Max Schumann, Threat Level, 2023, 14-color screen print with unique handpainted embellishments, ed. 100 for Printed Matter
In case you were wondering if there’s anything he can’t do or hasn’t done, the answer is not yet. Outgoing director of Printed Matter, Max Schumann has produced two prints for the upcoming Spring Benefit Bash. Each 14-color silk screened print of flower arrangements is embellished by handpainted blossoms.
The pictures fit well within Schumann’s own longstanding “outsider painting practice,” as PM puts it. Though titles notwithstanding, they do also feel like the brightest quadrant of “the dark energy at the heart of American politics, capitalism, and consumerism” that is the subject of Schumann’s critique.
The larger print, We Will Attack, is an edition of 35, and the smaller one, Threat Level, above, is an edition of 100. They both look great, but I posted Threat Level because the email drop for the prints had an animated GIF of it, toggling between the printed and embellished state, and it looked awesome. I ended up deciding not to serve a giant gif from my server, though, thanks. Some of us are even more not-for-profit than Printed Matter these days.
Danh Vo, We The People (detail), 2011-2016, 200 x 120 x 280 cm, at Galerie Chantal Crousel’s presentation at Art Basel
One problem with Christie’s selling the Fra Angelico after Basel is that as soon as my Fra Angelico Gofundme reached 10% I’d siphon it off to buy this gorgeous piece of Danh Vo’s We The People at Chantal Crousel’s booth. I’m only posting it because I assume it’s already been snapped up by someone in an earlier timezone.
Michael Lobel posted this cursed image on social media the other day.
While he was visiting Washington DC in 1976, Andy Warhol photographed Henry Kissinger accosting actress-turned-icon-turned-DC wife Elizabeth Taylor Warner, who was then married to Virginia Republican senator John Warner.
In 1976 Kissinger was Gerald Ford’s Secretary of State.
Guido di Piero, Fra Giovanni da Fiesole, posthumously known as Fra Angelico (Near Vicchio, circa 1395/1400-1455, Rome) The Crucifixion with the Virgin, Saint John the Baptist and the Magdalen at the Foot of the Cross tempera on gold-ground poplar panel, arched, the original engaged frame regilded 25.1/8 x 15 in. (59.7 x 34.2 cm.) Estimate: £4,000,000-6,000,000 at Christie’s London 6 July 2023
When I went to college I figured I wanted to be a banker, and since bankers collected art, I should study art history, to know what to collect. And so I studied Italian Renaissance painting. Which was fascinating and enthralling and transporting, but which is also the least collectible period of art imaginable. It’s even hard to see it in person.
So the idea of a 60cm tall painting by Fra Angelico being for sale is momentarily giving me pangs of regret for not sticking with banking. Anna Brady’s report on the Christie’s announcement has more detail about the painting, history, context, and scholarship than the Christie’s announcement itself, so that’s nice.
The painting of a crucifixion, dated roughly to 1419-1424, will be on view in New York from 10-14 June. Meanwhile, I’ve got about a month to scare up an extra £6 million. BRB.
NGL, it is wearying to keep wading into the legal minutiae, especially when it all feels like it’s missing what’s obvious. and. right. there. in. the. works. I guess it is literally just me. On the bright side, though, there’s a new deposition, which I am trying to get my hands on. Unlike the Cariou trial, only a very few pages have been excerpted so far, so no book. Yet. [Here’s a pdf of the filing, though, have fun.]
Anyway, point is, next week Phillips is selling a New Portrait that is new to me; it’s a poster? An edition? A takeaway? [Here it is on the floor, for drama.] Hard to say, frankly, but it is the Queen. And it came from Prince’s New Portraits show in London (at Gagosian’s Davies Street storefront) in 2015. Prince would make smaller proof editions for the Portrait subject, if they asked, and he did make variously sized Portraits later [see below], along with Instagram-related prints.
