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Just months after being charged with killing his wife, he donated a sculpture to a benefit exhibition on behalf of the War Resisters League, which the host purchased. It remains in situ.
Author: greg
Barnett Newman, Other (1963)
One of many epic paintings David Diao made about Barnett Newman’s catalogue raisonné is a yearly tally of work, sorted by category, into zips. Every time I see it I think, “Other? What was the one other?”
And then rewatching Diao’s 2013 Dia talk last night, I am reminded that Other is a synagogue Newman designed, Diao said, for an architectural competition. There’s a 2014 story at Grupa O.K. about Harald Szeemann wanting to borrow the model [fabricated by Robert Murray] for a show in 1983, and Annalee refusing to lend it. She left it to the in the CCA in Montreal in 1991.
LATER TONIGHT UPDATE: EXCEPT. Newman did not make this for a competition, but for an exhibition. In mid-1963 he was working on the Cantos print series when Richard Meier, of all people, invited him to be the only non-architect in a show at the Jewish Museum, Recent American Synagogue Architecture. Newman also wrote an essay for the catalogue about synagogue architecture in the postwar context. His relationship with the Jewish Museum soured a couple of years later when he opposed what he felt the museum was wrongly implicating him with constrictive labels of Jewish Artist or Jewish Art. Mark Godfrey gets into this and other early postwar artists’ reckoning with Jewish identity and culture a bit in his 2007 book, Abstraction and the Holocaust.
Was Ist Das Boot? Celmins| Richter Double Vision
Posting about underseen little grey Richters really brings out the underseen little grey Richters. In a conversation begun on bluesky, Michael Seiwert mentioned seeing several in a very interesting show last Summer at the Hamburger Kunsthalle. Vija Celmins | Gerhard Richter, Double Vision, curated by Dr. Brigitte Kölle, is an intriguing Celmins show that is also a very rare two-artist Richter show.
I love the show’s idea of “juxtaposing such a strong female position with the work of Gerhard Richter, so often presented as a singular phenomenon,” not just to see his work “with a fresh eye,” but because it puts both of them in a larger, richer context. These artists clearly share interests, approaches, motifs, and even biographies, that felt unexpected at first, but feel obvious now.
Some of the resonances between Celmins’ and Richter’s practices come immediately to mind: photo-based painting, found/everyday objects, seascapes, fighter planes, grey, they’re all in there. But browsing the catalogue, I was straight up surprised by the spread above, which features a 1963 Richter titled Schlachtshiff [Battleship], and a 1966 Celmins, Explosion at Sea.
That Richter, though, is one the artist destroyed in the mid-1960s. It was the first of the Destroyed Richter Paintings I had remade in China in 2012, after seeing a photo of it, from Richter’s Archive, in Spiegel. OK, technically, and explicitly to the point, I had Richter’s archival photo painted at the scale of the destroyed painting it depicted, and I have shown and lived with this picture. So it is wild to see it included in this discussion. As Jaboukie might have said if he’d ever posed as Richter on twitter, “Just because I destroyed it doesn’t mean I can’t miss it.” Obviously, I am buying the book immediately.
Vija Celmins | Gerhard Richter, Double Vision, May-Aug 2023 [hamburger-kunsthalle.de]
Previously, related:
2012: Will Work Off JPEGs: Destroyed Richter Paintings
2016: Destroyed Richters at Chop Shop, as tweeted by Roberta Smith
David Diao: On Barnett (And Annalee) Newman
Finally catching up to Adam Simon’s December post on Two Coats of Paint about David Diao’s now-closed show at Greene Naftali of 30 years of paintings relating to Barnett Newman.
Diao has so much going on in his Newman works, paintings about another painter, a subject which became a concept, and Simon does a good job pulling it together. In Jeffrey Weiss’ essay for a forthcoming catalogue of the works, he quotes Diao explaining that “his interest in Newman dates to a period associated with a crisis of faith in the viability of abstract painting.”
