A Jean-Paul Gaultier Ben Hur chair at the Roche Bobois store in Chevy Chase
Took the kid to get her booster at the vacated H&M flagship in the emptied out World Market mall in Chevy Chase, once the most luxurious shopping neighborhood in Washington, which is now a retail wasteland on top of a Metro station over which nimbys are nonetheless gearing up to fight redevelopment. Across the street from the basement TJ Maxx in the closed Neiman Marcus mall, and kitty corner from the worst Michael’s in the world, in the basement, below the Booeymonger’s, which is below the Mattress Warehouse, which is below three levels of no-validation parking deck, remains the Roche Bobois showroom, where this Jean-Paul Gaultier Ben Hur chair was pushed, without hope, up against the emergency exit.
Which, tbh, didn’t only feel out of place, but out of time.
Looking up something else in Francis Naumann’s Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Making Art in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction, I was caught off guard by the timing of the creation of la Boîte-en-Valise, which was still being conceived as an album:
On the very day when Arensberg wrote this letter [May 6, 1940], the advance of German troops forced Duchamp to flee Paris. With his sister Suzanne, and her husband, Jean Crotti, as well as Salvador Dali and his wife, Gala, Duchamp moved temporarily to the small village of Arcachon [on the southwest coast of France, near Bordeaux], where, to his surprise, he was delighted to discover that he could still carry out some work on his album. “I can even work,” he reported in a letter to the Arensbergs. “I found a good printer and I’m making progress on my album.” Indeed, work on the album continued at such an intense pace that when he returned to Paris in September, he arranged for a subscription bulletin to be printed announcing that the first deluxe examples of the album–which was now officially titled from or by MARCEL DUCHAMP or RROSE SELAVY–would be available on January 1, 1941. The description continued as follows:
“A box of pullouts [tirettes], leather covered (40 x 40 x 10[cm]), containing a faithful reproduction in color, cut-outs, prints, or scale models of glasses, paintings, watercolours, drawings, ready mades; /this ensemble (69 items) represents the most complete example of the work of Marcel Duchamp between 1910 and 1937. / This deluxe edition is limited to twenty examples numbered I through XX and each are accompanied by a signed original work / The price for each example is set at 5,000 francs, which will be reduced to 4,000 francs before the subscription period ends on March 1, 1941.”
…
The first valise rolled off the assembly line almost exactly on schedule. “My new box is finished,” Duchamp exclaimed in a letter to Roché written on January 7, 1941. “I am reserving one for your.” Ten days later, he wrote to Roché again, saying that although he is able to make about three boxes a week, he knows of only a few possible clients who could be sufficiently interested to purchase one. He asks Roché to tell Peggy Guggenheim that a deluxe edition is now ready (which, for the first time, he refers to as a “valise“), and she could have one for the subscription price of 4,000 francs. Finally he mentions to Roché that he is “having difficulty in finding the skins to make the outer valise.”
[p141-3.]
So to be explicit here, Germany attacked France on May 10th, 1940, took Paris on June 14th, and the French government eventually evacuated to Bordeaux. All the while Duchamp is contracting, producing and assembling the first Boîtes-en-Valise.
The Guggenheim Collection in Venice website calls this a Valigia, in German, it would be die Kiste im Koffer. And apparently Duchamp found he could produce the leather case at Louis Vuitton.
Rationing in occupied Paris began in September: “The rationing system also applied to clothing: leather was reserved exclusively for German army boots, and vanished completely from the market. Leather shoes were replaced by shoes made of rubber or canvas (raffia) with wooden soles.”
Naumann continued: Although he encountered some difficulty in securing leather during the time of the Occupation,…in May of 1941, he did manage to secure enough to issue two more deluxe examples [after Peggy Guggenheim’s, which was I/XX].” They were for his companion Mary Reynolds [the first of four 0/XX, actually] and poet George Hugnet [II/XX].
This part I knew, but didn’t register: In the Spring of 1941 Duchamp found out Guggenheim was shipping her entire art collection from Grenoble to the US, and asked her to take the loose materials for fifty Boîtes-en-Valise. In order to transfer those materials to her, Duchamp got a childhood friend/grocer to certify him for three months as a cheese merchant, so he could travel. The material was all shipped by the Summer of 1941. Duchamp himself wouldn’t arrive in New York until May 1942.
