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Ellsworth Kelly Black Face

Ellsworth Kelly, *Found in the sand*, 1964, collage on paper, 31 x 25 cm, selling 13 Nov 2024 at Rago

The jankiness of this 1964 Ellsworth Kelly collage is surpassed only by its intricacy. And its problematics lapped them both.

It is one of [at least] two collages Kelly gave to David McCorkle, who sailed with the artist to France for the last three months of 1964. Dale McConathy, listed in the Ellsworth Kelly Foundation’s chronology as a former employee of Betty Parsons Gallery, also joined them, and wrote a catalogue essay for Kelly’s show at Galerie Maeght. [Upon his return in 1965, McConathy became an editorial assistant, and then quickly literary editor, of Harper’s Bazaar, where he published his avant-garde artist friends and French theory. James Meyer wrote of McConathy’s role in magazine/art culture and the confluence of art & fashion in 2001. I think McCorkle later tried his hand at Broadway, then in the ’70s became a caterer. In any case, in 1964 Kelly was 41, and it sounds like McCorkle and McConathy may have been 40 together.]

The primary element of both of McCorkle’s collages, for sale at Rago Arts next week, is a Sea & Ski suntan lotion ad. They could have run elsewhere, too, of course, but the one with the girl grabbing the guy’s hair, titled PAL because of another collaged element, ran in the June 19, 1964 issue of LIFE magazine. And the one above ran in the July 3 issue.

Ellsworth Kelly, *David*, the AP of the 90×60 cm lithograph published by Imprimerie Maeght in 1964-65, a 1969 gift of the artist to the Norton Simon Museum

Kelly has torn the blonde, sunglassed face of the lifeguard in the ad, and drawn another in the void, with Black features. [From the one of many portraits Kelly drew of McCorkle that Galerie Maeght published as a lithograph, we know that Black face is not McCorkle’s.] We don’t know if McCorkle had a gorilla tattoo on his shoulder, one of the tiny, almost surgically collaged elements Kelly added. [Other carefully cut elements include “David” on the patch on the lifeguard’s swimsuit, and the compound that gave the work its title, “found/ in the sand, the,” at least part of which came from a caption in the same issue of LIFE.]

pp 8-9 in the July 3, 1964 issue of LIFE, featuring Albert Murray’s essay, “‘The Problem’ Is Not Just Black and White,” and the Sea & Ski ad Ellsworth Kelly used for his young friend’s collage

“in the sand, the” puts the whole issue of LIFE in Kelly’s hand at some point, not just a tearsheet. So what was on the page facing the lifeguard? A book review about “The Problem,” aka, “The Negro Revolution,” by Albert Murray. Is that what the Black face Kelly drew is looking at? Or was it the inspiration? That feels like the most benign explanation, though it does not explain the gorilla, which does not appear in this or any contemporaneous issues of LIFE.

13 Nov 2024, Lot 145: Ellsworth Kelly, Found in the sand, 1964, est. $5-7,000 [update: sold for $6,048] [ragoarts]

Flip Your Noguchi Coffee Table

That Scott Burton article has tuned my antenna for furniture sculpture. While Burton’s own interests took him back to, among others, Brancusi, this apparently rare, pre-production marble-top table by Isamu Noguchi just dropped into my inbox.

Noguchi Coffee Table, 1945-47, shown at left in a vintage photo with the aluminum “floral well” filled, and at right by Heritage Auctions, which is selling this rare thing on 22 Nov 2024

It was introduced produced for Herman Miller between 1945-47, and introduced alongside Noguchi’s similarly scaled and more extravagantly shaped chess table in 1948. It was expensive and not a success, especially compared to Noguchi’s more famous glass-top coffee table. This table was bought from the showroom by a Marshall Fields employee, and has been in the family ever since.

Anyway, point is, Heritage Auctions’ email says, “Its perforated and tripod form relates closely to Noguchi’s work in sculpture of this period, specifically his interlocking assemblages of shaped slabs of marble, slate, and wood. Concurrently, Noguchi experimented with functional ‘sculpture-for-use’…” “Everything was sculpture,” Noguchi said of the table forms through which he experimented with abstraction alongside his non-functional sculpture in the 1940s.

Honestly, I would love nothing more than to crawl under this table with a book on the history of furniture-sculpture and not emerge until Wednesday. But there’s probably a chapter about how Noguchi met the fascist threat by getting himself locked up in a Japanese American detention center, and yet went on to design the most innovative coffee table sculptures in history.

