Category: art

The Lost Jasper Johns

As someone who spent more than two years tracking down the greatest lost Jasper Johns painting, you’d think I would have already identified all the other lost Johnses. But I had not.

Though the list of destroyed Johns works is certainly longer and more mysterious—the artist is famous for destroying things he made before 1954, and the fire in his Edisto Island, SC home in 1966 wiped out many works Johns kept for himself, including many early sketchbooks—there are not that many lost or missing Johns works. There are only four, and all date from 1955-64.

Besides the Flag (1955) inside Robert Rauschenberg’s combine, Short Circuit (also 1955), and the Figure 4 (1959), there is another number painting, Figure 2 (1963, P138), whose trail goes cold after entering Karl Ströher’s collection in Darmstadt.

black and white photo of jasper johns' lost 1964 painting titled gastro after the name of the bar owned by miyagaki shoichiro and his wife kiyo, which is printed on the round coaster affixed to the 5-inch square canvas by brushy blobs and drips of encaustic. one of four missing or lost paintings by jasper johns, it disappeared when gastro closed in 1988.
Jasper Johns, Gastro (CR P138, 1964, 5 x 5 in., encaustic and collage on canvas,

But the last one, and the second most interesting lost Johns, is called Gastro. It’s one of four paintings Johns made during his stay in Tokyo in the summer of 1964. It is an encaustic collage of a coaster from the Bar Gastro [バー ガストロ], which was a gift to the bar’s owners, Kiyo and Shōichirō Miyagaki. [宮垣 昭一郎,キヨ] .

a group of japanese men in suits and one woman seated in a rock walled bar in harajuku in 1967, celebrating the completion of takiguchi shuzo's proof of poetic experiments: 1927-1937. looks like quite a party
Miyagaki Shōichirō [top row, right corner] and gang at a 1967 launch party for Takiguchi Shūzō’s Poetic Experiments: 1927-1937, photo: Funaga Mitsutoshi via Keio U

Gastro was a hub of the Tokyo contemporary art community, and I assume it was in Ginza, near Johns’ temporary studio at the Artists Hall. It was decorated with artworks by regulars, who were known as the Gastro-ren「ガストロ連」, or Gastro-gang. Johns must have become an honorary member, and his little painting, just five inches square, remained in Gastro until Shōichirō’s death in 1988. According to the CR, the whereabouts of the entire Gastro-ren art hoard is unknown.

Given the prominence of Miyagaki and other Gastro-ren members like poet-critic Takiguchi Shūzō, I’m surprised some enterprising art historian hasn’t tracked everything down yet, but here we are.

Send Twombly Duchamp Nudes

a framed cy twombly work on paper, 30 x 40 inches, is a medium grey background with noticeable brushstrokes, and a cascade of figure eights and fragments thereof in white crayon, descending from the upper left to the lower right, the same direction as duchamp's nude descending a staircase, of which this was once considered a study, which would make it kind of figurative, which might explain why it was de-titled when it sold at sotheby's in nov 2024
Cy Twombly, apparently not titled Study after Duchamp: Nude Descending a Staircase after all, 1968, oil and crayon on paper, 30 x 40 in., sold yesterday by the estate of Lothar Schirmer at Sotheby’s

When it was published in the 1999 catalogue of his own collection, Cy Twombly’s publisher Lothar Schirmer listed the title of this amazing 1968 drawing, which he’d acquired directly from the artist in 1968, as Study after Duchamp: Nude Descending a Staircase.

marcel duchamp's nude descending a staircase tracks the cubist, overlapping, fractured motion of a human figure painted in beiges as it descends from upper left to lower right, against a darker brown background. at the philadelphia museum of art
Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase (N0. 2), 1912, collection Philadelphia Museum of Art via Sotheby’s

When Schirmer (RIP) sold it yesterday at Sotheby’s, however, it was listed only as Untitled. And whoever wrote the lot essay for the Twombly wanted to connect it to Duchamp’s painting so bad, they began the essay with a picture of it.

