While searching for something else, I came across what is apparently the only work of Walter de Maria ever sold at Phillips, and I was not prepared for a “For Sale: Baby shoe. Never worn”-level tragedy—and in an original canvas slipcase.
Walter de Maria, The Pure Polygon Series – 3 thru [starts crying again], 1975-76, the faintest pencil line imaginable on six [sobs] 36×36 in. sheets, sold at Phillips in 2018
Walter de Maria The Pure Polygon Series: six plates 1975-76 Six graphite template drawings, on American Etching paper, with full margins, all contained in the original pine and maple wood portfolio and canvas slipcase. all I. variable all S. 36 x 36 in. (91.4 x 91.4 cm) All signed, titled, dated and numbered 12/21 in pencil on the reverse, published by the artist, lacking Nonagon.
What’s the actual title of the portfolio, you say? And I suppose the title of each work in it makes reference to [sobs again]
Catalogue Essay Titles include: The Triangle of Seven Template Drawings; The Square of Seven Template Drawings; The Pentagon of Seven Template Drawings; The Hexagon of Seven Template Drawings; The Heptagon of Seven Template Drawings and The Octagon of Seven Template Drawings.
Glenn Ligon, Untitled (There is a consciousness we all have…), 1988, Oil, oilstick, pencil, and acrylic on two sheets of paper, 30 x 44 3/4 in., collection: MoMA
Some time in 1988 before November, Glenn Ligon made Untitled (I Am A Man), which is called his first painting of a selected text, based on a 1968 civil rights protest poster he’d seen as a student in the local office of Congressman Charlie Rangel.
In November 1988, Jamaica Art Center visual arts director Kellie Jones’ proposal of sculptor Martin Puryear to represent the US at the São Paulo Bienal was announced. Puryear was the first Black artist to represent the US at an international exhibition. [He went on to win the grand prize and a MacArthur that year.]
One of the ten members of the Federal Advisory Committee on International Exhibitions, which made the selection, was Hirshhorn Museum chief curator Ned Rifkin, who actually said, to The New York Times, “There is a consciousness we all have that he is a black American artist, but I think his work is really superior and stands on its own.”
Glenn Ligon, No. 291 (Language), 1988, Oil, acrylic, oil stick, and graphite on paper, 30×22 in., a long promised gift of Emily Fisher Landau to the Whitney Museum, accessioned in 2024
Also in 1988 Ligon was working on stenciling found texts, on paper. Including quotes from “dreambook” pamphlets, street handouts that coupled dream interpretations with advertisement for an underground lottery his father worked at.
And also condescending quotes by major museum curators published in the newspaper. Untitled (There is a consciousness we all have…) comprises two sheets of the same size as the dreambook painting above. It shows an early example of Ligon stenciling a found text multiple times. In a composition similar to No. 291 (Language), faint and effaced versions of Rifkin’s quote can be seen on the top and bottom, respectively, of the left sheet, while the right sheet seems to bear traces of marks made by pushing the stencil itself.
And I thought this is how it must have felt to first encounter Ligon’s work. Much is made of Ligon’s choices of text and the resonance of their sources, but it feels worth noting how much of that information exists apart from his paintings. Though he eventually began mentioning titles in his own titles, early sources like dreambooks and Ned Rifkin were untraceable and unrecognizable, at least to someone who didn’t live them. So their first reference is Ligon, who put them there, not the source he got them from. Which makes Rifkin’s quote even more outraging, offensive—and, for a young Black artist reading it, dispiriting.
In 1991 Ned Rifkin left the Hirshhorn for the High Museum in Atlanta, and Ligon was in his first Whitney Biennial. In early 1993, presumably before he showed Notes on the Margin of The Black Book at the Whitney Biennial, the Hirshhorn acquired their only Ligon works to date: a door painting, Untitled (Black Like Me #2), and Untitled (Four Etchings), both from 1992. The painting was loaned to the White House for four years beginning in 2009. The National Gallery of Art acquired Untitled (I Am A Man) in 2012.