22 Nov 2024, Lot 67030: Isamu Noguchi, Rare and Important Table, est. $700k-1m [ha.com]

David Hammons’ Free Nelson Mandela Is In Atlanta, Y’all

David Hammons, *Free Nelson Mandela*, 1987, a 2015 installation image in Piedmont Park via Google Street View

I’m getting used to not knowing every work David Hammons makes privately, which he may or may not announce until years later. But I am not dealing well with only finding out about public sculptures commissioned more than three decades ago, which turn out to still be chillin’ in the random corner of a park in Atlanta.

TBF, Free Nelson Mandela IS mentioned in the 1988 intro to Dr. Kellie Jones’ 1986 interview with Hammons, one of the rare, foundational texts on the artist and his practice. But it never occurred to me that it wasn’t just a historic occurrence.

Anyway, it is a giant boulder with a “fan-shaped display” of iron bars topped with barbed wire. When it was originally installed, the gate in the prison-like fence was padlocked shut, and the artist had purportedly buried the key under the sculpture. Probably when it was moved to its permanent location in Piedmont Park, Hammons entrusted the key to Atlanta’s politicians, who opened the gate after Mandela’s release from prison.

The sculpture’s wikipedia page doesn’t seem to have been updated since 2012, but by Mandela’s death in 2013, it had been cleared of extraneous, artist-unapproved shrubbery. The interpretation of the Smithsonian’s public sculpture inventory description has the inscription on the work’s back. Would that also have been behind or “inside” the prison fence? I don’t know. The current siting definitely makes the inscription feel like the front, though.

David Hammons, *Rock Fan*, 1993, surrounded by little protest rock fans, at Williams College

What seems more interesting is how formally resonant this sculpture is to Hammons’ other works of the time. Like, specifically, Rock Fan, the giant boulder topped with antique fans Hammons installed at Williams College in 1993, which is only the biggest of his rock- and fan-related works, if not the only politically topical one.

The full/official/original title of the work is Nelson Mandela Must Be Free to Lead His People and South Africa to Peace and Prosperity. Which, with meddlesome South Africans in the news lately, makes me wonder if Hammons would make a JAIL ELON MUSK sculpture, perhaps in a park in Pennyslvania.

Mica’s Kenneth Noland Regift

The Erteguns’ ground floor dining room with Kenneth Noland’s Mica’s and Ahmet’s Gift, 1969, above the Regency console, looking tasty but a little slight next Morris Louis’s, *Hesperides*, 1959-60 [but acquired in 1974] image via Christie’s

NGL, the 4.75-inch by 9-foot painting Kenneth Noland gave Mica & Ahmet Ertegun looked more imposing on the Christie’s site. Actually, no, it is almost comically illegible as a jpg. And actually, it looks positively sweet and domestic in their dining nook. [Their 81st St townhouses are in contract.] The commode, urns, and accoutrements are available next month in the furniture portion of Mica Ertegun’s auctions, in case you want to recreate the whole tableau. [The Morris Louis is in the evening sale.]

the left square foot of Noland’s *Mica’s and Ahmet’s Gift*, in an [unmitered?] frame, via Christie’s

Christie’s describes this as a gift of the artist “by 1992,” but of course, Noland ran with the Erteguns long before that. Maybe Noland traded the painting for Mica and Chessy Rayner decorating his apartment in 1972. Maybe there was a housewarming rehang when the Erteguns acquired the Louis in 1974. Whatever happened, it’ll be regifted soon [with a 26% buyer’s premium].

20 Nov 2024, Lot 134: Kenneth Noland, Mica’s and Ahmet’s Gift, 1969, est. $100-150,000 [update: sold for $195,300] [christies]
Previously, related: Should we throw a party? Should we invite Alexander Julian?