And they said, “Untitled also pays homage to art historical forerunners and their attempt to capture movement in space and time,” without naming Duchamp. And then they quoted Suzanne Delehanty,

Like shadows of Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, figure eights, frequent personages in Twombly’s cosmos of signs, borrowed perhaps from the mathematical symbol for infinity, multiply, recede and climb through the surface of a 1968 oil and crayon on paper to express, as does the 1912 nude, an abstraction of motion in space-time.

trying to call Twombly’s symbols and signs personages without surrendering their status as abstract marks. [Delehanty’s text is cited as coming from the collected writings on Twombly edited by Nicola del Roscio in 2002, which elides its origin as a catalogue text for Twombly’s 1975 show at the ICA in Philadelphia, the city of Duchampian love.]

Discussing this and a couple of other related works on paper in his catalogue for Twombly’s 1994 MoMA retrospective catalogue, Kirk Varnedoe mentioned Duchamp exactly once, before going on at length about the Futurists:

That language of flow and fracture draws directly on the early modern fascination with the “cinematic” decomposition of forms in motion, in Duchamp (Nude Descending a Staircase,1912) and most notably among Italian Futurist artists, particularly Giacomo Balla.

It feels like a confluence of aversions: to figuration, to referencing other artists’ work, or to referencing Duchamp’s works specifically, but it feels acute in the detitling of this particular drawing. Looking at Duchamp’s painting had an impact on Twombly’s most significant body of work, which he apparently referenced many times. And Twombly went to great lengths to make sure his work was permanently installed down the hall from Duchamp’s. I, for one, would love to see something more on this connection than a passing namecheck.

Hysterical Obedience

James Bridle responds to the Schelling Architecture Foundation’s rescinding of an award because of Bridle’s public support of a cultural boycott of Israeli institutions that support genocide.

Getting Hannah Arendt quoted back at you should be a wakeup call for Germans, but I guess not yet.

Germany is far from alone in this situation. The far right, and the denial of genocide that accompanies it, are on the march everywhere. But the logic of Strike Germany is simple: if it is illegal in Germany to call for cultural change in Israel, then it becomes necessary to call for cultural change in Germany itself. Late enough to be ashamed, but never too late, I sign my name.

James Bridle: ‘The Denial of Genocide Is on the March Everywhere’ [artreview]

Al Ordover’s Johns’s The Figure 8

a 10 by 8 inch painting of the figure eight in messily blended black, grey, and white, without a distinct background or foreground object, but an overall abstract painting that also happens to depict a figure 8, was made in 1959 by jasper johns, and is being sold in november 2024 at sothebys
Jasper Johns, The Figure 8, 1959, 10 x 8 in., oil on canvas, [NOT?] being sold 20 Nov 2024 at Sotheby’s

In 1960, Leo Castelli’s gallery director Ivan Karp estimated that there were no more than fifteen people seriously collecting contemporary art. One of them was Al Ordover, who was one of the first people Karp took to Warhol’s studio.

Ordover bought this amazing little 1959 Jasper Johns painting, The Figure 8, from Castelli. One minute it’s obviously an 8, and the next it feels like it barely holds the 8 together.

Its only public exhibition was a December 1959 fundraising exhibition to benefit painter Nell Blaine, who had contracted polio during a summer trip to Mykonos. [Since vaccines are in the news, Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine was introduced in 1955, and was still in early distribution stages in 1959. Blaine’s paralysis left her in a wheelchair for life and unable to paint for several years.]

Why none of the history or context of this painting, as opposed to Johns’ use of numbers as a form/subject generally, is in Sotheby’s lot text, is a mystery to me. But with generalities, unrelated quotes, hyperbole, and a single jpeg are how six-figure paintings are sold these days, I guess. [update: OR NOT.]

20 Nov 2024, Lot 34 : Jasper Johns, The Figure 8, 1959, est. $3-4m [sothebys]

Marsden Hartley’s White Yucca for Arlie Kuntz

a painting of a stalk of white yucca blossoms against a bright blue background, brushy, by marsden hartley
Marsden Hartley, White Yucca (Memorial to Charles Kuntz), 1928-29, 31 3/4 x 25 3/4 in., selling today at Sotheby’s

After meeting him on the street in St Paul de Vence, Adelaide and Arlie Kuntz befriended Marsden Hartley and persuaded him to move to Aix-en-Provence with them in 1926. For the spring and summer of 1927, they painted together in Cezanne’s old studio, which was surrounded by flowering white yucca plants.

In 1928, Kuntz, 30, was killed in a motorcycle accident before ever having a public show of his work. For the remainder of Hartley’s life, Adelaide remained a significant patron of Hartley’s work, and some time around 1933, Hartley asked his dealer to get this painting to her.

In 2014, the Greenville County Museum of Art and Driscoll Babcock Gallery organized a two-artist show of Kuntz and Hartley, with works acquired from Kuntz’s daughter’s estate. She had long since sold off White Yucca. And Driscoll let his domain name expire.

[update: there were two other Hartley flower paintings at Sotheby’s today: some roses, and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller’s Pansies—not sure who that’s a portrait of.]

19 Nov 2024, Lot 550: Marsden Hartley, White Yucca, est. $80-120,000, sold for $114,000 [sothebys]

Wants vs Needs

the cover of Gregor Stemmrich's Robert Rauschenberg's Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953), Modernism, Literalism, Postmodernism is off white with blue text, like a museum wall label, above an empty gold but not metallic rectangle that might allude to the work discussed within for 1,028 pages
Gregor Stemmrich’s Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953), Modernism, Literalism, Postmodernism, 2023, from Hatje Cantz

I was like, this is it, I am going to finish Gregor Stemmrich’s 1,028-page monument of a book on Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing on this plane, and I put it in the bag.

And I ended up bingeing all six hours of the BBC Pride & Prejudice instead.

Isa Genzken Ur-World Receiver

isa genzken sculpture, weltampfanger, 1982, is a readymade, a panasonic rf-9000 shortwave radio in black and silver, with dials and buttons and two antennas, on a white pedestal of the same width, installed on a mezzanine in the white cube style gallery of the kunstmuseum basel in 2020. photo julian salinas
Isa Genzken, Weltempfänger, 1982, installed at Kunstmuseum Basel in 2020, Photo: Julian Salinas, © ProLitteris, Zurich, via contemporaryartswitzerland

Isa Genzken’s first Weltempfänger/World Receiver, from 1982, is a readymade, a National Panasonic RF-9000 (SWL) shortwave listener. It is seen above, without the cover, installed at the Kunstmuseum Basel in 2020, as part of an exhibition of Genzken’s work from 1973 to 1983 [which the museum does not document hardly at all on their own site].

It was preceded by a series of works, large and small, that appropriated magazine advertisements for high-end audio equipment. And it was a precursor, if not the model, for the Weltempfängeren made out of concrete, which Genzken showed in 1986. Though I don’t know how that processed; it was beyond the scope of the Basel show, and is not detailed in Lisa Lee’s 2017 book, Sculpture as World Receiver.

It is also, on its own, perhaps the most highly considered SWL ever made, and the vintage radio and listening community are consistent in their praise and appreciation of it.

As for my own process, it is laid out here. I had considered making a readymade Genzken Weltempfänger would be easier than making a concrete Genzken Weltempfänger. And while that may still be true, it would also be hella more expensive.

Isa Genzken at Kunstmuseum Basel, 2020-21 [contemporaryartswitzerland]

Better Read It Yourself: Burton on Brâncuși

a black and white installation photo of scott burton's exhibition of brancusi sculptures at the museum of modern art in 1989 depicts the entrance of the exhibit, where a thick pedestal sculpture by burton in the shape of a squared off, inverted u has two brancusi bird sculptures, removed from their original bases. beyond is a gallery with more brancusis; on the wall near the entrance are two small brochure holders, also created by burton. the distinctive thick grey and white grain of cesar pelli's moma circulation spaces is making me wish we could turn back the clock, but then I remember 1989, and maybe it's not a wistfulness for the past that makes me want to reverse time, but the dread of the immediate future. anyway, photo credit by mali olatunji
this installation photo by Mali Olatunji shows Scott Burton’s base/table/sculpture for these two sculptures by Constantin Brancusi, as well as, I believe, his brochure holders. image: moma.org

Looking for something with which to stay busy or distracted, I decided to record a reading of the brochure for Scott Burton’s 1989 Artist’s Choice exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, in which Burton rather boldly reconsidered the bases and pedestals of Constantin Brancusi’s sculptures.

The kicker for anyone who got to the end of the mp3 was to be the last paragraph on the back of the brochure, where it explained that Burton installed some of Brancusi’s Birds on pedestal tables of his own design, and also created seating and brochure holders for the exhibition.

Well, between the untraceable static that appeared in the tracks with the computer-generated voice, my attempts to re-record the tainted sections by reading them myself in a breathy ASMR-style voice, and the jarring editing process in an app I really don’t like, and finally the way these two voices only serve to compound anxiety rather than alleviate it, I’m shelving the whole thing.

Read Burton’s brochure yourself. You shouldn’t need me to tell you It’s been on MoMA’s website since like 2017. Anyway, what I’d rather hear is Anne Umland’s take on this exhibit, which she organized while an assistant to Kirk Varnedoe.

Artist’s Choice | Burton on Brâncuși, Apr 7 – July 4, 1989 [moma]

DH ATL 45 RPM FTW

Over the years as I’ve kept coming across David Hammons works, old and new, which hadn’t been publicly known, I try looking again for any info on one of his major public works—which also nobody knew.

In 1979 Hammons was one of a group of artists commissioned to make work for the big new airport under construction in Atlanta. Here is how ATL Airport Art describes it:

The initiative to display artworks at ATL originated in 1979, when the Domestic Terminal was constructed during Maynard Jackson’s first term as Mayor of Atlanta. In 1979-1980, the Airport commissioned and installed large-scale, permanent artworks by Curtis Patterson, David Hammons, Lynda Benglis, Benny Andrews, Sam Gilliam and others. The Airport received its first of two Governor’s Awards for the Arts for this series of commissions, but an ongoing program was not instituted and the artworks were not maintained. 

Benny Andrews’ chronology says he made a 95-ft mural, as did 13 other artists. Indeed, here is a 35mm slide showing Benglis’s giant mural. But Patterson’s website includes a large bronze relief. [Two, actually; he made another after the first got remodeled out of place.] And the project has five folders in Gilliam’s archive. But I’ve never been able to find a photo or even a description of Hammons’ work, or news of its status. [Though I think now the Airport Art site makes it pretty clear these early works are gone.]

But then reading Dr. Kellie Jones’ 1986 interview with Hammons again for the Mandela piece, which does still exist in Atlanta, I realized she’d asked him about it. [Of course she did.]

KJ: You did pieces for a while that had dowels with hair and pieces of records on them. Like the piece you did for the Atlanta Airport.   

DH: Those pieces were all about making sure the black viewer had a reflection on himself in the work. White viewers have to look at someone else’s culture in those pieces and see very little of themselves in it. Like looking at American Indian art or Egyptian art—you can try to fit yourself in it but it really doesn’t work. And that’s the beauty of looking at art from other cultures, that they’re not mirror reflections of your art. But in this country, if your art doesn’t reflect the status quo, well then you can forget it, financially and otherwise. I’ve always thought artists should concentrate on going against any kind of order, but here in New York, more than anywhere else, I don’t see any of that gut. It’s so hard to live in this city. The rent is so high, your shelter and eating, those necessities are so difficult, that’s what keeps the artist from being that maverick.  

So dowels, records, and hair? You mean like the extraordinary sculpture that just turned up at Christie’s this month? Untitled (Flight Fantasy) is from 1978, and is made of spindly bamboo reeds piercing a broken record filled like a taco with unfired Georgia clay. It is on view right now.

a david hammons sculpture from 1978, untitled (flight fantasy) hangs on a white wall. two halves of a broken record form an arc , filled like a taco with unfired georgia clay. the edges of the records have been drilled, and long thin bamboo reeds passed through. the reeds curve down at the ends from their own weight. thin curved wedges of record, like leaves or feathers, sprout from the center of the record taco, and others hang from the ends of the reeds. tiny tufts of black hair and colorful wound thread punctuate the reeds. two small dark discs on either side of the records give the hint of eyes, as in a ceremonial mask. this gorgeous and fragil looking work is at christies in ny in nov 2024
David Hammons, Untitled (Flight Fantasy), 1978, bamboo, Georgia clay, record fragments, plaster, colored string and hair, 22 x 60 x 9 in., selling 21 Nov 2024 at Christie’s

This sculpture has been in the same collection since it was made. It’s very domestically scaled, and I am having a hard time imagining how it would scale up for an airport. And I’m having a hard time imagining how something so fugitive and delicate would survive in what soon became the world’s busiest airport. On the other hand, given what we know about the conservation of unfired clay, I’m having an easy time imagining why it’d longer exist.

21 Nov 2024, Lot 7B: David Hammons, Untitled (Flight Fantasy), 1978, est. $2-3m [update: sold for $3,922,000] [christies]
Previously, related: David Hammons’ Free Nelson Mandela is in Atlanta, Y’allhttps://greg.org/archive/2024/08/08/what-happens-in-midtown.html


Glenn Ligon Rubbing

I’ve listened to a couple of interesting interviews now where Glenn Ligon talks about Glenn Ligon: All Over The Place, the show he’s organized of his work and the collection at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. Now it turns out there’s a benefit print for the show.

a glenn ligon print of a carbon and graphite rubbing made on kozo (mulberry) paper of the surface of a glenn ligon painting, which is comprised of repeated stencilings of a text by james baldwin. which is all good to know, but the print of the rubbing drawing is even more illegible than the thickest parts of the painting, with just forms of some letters coming through. the print is set in a very sleek and stylish but not overly fussy black folder, which they call a wallet, which appears to have a small disk magnet closure. it is available for sale at the website where i ganked this image, curating cambridge dot co dot uk
Glenn Ligon, Untitled, 2024, digital pigment print on Hahnemulhe, 41.9 x 30.5 cm, ed. 30+15AP via curatingcambridge.co.uk

It’s a digital print based on one of his recent drawings he calls Kozo Drawings on his site, after the kind of paper (mulberry). In the edition description, they’re explained as frottage, graphite rubbings Ligon made of the craggy surface of his own paintings. In this case, it’s a painting of a text from James Baldwin.

this carbon and graphite rubbing, which glenn ligon calls a kozo drawing because of the textured mulberry paper used for it, is vertically oriented, and shows the faint outlines of a stenciled text, almost enough to make you want to make out the words, not just the letters. a dark smudge obscures the left side of the three central rows. the size is 18 x 12 inches, it is untitled, but numbered (10), from 2023, and is on the fainter, more legible end of the series, it seems. it is not the one used for the fitzwilliam print tho
For example: Glenn Ligon, Untitled #10, 2023, carbon and graphite on Kozo paper, 18 x 12 in., via glennligonstudio

There’s something interesting about Ligon adding another layer to the mediation of his text pictures, particularly when it depends on their [also] being an object. Then there’s something else when the rough, fragile, abradedd sheet is translated to an ultrasmooth print. It feels almost like a facsimile. [And speaking of which, I can’t lie, as interesting as the print and drawings are, it was the sleek black envelope the print ships in that pushed me over the blogging edge. I’ve been making janky versions for Facsimile Objects, and this looks so much sleeker.]

Ironically, the prints were produced at Griffin in NYC, but now will ship from the UK. All for a good cause, though.

Glenn Ligon, Untitled, 2024 Limited Edition Print, GBP 1200 or so [curatingcambridge.co.uk via ig/@glennligon]

What Might Cady Noland Be Up To?

Looks like more writeups of the Cady Noland installation at Glenstone are turning up—and more images of it are getting out. Ian Ware at 202 Arts Review has apparently found the same stash of Noland photos online—though he is more assiduous in his image copyright crediting than I was.

And that’s all reason enough to rejoice. But beyond that, Ware has a very interesting, site-specific take on Noland’s take on her works’ new home. He finds a relationship between the temporary walls Noland erected to block a distracting view of the museum’s pond, and the museum’s own temporary walls blocking off the building’s renovations.

He also sees in Noland’s alterations and additions to the installation a critique of the Raleses and their multibillion-dollar project. Here he draws on the larger context of the Raleses’ business dealings and Glenstone’s construction–and the lawsuits with its contractor that precipitated the current closure and renovations of the new museum building—and even some of the lurid investment shenanigans by the contractor’s family—a local real estate dynasty, apparently—that “may as well have been written for a tabloid delivered straight to Noland’s doorstep.”

What feels more resonant—and which I think takes more properly into consideration the involvement of Emily Wei Rales, in curating, collecting, and institution-building—is the exhibition of Noland’s work alongside the text collages of Lorraine O’Grady and the powerful sculptures of Melvin Edwards.

As someone who’s watched the Raleses develop their vision from various vantage points, I feel like they’ve been thoughtful to iterate away from the narrow trophyism of, say, the Fisher and Broad collections. The collecting path from Split/Rocker did not have to lead to Noland, or O’Grady, or Edwards, but here they are. If they do take a couple of hits from an artist they think is significant, I imagine they’d be undaunted, maybe even appreciative. Their venture faces more credibility risk from privileging artists’ approbation than from accommodating their critiques.

But this gets to the crux of Noland’s work today, when the poisonous forces of media, politics and power have outstripped everything she flagged back in the day. Can her new work make a similar impact to her earlier hits? Is that even something she considers? Or does the proliferation of objects trapped and neutralized in acrylic blocks, perched on industrial logistics flotsam target a new, contemporary source of dread we’re still too asleep to realize? And does this luxuriously contemplative installation help us to see, or does it sedate us?

The House is (Still) on Fire, But There’s a Cady Noland Show to See. [202artsreview]

No, Clyfford Still Only *Threatened* To Exhibit A Blank Canvas

John Perreault recounted the story in his 2005 review of Mike Bidlo’s Erased de Kooning Drawings show, but I think he got it from Robert Rosenblum’s catalogue essay, who got it from Bidlo himself: that Clyfford Still once submitted a blank canvas to a museum group show out of spite, and then Bidlo did it out of homage. Here is how Bidlo explained it to Rosenblum in 2003, in Artforum:

RR: And didn’t you also do some kind of performance/installation piece about a mythical Clyfford Still?

MB: Oh yeah, that was the show curated by Alan Jones. The piece was based on the time Clyfford Still was asked to take part in a museum exhibition of regional work from California. Still claimed he didn’t want to compete with other artists, so he suggested that his contribution be a six-by-ten-foot unprimed canvas. I found this story in the Metropolitan Museum’s Clyfford Still catalogue. The idea of the blank canvas fascinated me. So many other artists have used blank canvases to make aesthetic statements, but Still’s gesture seemed to be the most nihilistic, a true act of anti-art. When we installed the piece in the Philippe Briet Gallery in SoHo, I included the text from the catalogue in a frame next to the painting.

I couldn’t find the Met’s Still catalogue, but Rosenblum did, and said the show was a group show of large-scale drawing at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, in 1949, and that Still sent a, “6-by-10-foot canvas blank as the fabric comes from the factory.”

But there is an earlier source for that quote, and it sounds like neither Bidlo nor Rosenblum knew of it, because it did not exactly go down that way.

It’s a letter Still wrote to Mark Rothko, a transcription of which is in the library of the Still Museum in Denver. [pdf] The letter is from December 1949, and includes a reference to “two days ago.” But there is also a “postcript” in which Still mentions repeating the tale “years later.” So did the show happen in 1950, or sometime closer to his arrival at the California School of Fine Arts in 1946?

Most of the story is Still mocking his colleagues’ efforts to supply a large drawing to the show, while refusing the invitation himself. Still didn’t show a blank canvas; he only threatened to:

Two days ago after a very sumptuous dinner at the Curator’s, the issue was revived. “All the show needs is a drawing by you, Clyff. That will really put it over. How about it, Clyff. Just a nice big drawing.”

