Louise Lawler, Sunset in a Bunker, 2009/10, c-print facemounted on plexi and plywood, 10×13 in., ed 2/5 (1AP) selling at Christie’s by 10 Oct 2025
Will we one day be able to deduce the travels and photography of Louise Lawler by close readings of her work, the way we can figure out where On Kawara was, and what he was up to?
Is there an entire body of work, for example, that she made when she visited the extremely bunker-branded Boros Collection in Berlin in 2009, and if so, was it kind of overwhelmed by all their Olafur Eliassons on view when it first opened?
Google Books scan of the cover of New York Magazine, Apr 14, 1986, which features o photo of SITE’s Laurie Mallet House, 1985
Speaking of that 1986 New York Magazine interiors issue with the feature on Willi Smith’s loft, it has another Smith-related project on the cover: the 1820 Greek Revival townhouse in the West Village which SITE renovated for WilliWear president Laurie Mallet. On her website, SITE co-founder Alison Sky said the project was titled, House of Memories, and the elements incorporated into the building were part of or referred to the house’s own history.
The way this overlaps the bottom stair shows how far out this plaster cast of another door in the house sits against the party wall. SITE”s Mallet House via NY Mag, Apr 14, 1986
Has Rachel Whiteread seen this? Has anyone? SITE’s Mallet House, via NY Mag, Apr 14, 1986
Though this does tell me how the doorframe left behind after a wall was removed relates to the bookshelf with cast plaster book ghosts seeming to poke through the wall from next door. Or did. This real estate listing photo shows the bookcase intact, but not the door.
I do not own a $6.3 million West Village townhouse that is the only residential project of one of the most fascinating and influential architecture firms of the late 20th century, but I like to think if I did, I wouldn’t tear chunks of it out for my random renovation and draw all over the rest. via realtor
Ok, it’s not Le Corbusier at E-1027, but the current [?] owners clearly did not feel constrained from adding their own paintings to SITE’s design.
A few weeks ago Francesca Fuchs talked with Tyler Green about her show at and about the Menil Collection and the de Menils, John & Dominique, and their house. The Space Between Looking and Loving: Francesca Fuchs and the de Menil House grew out of Fuchs’ archival research into a letter John de Menil had sent to her archaeologist father about a Roman sculpture the de Menils owned. It expanded into a multi-layered engagement with the house, the art in the house, the collectors, and the works she discovered in the Menil archives.
Fuchs makes paintings of photos, and paintings of photos of paintings, so ofc, I am already onboard. But two pieces of the exhibit really resonate:
The de Menils’ house was designed by Philip Johnson, but decorated by couturier Charles James; it’s the only interior James designed, and it remains intact. At the entrance of her show Fuchs made a version of a faux bois wall treatment James painted, I think in the living room or the library. It’s a modernist wall that looks like pale, teak veneer paneling, but it’s not. So kind of weird, and Fuchs clearly makes hers a painting of a paint treatment.
[L to R] Matisse Matisse, archival photos, Steen Matisse, Fuchs Matisse, Fuchs Matisse photos, at Menil
The other thing to highlight is the Matisse cutout hanging in the Menils’ kitchen, which everyone knew was green, because it’s in the Museum, and Dominique had the longtime framer at the Menil, artist William Steen, make a copy of it to rotate in and out.
Then Fuchs found an early color photo under all the black & white documentation, and it turns out the Matisse was red. So Fuchs and the Menil curator had to piece together the history of two Matisses [SPOILER: John & Dominique gave the red one to a kid for a wedding present, and @thelegendaryhitchhiker just posted it on tumblr. Turns out the kid and/or spouse sold it at Sotheby’s in 2007.] And to the Matisse original and Steen’s copy, Fuchs added her own copy of the red Matisse, or an archival photo of it, anyway, and other archival photos of it in the house.
I made a recording of 4’33” in Notre Dame, and even when I edit it to 4:32, it is showing up as 4:34 seconds long. Well, I will not use the computer to deceive you with an incomplete performance. You deserve the entire 4’33”, and that is what you get.
[a week later update: it’s August, but I honestly have no sense of anyone actually listening to this, which makes it even more hilarious to me. Do not listen challenge!]
After decades of tearing down medium-specific silos I’m not going to start rebuilding them now. And it’s entirely reasonable to look at Wolfgang Tillmans’ wide range of print formats and say that he has always been exceptionally aware of making shows that are also installations, and images that are also objects.
But by the time I made my way through Tillmans’ massive, catalogue raisonné-scale show that fills the Pompidou’s 6,000 m2 library, the pictures all felt familiar. The music, I love that for him. What I wanted to know more about are Tillman’s sculptures—and his painting.
On the French Rivierea there’s a villa one hilltop over from Éze that has always blown my mind. In a place where everyone else’s houses and villas are built cheek-to-jowl, the Château Balsan sits on its own 70 hectare (172 acre) hill that drops to the sea (or to the railroad track, at least). It was built in 1920 by Consuelo Vanderbilt and her French second husband Jacques Balsan (thus the name, though they called it Lou Seuil), in collaboration with the landscape architect of Blenheim Palace (she’d been traded to the Duke of Marlborough by her mother).
