Takashi Murakami, Claude Monet’s Woman with a Parasol – Madame Monet and Her Son A Spacetime of Awareness – SUPERFLAT, 2025 – 2026, acrylic on canvas, 100 x 81 cm, đ·: Kaikai Kiki via Perrotin
I heard two discussions of Takashi Murakami’s show in Los Angeles today, from people who could not be more different. And basically, it sounds and looks fascinating.
Murakami’s facility with Japanese art history has always been one of his secret superpowers. And it sounds like the current SUPERFLAT show at Perrotin slots into his overarching and innovative critique of western art history’s relationship to Japanese art and culture. It looks specifically at 18th and 19th century Japanese painting and ukiyo-e, and their connection to and co-optation by the Impressionists and the Japonisme movement.
Murakami has made intricate copies of ukiyo-e that traveled to 19th century France. And he’s made a full-scale copy of Monet’s 1875 painting, Woman with a Parasol â Madame Monet and her Son. Whether it’s a work like the Monet, painted in one quick, plein air session, or the dense woodblock prints, Murakami unifies them with his own technique, described as, “layer upon layer of silkscreened acrylic paint, applied with a special squeegee work application method.”
Which, what?? I am absolutely down for using exhaustive screenprinting for a monotype. But after seeing details on Perrotin’s website, this squeegee work application method is beyond my understanding. And I, for one, would like to see it.
[MORNING AFTER UPDATE] Oh, right, I can.
I googled at first, but only found that I’d joined the legion of content mills who republished Murakami’s press release text as-is. So I ended up at the sources.
Here are details of how Murakami translated Monet’s wet-on-wet brushstrokes into however many screens. Sometimes the scratchy structure of an emptied brush gets preserved, like the tan dots above the ‘M’. And sometimes it becomes a gradient of color, like the bottom of the ‘t’.
Murakami’s Monet signature made with Murakami’s “signature squeegee technique” Monet’s Monet signature made with Monet’s signature brush technique
Some colors get more intense in Murakami’s version, like that mustardy flame above the ‘n’, which is barely a thing in the Monet. But that same effect also makes the bare canvas/underlayer of Monet much more intricate. Like everything going on above the ‘et’ feels very different. Murakami’s resolution is higher, or seems higher, an oversharpening fallacy. But his colors look more liquid; they were laid down in the precise shape of a flow that never happened.
The painting, then owned by a BNP Paribas art investment fund, was on loan to a Courbet retrospective that later traveled to the Met and Montpellier. The painting was last on public view at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt in 2010-11.
The photo, by Maya Vidon for the European Pressphoto Agency, was published in the New York Times on December 7, 2007, to illustrate a news story about Merkel and Sarkozy pressuring Iran while the US pursued sanctions over the country’s nuclear program.
Harrison also appended the Vidon photo to a smallish, Rothko-esque painting which she showed in Vienna in 2008-09. It was perhaps the least leisurely of group of photos of world leaders at leisure, which appeared in works throughout the atypically thematically unified show. The photo and the show are mentioned in the catalogue for Harrison’s Whitney retrospective.
Rachel Harrison, Mustard and Ketchup, 2008, 71 x 48 x 48 in. or so, selling at Sotheby’s
This month the entirety of Mustard and Ketchup was revealed to the public for the first time, at Sotheby’s, where it will be sold today, as I type this, in fact. It turns out to be a delicate thing. The condiment bottles that give the work its name also give it an alternate scale. The photo is at (standing) eye level atop a dowel mounted into a square pedestal, surrounded by drill shavings. In one moment it looks like a teleprompter or information sign. Or a self-portrait on a go-go dancing platform. Then the eye falls, and suddenly the Burger Toppings of Calais are shuffling on their own mini-plinth at the base of the largest truckstop billboard America has to offer.
As Rachel Harrison said to Matt Dillon, “How does anyone know? Itâs a crap shoot. And with art, itâs about the long run.”
[DAY AFTER UPDATE] A kind reader sent a link to Le Consortium in Dijon, where Harrison’s 2008 exhibition Lay of the Land includes the same detail image as appeared nine years later in Interview. And though it does not appear in the museum’s installation shots, I’ve been assured Mustard and Ketchup was on view in Dijon. The world has now been neatly divided into those who saw Harrison’s show in Dijon, and those who did not. And the revelatory experience described in this post no longer holds for the former group. Hopefully amusement at the phrase, the Burger Toppings of Calais will be enough to keep us all together.