Scott Burton Estate Planning

a semi circular green granite bench with a matching circular green granite planter in the center filled with leafy plants was originally installed in the atrium of the equitable building in manhattan, and is photographed from above. it is by scott burton and has been dismantled, as the ny times discussed at length in an october 2024 article from whence this photo was ganked. — Scott Burton, *Atrium Furnishment*, 1986, granite, onyx, brass, plants, as installed in the atrium of the Equitable Building, 787 Seventh Avenue, NYC until 2020. photo: NYT says via Kasmin, but it was also in a 2023 exhibition and public program by Darling Green & Soft Network

Julia Halperin’s NY Times article on the precarious state of artist Scott Burton’s legacy is fascinating and somewhat exasperating. As he was dying of AIDS in 1989, the sculptor hastily made a will that left his entire estate, archive, works, and copyright, to the Museum of Modern Art. Burton’s dealer, Max Protetch and his friend and supporter Kirk Varnedoe, MoMA’s chief curator of painting & sculpture, figured it’d be the best way to preserve and promote his work. It sounds like it was a mess even when Protetch was still dealing and Varnedoe was still alive, but it has only gotten worse.

MoMA is not set up to maintain the market for Burton and his collectors, nor to rally for the preservation of his many public sculpture installations—which the museum does not own—and I don’t think they should be, frankly. [That said, even as a fan with some history, I had no idea how threatened or destroyed some of Burton’s NYC installations were.]

But it seems like the museum does have at least a financial interest, and perhaps a fiduciarily related art historical one, in supporting Burton’s reputation. [Whatever its asset holdings, MoMA appears to have only six Burton works officially accessioned into the collection. Maybe most of the remaining assets of Burton’s estate are the declared but unrealized editions of his sculptures. And maybe that’s what Kasmin Gallery’s doing in this story: angling for more posthumous edition business.]

Meanwhile, I’ve been fascinated to read art historian David Getsy’s history of Burton’s performance art practice of the 1960s and ’70s, which was in part a conceptualization of his experience in public as a queer man. That work—and that experience, Getsy argues—were influential on, even crucial for, Burton’s development of the subtle public sculpture practice he is best known for. It was that incipient queerness, in fact, which led Burton to suppress his performance work in a hostile political climate of the 1980s, so it wouldn’t thwart his public and corporate commissions.

It sounds like a little more public attention to Burton’s work and MoMA’s involvement with it will help them do what’s right.

A dying artist left his legacy to MoMA. Today he’s almost forgotten [sic] [nyt]
Previously, related: David Getsy talking about Scott Burton’s performance art
2023: Scott Burton Marble Armchair

Roni Horn And Anxiety In The Age of Digital Reproduction

Roni Horn, *Untitled (“The yes without the no.”)*, 2009-10, supposedly 18 x 36 x 36 in. glass and not a cgi rendering of glass, via Christie’s

Our collective understandings of shared reality are fraying. Archives are being erased. AI is flooding our digital commons to increasingly dire effect.

But only yesterday, I saw some Roni Horn glass sculptures. And I stood in their presence in an austere, if not quite nondescript, concrete space. I am saying I’m feeling very attuned right now. And I am almost 100% convinced that the pictures Christie’s is using here are computer-generated renderings.

And if I offered up my third party guarantee, I would still calculate a non-zero probability of taking delivery of a crate filled with 800 lbs of wet newspapers and a giclée print on top that said, “NO REFUNDS.”

This is why we need a video of a skateboarder jumping over it, please.

[UPDATE: have heard from correspondents at the showroom that the work is real, but the setting is fake. Amazing world we are living in.]

21 Nov 2024, Lot 5B: Roni Horn, Untitled (“The yes without the no.”), 1993, est.$800,000-1,200,000 [christies]
Previously, what does related even mean? Wade Guyton And Anxiety In The Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Fresson Twombly Tulips

Cy Twombly, *Tulips (iii)*, 1993, Fresson prints (6), image: 287 x 272 mm, selling at Christie’s

Remember how some of Cy Twombly’s photos were made by hand by a secretive French family who’s perfected some ludicrously complicated and luxurious wet-printing process, and the others were made by enlarging Polaroids on a color copier?

Yeah, these tulips are some of the former. Fresson Prints. Ask for them by name.

22 Nov 2024, Lot 690: Cy Twombly, Tulips (iii), 1993, est. $50-70k [christies]
Previously, related: Makin’ Copies: Cy Twombly Photos

States of Change: Bangers For Democracy

Thomas Demand, *Ballot*, 2018, open edition digital print on 12 x 10 in. paper, via statesofchange.us

A lot of bangers in the mix at States of Change, a limited-duration, open edition photo print fundraiser to support State Voices, a growing coalition of grass roots organizations around the country that work to preserve and expand voting rights in the US.

