Little Plume (R) and his son Yellow Kidney (L), in their lodge with an analog clock, 1911. Curtis removed the clock from published versions of the photo. via wikimedia
The general contours of Edward S. Curtis’s decades-long struggle to produce his 20-volume photographic epic, The North American Indian, are not the issue, though much of the details hit differently now than they did when I was a dewy-eyed child. This 2012 Smithsonian article does a fine job of laying out the top-line WTFs, like destroying his glass negatives to keep his wife from getting them in the divorce. And selling his $75,000 Kwakiutl restaged documentary to the American Museum of Natural History for $1,000 during WWI.
But what I was not prepared for Curtis’s Hollywood era.
In 1920, a broke 52-yo Curtis moved to Los Angeles, where he shot celebrity portraits, and took promotional film stills for his friend Cecil B. de Mille. Here is a hand-colored portrait of Anna May Wong, which sold at Christie’s in 2002.
I don’t know who that Barry Diller-looking guy is blocking him, but Charles DeRoche, who played Rameses, clearly did not have final edit on this photo. Also DeMille and Theodore Roberts as Moses. photo: Edward S. Curtis, via CHS
This is the only one that has the filmmaker in it; the rest are all posed or captured moments of the world of the film. But this one, too, of course, feels staged.
Curtis may have dismissed his commercial and commissioned work, but it still embodies his process, techniques, and aesthetic choices. Curtis has been criticized for his staging and manipulation of his North American Indian images, for the romanticization and exoticizing of his subjects, and for ignoring the active oppression and cultural violence Indigenous people were experiencing throughout his project.
The Hollywood work feels like a perfect lens for recognizing what’s going on in photographs, Curtis’s or otherwise.
I’m kind of pressed atm, and have never been happier to ignore Art Basel Miami Beach. When Chris Rusak sent along this photo, and wondered about the Clyfford Still-ish paintings in the background, though, I had to stop for just a moment, and think. And feel. And ache.
Because from the label, we learn that Koen van den Broek conceived this project “as a tribute to David Anfam (1955-2024), the renowned American art historian and authority on Abstract Expressionism. Through his work, van den Broek explores the visual, spiritual, and art-historical resonances between Vincent van Gogh and Clyfford Still—an intellectual and aesthetic dialogue that Anfam consistently foregrounded in his curatorial practice.”
And Gallery Baton brings them all the way to Miami only to end up—but no. Actually, no. A 10-meter wide suite of four 2.8m tall, Skittles-colored abstractions generically titled Season A through Season D, that reference two art historical giants while assiduously ignoring the resonances the memorialized scholar actually laid out, are actually the perfect backdrop for a CNBC Inside Wealth report on Beeple’s corral of oligarch-headed, NFT-shitting, murder robot dogs.
JP Morgan Chase just announced another $4 billion headquarters in London, Koen, hope you get that bag.
Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing, exhibition catalogue cover, via Artists Space
Today is World AIDS Day.
In 1989 the National Endowment for the Arts canceled a grant for an exhibition at Artists Space of artists responding to the AIDS crisis. Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing was organized by Nan Goldin, and the catalogue contained essays by Goldin, Linda Yablonsky, Cookie Mueller, and David Wojnarowicz. The Wojnarowicz essay’s political, non-artistic content, was the initial stated reason for the cancellation of the grant.
Artists Space has an extensive archive of the show, including the entire catalogue, and reporting and documentation of the NEA censorship scandal that engulfed it. David Wojnarowicz’s published statement about the grant cancellation is read here by a computer-generated voice.
Isa Genzken, Weltempfänger, 1987, concrete 16,5 x 24 x 4,7 cm, with a new antenna, ed. 8/18, selling at Lempertz in Köln on 5 Dec 2025
Every Weltempfänger is unique, but some are less unique than others. In 1987, pretty early into her World Receiver project, Isa Genzken made an edition of 18 these shortwave radio-shaped sculptures of cast concrete & antennae. They’re identical in shape, presumably made from the same mold, and so are distinct in their individual surface finish.
Isa Genzken Weltempfänger, 1987, installation view at Musix, Köln, via Galerie Buchholz
They’re also always described as registered in the Genzken Archive at Galerie Buchholz, so they’re confusing, but not shady. Could this Weltempfänger edition be related to something else Genzken was up to in 1987? Like, maybe her first show with Buchholz? Titled Weltempfänger? In late 1987 Genzken installed a now-iconic table full of various Weltempfängerin the window of Musix GmbH, a music supply store down the street from Buchholz’s gallery in Köln. Maybe this edition, like the tablescape, was an early experiment in how best to send Weltempfänger out into the world.
