Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, Dec. 1937, pochoir on collotype with stamp, 13 7/8 x 7 7/8 in. including the signed stamp, which is absolutely part of the work, not a margin, via Christie’s
Warhol bought this 1937 print edition of Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 from Duchamp’s estate, and in 2000, someone bought it from Warhol’s foundation. Now they’re selling it.
Duchamp began with Nude Descending a Staircase to make hand-colored prints of his earlier paintings for inclusion in the retrospective album project he was working on, which became la Bôite-en-Valise. It’s not clear how many loosies like this he made, but I expect Warhol only bought the one.
@chrissantamaria just posted this 1991 work, Santa Fe Cloud, which is at Jonathan Novak in Los Angeles. Artsy lists just one dimension for the work, 15 5/8 x 16 5/8 inches, but that turns out to be the fat shoplifter prevention frame. The painting itself is only 9 1/8 x 10 1/4 inches.
What other clouds or tiny landscapes did he make? Who knows? The cakes crowded so much out for so long, I feel like surprise is going to be the default setting for Thiebaud for a while.
Well, almost all. I was highkey surprised that David Hammons’ African American Flag (1990) was A) in the collection, and B) not being sold with everything else. But reading Peter Simon’s quote above, I guess he just couldn’t bear to part with it.
Glenn Ligon, Condition Report, 2000, screenprint on iris print, sheet: 31 7/8 x 21 5/8, the Bon à tirer for the edition of 20, plus one AP [plus 6 more AP and 2PP -g.o], selling at Christie’s London 20 Oct 2026
A while back I tried to track down all the editions of one of Glenn Ligon’s greatest prints—one of his greatest works to date—the 2000 diptych, Condition Report. It really felt like they were all in museums or otherwise as unobtainable as the 1988 painting they’re based on, Untitled (I Am A Man), Ligon’s first text painting, which is in the National Gallery.
This is the Bon à tirer, the proof that got the final approval to print the edition. Which is wild because Christie’s says the only declared proof was one AP. But there were actually 7 APs, and 2 printer’s proofs, in addition to the 20. Besides that anomaly, there is no indication of how it came to be owned by British clothing company founder Peter Simon. But this point, I think it’s best to just buy it, and sort out the details later, when it’s in your hot little hands.
2005 replica of The Golden Plates made by Stephen Pratt for the 200th anniversary of Joseph Smith’s birth, photographed at the LDS Museum of Church History and Art, via wikipedia
The news that a vast nuclear-powered AI data center being proposed for 9,000 acres of public land in eastern Utah comes cloaked in Mormon language feels like the latter days. In June, Project Beehive debuted a small test version of its modular nuclear reactor, which it calls Ward 250. The flaky startup behind Project Beehive has applied to build 456 wards, producing 9.6 gigawatts of electricity, equivalent to the peak summer electrical capacity of the entire state. This semantic strategy serves to ease public perception of the proposal, and to lowkey blunt public criticism. It’s the localized cultural equivalent of Meta introducing its AI surveillance tool with a kawaii mascot, backed by Palmer Luckey and Palantir’s CTO.
Expo ’74 Mormon Pavilion architectural model postcard, scan via visitexpo74
When @peterhuestis joked about the reactors’ containment structure being the Golden Plates, though, I had an epiphany, if not a straight up vision. Now I want everything built in Utah, from the grifter nuclear reactor farms and grifter data centers, from the stripmalls and dirty soda drive-thrus, to my mid-mountain ski house in Alta, to honor the state’s Mormon vernacular architectural heritage by being shaped like the Golden Plates.
Sol LeWitt, From the Upper Left and Right Corners Toward the Center of the Page. R 324, 3/29/1975, torn orange paper, 50 x 50 cm, via NativeSol LeWitt, From the Midpoint of the Left and a Point Halfway Between the Mid Point of the Left Side and Upper Left Corner Towards the Center of the Page. R327, 3/29/1975, torn orange paper, 50 x 50 cm, via NativeSol LeWitt, From the Midpoint of the Left and Right Sides Toward the Center of the Page. R329, 3/29/1975, torn orange paper, 50 x 50 cm, via Native
I’m not sure who’s going harder here: Sol LeWitt for his 1975 show of serially torn orange paper in the House of Orange’s own backyard in Amsterdam; Art and Project, the gallery which had been a fiery nexus of conceptual art for decades, and whose gallery exhibitions were complemented by the Art and Project Bulletin, a groundbreaking publication that became its own art and exhibition platform; Robert and Suzanne Pannier, the Belgian collectors who spent decades in the relentless pursuit of domestically scaled conceptual perfection.