[Next morning update: Of course, this was all known, even by me. Ecke Bonk has researched and written all this. It was all exhaustively laid out in the rare sale by the family of the original owners of what is now called a Series A Valise, at Christie’s in 2015.
Duchamp’s years-long efforts to find and reproduce accurate color images of his work, at a significant scale, in increasing uncertainty and literal peril all sounded exciting but slightly wearying when they’re recounted, for example, in an auction catalogue. And the slight production variations and different original artworks included in each deluxe edition in a catalogue raisonée kind of blur together in a safe, documentary haze.
I guess it just hits differently now. Why it’s easier now to recognize the wartime trauma, if not outright desperation, the project was immersed in. Duchamp fleeing to the countryside with all these years of amassed bits in a literal boîte. And the way the wartime New York Valises are filleted with drawings and maquettes of the pocket chess set Duchamp was working on, that was sure to be a commercial hit, and was not at all a thing. And the timeline clicks into place that it took until 1949 for the last deluxe Valise to be fabricated and sold.]
[Next night update: It’s been a lively day of discussion with folks about this, and there are a lot of views. I think the excerpts Wayne Bremser pulled from Calvin Tomkins’ Duchamp biography are the most salient; tl;dr: Duchamp took a leisurely cruise to safety, while Mary Reynolds, who stayed behind to run a Resistance cell from her Paris apartment with Picabia’s daughter, spent arduous and death-defying months to reach the US. Truly startling. And worse because I had read Tomkins multiple times, and none of this landed on me like it does right now. It really is me (and [gestures around dumbly] all this).]
[Day after that update: Reading Hilton Als’ essay in the catalogue for Robert Gober’s 2014 MoMA show, and he references Auden’s poem about Brueghel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, where “dogs go on with their doggy life.” And I remember I wrote about that Auden and that Brueghel in the Summer of 2002.
And then Als talks about Gober’s Two Partially Buried Sinks and quotes Molly Nesbit in 1986, writing how the mass-produced object–or its facsimile–”contains longings for individual greatness…and fears of loss.” And then he goes on to talk about Duchamp at length, and I feel a separate blog post coming on.]
One of the wilder stories I found while researching the Art in America essay on LDS architecture was of the first known photographs of the interior of a temple, which only happened in 1911. That feels late in terms of photography, especially because all four of the Pioneer-era temples in Utah–in St. George, Manti, Logan, and Salt Lake City–all opened in the late 19th century, when photography would have been possible. But though several hundred non-Mormon guests were invited to tour the Salt Lake temple before its dedication in 1893, there was no effort to share images of the interiors of temples with nonbelievers.
the Annex was the glass conservatory filled with plants on the south side of the temple. it was removed after 1941. photo c. 1911, by Gisbert Bossard, as published in Dialogue (Fall 1996)
Which is why in 1911 Gisbert Bossard, a disaffected 21-year-old convert from Switzerland thought the Church would pay a lot of money for the 80 or so photos he secretly made by sneaking into the SLC temple while it was closed for maintenance. Bossard got in with the help of a groundskeeper who tended the conservatoryful of live plants in the room that represented the Garden of Eden, and seems to have had the run of the place. Some of his photos included the offices of the church leaders on the temple’s top floor, and the Holy of Holies, a prayer room off the celestial room reserved only for the president of the Church–and Jesus.
Henri Matisse, le Pare-brise, sur la route de Villacoublay, 1917, 38 x 55 cm oil on canvas, collection: Cleveland Museum of Art
Carolina Miranda shared an image of this unusual Matisse yesterday to mark the anniversary of the artist’s birth. It is a small painting that tells its own story: it was painted on the side of a busy road to the southwest of Paris and to the east of Versailles. The artist apparently switched places with his son, Pierre, who was driving, and painted this little canvas right where you see it: propped on the steering wheel.
Matisse, The Windshield Seam, 1917
This meta-painting is only my second favorite thing about it, though. In this used Renault Matisse saw the chance to paint a panoramic view of and through three contiguous windows. That includes one made of two panes of glass, which abut at a seam Matisse traced in faint black as part of the structure of the painting, a fragment of a technological horizon. Matisse, on a drive with his son, really said, “Pull over, I need to make a painting of this windshield.” And he did.