[ACTUALLY ASKED UPDATE] Never mind. Thanks to Galerie Buchholz for confirming Genzken did indeed make the edition for the Kunstverein. The brochure also notes Genzken’s participation in the 1987 Skulptur Projekte Münster.]
Richard Serra, Untitled, 1971, crayon on paper, 11 1/4 x 10 in. sheet, bought by the Landys at Swann, being sold by the Landys at Rago
Is it a vortex? A bouquet?
I wish Kathy or Doug Landy had shared some insight from their 20 years of living with this wild little Richard Serra drawing. It’s signed on the back; it came from Salander O’Reilly, and it’s been publicly sold before. Yet this seems to be the first time the Richard Serra studio, at least, has heard of it.
10 Dec 2025, Lot 121, Richard Serra, Untitled/Linear Composition [sic], 1971, est. $3-5,000 [ragoarts]
Photograph after Glenn Ligon (Double America, 2012, 36 x 120 in.), 2016, Diasec flush-mounted, 44 x 129 in. sold from the Estate of Chara Schreyer in 2023. Were the power cables photoshopped out, or did Schreyer have them hidden in the wall?
I couple of weeks ago I got a report of a Wade Guyton in a sick crate at Matthew Marks. Seemingly cast metal, heavy-looking as hell, they seemed to sculptural—and, again, heavy—to be just actual crates.
Anyway, about 42:00 in, after an extensive conversation about these bronze and aluminum cast tube sculptures Guyton is showing at Francesca Pia in Zurich—yikes, showed, in what turns out to be Pia’s final show—HUO suggested Wade might be open to even more sculpture, which led to the crates, which are, in fact, frames.
Guyton always hated giving suggestions for framing his canvas works, while acceding to the necessity to protect them. And because they always looked great in the crate, he made frames by having travel crates disassembled, cast, and then welded back together.
“Because” is doing a lot in that sentence, mostly misleading. Because there is absolutely no logical, causal flow from “looks great in the crate” to “cast meticulous, bespoke crates from aluminum.” That is entirely artist logic. And it’s absolutely perfect.
For two whole years, it really seemed like the only way to show a Guyton was on a sweat shop clothing rack. Suddenly it feels weird if you don’t have it in one of these hulking crate frames. Wade first showed the crate/frames last winter in Gisela Capitan’s little storefront space in Cologne, but maybe Marks will be supplying them, now, too, just in time for Christmas.
People are afraid to even Swiffer their Cady Nolands now: Four In One Sculpture, 1998, ed. 5 of 20, was just sold, dirt and all, for $35,560 at Sotheby’s
When Ian saw Cady Noland’s1998 edition installed in the old Sarabeth’s space on Madison Avenue last week, he realized it was [also?] a text work. It has at least seventeen As, with perhaps some spares:
Meanwhile,
the bidding on this was so weird; it seemed like it suddenly flipped to no reserve, then a $4,000 bid was withdrawn, and for a brief moment until it got back on track, I did wonder if I’d get it for one crisp dollar.
I still have to see Richard Prince’s current show at Gagosian, and from the pre-press, I thought I’d be more interested in the sculptures. But looking through the works online, a couple of good-looking paintings reminded me of his hippie drawing paintings, which are works I regularly dig. And a couple, like Untitled (Folk Songs) above, from 2022, remind me—very unexpectedly—of Jasper Johns. And those are two streams I somehow never imagined would cross on this blog.
But maybe the surprise is from the Johns side. Just the other day @digitaldetritus posted an important but underappreciated [by me, anyway] Johns on tumblr: Decoy from 1971. Decoy was a painted variation of a complex series of prints, which were all part of a larger, retrospective reworking of Johns’ sculptures.
NGL, it was the heavily processed mechanical images of the sculptures that first made the connection. But then it was seeing the connective tissue of messy, even aggressively messy brushstrokes extend across both paintings. Prince talks a lot about de Kooning and Picasso, and there are interesting Guston shoutouts in other paintings in the show. But it was less this kind of throwback reference or direct engagement than the realization that some of Johns’s painting rhymed, or reverberated, with what Prince was doing.
In retrospect maybe it was obvious that the mindblowing work of an artist who challenged so many expectations of what art could be ends up so invested in defining what it’s not.
In the beginning was the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Catalogue Raisonné, with its work works, and its two catalogue appendices: Additional Material and Registered Non-Works. These included some variations of works; some works that were shown and later declared non-works; non-works that were originally sold or given as works; and works he gave to friends that turned out to be non-works.
