and their families. They are no less me gente than the farmers I came from.

a light brown-skinned male torso wears a kelly green short sleeved t-shirt with nahunta mi gente in blue and yellow text across the chest, a mockup for a design based on a tumblr comment that popped into my head upon seeing the name of a rural north carolina town where some of my ancestors once lived in the caption of a photo.