Where to even start when I’ve been at it for so long?
Interior of Buckminster Fuller’s US Pavilion from Expo ’67, with a lunar lander and satelloons to the left, and Alan Solomon’s curated show of American painting to the right, as seen in USIA director Jack Masey’s book, Cold War Confrontations
“It requires a genuine fight to produce one well-designed object of relatively permanent value,” said George Nakashima on the auction house’s webpage for this “rare” c. 1978 rosewood garbage can.
In 1989 Gerhard Richter made four large, slush-colored squeegee paintings [CR 706-1 through 4], which he titled Eis/Ice. In 1997, the Lannan Foundation helped give the brightest one, Eis 2, to the Art Institute of Chicago.
In 2003, Richter made a quarter-sized (100 x 80 cm) print edition of Eis 2 for the 40th anniversary of Lincoln Center Editions, a print fundraising operation of the Vera List Art Project. Richter and Robert Blanton’s print studio Brand X created an amazing 41-color screenprint version of the painting, just the kind of medium shifting challenge those guys would love.
Gerhard Richter, Eis 2 poster, 113 x 87 cm sheet of Somerset, unsigned, but still an edition
Clearly it worked, because Richter put out Eis 2 as a signed edition of 108 (plus 27 proofs) on Somerset. They started popping at auction about three years ago, and in the last year have sold for $56-$90,000.
Brand X also printed 500 copies of an unsigned poster version on slightly taller, narrower Somerset, with the Lincoln Center/List Art Posters caption. Same image dimensions (40 x 32 in.), same screens. These ur-Facsimile Objects sell for just a couple thousand dollars.
Ed Ruscha, Every Building on the Sunset Strip, 1966, collection: MoMA
With his deadpan, mechanically produced, offset printed, unsigned artist book, Every Building on the Sunset Strip, Ed Ruscha upended the art of photography. More recently he upended the art of photographing art. Museums are out there trying every way to depict the 7 inch-by-25-foot accordion-style book accurately on their little websites.
Ed Ruscha, Every Building on the Sunset Strip, 1966, collection: Getty Research Institute
MoMA shows just the cover, blank with the words The Sunset Strip at the top. The Getty shows the title page, plus a single, 14-inch spread, very manageable. The Harvard Art Museums treats it like a rare book, publishing images of the whole thing, in a gallery of 22 3-fold spreads. The Met, which never met a copyright it didn’t maximize, gives absolutely nothing, just the text description.
Ed Ruscha, Every Building on the Sunset Strip, 1966, screenshot, collection: Harvard Art Museums
Last year, the Getty, which holds Ruscha’s archives, went several extra miles by digitizing 60,000 of the over half million photos the artist and his collaborators have taken of the Sunset Strip since 1965. Turns out the book we know was just the first of at least 12 Sunsets spanning fifty years (so far), all of which are available online, for virtual driving.
12 Sunsets, Getty Research Institute’s digitized archive of Ed Ruscha’s, Every Building on the Sunset Strip
And then there is the single greatest photo in museum collection digitizing history, and I am 100% unironically serious when I say I hope the National Gallery of Art never replaces it, but uses it forever, in every medium, known or unknown, until the end of time.
Ed Ruscha, Every Building on the Sunset Strip, 1966, collection: NGA
The National Gallery of Art acquired Every Building on the Sunset Strip in 2015, when it subsumed the Corcoran. Every institution’s online collection presentation is shaped as much by its choices of software as by its information design and priorities, and the NGA’s even more so. The URL for the image above indicates it is generated to fit within a frame of a certain dimension, in this case 600 x 600 pixels.
two tiled fragments of Ed Ruscha’s Every Building on the Sunset Strip, collection: NGA
Clicking on the image doesn’t just zoom, it ZOOMS, taking the visitor to what may be the largest image of Every Building ever made, a near infinite scroll of more than 5,000 256px square jpeg tiles. Each tile is about 1/2 square inch of the original book, close in enough to see the halftone dot matrix used to render Ruscha’s photos on the offset lithographed page.