Olafur Eliasson, Diffused watercolour rainbow, 2024, Watercolour on paper, 46 5/8 x 63 1/2 in. via
“The illusion of light, long a desiderata of painters in Western art history, is here the result of applying thin, translucent layers of pigment in succession, with a precision of execution that creates a completely seamless transition through the color spectrum. The pristine, vaporous rainbow seems to emanate from the paper, the large scale enveloping the viewer in color.”
I listened to Thomas Lawson’s conversation with the Rabkin Foundation’s Mary Louise Schumacher on the way home this afternoon. I aspire to accomplishing so much and being so concise I can get it all done in a 31-minute podcast. He should win an editing award on top of the writing.
Lawson mentions his January 1988 essay in Artforum on the history and contemporary resonance of cyclorama paintings, and I just read it. The ending is absolutely eerie in its torn-from-today’s-headline vibe. And by today, I mean not just 1988, but 2024. How is that possible?
I wish I’d known of Lawson’s essay in 2010 when I was writing a series of posts proposing ways of saving Richard Neutra’s Cyclorama Building at Gettysburg, which was under threat of demolition by the National Park Service. TBF I was focused much less on the cyclorama painting—which had already been moved to a new, purpose-built visitor entertainment center—than on how the surviving architecture related to the built and marked history of memorialization on the battlefield. [Spoiler alert: it was destroyed.]
I missed this when it streamed live, so I was psyched to get the heads up from Gladstone Gallery that Diamond Stingily & Matthew Barney’s conversation from October 5, 2024, has been uploaded to YouTube.
I listened to it in the car and had expected to hear a lot of effusive praise for Carrie Mae Weems, in whose show the event was staged; for Precious Okoyomon, who organized the event; and for Bottega Veneta, which sponsored something. [Weems rather amazingly recreated some of her most iconic photos as Bottega ads, which, I’ve never wanted someone to get a bag more.]
Anyway, no, it has one of the coldest opens of any artist talk I’ve ever heard. A lesson to everyone. Also, Matthew Barney cut Barbara Gladstone’s hair, more than once.
In 2018 Andrea Fraser published 2016 in Museums, Money, and Politics, a 933-page report documenting the 2016 political expenditures of all the trustees of 125 museums across the United States. More than half the $6.4 billion poured into the 2016 US elections came from just a few hundred people, and, Fraser finds, most of them also dominate the country’s art and cultural institutions.
It is described as “like a telephone book,” by which I hope they don’t mean “so obsolete half the people alive right now have never seen one.” Well, now’s your chance. Fraser’s 2016 has been released as a PDF, available at the Wattis Institute. It includes texts by Fraser and Jamie Stevens, who led a year-long season of events and exhibitions at the Wattis focused on Fraser’s work.
It is still available in print, too, and I hope a suitable number of copies will be secreted away around the globe to show future historians of the 21st century that at least some people were aware enough to put out exhaustive reports.
Wanted poster as altered by the NY Post (though they didn’t obscure Mugrabi’s gmail address)
That is when Mugrabi handed out wanted posters in front of ACG’s office, claiming they’d stolen her Warhol. ACG hadn’t filed a defamation lawsuit yet, so they were still talking to the press. Combined with the exhibits filed in their lawsuit [NYC County Supreme Court, 654058/2024] explained that Mugrabi had sought a 12-month, $3 million loan at at least 11.25%, plus a 2.25% referral fee to one of those guys up there—all booked up front, so she’d net $2.595m—against a Basquiat she said was worth $30 million.
Because she didn’t have the $12,500 processing fee required by the term sheet she signed, ACG suggested she use the Warhol as security against the expenses she agreed to, like shipping, research, insurance, storage, etc. And that is how they came to have custody of both the Basquiat and the Warhol, even though, by February 2024, it had become clear to ACG that they couldn’t find anyone to hold the Basquiat loan.
I think any of us would be understandably pissed if we were charged $12,500, or $27,000 or $97,000 and counting for a loan someone couldn’t deliver. Even if the reason they couldn’t make the loan was because of all the other legal claims and disputes being made against us by all sorts of creditors and mortgage holders and former household employees.