This language of faith and crisis and the mysteries of abstraction has echoes in the origins of one of my favorite of Diao’s Newman paintings from 2014, which was here called BN: Cut Up Painting. It’s the blue and white work above.
When I wrote about Diao’s exhibition of the work in Brussels in 2016 [it was called Barnett Newman: The Cut Up Painting], I tried to pull together the accounts of its creation: Barney had asked his wife Annalee to cut up a painting that was finished, but, in his eyes, unresolved. She only did it after his sudden death, then anguished by a dream about the violent act, had it reassembled by a conservator. Barnett and/or Annalee’s work has been the subject of fascinating work by conservators, art historians—and Diao, but it has never been exhibited. Diao’s version is as close as we can get.
It really does seem like abstraction has been causing a lot of people a lot of grief over the years.
David Diao: Impeccable Touch [twocoats]
David Diao: On Barnett Newman, 1991-2023 [greenenaftali]
Previously, related, 2016: David Diao: Barnett Newman: The Cut Up Painting, 2014
Also: David Diao on Barnett Newman, from Dia’s Artists on Artists Lecture Series, c. 2013
Kominka Renovation By Atelier Tekuto, 2009
Traditional Japanese rural architecture was disappearing in the 1950s when Yukio Futagawa raced to photograph it and publish my favorite architecture book ever, Nihon no Minka. Some minka remain in states of reverent historic preservation. What it seems almost never happens, though, is that a minka is renovated. It feels like almost nothing gets renovated in Japan.
So it’s wild that in 2009, Yoshihiro Yamashita, working as Atelier Tekuto, did a modern update to a late 19th century kominka in Iwaki, Fukushima, using historically sensitive, if not preservationist, materials.
From the outside, the strongest gesture was replacing whatever metal garbage cladding was there with plaster panels. But the real breakthrough is on the inside, where drop ceilings were removed to reveal the roof and beams. It took me a minute to map this photo to the outside views, but the square paper lamp and stove help; this is just a two-story space photographed while lying on the floor.
Jukou, 2009, by Yasuhiro Yamashita/Atelier Tekuto [tekuto.com]
Previously, related: Kusakabe House, Takayama
‘Please note this lot is the property of a consumer.’
According to Section H1 of the conditions of sale [pdf], EU & UK buyers at online auctions conducted by Christie’s London have the right to cancel a sale within 14 days, IF the buyer is a consumer AND if the seller is NOT a consumer. This right is not available for lots sold by consumers. If the seller of a lot is a consumer, it will be stated, and/or the lot will be marked with the symbol, ∍.
But even if that weren’t the case, nothing says property of a consumer quite like the 555th example of a 1967 Gerhard Richter offset print published in an edition of 739, and which he subsequently declared to be open and unlimited.
Little Richter Panels
This odd, thick, little 1979 Abstraktes Bild is not only a rare example of Richter painting on wood, it has the same dimensions as that odd, thick, little 1964 grey Abstraktes Bild from the other day.
When they sold it in 2017, Christie’s tried to make it sound like this visibly multi-layered painting was part of Richter’s squeegee development process. But I think that thick, tectonic red surface got crinkled by something else, like plastic wrap.
Anyway, it turns out, though he definitely had an Alu-Dibond phase in the 1990s, Richter has not made that many paintings on wood panels. There were a couple of 2016 squeegees on wood in Zwirner’s 2023 show of “last paintings”; in fact, two of them were in Richter’s last show at Marian Goodman in 2020, too. One Alu-Dibond painting from 2016 is almost the same size as these wood ones. I imagine on a hard support, the squeegee just hits different.
Previously: Das Erste Abstraktes Bild?
Gerhard Richter Painted: a look at his paintings after his “last paintings”
It. Was. The. Boots. It. Was. The. Boots.
In 1997 Christopher Wool said making paintings from Richard Prince jokes felt “like I was Richard Prince for a day,” and “like I was doing Richard’s act.”