I am now trying to figure out how to extract these tiles, which are now the second-to-5000th best images of Every Building on the Sunset Strip ever made. Who knows, I might try to put them in a book.
Surrender Dorothy, a classic, early 80s view of the Washington DC LDS Temple from the Beltway, which someone almost immediately flagged as resembling Oz. Ganked from the Washington Post or wherever
A few months ago the editors at Art in America asked if I’d like to write about Mormon architecture for a religion-themed issue. I was like, “Do you want the spectacular space-age temples; the scrappy DIY pioneer rusticity; the mass-produced, suburban Mormcore cringe; or the unprecedented grappling with historical preservation?” And they said, “Yes, absolutely.”
The article is now online. “Building Mormonism: The Fascinating History of LDS Architecture.” Honestly, it feels like it could be three articles, and three more would come out of it. The more I dug and looked, the more interesting and revelatory stuff I found about the way the Church has approached its physical spaces and structures over its almost 200-year history. There’s probably a dissertation to be written on the early 20th century mandate to include a basketball court in every new meetinghouse. Or on the building missionary program that tried to optimize expertise and volunteer labor when demand for churches outstripped the local members’ construction skills. Or the impact on the built sacred environment of having a trans woman lead one of the most ambitious architectural eras in the Church’s history. [I think she’s already writing that last one herself.]
c. 1904 stereograph, The Mormon Temple at Kirtland, Ohio, image via LOC
I’ll add links to resources I found especially useful, and images of the buildings mentioned in the piece, so check back. In the mean time, I would have been lost without two blogs and one book: Historic LDS Architecture, where Bridger Talbot has been posting original research, photography, and travelogues since 2014 ldsarchitecture.wordpress.com went dormant in 2012, but is still full of photos and accounts of visits to architecturally notable church buildings. Places of Worship: 150 Years of Latter-day Saint Architecture is Richard W. Jackson’s 2003 historical survey of all the worship places of the LDS Church, and an institutional history of the Church’s Architecture Department, where he worked for many years. scottcsorensen.templephotos on Instagram provided a steady drip of inspo, and also a sense of perspective, that there was someone else spending even more time thinking about Church architecture than I was. And of course, whether that is comforting or Content Warning @TexturesofMormonism is the go-to source for recognition of the Church’s 70s and 80s homogeneous aesthetic.
The photo was at the Stable Gallery, where Thek had his first show, which McDarrah covered for the Village Voice. The notes and stamps on the back of the print relate to the caption and size for printing the photo in the paper. So this print’s seen some stuff.
Birthday Cake is, of course, made of pigmented wax that resembles a pyramid of slabs of meat, part of Thek’s Technological Reliquaries series. According to Cynthia Hahn’s The Reliquary Effect, Thek also titled the work, Josef Albers Homage to the Square. And though I can see how the top-down view of a 4-tier pyramid by itself would work, the strong diagonals of the vitrine’s steel, and the horizontal bands etched or painted into the sides seem like they’d obliterate the reference. Is the cake even a pyramid? Or is it a ziggurat?
Paul Thek, Birthday Cake, 1964, but dated in Parkett and beyond as 1967, photo: D. James Dee
NEXT MORNING UPDATE: Bryan Hilley’s search for other photos of Birthday Cake turn up a mystery that is a problem. This color photo of Birthday Cake by D. James Dee ran in black&white in Holland Carter’s 1991 Parkett essay on Thek, one of the first reassessments of the work after Thek’s death in 1988. [pdf] And it’s given the date of 1967.
All the other Technological Reliquaries are listed as 1965-66, which would make Birthday Cake a late Reliquary, even a culmination. Also, Cotter reads the glassed off meat as wistful commentary on the liberation of the Summer of Love, which, at 35, had just passed Thek by. Obviously, Cotter’s take is more involved than that, and boomers can bemoan the telescoping passage of time all they want. But it seems important to understand Thek’s work to know the time and place he made and showed his work, and for Birthday Cake and other meat works, it was October 1964 at the Stable Gallery, six months after Andy Warhol showed his Brillo boxes there.
