The thing that has stuck with me from the 1988 movie Beaches is Bette Midler’s character saying, “But enough about me; let’s talk about you. What do YOU think of me?”
In completely unrelated news, this season the St. Moritz location of Hauser & Wirth is stagingJean-Michel Basquiat. Engadin:
‘Jean-Michel Basquiat. Engadin’ traces the renowned artist’s connections to the country, which began in 1982 with his first show at Galerie Bruno Bischofberger in Zurich, returning over a dozen times to St. Moritz, Zurich, and Appenzell, as well as other places in Switzerland. The Engadin region in particular continued to fascinate Basquiat long after his return to New York, resulting in a body of work that captures his impressions of the Swiss Alpine landscape and culture through the lens of his highly distinctive and personal artistic language.
As if Bischofberger hadn’t done enough for the culture of Engadin by putting it on the back of Artforum every month, here is a whole show about an entire body of work Basquiat made on those mean straßen of S-chanf.
It feels comical to make a conceptual Basquiat T-shirt at this point, and anyway, a T-shirt with Skifahrer (Skier), 1983, on it has probably already come and gone at a Uniqlo popup in Samedan. Instead I would stitch a transparent document pouch between a pair of custom-dyed red flannel braces, and on Chalandamarz I’d put the exhibition catalogue on my chest like a breastplate and head into town with a cowbell, a whip, and a song.
Chalandamarz Basquiatkatalogträgenprüfen, 2025, image via
I can’t believe I got to the end of this post without referencing Rob Storr’s description of Basquiat’s montage painting, The Dutch Settlers (1982) as “Eye Rap.” d’oh.
The cover of Cy Twombly: Homes & Studios, 2019/2020, available for retail at Gagosian and Karma
While the arrival of Carlos Peris’s lovely book did not give me much to add on the subject of Cy Twombly’s photography, the arrival of Cy Twombly Homes & Studios has filled the content pipeline to overflowing.
First, don’t sleep on such a book when it first comes out; I missed the hardcover edition by my own negligence.
Second, Nicola del Roscio is an international treasure, and he should not be forced to write to share his insights and experiences alongside Twombly; sit him down and record him talking, Hans Ulrich Obrist-style, for as long as it takes. For every buck wild story about how much Twombly loathed studio visits, and when a Qatari royal made an unexpected visit to Gaeta via helicopter, he scrambled to set up a decadent luncheon in the courtyard is included, how many treasures and priceless memories are left out?
We just need to get it all while we can, and while he can. [And while recounting this history, may someone will ask Nicola how, while making this book in the midst of the first public disclosures of sexual predation against him, it was decided to use Bruce Weber’s 1994 photo of Twombly’s studio for the frontispiece.]
“Picasso drawing on chair,” reads the 2019 caption of 56 Bassano, a 1991 photo by Deborah Turbeville listed as 56 Bassano in Homes & Studios, which, well,
Homes & Studios, 2019, contains fleeting mentions of the following (non-exhaustive): the palazzo purchased in Tonnicoda, which Twombly felt guilty for abandoning, so he named some works after it ; the castle Twombly almost impulse-bought in the name of either Nicola or his studio assistant Viorel. And at least the third cringe mention (all, I think, posthumous), of Twombly’s closeness with his former nanny, a Black woman named Lula. There is a dissertation or ten to be written about Twombly’s relationship to the South (and Rauschenberg and Johns, for that matter; Twombly told Sally Mann their joint biography should be called, Dickheads from Dixie. Mann also noted that Lula was barely a decade older than Cy; she began working for the Twomblys when she was just thirteen.)
Anyway, point is, my most urgent takeaway from Homes & Studios is that we need more information on Twombly’s Picassos: How many are there? And are they actually Picassos? Because the one above, in Deborah Turbeville’s 1991 photo from Bassano, captioned in 2020 as “Picasso drawing on Chair,” was revealed in 2023, at least, to be a 1985 drawing by Twombly, either of a Picasso or in Picasso’s mode. If this can be mislabeled as a Picasso, what about the others?