Rachel Harrison, Mustard and Ketchup [foreground] and American Idol, both 2008, installed in Lay of the Land at Le Consortium, Dijon, 2008, image via Greene Naftali
[MORNING AFTER UPDATE] The good people of Greene Naftali have shared a photo of Mustard and Ketchup installed at Le Consortium in Dijon. Thus through jpg technology we can begin to narrow the divide between those who saw the show and the rest of us who now at least know a bit what it looked like. And it looks great, especially with its spindly formal rhyming with the mic stand in American Idol in the background. [American Idol was published in Bomb alongside the great conversation between Harrison and Nayland Blakeâabout the difference between seeing something in person and seeing it online. which I wrote a bit about last fall during Blake’s shows at Matthew Marks. The title of that post echoes the title of this one: Artworks Unfolding Slowly Over Time, In Cyberspace.
More than many of Harrison’s shows, the prevalence of rectangular columnar forms in the Dijon show made me think of Anne Truitt, an artist I know Harrison had been interested in for a long time. And American Idol, combined with the literal [Courbet] self-portrait posted at head height in Mustard and Ketchup, left me seeing figural references in Harrison’s work.
And that led me to think back about similar references in Truitt’s sculptures, too. Which is ironic, since I was really kind of a bitch to Blake Gopnik when he anthropomorphized Truitt’s columns of color in his Washington Post review of her 2009 Hirshhorn retrospective. Art is about the long run, indeed, and maybe in the long run, I’ll get it right.
As I was quietly thanking Jacques Adnet for this sleek, spare, and elegant desk, it did occur to me that 1940 was a helluva year to be designing modernist steel furniture in Paris. Let’s unpack that a bit!
Andy Warhol Be a Somebody with a Body, 1985, screenprint on acrylic, 8 x 10 in., selling at Christie’s
On his pre-blizzard gallery run, greg.org hero and advance scout Jack got curious about why this small, unassuming Warhol at Christie’s was dedicated to Dr. Linda Li. Turns out she was the first to treat him when he started having gallbladder pain in January 1987.
Unfortunately for Warhol, Dr. Li was a chiropractor, and her massage only made Warhol’s pain worse. It took him three more weeks to see an actual specialist. He got promptly admitted to the hospital undercover, had surgery, and then died in recovery on February 22nd, 39 years ago last Sunday.
If only we didn’t have a healthcare system where even rich, famous somebodies with bodies had to barter paintings for unhelpful medical care, Warhol might still be with us. He’d be 98, and New York Magazine would be asking him what he thought of Heated Rivalry.
[later in the day update] After someone mentioned The Warhol Diaries, I looked, and Dr. Li is all over them; Warhol went to her all the time for vitamins, massage/alignment/chiro and crystals, and so did a bunch of other famous people. So I imagine this painting, dated 1985, is more likely to have been a gift at some point, not a straight-up attempt to get out of paying for treatment. Hilariously, Warhol was wary of doctors especially who wanted to take art for payment. One guy asked, and he said, “maybe a print,” and the dr. was like, “No, I mean a portrait for me, and one for my mother,” and Warhol was all, “He wants $50,000 worth of art? What do I do?”
gah, a EUR40m auction and Christie’s cannot photograph these to scale? One is around 59 x 35 inches, and one is 60 x 36, but it’s not the ones it looks like.
West Flanders furniture dealer Roger Vanthournout and his wife Josette collected art for over six decades. Did they see Michael Jenkins and Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ show at Xavier Hufkens in Brussels in 1991? Is that what got them interested in Jenkins’ work, leading them to buy two large works on paper at Galerie Hans Mayer in Dusseldorf in 1992? Roger died in 2005, and Josette died last year, so we can’t ask them.
But we can sure look at Jenkins’ work in unexpectedly fascinating relation to Gonzalez-Torres’s. These two works, Counting (L) and Thirteen Lights (R), are flashe and pencil on paper. They also appear to be collage, not trompe l’oeil; so the drawings on paper that look taped on are taped on. And the drawings are of thirteen light bulbs on a string.
Felix made a stack with Jenkins in 1990. His portrait of Jenkins was in 1991. Both artists made works with bondage gear, and Felix made the go-go dancing platformâwith 13 lights along each edgeâin 1991. Then 1992 was full of light strings, with either 24 or 42 bulbs. The motif cannot be a coincidence. Whether there was a conversation about or between these two artist-friends’ works, there was certainly a shared context. Unlike Felix’s work, though, Jenkins’ has almost never been seen or shown or discussed beyond the moment of its making, during the AIDS crisis and queer resistance.
