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.
Sir Joshua Reynolds (attr.), Textiles in Space, c. late 18th century, oil on canvas, 226 x 131 cm
At some point in the late 18th century, it is believed Sir Joshua Reynolds painted extensions to a portrait of Queen Henrietta Maria, wife of Charles I, painted by Sir Anthony Van Dyck in the 1630s. The portrait was in the collection of the 2nd Earl of Warwick, who wanted to decorate his castle with identically sized, full-length portraits of the highest quality.
Reynolds is argued because of the quality of the execution, the importance of the portrait and the collection, and the importance of Warwick as Reynold’s patron. The attribution is not universally embraced, however.
The conjoined paintings by Van Dyck and his 18th century collaborator were sold in 1978, in situ, along with Warwick Castle, to the Tussauds Group, which was acquired by Blackstone in 2006, which did not sell them at Sotheby’s in 2015, but did sell them in 2016.
Anthony Van Dyck, Queen Henrietta Maria in a Gold Gown, c. 1630s, 103 x 84 cm, as exhibited at the Yale Centre for British Art, photo: Stephen Hand via adamfineart
The paintings were decoupled and the resulting Van Dyck, restored, was loaned to Yale for five years. It sold at Christie’s last night. The location and status of the possible Reynolds, and its original frame, and stretchers, is unknown.
I think I understand most of the issues around the Restitution Study Group’s unsuccessful attempts to get an emergency restraining order to stop the official transfer of the Smithsonian’s Benin Bronzes to the Nigerian government–everything except the timing. Why is this storydropping now, almost two months after a judge denied the motion? The RSG is insisting reporters note that its lawsuit is still active, even though the judge’s refusal of the ERO seems to find every argument in the Smithsonian’s favor. Going public now is somehow part of a strategy to amend their complaint and add new theories to the public debate over what to do with Benin Bronzes. Or more interestingly, to add a new constituency to that public and new voices to that debate.
It’s the time of year when people are publishing lists. And here’s mine. Starting with number 2:
2. Letter to Peter Norton When Peter Norton joined the Board of Trustees of the Museum of Modern Art, he apparently asked Douglas Cramer, who chaired the Committee on Painting & Sculpture, if he could sit in on the Committee’s acquisition meetings, to see how they worked. Cramer wrote back to express his utter bafflement at such a request, the audacity of which neither The Modern, nor the art world at large, had ever known, and that such things were not done, so no. Norton had the letter framed and hung it in the front hall of his Central Park West apartment, where he hosted many collection visits.
1. Joan Collins Visits Gemini! Postcard from Ellsworth Kelly
Ellsworth Kelly, Joan Collins Visits Gemini! 1985, collage on exhibition card, sold out from under me at Bonham’s in April 2022
On Tuesday, March 26, 1985, Joan Collins, star of the Douglas Cramer-produced Dynasty, was photographed meeting Princess Diana at a charity fashion show in London. The wire service photo of their meeting ran in the Los Angeles Times a few days later, on Friday the 29th. Did Kelly see it there? That weekend he had back-to-back shows in New York; a painting show closing at Blum Helman, and a wall reliefs show opening at Castelli.
Tues., 26 March 1985 AP Wirephoto of Princess Diana meeting Joan Collins in London, via ebay
Christopher Knight wrote an essay for Ellsworth Kelly at Gemini 1983-85, a catalogue/brochure of four series of editions now listed as being published in 1984. The cutout paper collage on the left of the card[-shaped piece of paper] above is similar in composition to Cupecoy Relief, from one of the 1984 series. Cupecoy is the name of a nude beach on St Martin, where Kelly & Jack Shear, and Cramer, would visit Jasper Johns. Was there an announcement card for the book or the works? Was there an exhibition? Was there an ad clipped from an art magazine and trimmed to postcard-size? Does the collage cover the text details of the series/book/show? Does the up-do’d head of Joan Collins cover a photo of the artist, as the caption says, at Gemini?
Ellsworth Kelly, Cupecoy Relief, 1984, painted aluminum, 58x50x3.75 in., produced by Gemini G.E.L. in an edition of 3 plus 2 AP, image: nga.gov
The card is inscribed on the back, “Joan Collins Visits Gemini!” Maybe because now it looks like Joan Collins is looking at an Ellsworth Kelly at Gemini. It is also signed, “EK 85.59,” which makes me think that Kelly revisited the card after giving it to his collector/friend Cramer, and gave it a catalogue number. Or did Kelly keep a running registry in his head at all times, ready to sign and number whatever cleared the artistic bar? You see the layers of awesomeness involved here.