In his first deposition, in the Canal Zone/Yes Rasta case, Prince explained that, “The reason why he took the girlfriends is he wanted to be a girlfriend,” and the reason he made the Rasta paintings was the desire “to look like that some day.”
So it stands to reason that the trustees of the Boots Foundation will feel like Wool, Prince, Luhring, and/or Augustine when they start filling pre-orders for these T-shirts next week. Godspeed you, Silkscreening Emperor!
Das Erste Abstraktes Bild?
David Rimanelli just posted this little Gerhard Richter painting on instagram, and I swear, I cannot figure out how I’ve never noticed it before.
It is just 14 x 10 inches, 35.7 x 25.5 cm, an oil on panel—the description on Richter’s website, and the Sotheby’s lot description from 2007 both say it is oil and tape on panel, but I really do think the absence of the tape is the point here.
Continue reading “Das Erste Abstraktes Bild?”The Sculptures of Etienne-Jules Marey
On social media this morning art historian Michael Lobel noted that Xavi Bou’s time-lapse photographs of birds in flight reminded him of the photos and sculptures of Etienne-Jules Marey. Which, respectively, of course, and wtf?
I did not know Marey made sculptures, but he did. In her extensive 1992 monograph Picturing Time, Marta Braun writes that sculptures were part of Marey’s efforts from 1885-87 to produce 3-D chronophotographs of movement.
Continue reading “The Sculptures of Etienne-Jules Marey”John Cage’s Truckera: The Making Of
From 1985-87 John Cage worked on one of his most ambitiously scaled projects ever, a full-scale opera created by chance operation. “Europera 1 & 2” debuted at the Frankfurt Oper in late 1987, and they have been an object of longtime interest and fascination on this blog. But because my interest was first in the visual and material aspects of the production—the props, the canvas flats with blown up vintage opera imagery—I missed a key sound element: “Truckera.”
“Truckera” was a 3-minute sound loop made of 101 opera LPs recorded in batches, and mixed down in layers into one “thick” truck-like sound. “Truckera” was to be played by the percussion section of the “Europera” orchestra. Which, fine.
What is wild, though, is that Cage produced “Truckera” live, on air, on the Columbia University radio station, WKCR, with a studioful of turntables and DAT decks and a team of dozens of audio engineers. It took almost three hours.
In between takes and mixes, Cage and host Brooke Wentz chat; Cage reads excerpts of collaged-together synopses from “Europera’s” 12 different programs; and they play recordings of various recent or related works. All the while, the sounds, cues, and logistical banter of audio production continue in the background [or whatever the Cagean equivalent is.]
At times the broadcast feels like, if not quite a Cagean composition, then definitely a Cagean performance, the kind of lecture/musical event Cage did often on college campuses. But it’s actually something rarer: a chance [sic] to eavesdrop on some central moments of Cage’s actual production.
This all comes up now because the Truckera broadcast was recorded, and rebroadcast, and rebroadcast again. WKCR aired it last September 5 to mark Cage’s birthday. And Laura Kuhn, director of the John Cage Trust, just finished airing it—in three one-hour installments—on her weekly show, All Things Cage, on WXGC. I haven’t actually gotten through all three yet, but it’s already the best Cage recording I’ve heard this year.
All Things Cage on WXGC via Wavefarm:
30 Dec 2023: Opera Mix For and With John Cage (1987) Part I
06 Jan 2024: Opera Mix For and With John Cage (1987) Part II
13 Jan 2024: Opera Mix For and With John Cage (1987) Part III
Kelly White Red Green Black, 2024
Imagine peace.
Thank You For Your Silver Service, Donald Judd X Puiforcat
Saw the Donald Judd X Puiforcat silver dinnerware again on wildoute’s tumblr this morning and was reminded I’m apparently not living in a way that it will effortlessly cross my path. I will have to seek it out at the Hermès store [or the Judd Foundation?]