Paul Thek, Meat Piece with Warhol Brillo Box, 1965, image: whitney.org, where they get the timeline right in their 2010 audioguide
Cyklopen Kulturhas, 2013, Stockholm, design by Viktor Marx
If the Eames House was not available, I decided it would be fine to live in a gas station felt like an appealingly modernist alternative. I’ve kept a list, to which I also added a decommissioned Minneapolis skyway, a temporary MoMA fire escape, and a reconstituted world’s fair pavilion or two. I would also add a greenhouse. There used to be a most excellent abandoned greenhouse on the roof of a building which you could see from the Roosevelt Island tram. Perhaps, I thought, Lacaton & Vassal could help me persuade the family, who, it turns out, really do not want to live in any of these repurposed industrial structures.
Cyklopen ground floor and mezzanine, image: archilovers
Now there is another. [shoutout Geraldine for the heads up] From 2011 until 2013 Stockholm architect and organizer Viktor Marx worked with Cyklopen, an autonomy-minded community organization, to rebuild their gathering space, which had been firebombed by neo-nazis. The result, Cyklopen Kulturhas is as spectacular as it is utilitarian.
The 2-storey, 459 sq. m. structure was optimized for safety, for flexibility, and for the self-sufficient group’s donated labor. A laminated lumber core was raised by hand, Amish barn-style, and ringed with upscaled scaffolding, on which the greenhouse-style tinted polycarbonate skin was hung. The upper floor, aka The Box, is enclosed and climate controlled; the open ground floor and mezzanine space are not. Let’s say it’s responsive to the climate.
Cyklopen 2 concept art showing Tetris-style tint design, also how The Box fits
There is room to spend a little more than almost no money to bougie up the place without, I think, losing the adapted reuse credibility. Solar panels. Radiant floors. Some Kieran Timberlake-style Bosch Rexroth extruded aluminum beams. [It’s fascinating that even with some formalist similarities, KT’s Cellophane House was optimized for the diametric opposite factors to Cyklopen: high end components were pre-constructed offsite, then shipped and craned into place in midtown in a few days, with stupendous logistical complexity and expense.]
Ultimately, I find what is holding me back from living the gas station/greenhouse/shed dream–besides the family buy-in, obviously–is the suburbanity, the single family house-ness of it all. I am a city person. We are city people, and a site where I could reasonably build a Swedish anarchist Bifröst greenhouse is nowhere near a subway–at least since MoMA built that Jean Nouvel supertower on the vacant lot next door. So I will add Cyklopen to the moodboard in my heart, and wish the original a bright and impactful future.
Jayson Musson’s show, His History of Art, continues at the Fabric Workshop & Museum until the end of the year. It’s not clear, though, whether this 30″ plush version of his pothead rabbit sidekick Ollie, from his kids sitcom-looking, three-channel video installation will last that long.
There are only 90 in the edition, and they’re the wackest art world plush toy since Mike Kelley’s emotionally needy Little Friend, which dropped in an edition of 850 in 2007. Collect’em all!
Mike Kelley collaborator Ahrum Hong posing with Little Friend back in 2007
Berthe Morisot, Peonies, 1869, oil on canvas, 41x 33cm, collection: Gift of Paul Mellon to the National Gallery of Art
The first work on the National Gallery of Art’s Artle quiz yesterday this Berthe Morisot painting of a vase of peonies, which, you have to admit, looks rather Manet-ish. I figured it wasn’t Manet, because if it was, I’d have already seen it–unlike the dogs, which–we’ve been over this–are occasionally incredible, basically every [late] Manet painting of a little arrangement of flowers is, as far as I’m concerned, a masterpiece, and I can’t imagine the National Gallery holding out on me by never showing this masterpiece. But I guessed Manet anyway, as a compliment.
Not that this is a masterpiece, ofc. Obviously, it’s a bit of a mess, with some moments of greatness. And some meaningful echoes of Manet, who Morisot met in 1868. Morisot’s family became close to Manet’s, and she modeled and sat for him. And let him rework her paintings. And married his brother.
Edouard Manet, Peonies, 1864-65, 60 x 35 cm, collection The Met
So Morisot would have known the peonies Manet liked to grow–and paint. Some of the half dozen paintings of peonies Manet made around 1864 had been shown repeatedly by the time the Morisots came to call.