But the work was also signed, “Love, Joan Collins.” The ultimate Cramer flex? Or did Kelly get Collins to sign a card when she visited Gemini? The making and sending and signing of this card hangs on the answers to these chronological questions.
If you are the person who practically walked away with this Ellsworth Kelly Rosetta Stone for one thousand two hundred and seventy five dollars [?!], please share your insights-and let me know when you’re ready to sell.
John Singer Sargent, “The Holy Trinity,” after el Greco, 1895, 31.5 x 18.5 in., oil on canvas, private collection currently on view at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
I went for the watercolors, but I could look at John Singer Sargent’s paintings of other artworks all day long. The first gallery of the Sargent and Spain show at the National Gallery is almost entirely copies of paintings Sargent made in the Prado, mostly Velásquez and El Greco.
John Singer Sargent, “Las Meninas,” after Velásquez, 1879, 45 x40 in., oil on canvas, collection The George Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, at the NGA
I can’t believe we’ll have to some day go to George Lucas’s museum to see Sargent’s copy of Las Meninas. But at least that day is not yet.
John Singer Sargent, Virgin and Saints, 1895, watercolor over graphite with gouache, 12.5 x 9 in., private collection via nga
The show was crowded, and I mistakenly figured I could look up everything I needed to know afterward, but I guess they’re saving it all for the book. From the room full of Sargent’s studies of Spanish religious painting, sculpture, and architecture, I wrongly assumed that the watercolor above of an altarpiece was related to the Gardner Museum’s study of the Caananite goddess Astarte/Ishtar for the Boston Public Library, which was hanging next to it. But the altarpiece dates from 1895, after that section of the library murals were completed. [Revisit update: it definitely informed Sargent’s depiction of the Virgin at the other end of the library, though, including the arrangement of candles in front of it.]
John Singer Sargent, Astarte, 1892-94, study for murals for the Boston Public Library, from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
A lot of these works were definitely not made to be shown. Sargent was making them for other reasons: For himself. Maybe like how Richter just wanted a Titian, Sargent just wanted a Velásquez. Or he was trying to figure something out. To capture a moment, a detail, a lighting effect, a space, an experience, a turkey.
John Singer Sargent, Turkey in a Courtyard, 1879-80, oil on canvas, 14×10.5 in., private collection
I will have to go back to see if there is any explanation at all for why Sargent went approximately 100x harder in the paint on this photobombing turkey in a Spanish courtyard than on the courtyard itself. This may be my new favorite Sargent ever.
Courtyard of the Casa de Chabiz, 1913, oil on canvas, at the NGA. Notice the carved capitals are the same
[Revisit update: there is zero mention of the Turkey in the weirdly sparse catalogue, even though Sargent returned to paint the same 16th century Granada courtyard 30+ years later, and included some donkeys.
Wait, is that a turkey standing exactly in the painting’s vanishing point?? Put there the same year he made the turkey bronze below? Please do not make me need to write a paper on Sargent’s turkeys. It’s Sargent; how has this scholarship not been done to death already?]
John Singer Sargent [!] Turkey, c. 1913, bronze, 18 inches [!], Corcoran Museum/NGA
[Completely unrelated, I’m sure: Turkey, c. 1913, a nearly life-size [?!] bronze the Corcoran Gallery acquired out of Sargent’s estate sale in 1925.]
Betty Parsons, Untitled, 1976?, painted rock, 3×6 in., image via Doyle New York
Sometimes it’s just impossible not to love a Betty Parsons sculpture. Just look at this little thing. The date on the back’s hard to read, but what if Parsons was 76 when she painted these eyes [?] on this rock. This is definitely one of those situations where I blog about it so I don’t buy it. But ngl, I do want it.
update: Parsons in a double exposure in her studio on the invitation for a 1975 exhibition at Studio Gallery in DC is not quite how I imagined her painting this little rock owl or whatever, but it’s probably closer to how it went down.
image via gallery98, also in the aaa betty parsons papers, but nfs, obv
Also a good time to remember that in his architect phase, Tony Smith designed Parsons’ studio and guest house on the North Fork.