All of this is deeply uninteresting, though, especially compared to the absolute buck wild marvel of someone named Mugrabi having only one Warhol. And what, then, is that Warhol? As the Wanted poster teases, it is a blue, 20 x 16-inch, Jackie from 1964. And Libbie told Page Six her ex-father-in-law Jose had purchased it “at Christie’s seven years ago” for $869,000.
Some part of that might be true. About seven years before February 2024, Christie’s sold at least three nearly identical blue 1964 Jackie paintings. All have the same scant info and direct provenance: “Andy Warhol Works from a Private Collection” acquired directly from the artist, no date given. The first, in a morning sale on 16 November 2016, sold for $703,500 against a $700k-1m estimate. On 18 May 2017, another one sold for $595,500 against an estimate of just $400-600k. Then in an evening sale in Hong Kong on 27 May, the last sold for HKD5.954, or $764,000, against a roughly $400-600k estimate.
Barring the possibility of a fourth Jackie sold privately, to the world’s biggest Warhol trader, for 15-60% more, and based on the trace of black along the upper right edge, I think Libbie’s Jackie was the cheapest one, from 18 May.
Andy Warhol Round Jackie, the provenance, it burnsssss
Lmao how did I only just realize that this is the same screen Warhol used for the round gold Jackie from the Jho Low/Swizz Beatz/US Marshalls sale situation?
I’m glad to have provided some text to the lot description of the Louise Bourgeois shackle-shaped silver necklace coming up for auction in Cologne next month. Even if I don’t get credit.
In related news, a silver shackle-shaped necklace made by Chus Burés for Louise Bourgeois with a very low number from the edition of 39 is coming up for auction next month.
Charles Sheeler, Barn Abstraction, 1917, chalk on paper, 14 1/8 x 19 1/2 in., collection: Phila Museum
Speaking of Doylestown,
I was so immediately in love with the precisionist paintings, and the dramatic photos, that it took me a while to appreciate the late, semi-abstract barn paintings of Charles Sheeler.
It was probably the early photos from Doylestown and Bucks County that opened it up for me, and realizing that the barns were not late and out, but early and the whole point.
installation view of Barn Abstraction, 1917, in Charles Sheeler, Oct. 1939, The Museum of Modern Art, photo: Beaumont Newhall
I mean, making a drawing like Barn Abstraction in 1917 is kind of amazing. This one, at the Philadelphia Museum, because it was owned by the Arensbergs, was literally the first work in Sheeler’s 1939 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. It feels like Sheeler was in his Morton Schamberg era, in a good way.
In 1918 Sheeler used the drawing as the basis for his first print, a lithograph, of which maybe ten copies exist? That’s the number MoMA uses, and it’s cited in the lot description for the example being sold tomorrow at Christie’s. It’s the first of five Sheeler prints being sold—he only made six, and they’re all low volume.
Installation view of Charles Sheeler at MoMA in 1939, showing Upper Deck, 1929, from the Fogg, and American Landscape, 1930, from MoMA, photo by Beaumont Newhall
But that’s all less important than this installation photo from MoMA’s 1939 show, in which two of Sheeler’s precisionist masterpieces—Upper Deck (1929) and American Landscape (1930)—look like they’ve been reworked into a resin pour by Anicka Yi. What would Sheeler do with a painting of this photo? Is that even possible?
It stood out because I found myself talking about the Taliban’s destruction of the Bamian Buddhas in 2001 in my Rabkin Foundation interview a while back. Which was not something I’d planned or anticipated, tbqh; that fragment had just been lying there in my head, I guess, and I picked it up.
TIL M.O. Williams was the Society’s first field correspondent. He photographed the Buddhas [and this other scene, from Herat in western Afghanistan] on the Citroën-Haardt Expedition, a 7,000-mile trans-Asiatic road trip by motor car, tractor, pony, camel, and yak between Beirut and Beijing. [At the time, the project was known by the more racist title, la Croisière Jaune, the Yellow Expedition.] And French philosopher, Jesuit—and sinopaleontologist??—Pierre Tielhard de Chardin was on the trip, too. Who knew?