Edouard Manet, Vase de pivoines sure piédouche, 1864, 93 x 70 cm, collection: Musée d’Orsay
What’s more amazing about this Morisot, though, is that it was unknown until 1980, when it was discovered underneath another painting, Un percher des blanchisseuses, from 1875. The title translates as a perch of laundresses, but the apparent English title is Hanging The Laundry Out To Dry. The combination of picturesque rural life and factory smokestacks encroaching on the horizon make the likely site of this painting Gennevilliers, a village outside Paris where the Manets owned property.
Berthe Morisot, Un percher de blanchisseuses, 1875, 35 x 45 cm, Gift of Paul Mellon to the National Gallery of Art
Morisot included the laundry scene in the second Impressionist exhibition in 1875, where it was one of at least four works by the artist purchased by Dr. Georges De Bellio. It passed through various heirs and dealers until Paul Mellon bought it in 1950. Given that timeline, it seems the most likely explanation is Morisot stretched a new canvas over the existing painting.
As a work from a historically important show, blanchisseuses was exhibited often over the years, and obviously included in the Wildensteins’ 1961 Morisot catalogue raisonné. But it was only thirty years later, when the Mellons were getting ready to donate it to the National Gallery that the peonies painting was discovered underneath it.
The Mellons ended up donating Morisot’s Hanging out the laundry in 1985. But they kept Peonies until 1994, which, wouldn’t you? For all this, I’d expected more study of this double painting, and how it came to be. Despite decades of Morisot and Impressionist popularity, Peonies has never been exhibited outside the National Gallery.
I see at least five other paintings from the period, mostly around 1875, of the same dimensions, including two other Gennevilliers landscapes. Were these pre-stretched canvasses from the art supply store? It’s now been 40 years; has anyone checked under them?
Koons’ description of Baptism as a six-page project–three 2-page spreads–excludes this sultry portrait intro page.
Today Artforum’s Lloyd Wise mentioned a project Jeff Koons did for the magazine in November 1987. Titled Baptism, the seven-page spread ran a year before his Art Magazine Ads series in the same magazine, which promoted his unprecedented, three-venue Banality show. Unlike the Ads, though, which were released as a print portfolio, Baptism seems to have been its own, standalone thing.
Baptism, Spread 1, Artforum Nov. 1987
Anyway, as one of the sites, George Washington’s restaged pew at St. Paul’s Church on Broadway [right], has since become an object of fascination here, I thought I’d look up the rest.
I haven’t gotten very far because I was surprised by this first object, a porcelain figurine of Don Quixote by Enzo Arzenton for the Italian manufacturer Capodimonte. Actually what surprised me was the image, which is the same one found on the website of this Staten Island Capodimonte importer almost forty years later.
Platinum and baguette diamond necklace mounting by Cartier, c. 1937, sold for $53, 775 by the Doris Duke Foundation at Christie’s in 2004
I was absolutely certain I’d written about this, but I guess I’ve just been thinking about this wild Cartier necklace mounting, minus most of the diamonds, which the Doris Duke estate sold for $54,000 for 18 years. It was truly a standout in the auction of Duke’s jewelry.
The preposterously scaled necklace was purchased by Duke’s boyfriend, a couple of years before they got married. She raided the necklace over the years, and remounted 79 of the diamonds in other pieces, leaving a gorgeous, platinum husk.
Doris Duke’s Zombie Cartier Diamond Necklace, reconstituted with period-correct diamonds and offered at Christie’s Geneve in May 2017 for CHF 3-5 million, image via alaintruong
A jewelry aficionado with an absurdly advanced appreciation of historical accuracy, and possessed of a conceptual sophistication rivaled only by their access to money, apparently spent years assembling period-correct cushion and Old European-cut stones to reconstitute Doris Duke’s Depression-era diamond fringe necklace. This zombie necklace was offered for sale at Christie’s in 2017, with an estimate of CHF 3-5 million. It did not sell, at least publicly.
Out of respect for the time and effort required to assemble them, I don’t want the diamonds to be released back into the wild; put them in a little bag. But definitely take them out, and let the necklace be restored to its perfect, skeletal state. It’s what Doris would have wanted.