Installation shot of a gang of cash&carry-size New Portraits at Gagosian LA, 2020, via yt
The Queen Elizabeth portrait is an entire Prince joint, though. Like he did with his Family portfolio, Prince posted QEII’s coronation portrait to his own Instagram account, and started composing. The Brant Foundation must have had notifications turned on, to get their white power emoji in there within the four hours between posting and screenshotting.
It’s all long gone now, of course, like the Queen herself. This 22×15 inch poster, unsigned and unnumbered in an edition some places say is 500, others just don’t know, is the only artifact left to mark this historic Instagram moment.
Lot 171: Sturtevant, Oldenburg Store Objects, Bacon & Pat of Butter, 1967, being sold at Swann
I lost track of the Schwartzes selling Sturtevant’s Oldenburg Store Object, Pie Caseamidst the Pompon hype. It was one of the most prominent objects from Sturtevant’s April-til-June 1967 repetition of Oldenburg’s The Store, and it was being sold by some of the most important collectors of Sturtevant’s work. [Eugene organized the 1986 Sturtevant comeback show at White Columns that brought her work into the context of the appropriationist Pictures Generation.
Yellow Curve Cookie and hibiscus lemonade at Glenstone
Today is the 100th anniversary of Ellsworth Kelly’s birth. There is a lot of Kelly content you can consume to commemorate. The Ellsworth Kelly Foundation has an EK100 list of public events [most of which are past] and current exhibitions.
The Glenstone retrospective is, of course, amazing, but also closed today. Unless there a whisper network of private visits on days the museum is closed? I would certainly hope so.
Ellsworth Kelly retrospective at the Guggenheim, 1996, image via guggenheim.org
If you can go back in time, definitely see the Kelly retrospective at the Guggenheim in 1996, one of the most phenomenal art experiences of my life and, along with the Dan Flavin installation and Hilma af Klint, one of the the greatest shows ever installed in that museum. The Guggenheim has resurfaced a nice 2004 Q&A with Kelly for EK100.
John Coplans’ 1969 Artforum cover essay is one of the first serious attempts to understand Kelly’s work on his own terms, and to recognize the foundational importance of his early work in France to his project.
Edgar Howard and Tom Piper’s 2007 documentary, Ellsworth Kelly: Fragmentsscreened a couple of weeks ago in Chatham, NY. Watching the trailer I recognized Kelly’s trip retracing his steps through Paris from the photos the studio posted on Instagram the other day:
Ellsworth Kelly seated under the Pont des Arts in 1949 and 2006, image via ig/ellsworthkellystudio
I also learned that he lived above our ice cream store? We rather ridiculously had Berthillon shipped to our wedding party in NYC. Anyway, Ellsworth Kelly: Fragments is on Vimeo in full.
screenshot of Ellsworth Kelly: Fragments (2007), dir. Edgar B. Howard and Tom Piper, which screened at the Crandell Theater in Chatham, NY on May 21.
Kelly’s oeuvre is very diverse, even though his mode of thinking allows for periodic returns, canceling any attempt at pinpointing a linear evolution. Better here to state his patience: very early on, he had understood the field of Modernism as an enterprise of motivation (it is against the arbitrariness and subjectivity of “invention”-as-expression that he had coined his various strategies); at the very beginning of his career, he had surveyed this field, seen both its limits and, within those, its vast expanse of fallow territory. Because he was alone then in envisioning all at once the many possibilities it could yield, he had accepted his historical task as that of tilling this land, digging out many unexpected treasures along the way.
Now, in a culmination of remembrances of his life and work—and his practice combining the two—I wonder about his relationship to time. To the way he found something from his own past to make work from in a certain present. How long did it take? When was it ready? How did he know? What did it need? What if the indexing of works to their archival, historical sources wasn’t an accounting tedium, but a way to understand and experience the work—and the life—more fully?
“Everywhere I looked, everything I saw became something to be made,” Kelly said, “and it had to be exactly as it was, with nothing added.” How long it would take, and when it would be made, he did not say.