Joel Meyerowitz, McDonald’s Sign, November 15, 2001 (printed 2006), c-print, image: around 6 1/2 x 9 1/2 in. on an 8 x 10 sheet, via the Art Institute of Chicago
For folks looking for less disturbing McDonald’s-related pictures at the moment, somehow Joel Meyerowitz, of all photographers, is here to oblige. [via @mlobelart.bsky.social]
Study for Gonzalez-Torres Untitled (Porch), 2024, good candies in wrappers, endless supply, ideal weight 175 lbs
Ten days out, our neighbors have already put a bowl of candy on a table next to their front door. I am baffled. But as leaving piles of candy for the taking season approaches, I was hit by the idea of a Felix Gonzalez-Torres candy pour for Halloween. A Sturtevant show just opened in Paris, so I feel good about putting this out there while you people with porches still have time to shop for 175 ideal pounds of candy.
The coolest scooter in Santa Monica, at Frank Gehry’s other house, designed with Sam Gehry, and phtoographed by Jason Schmidt in 2019 for Architectural Digest
Via some content artnet was putting into an architecture vertical, I came across some content Frank was putting out in 2019 to boost the Gehry brand via a collab with his son Sam. It was a house in Santa Monica that started as a spec house, but which became an age-in-place reboot of Gehry’s own house.
Which is all fine, I’m just setting the context for why I’m only seeing this 5-yo Architectural Digest photo now. Ignore the Kermit green Steinway [or file it away for an obscene trend piece; it’s a thank you gift from Michael Eisner, for the pavilion Gehry made him in Aspen], and focus in on that scooter/bench.
It’s so sick it makes me want to restart my dadblog.
I can find no mention of it. I’d have guessed it was an offcut, but the dimensions look bigger than the fir beams in the house itself. Was it a sample? How did this come to be?
Photo of Frank Gehry’s Chiat conference table, 1986, from when it sold at Wright20 in 2003 [n.b., it sold twice at Phillips, too]
The closest analog I can find in Gehry’s oeuvre is just down the street in Venice, but ages ago: the giant wood block & roller skate legs on a modular conference table made for the fish room at Chiat/Day’s temporary warehouse/office in 1986. NGL, it feels like a stretch.
The whole thing was unexpected, tbqh, but one of the surprise bonuses of the Rabkin Foundation writers award situation was meeting artist/photographer Kevin J. Miyazaki when he came to make my portrait. I asked him to bring a copy of his 2013-and-counting artist book, A Guide to Modern Camp Homes.
Modeled after Sears brochures for selling kit homes, Miyazaki’s Guide combines quotes from official notices and chirpy marketing with bright archival photos and renderings, as if racially segregated detention camps in the desert were the next step in the American Dream:
Customize Your Home Your new home is unfurnished, aside from your bed frames, mattresses, and stove. You may wish to customize it with room partitions made from hanging sheets, and optional handmade items such as chairs, tables, shelves and window curtains. At some centers, large piles of discarded, green wood may remain from the home building process…
Where Sears would have run blurbs from satisfied customers, Miyazaki quotes the testimonies of former detainees, firsthand accounts of the sort gathered by Densho. In 2013 when he first conceived the Guide, I imagine the juxtaposition of deadpan form and horrible content was meant to foster a meaningful reflection on the wrongs that had been perpetrated by the US government against its own citizens.
The next dates on the Guide, though, are 2017 and 2024, when Muslim bans; refugee children imprisoned and separated from their families; genocide; and campaign promises of industrial-scale detentions and deportations were back. And the guy behind it all just compared the jail sentences of the rioters convicted in the 2021 coup attempt to the WWII detention of 120,000 Japanese Americans.
And so now Miyazaki’s Guide functions, not as a gentle appreciation of the experience of the artist’s family and the Japanese American community, but as evidence in itself. That even just a few years ago, we held the truths of the deep, unjust, racist, violations of peoples’ fundamental rights and liberties to be self-evident, and that was reason enough to never let them happen again.
If you need me, I’ll be filling up my reading list, starting with Jupiter Magazine, one of the art publications Miter namechecked. The theme of Jupiter’s latest issue, The Theater of Refusal, revisits and renews Charles Gaines’ foundational 1993 exhibition of contemporary Black art and its critical context. Its form was a series of readings and screenings throughout the summer, which I will now try to approximate in my head.
