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Was Ist Das Boot? Celmins| Richter Double Vision

*Vija Celmins | Gerhard Richter, Double Vision*, exhibition catalogue from Kunsthalle Hamburg

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.

Vija Celmins, *Explosion at Sea*, 1966, 13 1/2 x 23 1/2 in., oil on canvas, in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago

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.

Spread showing rough times at sea from *Celmins | Richter, Double Vision* exhibition catalogue

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.

*Destroyed Richter Painting #02 (ship)*, 2012, 40 x 30 in., oil on canvas

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

Installation view of *David Diao: On Barnett Newman, 1991-2023*, at Greene Naftali, showing *BN: Cut Up Painting*, 2014, center. image: greenenaftaligallery

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

and if you go through and to your left.. Jukou, 2009, image: tekuto.com

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.

…and lie down in the kitchen, just next to the stove room, Jukou, 2009, image: tekuto.com

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.’

a 1967 print of a photo of a 1965 painting by gerhard richter of a cream sheet of paper being curled up from the lower right, exposing an open cone of its greyish white underside and the underlying surface, where richter signed and dated it, 6.2.67, feb. 6, 1967 — Gerhard Richter, *Blattecke (Sheet Corner)*, 1967, offset print mounted on cardboard, 234 x 180 mm, ed. 555/739, sold at Christie’s UK in 2019

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

Gerhard Richter, *Abstraktes Bild, CR 448/1*, 1979, 25x 36 cm, oil on wood panel, image via Christie’s, who sold it in Amsterdam in 2017

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.

Gerhard Richter, *Abstraktes Bild CR 947-2*, 2016, oil on Alu-Dibond, 27 x 35.5 cm, image via davidzwirner

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.

pre-order through Jan. 22 at boots.foundation

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?

Gerhard Richter, *Abstraktes Bild, CR-36-b*, 1964, 14 x 10 in., oil and tape (?) on panel, image via gerhard-richter.com

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.

The Sculptures of Etienne-Jules Marey

Etienne-Jules Marey, *Flight of a gull*, 1885, Collège de France via monash.edu’s 2002 archive of Expo-Marey, a defunct flash website

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?

Etienne-Jules Marey, lost bronze sculpture of gull in flight, 1887, via Braun’s *Picturing Time*

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.

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

four of the eight sterling silver pieces in the Donald Judd dinner service, by 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?]

Donald Judd dinnerware, with other Puiforcat photobomb, at 101 Spring, from tiktok/graciewiener

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.

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.

Man Ray, *Dust Breeding*, 1920, gelatin silver contact print, 2 3/4 x 4 1/4 in., like the one in Glenstone

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.]

“Voici le Domaine de Rrose Sélavy/ Vue Prise En Aeroplane Par Man Ray — 1921”, from *Littérature*, Oct. 1922, via David Campany

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

Edgar Degas, *Dancer Making Points*, 1874-76, 19 1/4 x 14 1/2 in., pastel and gouache on paper on board, a gift to the Nelson-Atkins from Henry and Marion Bloch, more or less

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??

Art Carny, Part 3: The Price of Frame

What to even caption this? image via austrianfineart.com

In 2016, Luna Luna organizer André Heller consigned a forged Jean-Michel Basquiat work to a very respectable dealer in Vienna, who made a pitchbook for it and took it to TEFAF in 2017. Heller made a frame out of painted broomsticks studded with nails, and bound together with twine. Heller cut up some of Basquiat’s little sketches that Heller had enlarged for the artist’s Luna Luna ferris wheel, collaged them around the frame, and then painted over them. Heller put a Basquiat head, a work on paper he bought in 1990 from Robert Miller Gallery, in the forged frame.

They were presented together, and available separately, as separate works: Untitled (1983) and Untitled (Frame) 1987. At TEFAF the drawing was $2 million, and the frame was $3 million. In the dealer’s catalogue for the work, Heller was interviewed by curator Dieter Buchhart, a leading expert on Basquiat, who asked repeatedly for details and context about the creation of the frame. Over and over, Heller spoke specifically, to make it sound like Basquiat made it, without explicitly saying he did. He talked about the idea, how he helped with the nails, because there were so many. It was part of the collaboration for Luna Luna. Heller connected the frame to Vodou, and said that Basquiat considered it an altar.

The drawing sold after TEFAF, and then the frame to go with it, for EUR800,000. At some point, the whole thing started to unravel, as Basquiat’s former assistant, and later Buchhart, called bullshit on the frame. Heller bought it back, unwinding the deal before it hit the media, and caught the attention of Viennese authorities, who decided not to pursue the fraud. Heller dismissed his actions as a “childish prank,” and his statements to Buchhart as an attempt to trip up a self-proclaimed Basquiat expert. He tried to get out of his forgery hole by saying he’d always just presented the frame as *A* frame with Basquiat drawings stuck to it, but his buyer called bullshit on that.

And so did Heller himself. Here [pdf] is the interview he arranged with Buchhart, published by the dealer he consigned with, to sell the forged Basquiat concoction he made and lied about. There was a lot of bullshit flying around the world in 2016, and this interview is definitely some of it.

And all of this was coming out literally at the moment Live Nation was buying Luna Luna and extracting it from its shipping containers for the first time in decades. So wild.

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Wienerbroither & Kollbacher [pdf, aws/amazon]
2022: A work attributed to Basquiat at TEFAF was made by André Heller [artnews]
2023: Viennese prosecutors drop investigation into artist who forged Basquiat painting’s frame as a ‘prank’ [artnews]

Art Carny, Part 2: Birch, Please

When we last saw Luna Luna, the 1987 art amusement park recently reopened in Los Angeles after spending the last 37 years in a bunch of shipping containers in fields in Vienna and Texas, one thing seemed clear: Drake did not spend $100 million to buy it from its previous owners, the Stephen and Mary Birch Foundation.

But the $100 million price is sort of unfair, a cheat, a third-round shorthand that was meant to get repeated in the same breath as Luna Luna and Drake. When the NYT first half-reported on Live Nation’s project, introduced to them by the Mugrabis, of bringing Luna Luna to Drake, the figure was floated as the “overall investment” that was “approaching $100 million.” What if it was the Mugrabis who tracked down Luna Luna at the Birch Foundation’s ranchette, made a deal for it, and flipped it, Yves Bouvier-to-Ryobolovlev-style, for a nice profit?

The Birch Foundation’s 990 filings with the IRS show that they sold the Luna Luna assets in 2022 for $15 million, $1.8 million below the “market value” carried on their balance sheet. So they actually lost money on their collection of Basquiats, Harings, and their Hockney, Dali, and Lichtenstein pavilions, at least on paper. Not-for-profit indeed. But they did still get $15 million in cash, right? Where’d that go?

While trying to figure out the details of Luna Luna’s history between its hype launch in 1987 by André Heller, and it’s re-emergence with Live Nation & Drake, two sidebar stories kept jumping into view: the first is Heller’s near miss with forgery charges. Heller tried to turn a minor Basquiat drawing into a major “Basquiat Artwork” by collaging the artist’s little sketches for his Luna Luna monkey butt ferris wheel onto a crude Africanist frame. He sold the work, then scrambled to buy it back when the heat was on, and then tried to blow off the whole thing as a “prank.”

The second, is the giant WTF that is the Stephen and Mary Birch Foundation, and how did they end up with an agreement in 1990 to buy Luna Luna from Heller in the first place? We could ask André Heller, but I think the answer to the first question is also the answer to the second: the Birch Foundation is a giant pile of money and vast tracts of land under the complete and unaccountable control of one or two people who use it for what they want.