Ellsworth Kelly, Seine, 1951, at the Philadelphia Museum, which is currently doing an EK100 show of drawings and other works related to reflection and water
Kelly never sat by the same Seine twice, but he did build bridges across time, between the things he saw, and the things he made, and those bridges are only beginning to be mapped.
Hauser & Wirth just showed this gorgeous Jack Whitten work from 1975 at Frieze. It’s a grid of 42 Xeroxed images on legal-size rice paper (8.5×11 in.) mounted on canvas, and it’s called Xeroxed! III.
In his 2009 oral history at the Archives of American Art, Whitten explains how Xerox invited him and several artists to Rochester to experiment with the tech, the equipment, talk to engineers, make work, and put on a show. Whitten’s own interest was in the highly manual process of early Xerox flat plate technology. I assume the exclamation point in the name is from the executives’ reaction to Whitten using their freshly trademarked brand as his title. The show never happened.
Gerhard Richter’s 128 Details from a Picture, meanwhile, happened three years later.
[few minutes later update: Harvard Art Museums have a single sheet Xerox work called, Broken Spaces #4, from 1974, where Whitten worked the toner powder across the surface of the paper with a scraper, and it began tracing out the electrostatic waves he was generating. Amazing, and consult a conservator, I guess!]
Jack Whitten, Broken Spaces, #4, 1974, 22 x 17 in., toner on paper, collection Harvard Art Museums
Robert Rauschenberg, The Ancient Incident, 1981, wood and metal stands, chairs, image RRF
Lawrence Voytek began working for Robert Rauschenberg in 1982, right out of RISD. He set up a workshop in Captiva, Florida, and for decades was involved in helping the artist fabricate his work and solve complicated technical challenges.
“Bob told me he asked Jasper if he could paint a little…Jasper said ok and Bob got a little red on the white….enough !….Jasper scratched the red off….so Bob” img: ig/lawrencyvoytek
Yesterday, artist Eric Doeringer sent me an Instagram Reel Voytek posted for Memorial Day. Voytek shows off a small, bright Jasper Johns-style American flag on a wood panel, which he holds with one hand while recording with his phone in the other. I’ve transcribed the Reel for Art History:
Happy Memorial Day, everybody. This is an encaustic flag. There was a painting that Bob did [Short Circuit, obv] that had a Jasper Johns that was stolen, and it was at Captiva for a while. Bob asked me to make a kind of a copy of the Jasper, doing the real encaustic. He didn’t use it on it; they had a Mary Stravant [sic, Sturtevant] flag that had newspaper and stuff. But this was kind of fun. I melted Crayola crayons, and I had hot wax, and I made a Jasper Johns flag so there you go. Happy Memorial Day.
in 1954 Bob was with Jasper when Jasper had the dream of painting an American flag, and that really sort of was a gamechanger.
Indeed it was, Lawrence, indeed it was.
Voytek’s oral history doesn’t mention Johns, Short Circuit, or Flag (this one or any others). Rauschenberg’s story from Voytek’s caption, though, about asking to paint some of the original Flag is out there. Johns’ story about the dream is, by definition, solitary. But I think this is the first account I’ve seen that acknowledges someone else was in the bed.
A real thing of beauty: Lot 107, Donald Judd, rare galvanized steel armchair, est. $60-80k at Wright20
I knocked off Donald Judd because I had to; there was no such thing as a Judd Crib. Michael and Gabrielle Boyd, meanwhile, knocked off Donald Judd because they could. By acquiring an extremely rare 1 of 2 Judd armchair in galvanized steel directly from the artist in life, they generated an auratic bubble where fabricating your own Douglas Fir ply chairs was apparently preferable to buying estate editions. Which, in 2010, were fully available, btw.
[few days later update: whoops. they’re gone.]