Last summer Copenhagen artist Henriette Heise held a seminar at the National Gallery of Denmark to consider artists’ late work. The artists ranged from Michelangelo to Lutz Bacher to Felix Gonzalez-Torres. She discussed it with Pernille Albrethsen for Nordic Art Review:
When it comes right down to it, the late works are eyewitnesses from the edge, from the end of life. Many of them testify to a courage to dare to look at what scares us. We must somehow train ourselves to get better at going through changes without becoming paralysed, unable to act. I myself am of an age where I can remember the Cold War, the AIDS crisis, the Chernobyl accident, and other things. There are short periods of stability and then there are periods of great upheaval, such as the one we find ourselves in now. At present, I feel a great need to think about how I can use my voice in the current crisis without having to make art that has been somehow pre-ordered or could have been made by AI. So, yes, one of things I have learnt from many of the late works is a kind of unlearning, a resetting of what you think you know and think you can predict.
Quoting her takeaway here only makes me want to read and see it all; it sounds like it has only gotten more relevant in the six months since it happened.
Camille Drury’s photo of Carl Andre’s work Breda (1986) installed at Paula Cooper Gallery in Jan. 2025
Though he didn’t show in the US in the years between the murder of his wife Ana Mendieta and his indictment for said murder in 1985 and his trial, where he got off, in 1988, Carl Andre did have quite a busy European exhibition schedule.
In late 1986, he had two simultaneous gallery shows, in Brussels and at Konrad Fischer in Düsseldorf, where he showed sculptures made of elongated blocks of the material, “Belgian Blue Limestone,” that gave the shows their titles.
Those were followed almost immediately in 1987 by simultaneous museum retrospectives in the Netherlands, at the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, and the Haags Gemeentemuseum in, obviously, The Hague. There were eight more shows in the next 18 months.
But the point is, as the one-year mark since Carl Andre’s death approaches, Paula Cooper, who helped spring Andre from Rikers, is opening an expansive presentation of his work in both her gallery spaces. At the center of the largest space will be Breda (1986), a work comprising 101 blocks of blue Belgian limestone first exhibited in The Hague.
Like so many things from Carl Andre’s Indictment Era, the significance of this sculpture, and this show, goes without saying.
an undated archival image of Gordon Matta-Clark’s, Rosebush, 1972, on the west side of the entrance to St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, NYC, image via David Zwirner IG
That’s when the artist planted a rosebush inside a small, gridded wrought iron cage at the entrance of St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery on East 10th Street in Manhattan. The work was “reactivated” last September as part of —or “alongside”—Energies, an exhibition at the Swiss Institute on artists collaborating with local communities and ecologies. The reactivation took the form of planting a new bush in the Spring, adding a plaque, and staging an afternoon of readings, music, and dance in collaboration with The Poetry Project and Danspace Project, both of which have long operated at the church.
How could Gordon Matta-Clark’s “only existent work in an outdoor, public space” be so lost for so long that it needed a double-dated (1972/2024) “reactivation”? Reactivation seems, in this case, to be a curatorial conceit to draw attention to the work in its community. But it also connects the rare, extant work’s physical reality with the estate, which seems oriented to handling documentation and the occasional collage or sketch.
That’s the Kimbell Art Museum’s Healing of Lazarus on the right, next to the Transfiguration and Healing of the Blind Man from the National Gallery in London. No explanation why the one is in that lol strip frame, though.
Matsuura Takeshiro’s drawing of one corner of his One-Mat Room, with katakana keys to identify the various pieces of wood or other artifact, as published in Mokuhen Kanjin, and screenshot from Prof Henry D Smith II’s Oct 2024 lecture at the Noguchi Museum
After two decades as an explorer and cartographer, Matsuura Takeshirō, who gave the northern island of Japan its name, Hokkaidō, settled into a second life as an antiquarian. In anticipation of his 70th year (1888), he decided to build a tiny study onto his small house in central Tokyo, and asked his antiquarian colleagues across Japan to each send him a piece of old wood. He called the study the Ichijōjiki ((一畳敷), or One-Mat Room, though it is actually slightly larger than its single tatami mat. Matsuura documented each piece of wood, its source and significance, and its donor, in a tiny, self-published catalogue, Mokuhen Kanjin (木片勧進), which Columbia professor emeritus Henry Smith II translates as, A Solicitation of Wood Scraps.