In all the years I’d known about the house, I’d known about the Vanderbilt connection, but not anything of its current/latest owner. Until yesterday. Vanderbilt died in 1964, and by 1969, it was owned by France’s leading mall developer, Robert Zellinger [de] Balkany. That’s when married his second wife there, Princesse Marie-Gabrielle de Savoie, the daughter of the last king of Italy. Judith Benhamou reports that it was around this time he added the “de” to his name, and insisted on being addressed as Barone, though I don’t think that’s how defunct Italian titles work.
Anyway, he filled Château Balsan and his multiple other houses with extravagant furniture and objets, long after he and the Princesse divorced in 1990. This buck wild vermeil candelabrum, for example, he bought at Christie’s in 2004.
It was made for the Duke of York, King George III’s second son, in 1824, and depicts Hercules slaying the Hydra; each of its nine heads holds a candle. It stands 35 inches high, and is made from 35 kg of silver. It’s a baroque pastiche composition by Edward Farrell, the master silversmith at Kensington Lewis, who fed the Duke’s massive silver habit. Relatedly, it was first sold after the Duke’s death in 1827, along with all his silver, to settle his massive debts. Most of the stuff, though, including this candelabrum, ended up selling for less than a quarter of what it originally cost, which, combined with the death of his main client, kind of crashed Kensington Lewis’s retail business.
Anyway, ZdeB must have bought it after it failed to sell in 2004, because it is not listed. He died in 2015, and the candelabrum was the top lot in a 2017 700-lot sale of stuff from Paris and Éze, the fourth time it came up for sale at Christie’s. Not a lot of bangers; only 20 lots sold for more than GBP 100,000, but he made it up in volume, I guess.
It seems like the house remains in the family, though if it sold, it’d probably be the most expensive house in the world, and would sell to someone far worse than a mall developer.
Imagine actually staging a balloon show in the Grand Palais, and deciding what the grandest, vastest art space in the world really needs is five, little Christmas ornament satelloons suspended over a field of temporary sheds, each containing its own Museum of Ice Cream-style balloon instagram spectacle. Does that feel insufficient? Yes? Should we add a light show turning them into disco balls? Should they rise and sink in sync to music? Should they invite Bella Hadid? It’s like, confronted with the central faiblesse of the aesthetic experience, Hyperstudio could only think to keep adding to it.
screenshot of Erwan Franck’s youtube video of visiting Euphoria, a balloon-themed spectacle at the Grand Palais in Paris
Look, I am fully aware that a sporadic series of blog posts over 18 years is no way to realize a 100-foot wide aluminum sphere sculpture exhibited in one of the most prominent art venues in the world. I get that. I’m glad the Grand Palais was at least aware.
But this is not just about me and my balloon. Kusama has been showing inflatable immersive environments for years, and she is not here in the Balloon Museum’s Euphoria. LVMH was fine to put dots all over their stores, but apparently did not see fit to underwrite her obliteration of and in the Grand Palais.
Martin Creed’s Work no. 3883: Half the air in a given space, 2024, inside a pathetic greenhouse at the Grand Palais, as part of the Balloon Museum‘s instagram show, Euphoria
And then there’s Martin Creed, an Old Master of the contemporary balloon arts. For the Grand Palais he made, of course, Work no. 3883: Half the air in a given space (2024). And the space they gave was inside a f’ing greenhouse. The Balloon Museum was really given the biggest space in Paris to stage an exhibition of the most important balloon-based artwork of the age, and said, “Half the air in a given space? Sure thing, I give you an Amazon box with a balloon in it.”
The table is from the Walker House (1935-56), which was the subject of an intense LA real estate fairy tale its ecstatic buyer wrote for Apartamento in 2017. But stripping the old paint off the built-ins, it seems like they prioritized their little kids’ neurological development over historic preservation, which, honestly, understandable, but which might imperil the return of this asymmetrical table to its home.
Rudolph Schindler table for the Walker House, sold at Bonham’s in 2014
Oh, but look how it opens up! The table was the roughest of six lots of furniture the original owners’ heirs sold off in 2014, plus the archive, with not an identical finish among them. What if the paint’s from like the 70s?
Ellsworth Kelly, Window, Museum of Modern Art, Paris, 1949, oil on wood and canvas, two joined panels, 50 1/2 x 19 1/2 in., a gift of the artist to the Centre Pompidou, image via ellsworthkelly.org
In our timeline, in October 1949, Ellsworth Kelly, a young former soldier studying painting on the GI Bill, saw the windows of the Museum of Modern Art in Paris in a new way, as a composition, one that could become a painting/object just as it was, and in fact, the whole world was like that, full of subjects he could spend his whole life discovering and transforming into paintings.