A lot of really good artists have put in some very solid work for an important cause at a critical moment. But NGL, these kind of prints are nice, but small—digitally printed on 10×12 paper—and unsigned. So a little slight in themselves. But what they are designed for is to shake $100 or more needed dollars from you. So just pick your favorites and go for it, while you can.

States of Change is open through November 4, 2024, to US citizens and legal permanent residents. [statesofchange.us]

I Am An American

To recognize that censoring Dorothea Lange’s photos of American citizens being incarcerated without charge or cause by the US government because of their race has a long history absolutely does not help when they do it again.

The Wall Street Journal reports that “[U.S Archivist, Colleen] Shogan and her top advisers told employees to remove Dorothea Lange’s photos of Japanese-American incarceration camps from a planned exhibit because the images were too negative and controversial, according to documents and current and former employees. Shogan’s aides also asked staff to eliminate references about the wartime incarceration from some educational materials, other current and former employees said.”

It’s among a whole host of controversial, conservative, and censorious demands Shogan and her team have made as part of the renovation of the National Archives Museum. Every reported change whitewashes American history with explicit conservative slants, and silences or erases non-white Americans.

Just as the racism-fueled shameful injustice of Japanese American incarceration during WWII was ordered by FDR, this cowardly censor running the Archives was appointed by Joe Biden.

[next day reactions update: via @shannonmattern.bsky.social comes Charles Pierce’s context-setting on Shogan’s pre-emptive cowardice in the face of, of all people, Josh Hawley]

Prevously, all too related:
2018: A Brief History of Blogging About America Imprisoning Children, 6/X
2011: I Am An American

Cassie Packard’s Rabkin Interview Dropped

I know it’s about writing, but I also loved listening to Cassie Packard and Mary Louise Schumacher talk about editing, and Packard’s approach to art show reviews. The story about the college kid Packard was sharing Amy Sillman’s epic 2011 essay, “Ab-Ex and Disco Balls” is also choice. But after teeing up a slew of Packard’s writing in the links I hadn’t known before, my next biggest takeaway from her Rabkin Interview is introducing me to Merve Emre’s podcast, The Critic And Her Publics, which is now filling up my queue.

Cassie Packard 2024 Rabkin Foundation Interview [rabkinfoundation.substack]

The Funeral Is Kate Zambreno’s Go-to Manet

Édouard Manet, *The Funeral*, 1867, oil on canvas, 28 5/8 x 35 5/8 in., at the Met since 1909

Someone on a social media site had quoted Kate Zambreno on her favorite Manet, in the opening pages of To Write As If Already Dead, and unfinished canvas he kept in his studio for nearly 30 years:

The Funeral (1867) is said to depict Charles Baudelaire’s funeral on September 2, 1867. The absence of a crowd could possibly be explained by others being away from Paris on holiday, or the threat of the gathering storm. Manet was one of the few mourners present. Although Baudelaire spent his last years in a nursing home in Paris, he had been estranged from the city for some time, in his penurious exile to Belgium. No longer being able to share walks with his friend in the Tuileries, Manet would write complaining about the shocking reception of his paintings in the Salon, which had previously rejected him, how he was savaged and caricatured by the press, both he and his paintings seen as stupid, abominable, ugly. Baudelaire had little patience for his friend’s bourgeois crav- ing for approval. One caustic reply, from 1865: “Do you believe you are the first man to find yourself in such a place? Have you more genius than Chateaubriand and Wagner? People mocked them quite a lot don’t you know. They did not die from it.” The painting was unfinished, only discovered in Manet’s studio after his death. I wonder how often he looked at it, and when he did, whether he still thought of his friend. Perhaps it was unfinished because there was something still unsettled, even private, for him about the canvas.

Pissarro traded his own works to Vollard for it, and his widow sold it back a few years later. It’s been at the Met since 1909.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres @ NPG

Selfie in *“Untitled” (Fear)*, 1991, blue mirror, 30 5/8 x 25 7/8 in., embedded in the wall this time at the National Portrait Gallery

Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Always to Return, at and around the National Portrait Gallery is excellent in several precise and unexpected ways:

The inclusion of all 55 of the artist’s puzzle works [first shown like this at Art Basel 2019, including with five exhibition copies, which I didn’t know was a thing here.]

The inclusion of strong non-signature works like “Untitled” (Fear), above, and “Untitled” (A Portrait), the artist’s only video work.