Then there were the photographs and snapshots given to friends, a warm sea of images Felix and his friends soaked in, and from which he drew so many of the images he used for puzzles, billboards, and other works.
There was the book, or book projects, which the artist approached as a work as he made and selected images, his collaborators reported, but which nonetheless do not make the CR.
There were the unrealized works, some of which were realized posthumously.
Then there were the exhibition copies, which are not stacks or candy spills, or billboards, non-persistent, certificate- and ownership-based works whose temporary realizations are called manifestations. Exhibition copies are copies outside an edition, of puzzles, for starters, which turned up among the complete set of puzzles first presented for sale at Basel, and then shown at the National Portrait Gallery.
Speaking of which, there were also the exhibition copies of snapshots, which were not works to begin with, and which were a surprise, frankly. But if the Smithsonian wanted to borrow the light string Christmas cards Felix sent me, I’d look for a workaround, too.
Archival Material Associated with Felix Gonzalez-Torres Project for the Cover of The Paris Review, Fall 1991, sold at Sotheby’s from the collection of William Georgis and Richard Marshall
To all this is [now?] [also?] added Archival Material. So far, one example has come to public/market attention, and if it were any other artist, it’d be tempting to call it a study or a drawing. In March 2024 Bill Georgis sold the collection he and longtime Whitney curator Richard D. Marshall had accumulated over their many years together. It included numerous works artists made or gave Marshall to be used for the cover of The Paris Review, a side hustle Marshall had from 1975 until around 1990.
images of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ covers for The Paris Review No. 120, Fall 1991, with, and I quote: Untitled (Perfect Lovers), 1988 and Untitled (Dolphin Halos), 1990. Unquote. THE DOLPHINS ARE HALOS
Though the cover Felix designed was for the Fall 1991 issue. As the signed note indicates, Felix had an idea for a portfolio for the magazine, but was content with just the cover—clocks on the front, dolphins on the back. The color sample is from Duron paint [not Pantone], and based on vintage issues I’ve seen online, the ink faded pretty dramatically.
It seems worth noting that though the drawing is signed, Sotheby’s does not attribute it to Felix, just describing it as “Archival Material associated with Felix” &c. &c. Two objects Christopher Wool made for Marshall for the cover of the 1989Whitney Biennial are also labeled as “archival material,” but Sotheby’s at least lists Wool as their maker.
All three archival material lots sold, and both the Felix and the best Wool sold for more than 4x their estimates. Whether it complicates ownership as a defining feature of Felix’s works, the market seems ready to handle these objects.
How they enter into the larger discussion of the artist’s work and what they reveal about his practice remain unclear. Finding out how audiences might respond to Archival Material would probably involve them turning up more or less at random, and somewhere besides an estate auction.
[Mail Call Update] I knew that Felix had not contributed any content for the interior of The Paris Review. I did not realize an illustration of a Donald Moffett work accompanied the table of contents. Glory, 1991, does not appear elsewhere online, though a similar bowling ball with a single, similarly sized hole, Untitled (You You You), 1990, is in the collection of the Walker Art Center, a 2015 gift of Eileen & Michael Cohen (the first owners of “Untitled” (Leaves of Grass).)
Felix’s works, meanwhile, are captioned as Untitled (Perfect Lovers), 1988, without the quote marks around “Untitled”, or the work’s more expanded date range (1987-90); and Untitled (Dolphin Halos), 1990. Besides being the only mention I can find describing the dolphin ring motif as a halo, this double dolphin halo [!] design corresponds to no other work, non-work, or published additional material. Perhaps there is a new category of lost works, or lost non-works, remaining to be explored?
There was this Tom Friedman drawing on a pedestal at Feature that was a forest of amputated daddy longleg legs.
A Sarah Sze sculpture with Tic-Tacs hot-glued to cantilevered packs of gum and boxes of French matches.
“Untitled”, 1990, embossed paper in archival box, 8 x 14 x 14 in., ed 12+5AP, image: Brandon Wickencamp/Andrea Rosen Gallery via FG-T Fndn, not the example being sold at Bonhams tho
And a Felix Gonzalez-Torres paper stack where you’re not only not supposed to take the paper, but you’re supposed to keep it eight inches high. Also, it’s not printed with a dolphin motif, but embossed, so it’s irreplenishable.
These are artworks I love that give me conservation nightmares.
Hmm, doesn’t that stack look like a little raggedy? You better keep it straight. Wait, are all those sheets at the bottom getting compressed unevenly, putting the embossment at risk of getting smushed away? Do they need to be rotated without being overhandled? Or perhaps interlaced with archival protector sheets? I’m getting anxious just looking at it.
Godspeed all seventeen of you paper conservation maniacs.
Jenny Holzer, THE FUTURE IS STUPID panty hose, 1993, for the AmFAR X Barneys Art Object collection, via WrongAnswer.ca
Geoff Snack posted this unopened pair of Jenny Holzer panty hose to WrongAnswer this morning, and now they’re gone. Of all the artist-designed clothing editions in the 1993 AmFAR Art Object collaboration with Barneys, I think the Jenny Holzer panty hose are the most vulnerable.
Richard Prince, joke shirt, ed. 150, 1993, embroidery on cotton, Art Object for AmFAR & Barney’s [sold] via Bengtsson Fine Arts
Kenny Scharf has the Art Object print ad [pdf] listing all 19 artist collabs, and honestly Prada making a JSG Boggs backpack is an even wilder combo than Frette making Scharf’s napkins. What a world. [see below]
[NEXT MORNING UPDATE] So a pair sold on eBay YESTERDAY. There were Jenny Holzer panty hose at Printed Matter. I mentioned them to a friend just now, and he was all, “Hah, yeah, I remember them from Barneys. AmFAR. I had some and sold them.” So while until yesterday I thought I’d been living in a world oblivious to Jenny Holzer AIDS fundraiser panty hose, I was actually living in a world where everyone around me knew about Jenny Holzer panty hose AND DIDN’T TELL ME.
The other day @octavio-world posted this startlingly spare etching by Boucher, which is a set of words that very much did not compute for me.
Part of what struck me was the frame, not just outlined, but incorporated into the composition, the ropes on the swing attaching or extending perhaps? as she hangs in this empty space.
From the Internet Archive, I learned the print is at the Cleveland Museum of Art, a 1927 gift of The Print Club of Cleveland. But when I tried to find other examples of the etching around, I kept coming up empty. From The Metropolitan Museum’s history of 18th century etchings, I learned that it was made after a c. 1715 sketch by Jean Antoine Watteau. The Met’s book has a brief analysis of the changes Boucher made to translate a small chalk drawing into ink.
When Watteau died in 1721, one of his greatest collectors and friends, Jean de Jullienne, enlisted Boucher, then just 19, and several other artists to make a monumental catalogue of Watteau’s work, including the hundreds of sketches Jullienne and others had amassed.
Boucher’s Watteau etchings, pl 259 & 260, in vol. 2 of the Recueil Jullienne, 50.6 x 33 cm, but here turned sideways obv., digitized by INHA
Boucher ended up making over 100 of the 351 etchings in the first two volumes: L’Oeuvre d’Antoine Watteau (1726) and Figures de différents caractères, de paysages, d’études dessinées d’après nature par Antoine Watteau (1728). The Swing is plate 260 in the second volume. Together with two additional volumes of prints after paintings and ornament designs completed in 1735, the entire compendium project is known as the Recueil Jullienne. The massive set, 50cm tall, was published in an edition of 100, authenticated by Jullienne’s signature, by license of the king, who took ten copies for himself.
Hélio Oiticica. Red Monochrome, 1959. Alkyd on board, 11 3/4 × 11 3/4 × 1 1/8″, collection: MoMA
It’s the image on top of Gladstone’s email announcement and MoMA’s exhibition information page, so I assume Hélio Oiticica’s Red Monochrome is included in Less is Morbid, Arthur Jafa’s Artist’s Choice exhibition organized with Thomas Lax, which opens next week.
A spin on the Miesian maxim which drove much of The Modern’s Modernism, Jafa’s title calls out “the way art institutions valued supposedly rational cultural disciplines over forms of life—Black, queer, and feminine, for example—imagined as excessive and chaotic. In response, Jafa suggests, ‘The answer to disorder in the universe is not genocide. The answer is in how we coexist.'”
Bob Ross, An Alpine Lake Under A Pink & Blue Sky, 1981, oil on canvas, 24 x 18 in., selling at Bonhams
Granted, I’ve never looked, but I have never seen an actual Bob Ross painting for sale. I thought they were all locked up in some corporate vault. Well, there are two on the loose, and now they’re being auctioned at Bonhams. This one has that iconic palette knife mountain flanked by happy trees; the other one’s asymmetrical, and snowy, with a cabin.
Oh wow, there are actually five at Bonhams in two different sales. The two above are from a private collection. Three other paintings—twofrom Ross’s TV show, and one from a book—are being sold by the company with proceeds to benefit American Public Television.