The tears on the Panniers’ LeWitts look almost like creases, and the verso shows no tears at all, only a second title and signature. So LeWitt mounted them. One tear on the MoMA work actually looks like a tear, though, and seems to reveal a backing board tinted orange. On all of them, LeWitt’s pencil crosshairs mark the center of the sheet, the unreached target of every tear.
The Panniers’ LeWitts are being sold at Native in Brussels next month, and honestly, if you buy more than zero but less than all three, what are you even doing? Better to stay out of someone more serious’s way.
New Openings Against Old Surfaces focuses on Matta-Clark’s artist book practice, and its emergence from the 1972 exhibition at 112 Greene St where Walls Paper first incarnations appeared. Matta-Clark first showed his photos of exposed interior walls on newsprint, “in long newsprint strips from ceiling to floor, and a version offered in tall stacks that one could freely take and hang at home.” The sliced book version followed in 1973.
WYD, Marblehead Pottery glaze deep as the midnight sky? Earthenware bookends, 5 1/2 x 5 1/2 x 2 3/4 in., selling tomorrow at Toomey & Co.
Until five minutes ago I had too many bookends in my life, and suddenly I don’t have enough. I need a pair of 100-yo Marblehead Pottery Egyptian Revival bookends with seated scribes covered in a thick, deep blue glaze. My budget is $200.
After already selling off their collection of modernist houses filled with iconic design and postwar art, Gabrielle and Michael Boyd are now liquidating their vast art, architecture & design library.
Richard Prince, orphaned screenprint from Human Nature (dub version), 2001, 24 x 17 cm, signed but unnumbered ed. 250, being sold by the Boyds at Wright20
a beautiful example of the non-deluxe version of Richard Prince & Glenn O’Brien’s Human Nature (dub version), 2001, ed. 750, with an inscription by O’Brien, at Nick Harvill Libraries
Screenshot of Marian Goodman Gallery’s IG post of Night Seascape, a felt banner made in 1966 in an edition of 20 + 2 AP by The Betsy Ross Flag & Banner Company, which is on view at Independent 20th Century.
At the Independent this weekend, David Platzker’s Specific Objects and Marian Goodman Gallery are showing a selection of artist banners from the Betsy Ross Flag & Banner Company. Additional banners are at the gallery in Tribeca, and there’s also a print publication where Platzker pulls together the history of the artist banner project, from a Madison Avenue art gallery’s attempt to advertise shows during the city’s newspaper strike in 1963; to an immediately successful traveling exhibition organized with the American Federation of Arts; to the founding of Multiples, Inc. to publish artist editions in non-banner formats; and eventually to Marian Goodman founding her own gallery.
Roy Lichtenstein’s Night Seascape (1966) [above] is from Betsy Ross’s breakthrough era, when artists were creating works specifically for the banner medium.
Andy Warhol, Pat for First Lady, 1963, 7 x 5 1/2 feet, nylon, image via the AFA Papers at AAA
Platzker documents 95 banners made over a decade, but one of his most remarkable finds is from the beginning, the Betsy Ross debut show at Graham Gallery in June 1963. It is a 7-foot banner by Andy Warhol, a 5.5-foot wide screenprint on nylon of a 1960 Richard Nixon presidential campaign button with Nixon’s wife Pat, and it was completely unknown and undocumented in Warhol’s oeuvre.
Pat for First Lady 1960 campaign button, 3 1/2 in. diameter, via LBJstore, h/t David Platzker
Nixon’s campaign organized a whole Pat for First Lady Week in October 1960. Platzker notes that “Nixon, having lost to Kennedy and then to Pat Brown in the 1962 California gubernatorial election, had recently moved to the Upper East Side,” started work as a corporate lawyer, and told the press, “he was never going to run for political office again.” So in the midst of Camelot, just months after Jackie had enlisted Mark Rothko and Franz Kline to help bring the Mona Lisa to the Met, Warhol was making a giant reminder of what might have been. And the Nixons might have seen it.