Lot 111 in the third Boyd sale at Wright20: two After Donald Judd chairs in Douglas fir ply, est. $2-3,000
Lot 110: Sol Lewitt Sao Paulo Biennale t-shirt by M. Officer, est. $500-700, 7 June at Wright20
After he made a giant Italian fresco-colored wall work for them in Hartford, the Wadsworth Atheneum curated Sol Lewitt into the 1996 São Paulo Biennale, where he made giant fresco-colored wall works there, too. Bands of color radiated off of three-, four-, five-, six-, seven-, eight-, and nine-pointed stars. The project was memorialized in a t-shirt collab with M. Officer, the Brazilian Gap. The giant label on the front confirms it was sponsored by the United States Information Agency, The National Endowment for The Arts, The Pew Charitable Trusts, and Arts International IIE [The Institute for International Education].
Verso via Wright20
Five years ago, you could have bought two of these t-shirts for $418. Or you can get one right now on eBay for $1500. If you want to try splitting the difference, a t-shirt owned by modern design aficionados Michael and Gabrielle Boyd is being auctioned in a few days. Me, except for figuring out if these were really screenprinted, I’m not that interested. I’m happy to see what the next Uniqlo collab drags in.
Cy Twombly, Untitled, 1985, graphite on paper mounted on wood 9 3/8 x 7 1/4 in., on view at Amanita NYC, via ig/ctorre and touchtone7
I could be doing worse than to be known as the guy trying to find Cy Twombly’s first Picasso. This is at least the second, which makes the other one at least the third.
Amanita, a Florence-based gallery founded by “a veritable boy-band” of dealers, including Twombly’s grandson Caio, opened a permanent space on the Bowery last fall. Their current show of 28 drawings spanning 100 years, includes at least two works by Nonno Twombly, including the extravagantly framed Picasso head above.
Cy Twombly copy of a Picasso painting, 1988, as exhibited at the Prada Foundation
For those keeping a timeline, the head above is from 1985, three years before the copy Twombly made of a 1939 painting. That still leaves Twombly’s first Picasso, which is also the first painting he ever made, he said, unseen. That, any any additional Twombly Picassos in between. [shoutout to ctorre, 165bleeckerst, and matt/touchtone7 for sending this image along via instagram. We’ll get our Twombly Picasso boy band back together soon, I can feel it.]
L0t 353: Jacques Barthélémy DeLamarre, “Portrait of a small poodle, said to be ‘Pompon,’ a beloved dog of Marie Antoinette”, 9.5×12.5 in., sold yesterday for USD 279,400
Let’s stipulate that this and all other portraits of the dog said to be “‘Pompon, a beloved dog of Marie Antoinette,” are beyond reproach as sublime objects whose puppily gaze pierces the viewer—and the artist before them, the ur-viewer—to the very soul, and that the muses attend them, shining their divine rays from the upper left corner to light up that shaved ass at least a dozen times. Let’s stipulate, too, that while there is no explanation under the sun or the Sun King for why these paintings should be $4-11,000 one day, and $279,400 the next, the buyer of this painting yesterday, and all their fierce but unsuccessful rivals, are all connoisseurs of the most sophisticated taste and judgment.
All that can be true, and yet when you look at this painting—surely a masterpiece of its own singular genre—alongside paintings made by artists whose careers in service to the queen and the court of Versailles are long and widely known, it just don’t add up. It just don’t add up.
Lincoln, 1958, 17×21 in., with traces of swastikas still visible on the collaged paper on the right, via artic.edu
[The anti-Semitic defacement of Lincoln, the 1958 Robert Rauschenberg combine sold last week at Christie’s, was first reported yesterday in Kenny Schachter’s post-auction recap on artnet. Schachter said Lincoln was “infamous” for the racist vandalism that took place at some as-yet-unconfirmed point, when the work was owned by the Art Institute of Chicago. IYKYK, but so far, I’ve found no news or art text mentioning it. So what happened, and when?