In another timeline, a young Ellsworth Kelly saw these two off-the-shelf prairie mullion windows kludged together to look like one tall, misaligned, window on a house in the middle of a gravel field in North Carolina that was just posted on McMansion Hell, and drove straight to the army to re-enlist as a requisitions compliance auditor, eventually retiring from a job at a cubicle in Ring C of the Pentagon. His little yard is full of old stoves, which he salvages from apartment turnovers, repairs, and sells on Facebook.
Enslaved people made the bricks for the White House from clay on or near the White House grounds at least twice. After the White House was burned in 1812, most of the original 1792 bricks were too damaged to use in the 1814-17 reconstruction. The 1817 bricks were removed during the 1948-52 gut reconstruction of the White House by President Harry s. Truman. 95,000 went for projects at Mount Vernon. 10,000 went to a project at Fort Myer. A New York congressman bought White House bricks left over from the Fort Myer pile, along with 1600 lbs of White House stone, and stored it at some guy’s farm for a while. When came to pick up most of it, he left this lot of 166 bricks. “This may very well be one of the last large groups of White House bricks in public hands,” says the Shenandoah Valley auctioneer Jeffrey S. Evans.
I’m trying to imagine the excitement if these original White House bricks were returned to the White House, or if they were exhibited publicly near the White House today. Or tomorrow.
Buckminster Fuller Geodesic Chandelier as installed at Drawing Matter London, image: Jesper Authen
I still don’t have it/one, but that’s not important right now. What matters is that the truncated icosahedron chandelier made of Perspex prisms and fishing line that Buckminster Fuller concocted as a belated wedding present for HRH Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon remains in good hands, and is well-cared for.
At some point after blogging about its 2007 appearance in a World of Interiors feature, and after tracing its original sale, I realized that was not some random table in a random former cheesemaker’s cottage in Somerset it had been sitting on. It had been acquired by Niall Hobhouse, and the cottage was part of Shatwell Farm. Hobhouse had made the working corner of his ancestral lands into the site of Drawing Matter, his ambitious archive of architectural drawings and research.
Last fall, Drawing Matter moved into town, and the chandelier came with it. Came home, in a way. In 2008, seeking to fill out its history, Hobhouse invited His Lordship to share his recollections of this singular object. Apparently it was too big to fit through the doorway of their private apartments at “KP,” so it was installed over the stairs. And indeed, it was remembered less as a two-years-late wedding present, and more of a way for Fuller to gain an audience, and perhaps, patronage for his world-building architectural schemes.
Anyway, last week Jesper Authen of Drawing Matter kindly sent along a photo of the chandelier, which lends a mid-century Kensington Palace vibe to the archive’s new Central London space. Truly I’ve never seen it looking better.
Mint, partially in box? The wood base has been unboxed for this photo showing the untouched and apparently intact glass top of a Noguchi Coffee Table, from the era before foam packaging, selling 5 June 2025 at Potter & Potter
The Eames plywood leg splint market knows how to handle splints in their original packaging, partly because there are so many of them. The Noguchi Coffee Table market, OTOH, has to be looking at this thing and scratching their collecting heads.
The crate has a shipping address on it, twice, for Charles Eames at the Venice studio. It feels like a grail of some kind? But of what? That address has a zip code, so it’s after 1963. And it is printed with a large-format dot matrix printer, which, according to my IBM sources, was not even a thing until like the late 1970s at the earliest. Charles died in 1978.
So unless it’s going straight to a new garage, I assume whoever buys this will unbox it immediately, and end up with a nearly 50-yo coffee table that looks like you just bought it at DWR.
Prouvé X Prouvé dining table, 72 x 202 x 92 cm, painted steel, iron, stainless steel, laminated glass, from the estate of Simone Prouvé, selling 27 May 2025, Lot 84, at Artcurial
See, maybe not this one specifically, but this is the kind of FrankenProuvé collab vision I’m talking about.
It sounds like Simone Prouvé made this dining table by taking a base from her father, reinforcing it with an iron frame [which is now rusting], and putting a laminated glass and woven steel top of her own, based on an idea from “self-described Goth” architect Odile Decq, for whom Prouvé wove a steel facade for MACRO in Rome. So that’s around 2006-7.
This « tout aluminium n. 151 » Prouvé sideboard is being sold among a bunch of textile and other design objects from Simone Prouvé, Jean’s daughter. So it could have only ever been hers and still accurately described as “Famille de l’artiste, puis par descendance.”
But it cannot be the case that she had to buy it retail, right? And just because Artcurial is only going with the date it was designed, and the EUR60-80,000 estimate seems low [sic], I’m—caveat emptor—sticking with this title format.
Phillips has other wider views, but the whole point here, I think, is the very shallow, rounded bevel on the undersides, and then not painting the very thin edge. Beautiful.
Here it is in situ. Uh oh, don’t look at that. Because now you realize there’s another one, that you can’t get. Also, did the stylist really pull all the glasses off the shelf for this photo? Also, is the floor reflecting onto the ceiling, or is this some kind of 4th floor of 101 Spring St-style plane matching? Also, need me some Superleggera chairs.