After the Graham Gallery, the AFA sent the show, Banners USA, on a two-year national tour. On November 22, 1963, it was on view at East Tennessee State University, its second of fourteen stops.
Traffic stopped where it should flow, and got absolutely jammed on the diverted sidestreets where it should have trickled, and I assumed Xi Jinping was on the move to or from the Chinese Embassy, which is in the neighborhood.
Just the opposite. I went down the street to see, and it was a huge protest march for Tibet, larger than I’ve seen in years. So I stood to watch. Then this guy walks by with this rad beanie, and so I wade in, and ask him where to get one, and he’s like, “you want this hat?”
And I’m all, “One like this?”
And he goes, “Have this one!”
And I’m like, “Really? Thanks!”
Free as in Tibet: a Free Tibet hat a Tibetan rights marcher just gave me
So I stood there with my new FREE TIBET beanie, smiling back at the marchers, and then I see a couple of other guys with the hat, and so I wade in and ask them where it came from, and they’re like, “My friend just gave it to me.”
So I still don’t know. I see some online, discontinued products on the Amazon archipelago. Some variations are a little more sophisticated, double-sided, or with the red and blue radiating out to better match the flag.
Superflex, Free Beer/Brewing Kit, 2005, installation at Centre d’Art Contemporaine in Geneva in 2007 by Francis Ware via superflex
So maybe this is just a Free Tibet hat that circulates among friends of Tibet, a free Tibet hat. In any case, I will add it to the greg.org Free TibetTextile Collection.
Uniqlo, you know my email conversion rate, and I’m literally inside your linen shirt right now. And The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc., I will always be grateful for that AWP award that one time. So know that I am coming from a place of love when I say, “‘ANDY WARHOL TRANSFORMATION Discover the collection that traces the sources of Warhol’s inspiration by exploring the everyday images that inspired his iconic works.’ WTF?”
Did you forget to ask Elaine?
And the image is a workup of the screen from Modern Photography editor Patricia Caulfield’s magazine spread of hibiscus photos, which she successfully sued you for using?
And on the collection banner is one of the self-portraits made with the same photobooth picture as the Red Self Portrait Bruno B that Warhol put on the cover of Rainer Crone’s 1972 catalogue raisonné, the lawsuit over the deauthentication of which led to the dissolution of the Andy Warhol Authentication Board?
How could you put this Warhol Greatest IP Lawyer-trolling Hits collection together and not include the cover of Vanity Fair’s special commemorative issue, The Genius of Prince?
Robert Gober, Plywood, 1987, 94 3/4 x 47 x 5/8 in., verso, via Christie’s
I saw this Robert Gober Plywood at Boesky in 1998, and it blew my Gober sink- and crib- and leg-addled mind. Now it’s for sale.
Gober was already fluent in sinks and beds by 1987 and was seeking to try to make, he said, an abstract sculpture. “What I ended up making is an extremely realistic sculpture of a more or less abstract object.”
The faces are indeed realistic, the kind of rough veneer used to manufacture plywood. Gober got Peter Ballantine’s help to get a minimum order of veneer—one flatbed truckful—from a mill in Oregon. Yet he did not make a truckful of sculptures from it, just two.
In addition to the artisanal dimensions, the Goberian handcrafted moment here is the edges, which are built up from 1/8-inch strips like marquetry to resemble the internal plys of manufactured wood, and to hide the particleboard core within.
Robert Gober, Plywood, 1987, 94 3/4 x 47 x 5/8 in., verso, via Christie’s
I tried to zoom in on Christie’s photo to show the detail of the edges, and it dissolved into what looked like CG or a Sylvia Plimack Mangold, keeping the abstract/realist tension alive.
I love that he signed the very ↑TOP↑ edge. It goes on view—presumably, face out—on Friday, the 25th, for a week.
[this weekend update] thanks to greg.org hero Ian for sending this photo of the handmade edge of Gober’s Plywood. This is the good stuff:
