art – Page 22 – greg.org

Le Tat, C’est Moi

Decoupage what you know: HM Margrethe II of Denmark literally cutting out pictures of diamond jewelry to collage onto a classical portrait

This is a detail of a decoupage panel made by HM Margrethe II, now-former Queen of Denmark. It was the header image of Margrethe II of Denmark, Artist-Queen an exhibition of 60 artworks by the queen at the Musée Henri Martin in Cahors, in southern France. The queen’s late husband Prince Henrik was a French count whose family is from the region—people from Cahors are called Cadurciens—and the royal family owns a chateau and vineyard nearby.

the ignominy of ganking images of royal decoupage from pinterest

The queen has been making art at least since the 1970s, and she is quite active in several mediums, devoting at least one day a week to her practice. She just abdicated her day job, so perhaps she is in the studio even more now.

Margrethe’s art is in the news because a painting she made in 1988, the year she officially began exhibiting, is coming up for auction. This is apparently quite rare, because The Queen doesn’t sell work; sometimes she gives it as gifts. [This painting is being sold by the family of a former courtier.] Her paintings are probably never as interesting as the moment in which they are being made.

HM Margrethe II of Denmark, *Juliette and the Sibyls of Verona*, decoupage garbage can, n.d., photo: Berit Møller via kongehuset.dk

At least they’re not as interesting as this idea of The Queen using her art objects either as gifts or decorations. The website for the Danish Royal Family has a decent amount of information about her art practice. The decoupage items she makes by gluing images cut out from magazines decorate her palaces, hunting lodges, chateau, and yacht. All the guestrooms at Christian VII’s palace at Amalienborg, for example, “are furnished with a wastepaper basket decorated with The Queen’s découpage.” Decoupage is a very active process which benefits from a sense of composition and industriousness, both of which The Queen seems to have in abundance. The Queen decoupages in the opening credits of De Wilde Svaner, the 2009 film adaptation of a Hans Christian Andersen tale for which she created the scenery and costumes.

HM Margrethe II of Denmark, *Pillow for the Royal Yacht Dannebrog*, 2003, embroidered textile, image: Iben Kaufmann vai kongehuset.dk

The Queen’s embroidery practice is very similar. She designs her own patterns or even stitches freely, without patterns, as she makes personal and household objects and gifts for family members, friends, and privileged subjects. Chairs

In one sense, this personal creative exercise, crafting nicknacks for yourself, your home, and your friends, feels like a carving out of a private space, a practice of respite and normalcy. But it is also very much the opposite: individual, domestic labor so time-intensive it gets stripped of any economic justification, and so falls/is elevated to emotional and relational tokens of interpersonal exchange, deployed by a monarch in service of the preservation and reinforcing of that monarchy’s power. The beloved queen of the people leaving her personal marks across the vast properties and resources at her—and her family’s—disposal, and cultivating networks of loyalty and influence by giving gifts of her time and artistic pursuits. Margrethe II is an artist, and her medium is Queen.

Margiela Artisanal Cardboard, Rover, Bunny, Beanie

The Maison Margiela Artisanal show was fascinating and felt strong, of a piece, current if not exactly new. If anything, it echoed some of the trashy Belle Epoque collections Galliano did for Dior around 2000, maybe more unsettled, which is fair. Rewatching it on a big screen, a couple of things really jumped out:

The pieces made of stiffened, pleated/ruched silk, I assume, that resemble corrugated cardboard.

The little rover shooting on the far side of the underpass was far less noticeable at first than the interior camera operators.

[The way almost everyone in the audience was recording their own phone videos, OTOH, was inescapable.]

Oh yes, here are four people recording on their ph—WTF that person is wearing a literal bunny outfit. I know it is from the Fall 2022 Artisanal collection, but I do not care; I want to go back to not seeing it please.

Ditto the white beanie, bro. While we are trying to grasp a vision of a future teetering elegantly in front of us, this pickme white headgear keeps snapping us back to the past. Of course, the past is never past, not for culture, not for fashion, and not for Galliano.

Today Job: On Working Late

The closest thing to Apr. 5, 1966 I can find, On Kawara’s E 13th St studio, photographed in late 1966, published in the catalogue for the Guggenheim’s retrospective, *On Kawara — Silence*, 2015

On Tumblr Voor Werk asked the archetypal artist question, prompted by stunning early photos of On Kawara’s work and studio: how did he pay for it, and how did he live to keep making it?

Even though I knew the only thing written in the biography section was “29,771 days,” I looked for clues in the catalogue for On Kawara — Silence, Jeffrey Weiss’ 2015 show at the Guggenheim.

tl;dr: The amount of time accounted for by the production of the date paintings alone does not seem conducive to having a regular job. The only thing I can guess besides family money, wife supported them, or somehow eked out a living selling date paintings from his studio, is that he made money playing mahjong. Or maybe Kasper Koenig kept it going.

Kawara was a well-known avant-garde artist in Japan in the 1950s, and wrote essays for Bijutsu Techo, the leading Japanese art magazine. But he also didn’t have shows for extended stretches. He traveled to Mexico and Europe and settled in Paris before moving to New York in 1964 on a student visa. Which he took art classes at the Brooklyn Museum to keep. He was 31. With some precursors, including many paintings he destroyed, the form of his Today series came into focus in January 1966, but developing the full concept took some time [sic].

In his essay, Weiss traces some of Kawara’s apparent thoughts and questions about the project through the date paintings’ subtitles. Alongside headlines, phrases, or even full sentences from the day’s newspaper, Kawara sometimes used personal anecdotes, observations, or meta-commentary as subtitles.

Some subtitles were repeated, and showed hints of both future bodies of work and community: “I met Nam June Paik at the B.M.T. Canal St subway station [insert various evening times].” And my favorite so far, is for April 5, 1966— “Tono, Arakawa, and Johns are now waiting for me in Tono’s apartment.”—when Kawara ended up missing a dinner with Yoshiaki, Shusaku, and Jasper in order to finish the day’s painting.

Though Kawara was included in many group shows, including some now-historic ones, by 1969, his date paintings were not exhibited in any significant way until 1972, five years and hundreds of paintings into the project.

Richard Prince Settled His New Portraits Copyright Lawsuits

The copyright infringement lawsuits over Richard Prince’s New Portraits works were set to begin on Monday. Yesterday, though, the judge accepted mediated settlements between the parties, and the cases are over.

Exhibit 7: Not *Willfully* Infringing Billboard, now ENJOINED, from *Graham v Prince*, as seen on the West Side Highway and in the book, obv

According to the settlements, Prince will pay Donald Graham and Eric McNatt each “damages” equal to “five times the sale price” of the New Portrait that included their photographs. For Graham, that is Portrait of Rastajay92, which sold to Larry Gagosian for $38,000. For McNatt, that is Portrait of Kim Gordon, which sold at Blum & Poe Tokyo for $90,000. Prince, Blum & Poe, and Gagosian and his gallery are all also enjoined from “reproducing, modifying, preparing
derivative works from, displaying publicly, selling, offering to sell, or otherwise distributing” either phototographers’ original images, the New Portraits incorporating them, the respective exhibition catalogues and, in Graham’s case, the West Side Highway billboard showing a wonky iPhone installation shot of Prince’s New Portraits exhibition at Gagosian. Both settlements also include “all costs incurred.”

The settlement was reported in The Art Newspaper and Courthouse News as Prince being found “guilty” of infringing the photographers’ copyrights. And it is absolutely the case that the settlements include judgment “entered in favor of the plaintiff[s] and against the defendants for the claims asserted against them” in the complaints, which is copyright infringement.

Yet Marion Maneker, the hardest-working man in the art lawsuit business, quotes folks from Prince’s legal team saying that, “Mr Prince made no admission of willful copyright infringement,” and “did not pay legal fees for either party’s lawyers.” Which sounded like a contradiction, and both these claims can’t be true, until I was writing this post.

“This settlement allows Richard and all of the artists to move forward with their practices,” they told Maneker. Which, ironically, echoes something Prince expressed in his 2018 deposition for the cases: a desire to move on and not think about the New Portraits series again. And even though it was reflective of and inextricable from many, many facets of his practice over the years, he did not add.

Update: the NYT account seems to be clearer about the parties’ interpretations of the settlement.

Nebelmeer, Nebelmeer

*Untitled (Nebelmeer)*, 2024, 48 x 48 in., paint on canvas, installed on a wall painted in complementary Benjamin Moore color with a suitably atmospheric name, via zillow

In what, from the finishes, looks like the early 90s, A police station in Georgetown was converted into two townhouses. One of them is being sold with help from a little known version of Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above The Sea and Fog. The H on the throw on the sofa stands for Hamburger Kunsthalle.

Previously, related: Monochrome House, 2016
Untitled (A Painting for Two Rooms by Cactus Cantina), 2017
Untitled (Blurred Frida), 2020
LMAO I have works like this that I haven’t even posted, just grabbed the MLS image and declared it, talk about tree falling in the forest

Manifest Destiny

EMPIRE
EMPIRE
EMPIRE
EMPIRE
EMPIRE
EMPIRE
EMPIRE
EMPIRE

Just months after being charged with killing his wife, he donated a sculpture to a benefit exhibition on behalf of the War Resisters League, which the host purchased. It remains in situ.

Barnett Newman, Other (1963)

David Diao, *Barnett Newman: Chronology of Work (Updated)*, 2010, acrylic & vinyl on canvas, 84 x 156 in., image via Greene Naftali

One of many epic paintings David Diao made about Barnett Newman’s catalogue raisonné is a yearly tally of work, sorted by category, into zips. Every time I see it I think, “Other? What was the one other?”

Barnett Newman, *Model for a Synagogue*, 1963, collection Centre Canadien d’Architecture

And then rewatching Diao’s 2013 Dia talk last night, I am reminded that Other is a synagogue Newman designed, Diao said, for an architectural competition. There’s a 2014 story at Grupa O.K. about Harald Szeemann wanting to borrow the model [fabricated by Robert Murray] for a show in 1983, and Annalee refusing to lend it. She left it to the in the CCA in Montreal in 1991.

LATER TONIGHT UPDATE: EXCEPT. Newman did not make this for a competition, but for an exhibition. In mid-1963 he was working on the Cantos print series when Richard Meier, of all people, invited him to be the only non-architect in a show at the Jewish Museum, Recent American Synagogue Architecture. Newman also wrote an essay for the catalogue about synagogue architecture in the postwar context. His relationship with the Jewish Museum soured a couple of years later when he opposed what he felt the museum was wrongly implicating him with constrictive labels of Jewish Artist or Jewish Art. Mark Godfrey gets into this and other early postwar artists’ reckoning with Jewish identity and culture a bit in his 2007 book, Abstraction and the Holocaust.

Was Ist Das Boot? Celmins| Richter Double Vision

*Vija Celmins | Gerhard Richter, Double Vision*, exhibition catalogue from Kunsthalle Hamburg

Posting about underseen little grey Richters really brings out the underseen little grey Richters. In a conversation begun on bluesky, Michael Seiwert mentioned seeing several in a very interesting show last Summer at the Hamburger Kunsthalle. Vija Celmins | Gerhard Richter, Double Vision, curated by Dr. Brigitte Kölle, is an intriguing Celmins show that is also a very rare two-artist Richter show.

Vija Celmins, *Explosion at Sea*, 1966, 13 1/2 x 23 1/2 in., oil on canvas, in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago

I love the show’s idea of “juxtaposing such a strong female position with the work of Gerhard Richter, so often presented as a singular phenomenon,” not just to see his work “with a fresh eye,” but because it puts both of them in a larger, richer context. These artists clearly share interests, approaches, motifs, and even biographies, that felt unexpected at first, but feel obvious now.

Spread showing rough times at sea from *Celmins | Richter, Double Vision* exhibition catalogue

Some of the resonances between Celmins’ and Richter’s practices come immediately to mind: photo-based painting, found/everyday objects, seascapes, fighter planes, grey, they’re all in there. But browsing the catalogue, I was straight up surprised by the spread above, which features a 1963 Richter titled Schlachtshiff [Battleship], and a 1966 Celmins, Explosion at Sea.

*Destroyed Richter Painting #02 (ship)*, 2012, 40 x 30 in., oil on canvas

That Richter, though, is one the artist destroyed in the mid-1960s. It was the first of the Destroyed Richter Paintings I had remade in China in 2012, after seeing a photo of it, from Richter’s Archive, in Spiegel. OK, technically, and explicitly to the point, I had Richter’s archival photo painted at the scale of the destroyed painting it depicted, and I have shown and lived with this picture. So it is wild to see it included in this discussion. As Jaboukie might have said if he’d ever posed as Richter on twitter, “Just because I destroyed it doesn’t mean I can’t miss it.” Obviously, I am buying the book immediately.

Vija Celmins | Gerhard Richter, Double Vision, May-Aug 2023 [hamburger-kunsthalle.de]
Previously, related:
2012: Will Work Off JPEGs: Destroyed Richter Paintings
2016: Destroyed Richters at Chop Shop, as tweeted by Roberta Smith

David Diao: On Barnett (And Annalee) Newman

Installation view of *David Diao: On Barnett Newman, 1991-2023*, at Greene Naftali, showing *BN: Cut Up Painting*, 2014, center. image: greenenaftaligallery

Finally catching up to Adam Simon’s December post on Two Coats of Paint about David Diao’s now-closed show at Greene Naftali of 30 years of paintings relating to Barnett Newman.

Diao has so much going on in his Newman works, paintings about another painter, a subject which became a concept, and Simon does a good job pulling it together. In Jeffrey Weiss’ essay for a forthcoming catalogue of the works, he quotes Diao explaining that “his interest in Newman dates to a period associated with a crisis of faith in the viability of abstract painting.”

This language of faith and crisis and the mysteries of abstraction has echoes in the origins of one of my favorite of Diao’s Newman paintings from 2014, which was here called BN: Cut Up Painting. It’s the blue and white work above.

When I wrote about Diao’s exhibition of the work in Brussels in 2016 [it was called Barnett Newman: The Cut Up Painting], I tried to pull together the accounts of its creation: Barney had asked his wife Annalee to cut up a painting that was finished, but, in his eyes, unresolved. She only did it after his sudden death, then anguished by a dream about the violent act, had it reassembled by a conservator. Barnett and/or Annalee’s work has been the subject of fascinating work by conservators, art historians—and Diao, but it has never been exhibited. Diao’s version is as close as we can get.

It really does seem like abstraction has been causing a lot of people a lot of grief over the years.

David Diao: Impeccable Touch [twocoats]
David Diao: On Barnett Newman, 1991-2023 [greenenaftali]
Previously, related, 2016: David Diao: Barnett Newman: The Cut Up Painting, 2014
Also: David Diao on Barnett Newman, from Dia’s Artists on Artists Lecture Series, c. 2013

‘Please note this lot is the property of a consumer.’

Gerhard Richter, *Blattecke (Sheet Corner)*, 1967, offset print mounted on cardboard, 234 x 180 mm, ed. 555/739, sold at Christie’s UK in 2019

According to Section H1 of the conditions of sale [pdf], EU & UK buyers at online auctions conducted by Christie’s London have the right to cancel a sale within 14 days, IF the buyer is a consumer AND if the seller is NOT a consumer. This right is not available for lots sold by consumers. If the seller of a lot is a consumer, it will be stated, and/or the lot will be marked with the symbol, ∍.

But even if that weren’t the case, nothing says property of a consumer quite like the 555th example of a 1967 Gerhard Richter offset print published in an edition of 739.

Little Richter Panels

Gerhard Richter, *Abstraktes Bild, CR 448/1*, 1979, 25x 36 cm, oil on wood panel, image via Christie’s, who sold it in Amsterdam in 2017

This odd, thick, little 1979 Abstraktes Bild is not only a rare example of Richter painting on wood, it has the same dimensions as that odd, thick, little 1964 grey Abstraktes Bild from the other day.

When they sold it in 2017, Christie’s tried to make it sound like this visibly multi-layered painting was part of Richter’s squeegee development process. But I think that thick, tectonic red surface got crinkled by something else, like plastic wrap.

Gerhard Richter, *Abstraktes Bild CR 947-2*, 2016, oil on Alu-Dibond, 27 x 35.5 cm, image via davidzwirner

Anyway, it turns out, though he definitely had an Alu-Dibond phase in the 1990s, Richter has not made that many paintings on wood panels. There were a couple of 2016 squeegees on wood in Zwirner’s 2023 show of “last paintings”; in fact, two of them were in Richter’s last show at Marian Goodman in 2020, too. One Alu-Dibond painting from 2016 is almost the same size as these wood ones. I imagine on a hard support, the squeegee just hits different.

Previously: Das Erste Abstraktes Bild?
Gerhard Richter Painted: a look at his paintings after his “last paintings”

It. Was. The. Boots. It. Was. The. Boots.

pre-order through Jan. 22 at boots.foundation

In 1997 Christopher Wool said making paintings from Richard Prince jokes felt “like I was Richard Prince for a day,” and “like I was doing Richard’s act.”

In his first deposition, in the Canal Zone/Yes Rasta case, Prince explained that, “The reason why he took the girlfriends is he wanted to be a girlfriend,” and the reason he made the Rasta paintings was the desire “to look like that some day.”

So it stands to reason that the trustees of the Boots Foundation will feel like Wool, Prince, Luhring, and/or Augustine when they start filling pre-orders for these T-shirts next week. Godspeed you, Silkscreening Emperor!

Category: art