In 2013 artist Jayson Musson created a sculpture live on Vine & Twitter, and offered it for sale. Though I was in DC at the time, I saw it, bought it, and rallied some friends on the ground to pick it up before it got scooped or tossed. That saga was capped in a blog post. And now, on the moment of decoupling this site from the site of the sculpture’s creation, I have finally installed it. It’s a little dusty, but it holds up.
Jayson Musson, Punk is dead. Art was never alive. If I said I never stressed about money that’d be a lie., 2013, found materials. [also a Maki Tamura scroll drawing, pour one out for A/C Projects]
Tejo Remy Re-Bench made from Balenciaga deadstock fabric at the London store, Nov. 2022, via
In other problematic textile repurposing news, Droog designer Tejo Remy, who has always made custom Rag Chairs from the client’s bags of old clothes, has collaborated with Demna. Remy made Re-Benches out of deadstock and offcut fabric for Balenciaga, which were installed this month in ten boutiques worldwide. After two weeks on display, they went up for sale online. Artnet says the drop on the 22nd was a surprise, and sold out immediately. But there was time to put out press releases to the hypesphere. Balenciagattention was then promptly devoured by the rightwing vortex of shit, when online q-trolls fed the latest ad campaign through the p3do conspiracy outrage machine in the stupidest way possible. The company responded by loudly suing itself and its creative team.
None of which is the point here. The point is that Demna, too, is recycling. Remy made a Rag Chair last September at the Musée des Arts Decoratifs as a performance. He used linen panels left over from the exhibition, « Luxes », the hometown version of « Dix mille ans de luxe », with the Musée programmed for the Louvre Abu Dhabi in 2019, sponsored by the Confédération Européenne du Lin et du Chanvre, the European Confederation of Flax and Hemp.
August 2022: Gap before the stormfront, image: @owen_lang
The video recap very much does not look like a performance, but it does work as a how-to for making your own Rag furniture. Whether you use the leftover scenery from your pandemic-era exhibitions or your bags of damning fits by suddenly outré designers, you can tell your own story! Or maybe you have a lead on those giant bins of cancelled Yeezy x Gap joints you can turn into at least ten of the dankest Rag Chairs ever.
Where has this Pierre Jeanneret teak and steel and glass bookcase been all my life? The Central State Library, you say? Can you loot three more to match?
Suddenly I’m rethinking my moral objections to the emptying of Chandigarh for the aesthetic enrichment of the bourgeoisie of the west. [oh wait, I already rethought it.]
The lot essay says Jeanneret’s “crenelated shelves of the Central Library display case recall the undulating glass panels and alternating railings of the interior architecture he had designed.” Hmm. Here is a photo of the cases installed in the library.
Interior views of the Central State Library, Sector 17, Chandigarh, India by Pierre Jeanneret, photo: Jeet Molhothra, via CCA
Danh Vo, Untitled, 2021, graphite & ink on A3 paper by Phung Vo, Revolver for Secession
Danh Vo had two shows simultaneously last fall, with work that turns out to be related.
Thought it had an ISBN number, the publication for Vo’s show at Secession in Vienna was not a book, but a drawing. The artist’s father Phung Vo wrote the word Neolithic on one side of an A3 piece of paper. The exhibition’s sponsors Secession’s colophon were stamped on the back. It was slightly baffling, tbqh.
Danh Vo, Untitled, 2021, graphite and c-print on paper, A3, framed, image: massimodecarlo
Meanwhile, at Massimo De Carlo, he showed photos of flowers from his farm outside Berlin, mounted on an identically sized sheet of paper, with the scientific name underneath, also written by his father, in the same script as Neolithic.
Danh Vo, Untitled, 2021, detail
They’re impossible to see from the reproductions online, but there are tiny alignment crosses above Neolithic. The text is in the same place on both, and the marks seem to be where a photo would go. The composition of these works is basically the same.
The Neolithic publication is the first thing Manuela Ammer asked Vo about in their gallery talk at the closing of the Secession show. Vo explained that he’d come to see these two things–specific names of flowers and the neolithic–as opposites, and that his practice entails not choosing, but doing both, and considering the difference.
To Vo, neolithic is an abstraction, an amorphous period of time about which there is so much we can’t know, because the only human traces that survive are stone. This is what is captured, he did not say, by the absence of a photo.
I started this blog in 2001 as a side project for my filmmaking. It was the place to share my inspiration, development, behind-the-scenes, making-of, marketing, reception, and commentary.
screenshot of @zootycoon’s tumblr post with the bootleg platform sneakers with a label based on a movie poster that unlocked the Goncharovissance
Now Tumblr has, in one day, generated an entire metacontent universe around a film that doesn’t exist: Goncharov (1973), produced and/or, disputedly, directed by Martin Scorsese. It is spectacular, and exactly the kind of thing I got into blogging about movies for.
[update: I am told that Goncharov (1973) is, in fact, an absolutely real film. If it wasn’t, would it have an elaborate and exhaustive Google Doc mapping its history, production, plot, music, versions, and analysis? And there’s a poster? And then there’s all the fanfic. My apologies to Messrs JWHJ0715 and Scorsese.]
At one point in the 1910s, before he was married, my great-grandfather Wilford “Bill” Hilton sold aluminum cookware door-to-door in southern Utah. That’s according to an undated note my great-grandmother Vera Snow wrote to accompany these drippy aluminum blobs. In the 1920s, when my grandmother Lora Hilton was a little girl, the note continued, she accidentally melted some of these leftover aluminum pots on the stove.
The resulting dripped and pooled forms were interesting enough for my great-grandmother, and then my grandmother, to save in a drawer for a hundred years. I’ve had them on the bookshelf for a couple of years now, trying to think of what to do with them. Mostly, I just look at them and think about these people who kept these things. Sometimes I think about trying to photograph them better.
Obviously, if asked, I would install gargantuan replicas of them on the plaza of the Seagram Building. I’m not naive.
Brigham Morris Young, son of one Mormon prophet and son-in-law of another, dressed as his operatic alter ego, Madam Pattirini, for a concert at the Sugar House Ward, Salt Lake City, c. 1901
With news that at least two of the five victims of the Colorado Springs terrorist attack on Club Q were trans, and that the shooter, apprehended by patrons of the gay club he attacked, is a member of the LDS Church, it’s important to note the impact of the Church’s own positions and rhetoric in stoking anti-LGBTQ hatred and violence among its members, and as part of an increasingly extremist network of right-wing religio-political groups around the world.
Whatever progress and enlightenment it has achieved, the LDS Church and its constituent communities are far too often a source of bigotry and pain and an unsafe space for queer members. And the Church’s treatment of trans members is even worse.
When one Church leader–a cousin, fwiw–quotes another calling for “musket fire” in defense of the Church’s anti-LGBTQ policies, and when racist, misogynistic, and homophobic harassment by extremist members goes unchecked, even unmentioned, the Church should recognize the impact this has: and that includes stoking the murderous violence that one member unleashed last weekend on his queer neighbors. It’s not as if the guy had to be a zealot hanging on every word; in this case, he apparently was not, but was raised up in it. And then he found more hate to reinforce and build on what he’d absorbed.
The point is, the organization that should be fostering love is seeding bigotry and lending credence to active agents of violence against LGBTQ people.
Lot 50: Group of Shells and Beach Pebbles, from the Estate of Joan Didion, image: stairgalleries
Let’s for a moment say we won’t even think about the money. If that seems hard, just imagine that someone donated $7,000 to Parkinson’s research and Sacramento women’s college writing scholarships, and in return, rather than public recognition and a tax deduction, they received Group of Shells and Beach Pebbles.
And then they paid $1,960 to a Hudson Valley auction house to warrant that these “approximately 26” shells and rocks–there are, in fact, 32 shells, 17 rocks, and one item whose rock-or-shell nature I could not determine in the auction house’s display photo–that “[t]his group of shells decorated the fireplace mantle in [Joan] Didion’s living room.”
Atelier van Lieshout, Untitled (Litter Bin), 1991, fiberglass, 35 x 30 x 30 cm, image: christie’s ams
Before he designed a slave city or declared a pier in Rotterdam as his own anarcho-utopian country, Joep van Lieshout got attention for his brutalist/minimalist fiberglass sculptures shaped like furniture, plumbing fixtures, and architecture. It rarely comes to the market.
But lo, here is a 1991 work, Untitled (Litter Bin), being auctioned at Christie’s Amsterdam. I’d call it a great start.