The inclusion of two variants of the portrait [sic] of flowers on Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas’ grave. [n.b.: There are more.]

But the most intriguing and effective thing was the threading of Felix’s work throughout and among the collection of the NPG. It worked in small, even tiny ways, like reuniting a little Eakins portrait of an ancient Walt Whitman with a candy pour, “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), which had been shown together at the NPG’s 2010 Hide/Seek exhibition of queer portraiture.

But it hit hardest and most unexpectedly in the most intrusive installation: “Untitled” (Death by Gun), the stack of photos of Americans killed in one week of gun violence, on the floor of a heavily trafficked hall gallery, in front of two works that felt like the NPG’s 19th century bread and butter.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Always to Return installation view with *“Untitled” (Death by Gun)* installed in front of Christian Schussele’s *Men of Progress* at the National Portrait Gallery

The painting turns out to be Christian Schussele’s 1862 Men of Progress, an amalgamated portrait of various American inventors, including Samuel Colt, inventor of the revolver pistol that made shooting people easier, quicker, and more convenient.

*Catlin the celebrated Indian traveler and artist, firing his Colt repeating rifle before a tribe of Carib Indians in South America*, c. 1855-60, installed at the National Portrait Gallery

Next to them [in a way I could have photographed all three together, had I only realized the complexity of the connection] is a print after a George Catlin painting, where the artist shows off a Colt rifle to a group of Carib Indians. Turns out that after the economic failure of his massive “Indian Gallery” project, Catlin accepted a commission for a series of paintings for an aggressive marketing campaign promoting Colt’s new guns. That went well. For the gunmakers, at least.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Always to Return runs through June 2025 or until the end of the republic, whichever comes first [npg]
Previously, related: on Hide/Seek and the controversies around its censorship

Duchamp Sac du Bouche-Évier

The timing of Duchamp’s Bouche-évier multiple is a bit unclear to me. He Macguyvered the drain stopper for his bath in 1964, but didn’t have the editions of it cast in bronze, steel and silver—100 each—until 1967. So he was coming off his Pasadena retrospective, and in the middle of his Schwarz readymade fabrication-palooza. So minting his own coin or medal must have felt last icing on the selling-out cake.

None of which is that interesting, tbh, and with 300+ out there, the stoppers turn up all the time. What I’ve never seen, though, is one with an original leather pouch. It certainly is.

Marcel Duchamp, Bouche-évier, 1964, APII in bronze with sac, selling 21 Nov. 2024 at Cottone [liveauctioneers]

Science Is Truth Found Out Scarf

Ed Ruscha made a drawing in 1986 with the saying carved into the science building entrance of Hollywood High School. In 2022 (RED) and Gagosian used the drawing for a silk scarf edition by Massif Central, with (NET) proceeds going to equitable COVID relief around the world, matched by the Gates Foundation. Not sure if all that shophilanthropy is still in effect, but while science is still around, there are still scarves available at Artware.

[after thinking about it for five minutes update:] I think they really did just tack a $1000 premium on these (Red)scha scarves, and said, oh hey don’t worry about buying these scarves in a pandemic; we’re raising [sic] a million dollars.

Ed Ruscha Science Is Truth Found Out Scarf, ed. 500, $1,600 [artwareeditions]

In Advance of a Sale of In Advance of a Broken Arm

Behold, Joseph Kosuth’s Marcel Duchamp: *In Advance of A Broken Arm (Fourth Version)*, 1915/1964, ed. 1/8, published by Galleria Arturo Schwarz, Milan, being sold in November 2024 at Christie’s

We have some idea about the 17 urinals—17 or so, I haven’t kept up. But where are Marcel Duchamp’s shovels? Arturo Schwarz produced editions of eight replicas of 14 Duchamp readymades in 1964, originally offered in a complete set for $25,000. Were there really only eight? In Advance of a Broken Arm (Schwarz, 1964) is listed as the fourth version. Where are the previous ones?

[The most concentrated source of info on Duchamps comes, unsurprisingly, from Francis Naumann, who has been researching and trading in Duchamp’s works for decades. Check, for example, his 1999 book, The Art of Making Art In The Age of Mechanical Reproduction, which steps through Duchamp’s physical production chronologically. Or Naumann’s readymade market recap from 2003.]

I think there are 16 shovels to account for. 12 exist; 2 are exhibition copies; and 2 are lost. Here they are in roughly chronological order [of where they ended up]: