“Obviously, it’s a clock, the whole project is a clock. It’s managed by the moon,” said Darren Almond of his Fullmoon Photos series in this seven-year-old video from the Louisiana Museum.
It’s been a minute [h/t @br_tton] since I remember how thoughtful and interesting I find Almond’s work, then he comes up with this:
It started off as a romantic gesture, an inquisitive point. Then it became a kind of controlled concept. But then I was involved in this meditation by moonlight. I was involved in the act of making the photograph. Then my life was becoming connected and had a strong relationship with the landscape. I was going off into this landscape we are no longer familiar with, which is the landscape of the night, away from all the pollution, the light pollution that we’ve generated, that we surrender ourselves with.
Darren Almond, Fifteen Minute Moon, 2000, c-print on aluminum, the first one is apparently of/near Mont Saint Victoire, with the autoroute running through it, and an exposure that literally lasted as long as a kiss? That is romantic.
Recognizing the change we undergo by the making of the work. It’s something I think about a lot, at various levels. I have unrealized projects that would, I recognize, consume me, were I actually to attempt to realize them. Some of them are maybe even unrealizable by design. There are tabs open for a project I actually consider doing. There are tabs open for posts I have yet to write. These are the impacts of writing and connecting as I do.
In a 2017 interview for MUDAM he talked about the end of the project, and what had been invisible to him before:
In 2013, I was in Patagonia. There, the atmosphere is very clear, there’s far less light pollution and you’re able to literally see the colours of the night sky. This experience marked a cut-off point for me. After twenty years of traversing the globe and looking through the lens of a camera at what I could see in front of me, I suddenly felt that I needed to approach landscapes that I couldn’t see, landscapes beyond visibility, but through the visual somehow, using a tool or a mechanism to see into the shadows, to enlighten the shadows that lie before us.
What followed was Timescape paintings, “Inspired by views of the deeper space…[that] materialise the impression felt when faced with this night sky,” and “that evoke the visible confines of the cosmos,” according to MUDAM. “Despite their apparent blackness, these paintings are obtained from numerous layers of different flat colours applied successively on an aluminium support.”
Darren Almond Timescape paintings installed at MUDAM in 2017, image via Max Hetzler
So twenty years of meditating by moonlight and traveling to forgotten landscapes led Almond to become an abstract painter trying to capture the impression of looking up at the night sky. I was worried this romantic project didn’t sound like progress, but then I remembered we exist within cycles of time, some of which are made visible by moonlight, and some which only come into view after many trips around the sun.
Bernice Bing, Self-Portrait with a Mask, 1960, image: Asian Art Museum via Hyperallergic
I’m late to John Yau’s essay on Bernice Bing, the late Bay Area artist who explored the abstractionist movements of the mid-20th century, and then developed a synthesis of her own of west coast abstraction, calligraphy, and Zen. But it’s not too late to see the exhibition built around the 20 pieces of Bing’s work recently acquired by the Asian Art Museum. The show, curated by Abby Chen, runs through June 26, 2023.
Richard Prince, Howdy Burgers, 1972, Watercolor, pencil and charcoal on paper, matted, 24 1/2 x 21 3/8 in., via Barridoff Auctions/liveauctioneers
Art historian Michael Lobel spotted this unusually early Richard Prince work coming up for auction in Maine. It’s not unusual for Lobel; he curated a whole show of Prince’s early work, which was shown and collected, but which the artist has mostly tried to write out of his own history. Because of that, it’s rarely seen, and almost never discussed. [Bruce Hainley did review the show for Artforum, though; and the catalogue is a work of conceptual art in itself.]
Howdy Burgers is constructed as a watercolor illustration of a stained napkin, annotated in pencil: “Study for HOWDY (#1)/ appeared one strange day/ out of nowhere when reaching/ for a napkin I was/ suddenly faced with/ HOWDY NOW YOU/ ARE TOO” is the most prominent text, surrounding the napkin along with “HAMBURGER STAINS OR Burger stains” and “White No. 1 Study/ (1) White napkin.”
Under the IT WAS A STRANGE HOWDY banner are fainter texts with arrows, “NOTE: This printing is not/ by Andrew Wyth [sp]” and “Early reproduction of early/ pre-colonial sighn [sp] (notice the/ handy electric cord which runs/ down the page) this is also/ early American reproduction of an/ electric cord.” And sure enough, the sinuous trail of brown paint ends in a penciled electric outlet.
So a lot is going on within the work, and with references beyond; it’s certainly more complex than it seemed even a few minutes ago, before I started parsing it. To some extent, it looks a lot like another work Lobel called out, a 1993 melange of text and drawing on a smoky face that appears to be a drawing from 1975, which sold at Phillips in London last December.
Richard Prince, Untitled (Taco Bell), 1993, ballpoint pen, pencil, collage and charcoal on paper, sold at Phillips in Dec. 2022.
Untitled (Taco Bell)‘s annotations turn out to be less captions and more Prince’s joke works. One example: “A funny thing happened to me while coming out to/ the mike tonight. I forgot my act.” Meanwhile, the moody, pointillist young face on a sheet signed “Prince 75” was augmented after it was affixed, with rudimentary hair, neck and shoulders. It’s as if Prince was seeing his old work, and asking what he could make of it [“A brooch, a pteradactyl,” etc.]
By 1993, he developed several significant bodies of work, this collaging and reworking of existing works feels of a piece with his larger practice. And it resonates with stuff he’d do later, too. But it’s really interesting to see it in the light of this far earlier work, a drawing from the period it originated, the period Prince raided for parts.
Lobel reminded me that in 1993 Prince had just finished working with Lisa Phillips on his first big retrospective, at the Whitney, and so had an occasion himself to revisit his work, early and not. This is a rare chance for others to do the same.
Robert Rauschenberg photographed by Cy Twombly at 61 Fulton Street, where he lived from Spring 1953 until Summer 1954
[CORRECTION: The Twombly sculpture is in Chicago, see below.]
This Cy Twombly photograph of Robert Rauschenberg has been around. He is in his Fulton Street studio, the crumbling walk-up he moved into when he returned to New York from his Italian romp with Twombly in the Spring of 1953. Clearly, he’s settled in a little bit, put some interesting stuff up on the wall.
[l to r]: Barnett Newman, Twelfth Station, 1965, acrylic on canvas, 78 x 60 in., collection: NGA; Study for Untitled (Newman Twelfth Station Glitch I), 2013/2023, jpg of pdf
It’s been almost ten years since I found the Internet Archive scan of the Guggenheim’s 1966 catalogue for the debut exhibition of Barnett Newman’s Stations of The Cross had not one, but two alternating glitches in it.
Study for Untitled (Newman Twelfth Station Glitch II), 2013/2023, jpg of pdf
And ten years and five minutes since I decided they should be made into paintings.
And ten years, five minutes and a day since I last thought about me actually painting them myself. I guess these things just take time. I was about to buy an old catalogue of Barnett Newman prints when I realized I already had two. And that memory of Newman’s interest in the borders around prints, intrinsic to the medium, and his treating lithograph stones as an instrument to be played, reminded me of these pages. And though my previous comparison this instrument metaphor to Richard Prince’s description of playing a camera didn’t help me make the connection at the time, I now see that a scanner can be an instrument as well, with what Newman called its repertoire of “instrumental licks.” [Which, now that I type it, reminds me of Sigmar Polke’s hyperexpressive use of a Xerox machine to make his artist’s book, Daphne. But if the artist introduces them himself, are they even glitches?]
Still not sure what form(s) these should take—whether books, or prints, or paintings, or paintings of paintings—but I am glad to be thinking about it again.
Florine Stettheimer, Studio Party (or Soirée), 1917-1919, 28 x 30 in., collection Yale University Art Gallery
In her 1995 biography of Florine Stettheimer Barbara Bloemink identifies everyone the artist put in this painting of a painting unveiling, based on guests whose presence at such soirées had been recorded somewhere. I don’t have my copy of Bloemink’s book handy, but my guess is the sources were the correspondence and journals of Florine and Ettie Stettheimer at Yale’s Beinecke Library, which transferred the painting to the Art Gallery in 2019.
According to Bloemink, the two guys contemplating the painting in the lower left are sculptor Gaston Lachaise and cubist evangelist painter Albert Gleizes. Ettie Stettheimer is in green in the upper left, sitting next to poet Isabel Lachaise, the sculptor’s wife and muse. Painter/sculptor Maurice Sterne is standing behind them. Sterne’s wife Mabel Dodge, a friend of Gertrude and Leo Stein with a giant villa in Florence and a downtown Manhattan salon, who was part of the founding of artist colonies in Provincetown and Taos, is not pictured. But that’s Leo Stein on the pouf, next to playwright and Carl van Vechten squeeze Avery Hopwood on the ottoman. Florine Stettheimer herself is sitting on the sofa at right between Madame Juliette Gleizes and an unknown figure in harlequin pants.
Florine Stettheimer, portrait of “Hindu poet Sankar” in front of the nudest part of the artist’s nude self-portrait, a detail from the 1917-19 painting, Studio Party (or Soirée) at Yale
Everyone’s accounted for so far, but Bloemink identified the dark-skinned figure in a black suit at the top center of the picture, sitting in front of the nude self-portrait Stettheimer never exhibited publicly in her lifetime—nor was it included in the posthumous show Marcel Duchamp organized for her at MoMA in 1946, although this painting was—as “Hindu poet Sankar.” Sankar, whose only mentions I can find are related to this painting, but it seems pretty clear the reason they were invited was to keep the painting from getting censored on Tumblr. So who even is Hindu poet Sankar, and what have they done? Literally every online mention of them tries to sound like of course, they know who Hindu poet Sankar is, but if you don’t know, they’re not going to tell you.
Anyway, Sankar looks a little uncomfortable, not to say out of place—no, stay right there, Sankar, don’t move, I’ll get you a drink. This is a family blog.
[At least it’s not just me update: In a 2017 paper [pdf] on the interrelation between Carrie Stettheimer’s well-known doll house models and, respectively, Ettie’s writing and Florine’s painting, Duke art historian Annabel Wharton notes that, even after enlisting the help of Asian Studies colleagues, she was unable to further identify “Hindu poet Sankar.” According to Wharton, Bloemink learned of the Sankar ID from a 1991 conversation with Yale’s longtime bibliographer and curator Donald Gallup [who died in 2000]. Gallup helped acquire and process Gertrude Stein’s papers, too, so he was familiar with the modernist milieu. Maybe the answer lies somewhere in the library.]
NEXT DAY UPDATE: With no information forthcoming from the Stettheimer side, it seemed useful to try looking around to see what prominent Indian poets or other figures were making the scene in New York City in 1916-1919. A couple of possibilities: In September 1916, a Columbia grad student named Shankar M. Pagar married fellow Columbia student Radhabai Pawar in what the Times called the first Hindu wedding on record in the United States. At least it was the first one in the Times. Their reception was at the Hindustan Association of America, an ex-pat student group where Pagar was an officer. There was no mention of poetry, though, and the Pagars were planning to return to India after completing their degrees in mid 1917.
The HAA archives mentioned another, more prominent possibility: Benoy Kumar Sarkar, a prolific Calcutta sociologist and nationalist. I couldn’t find mention of Sarkar as a poet, or that he visited New York before the 1930s—and I gave up looking when his Wikipedia page said he praised Nazism and recommended India establish a fascist dictatorship [presumably a Hindu dictatorship instead of an English one.] But Twitter user @sand_fiddler pushed past that to find the Times ran a full-page feature & interview with Sarkar during a Spring 1917 US tour. Not only was Sarkar credited with publishing three volumes of Bengali poetry, his interview is laced through with references to Homer, Wagner, Chinese poetry, Walt Whitman, and Rabindranath Tagore. Now that we know he was in town, the only question remains the most salient one: is there any indication he visited Stettheimer? And that he might be the Sarkar/Sankar we’re looking for?
FEB 2024 UPDATE: Thanks to a comment from Tumblr scholar @Idroolinmysleep, published identification of Sarkar as Stettheimer’s “Sankar” now extends back 20 years. In 2012, NYU historian Manu Goswami identified Sarkar, and discussed his aesthetic theories and curatorial efforts in an extensive article on Sarkar and interwar internationalism. It’s a dense but fascinating read. Along with flagging a Sankar/Sarkar indexing error, Goswami cites a 2003-4 article on sculptor Gaston Lachaise by artist, art historian, and then-Met researcher Virginia Budny, that also identifies Sankar as “surely Sarkar.” Budny notes the same NYT article above, Bloemink’s date of the painting by a stretcher inscription [“August 25, 1919”], and Sarkar’s friendship with the artist Max Weber to put him in this NY artistic milieu. From here on out, any further mention of “Hindu poet Sankar” in discussion of Stettheimer’s work should be considered like brown M&Ms in Van Halen’s dressing room: a sign that the promoter didn’t read to the end—or dgaf if they got things right.
The last something: Gerhard Richter, Abstraktes Bild (CR 952-4), 2017, 200x250cm, image:gerhard-richter.com
I get it, it’s been six years since Gerhard Richter announced he’d “retired from painting,” but after several months of press releases and invites for a show of “new and recent” work, it still came as a shock to read David Zwirner describing the show opening last night as containing “a group of Richter’s last paintings, made in 2016–2017.”
Gerhard Richter painting in Gerhard Richter Painting, 2011, image from Corinna Belz’ film
Of course, what it technically means is, “last paintings on canvas.” Or “last squeegee paintings.” Which still shocks to think about; I, for one, would like him to still be painting. But given the artist’s incredible physical exertion while making the squeegee paintings in Corinna Belz’ 2011 film, Gerhard Richter Painting, it’s understandable. I’m still trying to think through what to make of it, though, and to see what Richter’s making now.
Mural With Girl With A Pearl, 2023, paint on plaster, Vermeer, dimensions variable (installation view via @BMPMurphy)
I’m not sure I could think of a greater honor than to have work in a two-artist exhibition with Vermeer. I certainly didn’t think of anything before today.
But now I am beyond thrilled to announce my site-specific installation, Mural With Girl With A Pearl is on view at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. It comprises a painting on the wall holding Girl With A Pearl, and the painting Girl With A Pearl itself. It’s hard to say how long it will be there; certainly this incarnation won’t go past March 30th, when Girl With A Pearl goes back to The Hague. Tickets to see it are definitively not available. [But if you do go, SEND PICS!]
Like Vermeer’s work, which it incorporates, it is an exploration of the subtle effects of light captured in built up layers of paint. And like those light effects, it may be fleeting, perceived only in the periphery of vision, occupying the liminal spaces around the older work that is the predictable draw of our attention.
Mural With Girl With A Pearl, 2023, paint on plaster, Vermeer (installation view via @blogexhibitions)
But for now, if you look up, and the gallery lights hit at the right angle, you will feel your field of view, and with the close looking you’ve exercised, you’ll recognize the changing world beyond the frame.
Mural With Girl With A Pearl, 2023, paint on plaster, Vermeer (installation view via @BrothersCammy)
You’ll see the new horizon coalesce just above Girl with a Pearl Earring‘s head. The loose grid of brusquely brushed forms —pearls? lights? ships? celestial figures? yet too big to be stars?—shimmering in formation in the graying sky.
While the current installation involves Girl with a Pearl, I am happy to discuss how to make the piece work for your Vermeer, too. Or, if you’re at the Mauritshuis, we can recreate the Amsterdam magic. Just because the Vermeer show is once-in-a-lifetime doesn’t mean this collab has to be, too.
Mural With Girl With A Pearl, 2023, installation view via @worldelsewhere/ig
April Update: Thanks to @worldelsewhere, I am able to say that the installation stayed up until Girl With A Pearl left for the Mauritshuis. Thank you all for your engagement.
Jasper Johns, Paregoric as Directed Dr Wilder, 1962, 20.25 x 14 in., paper, oil and graphite on canvas, sold at Christie’s in 2012
When Douglas Cramer sold this Jasper Johns painting at Christie’s in 2012, he told the story of its creation, as a thank you to a doctor for making a house call the artist didn’t have the money to pay for. But that feels incomplete, since, if Johns filled Dr Wilder’s prescription for Paregoric at the Sande Drugs on 76th Street, doesn’t that mean he was living in his penthouse on Riverside Drive by then? I think there’s more to the relationship with Dr. Wilder than, “If I live I’ll pay you Tuesday.” [If nothing else, they stayed in touch enough for Dr & Mrs. Joseph Wilder to loan the painting to the artist’s solo show at the Jewish Museum in 1964.]
Anyway, I found my way to this painting, and the text for this installment of ASMRt, through John Yau’s 2018 article for Hyperallergic, which I just reread, having bookmarked it at the time.
When I saw this 1989 photo of the Opéra Bastille on Tumblr last night, I was surprised. Not just because I’d never seen Cy Twombly’s curtain for the Opéra, but because I’d completely forgotten it ever existed. I didn’t remember, even when I was writing about Cy Twombly making curtains for European opera houses. I’ll take responsibility for that to a point, but looking into it, I think the invisibility of Twombly’s monumental public work starts at home.
Cy Twombly, Sans titre, 1986, 234 x 326 mm, pastel, graphite, and ink on paper, one of six studies for the Bastille curtain, purchased in 1989 by Centre Georges Pompidou
There is no mention of Twombly’s curtain on the website of the Opera de Paris, or on the Opéra Bastille’s Wikipedia. It didn’t yet exist when Harald Szeeman organized his 1987 Twombly retrospective that traveled to the Pompidou in 1988. From the Pompidou’s perspective, it exists as six tiny sketches. It’s not in Kirk Varnedoe’s catalogue for Twombly’s 1994 MoMA retrospective. To paraphrase Rauschenberg, it existed in the gap between art and opera, a painting Twombly didn’t actually paint, and the thing operatic artists literally move out of the way to present their real work.
Art & Obsolescence, Cass Fino-Radin’s podcast about conservation and the materiality of digital and media art, has been consistently fascinating since it began, but the latest episode is particularly tremendous. Cass talks with Carol Mancusi-Ungaro, the Whitney’s chief conservator, who also worked at the Menil, and at Harvard, and who is one of the most influential forces in the conservation of contemporary art.
In less than an hour, Mancusi-Ungaro talks about working for Dominique deMenil; solving a mystery of the Rothko Chapel; starting the Artist Documentation Program that interviews artists about their process and materials; working with Annalee Newman on the material legacy of Barnett Newman; the Replication Committee she helped launch at the Whitney, to sort out issues of reproducing fugitive artworks; and her work with Cy Twombly over the decades—and the book she’s writing about their interactions.
Twombly talking about his Menil works is one of my favorite ADP interviews; it was removed from the site for several years, but is now back [with some edits, I guess, but still.] And Annalee Newman’s experience of cutting up Barney’s unfinished canvases was one of the inspirations for my 2016 project Chop Shop, and the proposal to slice up Newman’s Voice of Fire and disperse it to save it from angry Canadian taxpayers. And the Replication Committee! I mean, obviously. Anyway, a must-listen.
[update: in his 2017 ADP interview Josh Kline talks about a New Yorker article about his work, and the Replication Committee.]
Katherine S. Dreier chillin’ in her library with Marcel Duchamp in his art handler drag, leaning against the broken Large Glass, in 1936. image via Guggenheim.org
While it is sort of shocking to see a 49-year-old Marcel Duchamp dressed like an art handling street urchin as he leans against his masterpiece in its original home, this is exactly how I always picture the owner of that home—and that masterpiece—Katherine S. Dreier: a genial and traditional patron, just chilling with her amazing artist friends and their work.
Katherine S. Dreier, Abstract Portrait of Marcel Duchamp, 18 x 32 in., acquired in 1949 by the (second) Museum of Modern Art
But Dreier made work, too. Her 1918 Abstract Portrait of Marcel Duchamp is up at MoMA at the moment. And a 1940-41 painting, Explosion, is on view at Yale, which also holds Dreiers as part of the Société Anonyme collection. But she’s discussed and remembered much more as a collector and patron, and what discussions I can find about Dreier’s work are locked up in old, undigitized tomes.
Though painted more than a decade later, Zwei Welten (Two Worlds), donated to Yale in 1941, seems to depict similar forms in similar space. In Paris, Duchamp’s brother Jacques Villon adapted Zwei Weltenas a lithograph. Dreier had an abstract language she liked, I guess. Before that, there was a chapel mural of Jesus, so she had range. Or rather, she had a journey.
Spinning Wheel, 1920-26, 32 x 30 in., donated to Yale in 2020
Things are on the move now, too. This painting, Spinning Wheel (1920-26), ambiguously dated but specifically titled, was acquired by an alum in 2015, who donated it to Yale in 2020. Dreier’s was not a precisionist abstraction.
The most intriguing Dreier painting is the one we can’t see. A negative exists in Yale’s collection—dated 1941, with no known prints—for a photo of a[nother] portrait of Duchamp, which is provocatively labeled, “her missing painting.” I would very much like to see it.
“her missing painting”: Katherine Dreier’s [other] portrait of Marcel Duchamp, 1918, 60 x 23 in., as reproduced in The Société Anonyme, 2006.
[next morning update: eagle-eyed hero Bryan Hilley remembered seeing an image of this missing Duchamp portrait in the 2006 YUP catalogue of the Société Anonyme edited by Jennifer Gross. It was apparently five feet tall, and the date was 1918, sot the 1941 date above must be for the photo of it by Joe Schiff.]
Ellsworth Kelly, 13 Drawings, 1979 8.5 x 11 in each, graphite on paper, marked “EK 1-13 JAN 25 79” on the verso, to be sold at Christie’s NYC on March 10, 2023, with an estimate of USD 300-500,000.
It’s late January. It’s cold and gross back home, but you’ve gotten away. You’re at the beach. Let’s say St. Maarten. The house fits a few friends. It’s quiet, peaceful, relaxing, private. Or maybe it’s joyous, raucous, uninhibited, and freeing. Honestly, I don’t know, I wasn’t there. One morning before breakfast, or maybe it was a late afternoon after a hot day at the beach, you notice your friend Ellsworth sitting on the edge of his lounge chair, facing away from the pool and toward the rhododendrons. You don’t disturb him. As you’re about to drive him to the airport, he presents you with a sheaf of drawings, a token of thanks for a wonderful visit. You cherish those drawings and the memories they evoke for 44 years, then you sell them at Christie’s for half a million dollars.
EK 10 MAR 23 T, 2023, silkscreen on Hanes Authentic T-shirt, $30 or $40, shipped.
Everyone marks the 100th anniversary of Ellsworth Kelly’s birth differently. Some people organize a massive, traveling exhibition. Some sell the stack of plant drawings Kelly gave them from January 25, 1979. And some people celebrate the sale of those drawings with a T-shirt.
The EK 10 MAR 23 T is silkscreened on daffodil yellow Hanes Authentic T, and is accompanied by a hand-signed and numbered certificate of authenticity. The shirt will be available only until the completion of the sale of Lot 139, Ellsworth Kelly, 13 Drawings, at Christie’s New York, this Friday, March 10. The sale starts at 10AM Eastern, with Lot 101. After the sale ends, two shirts will be available, upon proof of ownership, as a prize for a successful bidder—or, worst case, as a consolation for an unsuccessful seller. Otherwise, get your orders in before like 10:30 Eastern?
[Note: If the project reaches a breakeven number of 10 t-shirts, it’s a go, otherwise I’ll refund everyone and cancel it. This is the first shirt project I’ve done since Elmugeddon, and I frankly have no idea what my social media reach is these days. Or what t-shirt fatigue may be setting in, for you or for me.]
The shirt is $30 shipped in the US, and $40 shipped worldwide. Order an EK 10 MAR 23 T via PayPal until the morning of Friday, March 10, 2023:
[morning of Friday, March 10, 2023 update: the drawings failed to sell at a top bid of $220,000. Please accept two t-shirts as your consolation prize, dear seller, and thank everyone else for engaging!]
It is by fashion illustrator and creative director Joe Eula, and it’s huge, maybe the biggest work of his I’ve ever seen—because I’ve never been able to find images of the giant Eiffel Tower scrim he painted on the fly for the Battle of Versailles in 1973 after discovering the backdrops he’d made used inches instead of centimeters, and so they didn’t fit.
But the size only underscores the wtf-ness of the subject: these are life-sized monkeys at the bar, and lounging in the club chair under a disco ball [?] in the country house next to what looks like a roaring fire? And those monkeys, according to Doyle, the auction house that sold this painting in 2006, those “abstract monkey figures represent Bobby Short, Elsa Peretti, Mrs. Glenn Bernbaum and Joe Eula.”
Joe Eula, Bobby Short at The Living Room, 17.5 x 14.5 in., ink and watercolor on paper, sold with a sketch of Lou Rawls at Doyle in 2006 for just $780
Bobby Short, we know, of course. In fact, his friendship with my family, and the presences of Eula’s poster of him in my mom’s basement, was the first Google search that led me to this monkey business. [Turns out the original sketch for that poster sold at Doyle, too, for not much at all. I really wish I’d known. You out there? HMU!]
Of course, Short was friends with everybody, including Eula—who, like Elsa Peretti, was extremely close with Halston—and [Mr.] Glenn Bernbaum. Short might have been the only Black person who could regularly get a table at Bernbaum’s restaurant, Mortimer’s. But though I did a spit take and a doublecheck after seeing this painting, there very much was no Mrs. Glenn Bernbaum.
Bernbaum’s meanness, snobbishness, racism, alcoholism, and anti-Semitism, along with Short’s relentless, performative, anti-sensual charm, all stem from the same thing: the ingrained personal discomfort at the precarity of being gay and Jewish or Black among the ruling class of a systemically racist and homophobic society.
The Doyle auction included 42 lots of Eula material, which makes me think they were from his collection. Nothing else sheds any light on this painting, though. Was it a weekend visit of friends to Eula’s house in Hurley, NY? The late date, 1996, was not long before Bernbaum died. Eula died in 2004, and Short in 2005. Short’s own estate auction at Christie’s included large amounts of African art and furniture, as well as racist artifacts from the US Jim Crow era of his youth; I think he had a not-unsophisticated view of the implications of his closest friends depicting him—and them!—as monkeys, even if today it fees like All Monkeys Matter.
But where did this painting live? Who saw it? How did it come about? Did Glenn Bernbaum actually have quiet, goofy weekends with friends where he could just be? Elsa Peretti, the last monkey standing, died in 2021, so the chance for a firsthand account is gone. [few minutes later update: Perhaps Cathy Horyn, who wrote the book on Eula in 2014, and hung out at his Hurley house, knows something about this monkey painting business.]
In 1982 John F. Kennedy, Jr. was a senior in American Studies at Brown, living off campus in a house with, among others, Christiane Amanpour. Under what circumstances would he make…this? It looks like the top of a newel post on a stairway, except it has to be carved, not just turned. And while newel posts are topped with balls, acorns, and even pineapples, I have never seen one topped with apple apples. Also it is painted and distressed. And signed on the bottom which, if it were meant for a newel post, would be invisible forever, a secret revealed only to future carpenters.
But imagine you can conjure a scenario where JFK Jr. made this. Now think of the situation in which John-John gave this little painted apple objet to legendary cabaret star Bobby Short [RIP 2005].
I mean, I don’t doubt they knew each other, such as these things go. Short was certainly friendly with Kennedy’s mother and aunt. But how? When? Why? Did he take a woodworking class at Brown, and made all his Christmas presents that year? In which case, how is this the only one? Or the only one to come to light?