Technically it dropped last spring. From this hilarious tiktokker [“also the building’s beautiful”] and the Vogue piece, it looks like the embargo for the fashion/influencer reveal at 101 Spring lifted on May 15th. But it kept getting announced/discovered through the fall. And the making of video on Puiforcat’s own page for the collection is only a month old. Anyway, I think you can no longer use the excuse that it wasn’t available.
Continue reading “Thank You For Your Silver Service, Donald Judd X Puiforcat”About Those Small Pictures
Recently I tried making Facsimile Objects of Richter overpainted photos. They started as 4×6 printed snapshots, I figured, why not start there? And they’re fine, I guess, so my dollar wasn’t wasted. But they ultimately lack the physical presence of overpainted photos as, well, photos with paint on them.
For a while I did wonder if it was the size, though. Maybe an image that small, palm-size—which is now phone-size—is just kind of maxed out in its impact. This was disproved this morning.
This was disproved this morning. I popped into Glenstone, as one does, looking for an R.H. Quaytman catalogue [didn’t have it, have to order it], and I went through the newly installed permanent collection exhibition in the Gwathmey building. In the first gallery between the Hilma af Klints and Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel, on the wall across from Fountain, is Man Ray’s Dust Breeding. And it’s tiny.
The more common version of Dust Breeding crops out the horizon line between the Large Glass and Duchamp’s studio wall, and is usually printed later and larger. This early contact print, just 7 x 11 cm, is from 1920, and is the version that was first published. Called perhaps “the first Surrealist photograph,” Man Ray’s picture accompanied an article about Duchamp by André Breton in the October 1922 issue of the surrealist journal Littérature. It was captioned as “The domain of Rrose Sélavy” and a “view from an aeroplane.” [It also had a date of 1921, but hey.]
Point is, it’s an amazing image, and an amazing object. And experiencing it in person makes me think I’ve seen it before. In her 2010 MoMA exhibition of photography and sculpture, The Original Copy, Roxana Marcoci included the print above, a loan from the Bluff Collection LP, in a little group of tiny, vintage Duchamp photos. Glenstone doesn’t have info or an image available yet of their print, I would bet a dollar that it’s the same object. A dollar or a Richter pic.
Huegette Clark Degas Facsimile Object
Speaking of unusual endings to the California real estate fortunes of somewhat reclusive copper heiresses: at some point in the early 1990s, soon after she moved into her $829/day hospital room with Central Park views, Huguette Clark’s Degas, Dancer Making Points, above, was stolen from her Fifth Avenue apartment. Clark didn’t want a scene, so she said do nothing, though someone called the Feds anyway, because they knew. It got fenced to Peter Findlay Gallery, where Henry & Marion Bloch, of the H&R Blocks, bought it in 1993.
In 2007, after an auction house and the FBI tracked it down, and the Blochs were resistant to give up their good faith purchase, and Clark, 98, was not interested in the attention of a lawsuit, the Blochs proposed a solution: Clark would donate the Degas to the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, where the Blochs had already pledged their Impressionist collection; she’d get the $10 million tax deduction; and they’d borrow it back from the museum until their deaths. And all of this would be completely secret.
Bill Dedman of MSNBC, who broke the whole Huguette Clark story, described the handoff that was required to make it happen:
In October 2008, on a clear but crisp Monday at the Bloch home in Mission Hills, Kansas, a Bloch representative handed the ballerina in the gilded frame to Clark’s attorney, who walked out to the car and handed it to a representative of the museum, who then handed it back to the representative of the Blochs, and back on the wall it went.
Clark had two other requests: 1) that the Corcoran Gallery, which held many artworks from her father’s collection, and where she once showed her own paintings, be permitted to borrow the Degas up to three times. [It never happened before the Corcoran closed in 2014, and it’s not clear whether the offer extended to the National Gallery, which took all the Corcoran art it wanted.] and 2) that Clark receive a full-scale photograph of the work. Which she did. Its current whereabouts are unknown.
Previously, related: Huguette Clark Paintings??