Willem de Kooning in his jacket in his studio in May 1962, photographed by Dan Budnik; and Megan Craig’s Willem de Kooning jacket, photographed by the artist for The Yale Review
Artist and philosophy professor Megan Craig has written a beautiful and transparent essay about the difficulties and rewards of a life of painting. More particularly, it’s about the difficulties of a life of art when not painting. It’s wrapped in her story of an artist friend giving her an old denim work coat that originally belonged to Willem de Kooning:
I drape the jacket on a chair, then move it to a hook. Everywhere I put it seems wrong. I realize Jay might like a photograph of the garment in its new home, so I study the picture in The New York Times Magazine article, slide out a big canvas I painted many years ago, and lean it against my painting racks, as though it is a work in progress. I moe the chair in front of it and put on the jacket, which is huge on me, half expecting to be struck dead or find my face melting off like in that fateful scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark when they finally pry open the Ark of the Covenant. My back to the camera, I snap a photo as similar as possible to the one of de Kooning from 1962 and text it to Jay. He likes it; I can picture him smiling. But I cannot leave the jacket on for too long. I am unable to even put my hands in the pockets, paralyzed by the thought of de Kooning’s hands having been there. I place it back on the chair.
As someone engrossed with art who does not paint, I am in awe of Craig’s ambivalence, but I also did feel like I wanted to find that jacket. And since greg.org hero Brian Sholis sent Craig’s essay yesterday, it has been a whipsaw journey.
“Twombly reviewing his photographs at Schirmer/Mosel’s office”, Munich, 2010 Courtesy Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio, photo by Nicola Del Roscio via cytwombly.org
Spanish artist/art historian Carlos Peris wrote a dissertation, and a book, on Cy Twombly’s use of photographs as a core part of his creative process. Here is a quote from a conversation he had with poet Dean Rader at the Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio in the summer of 2024:
[…] there are some photographs from the archive that show Twombly with all the Polaroids arranged on a table. So he used to play games like memory games with them and stacking them and reorganizing them, like for more focused to less focused on, from more specific content to a more abstract one. And all this kind of games played with this kind of card game or tarot card or something like that, so this kind of trying to recall or to go back, it’s a kind of souvenir. Of course. Yeah. These photographs, what they did was to take these specific moments, so he could come back to them and think again about them and feel them again. And I think that happens all the time with his paintings. As you said before, you feel when Twombly is making that scribble, making that gesture of that paint or over the materials having there. So that motion, I think with photographs he was trying to reconnect with that moment, with that state of mind, with that specific moment.
That includes two additional documentary shorts by Andrea Bettinetti, the director of Cy Dear. One is about a 2023 exhibition, Cy Twombly, A Journey to Morocco, 1952-53, and the other is a making of video of Un/Veiled, an exhibition and events program staged at the Fondazione Nicola del Roscio in Rome in 2022 and 2024. The whole thing is under the umbrella ofIn Perspective, which focuses on other artists, poets, musicians, etc., who have been influenced or inspired by Twombly’s work.
The conversation between Peris and Rader, whose focus is on the relationship between seeing and reading, image and text, went up a couple of weeks ago. Peris’s book, meanwhile, From State of Mind to the Tangible: The Photograpic Cosmos of Cy Twombly, has been around since 2022. I will probably write more about it when it arrives.
[after the book arrived update: I will not. It’s nice, but Peris’s text is more poetic than revelatory. The important idea that Twombly used photos as tools for revisiting details or atmospheres remains to be expanded upon. Also, they reproduce Twombly’s Polaroids at like 80% scale, when it would have been just as easy and more impactful to print them full-scale.]
There are apparently more than 5,000 Polaroids in the Archive. Did Twombly take all of them? Did he point and Del Roscio shoot? Is one question that occurs to me about Twombly’s process. But more interesting rn is the trajectory of a moment: the making of a mark, the making of an instant photo print of it, the sorting and accumulation of photos, and the revisiting and re-experiencing of moments.
It makes me think of three inapposite things at once: Andy Warhol making Polaroids and turning some of them into paintings. Willem de Kooning painting atop projections of details and gestures from earlier paintings. And Cady Noland making Polaroids of “non-existent” works. In the painters’ cases, the artist uses a record of a moment, whether an image or a mark, to fix it in paint. Instantaneity is not just a tool, but a subject. But Warhol only did that with a tiny fraction of the Polaroids he took. The rest of those moments, Like Noland’s sculptures, are long gone.
Matt Johnson, Sleeping Figure, 2023, installed at Marfa Invitational, photo by bsky/Stacey Burns
The only thing I’ll say about Desert X is Jamal Khashoggi. But since Matt Johnson installed Sleeping Figure (2023) at Marfa International Foundation‘s sculpture ranch, I think it’s now OK to say it is an absolute banger.
That’s what crossed my mind this morning when I checked into Bluesky and saw Stacey Burns’ photo of the new year’s first sunrise landing on the dozen decommissioned shipping containers.
And what’s this? Under the clear Texas light of the cloudless day we can see that someone has painted a sleepy face on the head/container. I guess because it’s a figure, and it’s sleeping? Did a convoy of literalists just cross the border? Did they paint “Not actually a store” on the front of Prada Marfa?
screenshot from Part 5 of Logistics (2012), on YouTube
Logistics (2012) is a 37-day-long film by Erika Magnussen and Daniel Andersson that tracks in real time the route of a cheap, electronic pedometer from its warehouse in central Sweden back to its factory in Shenzhen. While it does answer the question of where the stuff in our world comes from, it is primarily concerned with how it gets to us, via truck, train, ports, and most of all, container ships.
Logistics first screened in Uppsala in 2012 and has streamed on various platforms, but since Spring 2024, it has been available on YouTube in 107 8-hour segments. It feels right at home.
President Jimmy Carter’s 1977 statement to the cosmos, above, was encoded as an image, like a photostat, on the Golden Record attached to the Voyager space probes. A similar statement image was included from Kurt Waldheim, then secretary general of the United Nations.
For whatever reason, neither image is included in the lists of 115 or 116 images that Carl Sagan and his committee selected for the Golden Record. According to Wikipedia, these are the 117th and 118th images on the record.
This Voyager spacecraft was constructed by the United States of America. We are a community of 240 million human beings among the more than 4 billion who inhabit the planet Earth. We human beings are still divided into nation states, but these states are rapidly becoming a single global civilization.
We cast this message into the cosmos. It is likely to survive a billion years into our future, when our civilization is profoundly altered and the surface of the Earth may be vastly changed. Of the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, some–perhaps many–may have inhabited planets and spacefaring civilizations. If one such civilization intercepts Voyager and can understand these recorded contents, here is our message:
This is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination, and our good will in a vast and awesome universe.
The groundbreaking for the Yoshio Taniguchi addition to The Museum of Modern Art took place in May 2001 under a tent in the demolished Sculpture Garden, which had been repurposed as a staging area. I was sitting on the outer edge of the first bay of seats, stage right, and Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s security detail was standing behind me, on the aisle, while he was on the low dais with everyone. Architect Yoshio Taniguchi was on the far side of the arc of trustees and dignitaries. There were silver MoMA Builds hardhats and shovels for everyone, arranged in rows on edge of the dais next to the dirtbox.
David Rockefeller and Rudy Giuliani ceremonially breaking ground for MoMA’s renovation in May 2001. Architect Yoshio Taniguchi talks with Agnes Gund in the background, image: bizbash
When it came time to do the ceremonial groundbreaking, there was some not completely scripted bustling around, as everyone got their hardhats on, and when someone tried to hand a hardhat to the mayor, his security guards sprung forward and hissed to each other intensely: “Oh shit, not the hat, not the hat.” because Giuliani was still in his combover era. He ended up not wearing a hardhat.
After the photo-opp broke up and the mayor left, gladhanding and milling about began, and I grabbed one of the unclaimed hardhats from Taniguchi’s end of the dais. [A shovel seemed a bit much.]
Gothamist‘s November 2004 photo of the inaugural installation of the atrium, with Barnett Newman’s Broken Obelisk looking great, and Monet’s Water Lilies looking flat af
The dedication of the Taniguchi addition took place in November 2004 in the Marron Atrium. I brought the hardhat in my eight month-old daughter’s stroller. As the event was breaking up, I took her to meet the Taniguchis, and presented the hardhat to him to sign, which he graciously did. I’ll post a pic of it when I can.
This was originally called the Matisse Stairwell. My 2004 copy of this Timothy Hursley photo is 250 pixels wide.
The stairway with the window on the atrium; the separate window onto the atrium that gathers dust beautifully; the windows onto the city; the restored entrance of Goodwin & Stone’s building; the porches on the Garden; and the corner where he resolved Cesar Pelli’s otherwise unrooted tower in the lobby and the Garden, are my favorite elements of Taniguchi’s design. They’re all moments where Taniguchi sought to integrate his space and structure with its context and history.
The galleries have always been fine for me; I think I was cured of misplaced nostalgia for the Pelli-era or earlier galleries by a conversation with Terry Riley, where he relayed a conversation with Taniguchi. After the finalists had been selected, Riley suggested to Taniguchi that he reconsider his more reverential approach to the existing galleries. He showed plans of the evolving museum, and how the galleries echoed the dimensions and plans of the rowhouses that had been demolished with each expansion. This constraint was long gone, Riley showed, and the new building could—and should—take its program from the art and the curators who would use it. I remember thinking this was profound and correct. But over time, I’ve also come to recognize that those phantom townhouses didn’t just impact the floorplan, but the kinesthetic experience of viewing art in the spaces they influenced. MoMA’s galleries felt a certain way, and that has changed as the building and the institution evolved.
Taniguchi and Serra and St Thomas Church, 2005
Taniguchi delivered beautifully on what he was asked to do, opening up the museum to the city as a spectacular stage for the likes of Richard Serra and Marina Abramovic. It set the stage for what followed, too: the real estate maxxing, the Nouvel supertower, and Diller + Scofidio turning the townhouse-sized Folk Art Museum into a void. [No bronze tables yet, though.] I wonder how often Taniguchi visited.
Painting is not photography, so the date of 1930-40 for a painting that includes a reference to a broadway show that only ran in 1925 is plausible, given other evidence. Merry Christmas and Happy Hannukah.
Cy Twombly, Untitled, 1961, pen on note paper, 9 x 6 1/4 in., sold and then deleted from Artcurial
Maybe you’re different, but I confess, I never imagined Cy Twombly making sketches. Like his marks, or his line, which Barthes described as “without goal, without model, without telos,” his compositions always feel like they just happened, products of the moment of their execution.
Cy Twombly, Study for School of Athens (R0me), 1960, photo John Etter via Hauser & Wirth
He called some works studies, of course, but those always seemed like iterations, or versions, which were things he made a lot of. Hauser & Wirth brought one to Basel a few years back, and it very much feels like a version.
He also worked in series, groups, and it’s impossible not to imagine he mapped those out ahead of time, or at least planned them in some way.
Cy Twombly, Untitled, 1961, pen on note paper, 9 x 6 1/4 in., sold and then deleted from Artcurial
But here are five what look like preparatory sketches on two sheets of little notebook paper. They are from 1961 and belonged to Robert William Burke, a dealer in Paris whose books from Twombly were inscribed to “Willie.” On the back of these sheets, though, Twombly dedicated them to “My K… 2” and “My K… 3,” and honestly, “Who is K?” is a less urgent question right now than, “So that means there’s also a 1?”
Actually, the real question is what these actually are. I don’t have Twombly’s complete oeuvre handy to see if these relate to some specific c. 1960-63 works, but I can’t find any that map to the narrative. And to the map. There is geography and place—landscape—in these sketches, with Mount Olympus towering over all. The last one looks like Mordor. It’s the one Burke apparently kept in the foyer.
Robert William Burke installation view, via Artcurial
There is also time, sequence: that top one literally goes left to right, start to end, with battles and places in between.
That Twombly planned, or worked out, or imagined, such traditional compositional structures for his paintings feels almost as anachronistic and radical as his antique, classical, and poetic references. Even if they get buried by his marks and signs, or even if they just remain in his head, or his eye.