“O.K. I’II give you a picture. After alI, this show to an artist of integrity can only be a gesture. Since it is made for a museum program, I will give you my gesture, my respect for the public art gallery working in these terms. I will give you my contempt for the whole business: a 6 x 10 foot canvas blank as the fabric comes from the factory.”

The matter was not mentioned again.

I don’t quite get how the postscript timing works—

Postscript: I told the story years later to Ed Cahill in New York City. He said, “I would have taken you up on that and hung your canvas.” I repIied, “I know you would have, Ed. That is why I wouldn’t have made even that offer to you.”

—but there are letters in the Still Archives from 1954 where Still refuses Cahill and Dorothy Miller’s group show invites more graciously.

For his part, Bidlo was happy to contribute to a group show, which was titled, improbably “Clyfford Still: A Dialogue.” It was organized in October 1990, and Roberta Smith described Bidlo’s massive blank canvas as, “mostly as an accessory to a story of Still’s megalomania told in an accompanying wall label.” The fate of Bidlo’s Not Still is unknown to me at present.

Oh, Walter de Maria’s Africa Lithograph for Hommage à Picasso, We’re Really In It Now

After Picasso died in 1973, publishers in Berlin and Rome decided to capture the moment with a sprawling print portfolio project, Hommage à Picasso. It included 69 artists in six boxed volumes in red linen. Even though many of the 58 artists in the initial five volumes were Americans, there was also a separate 11-artist volume for America’s Hommage à Picasso—which included two works too big to fit in the box. There were also three artworks delivered in matching linen-covered tubes.

It’s really all over the place, and Hommage à Picasso‘s most accurate embodiment of Picasso’s influence on the 20th century art world is that it was almost entirely men (66), almost entirely white (65), and the portfolios that didn’t go to museums have often been broken up and stripped for parts. [Sotheby’s had a complete set in 2017, and Wettman sold a 54/58ths Hommage last May, with a complete America’s Hommage sold separately.]

The only reason I mention any of this is because in 1974, Walter de Maria was at Virginia Dwan’s ranch, working on the first version of Lightning Field. And I can only imagine him taking a break from precisely driving stainless steel spikes into New Mexico soil to make his contribution for America’s Hommage à Picasso portfolio:

Walter de Maria, Untitled (from America’s Hommage à Picasso), 1974, published 1975, lithograph on 30 x 22 in. sheet, this is Dorothy Miller’s proof at MoMA, but Stair has another AP rn

In a more just world, this would be the most famous work of art of age. In an actually just world, though, it would never have existed.

20 Nov 2024, lot 368: Walter de Maria, Africa-Picasso [sic], est. $500-700 [update: sold for just $400!] [stair]

The Little Prince

a 14 x 11 in painting by richard prince floats in a plain white frame. on a monochrome kelly green surface, a joke is screenprinted somewhat jankily in pale pink ink: you know i was up there in prison talking to charlie manson and he says to me, he says, is it hot in here or am i crazy? selling at christies in nov 2024
Untitled, 1992, 14 x 11 in., acrylic & silkscreen on canvas, selling this month at Christie’s

Over the years, I’ve tried making some myself and used them as references for other works. Nothing profound to say here, I just really, really like Richard Prince’s little joke paintings.

a richard prince painting, 14x11 inches, is painted all over in brushy bright yellow, with splotches of green peeking through from underneath, like a change of plans or a correction. a joke is screenprinted on the center in dark purply black ink: my mother and father keep fighting. they rand and they rave and they shout. who is your father somebody asked. that's what they're fighting about. I think this one sold at sotheby's a while back, but these little paintings were originally shown at john mcwhinnie's rare book gallery in the 1990s. rip
I mean, they’re like trading cards

They also do remind me of John McWhinnie, who showed them, and was amazing, who always had discoveries, and is gone, which sucks. So maybe it’s weird that a monochrome joke painting can also be mournful, but here we are.

22 Nov 2024 Lot 811: Richard Prince, Untitled, 1992, est. $100-150K [update: sold for $296,000] [christies]