The most extensive text on Jenkins’ practice, I think, is his Summer 1992 Bomb interview with Bill Arning. He doesn’t mention anything directly related to these works, except for yellow, a color used for its nautical references to quarantine and disease. [I just read a quote from Victor Klemperer, too, about the horror of being forced to wear the six-pointed star in Germany; he mentioned yellow’s historic association with the plague and fear of Jews.]
Felix and the Vanthournouts are gone, but maybe it’s time to ask Jenkins.
[next morning update] It’s a mixture of gratitude to Michael Seiwert for posting the Artforum review of Jenkins’ 1991 show at Jay Gorney, and sadness at my having not thought about Artforum when writing this post. On the bright side, Contemporary Art Library recently posted an archive of Gorney’s shows, including Jenkins. Incredible. Two things pertain to the drawings at hand: Jenkins was in portrait mode. All the drawings in 1991 were this 60×36 human/door/window scale. The counting is in NYC, too, in one drawing, but the counting is different, continuous, where the drawing above seems to record multiple counts. There’s the trace of human experience without an indication what’s being tallied or why.
Michael Jenkins, Tower with Crazee Windows, 1991, paint on wood, board, wire, 59 x 24 x 10 1/2 in., exhibited at Jay Gorney in 1991, archived at Contemporary Art Library
The yellow stripes appear in one drawing, and inside this sculpture, Tower with Crazee Windows, 1991. Beautiful photos everywhere, though the yellow does start to feel immediately overwhelming. Maybe Jenkins thought so, too. The two 1993 works he showed next were red and white.
Look at me not cropping the clunky credit caption via Gagosian via Christie’s
When I saw this giant eye staring out from the lot at Christie’s, with barely a five-figure estimate, I was sure it was some random photo, ancillary merch. But no, it is the entire video installation, one of the greatest works of the 21st century.
If the price of art meant anything at all, Douglas Gordon’s Play Dead; Real Time (Other Way), 2003, should be like $10 million, easy. That one of the edition of just seven is coming up for auction in the first place is wild. Look at that exhibition history. So many institutions, is there even another copy in private hands?
But with an estimate of just $20-30,000? That is completely bonkers. Is this really who we are as a culture/economy? Do the people with so much money really value this artwork so little?
Douglas Gordon’s Play Dead; Real Time (Other Way), 2003, installed where it was made, at Gagosian 24th st, in 2003, image: Studio lost but found via Gagosian via Christie’s.
Srsly, seeing Play Dead at Gagosian, in the gallery where it was made, remains one of the most amazing video art experiences I’ve ever had. It should be installed on life-size screens everywhere. [And, again, it has.]
What’s even more extraordinary than Houston dealer/curator/collector/trustee Janie C. Lee [RIP] owning this piece, is that she apparently bought it from someone else, in 2006. Who TF would unload it so quickly? Some bootlegger, I assume [if so, hmu]. Anyway, while serving on the board of the Menil, Lee was one of the forces behind the creation of the Menil Drawing Institute. And the proceeds of her Christie’s sale will benefit the MDI. So really, you all have no excuse for abiding by this low estimate. Screw anonymous phone bidding; we need to name and shame the underbidders.
[half a day of outrage later update]: OK, it might be the case that this is a single-channel, monitor-based edition of a larger work. The show at Gagosian was titled, Play Dead; Real Time. The press release mentions three works, but does not name them. The stills are captioned, Play Dead; Real Time (Other Way), and are described as a “DVD on monitor” in a “dimensions variable” edition of 7. The installation shot is not captioned. MoMA’s edition of the work, Play Dead; Real Time, does not mention an edition, but is described as a “three-channel” work with two projectors, two screens, and a monitor. Crucially, the videos are different: “19:11 min., 14:44 min. (on large screens), 21:58 min. (on monitor).” Which all differ from (Other Way), which is 23:44. When the work [sic] was installed at Tate in 2013, it was titled, Play Dead; Real Time (this way, that way, the other way), implying that each screen was different. And indeed they were: the two projections move clockwise or counterclockwise and fade to black in between elephant tricks; the monitor work transitions by zooming in and out from the elephant’s eye. The monitor video’s duration is 23:44. If this is indeed a domestically sized element/variation of a larger installation, it should still be priced at between $1 and 3.333333 million, at least.
Ugo Mulas, c. 1969/70, the Twombly/Franchetti salon in Rome, with Warhol and Chamberlain installed properly, and a Bolsena painting, off its stretcher and unrolled ON THE FLOOR WTF, via Cy Twombly Homes & Studios
We still live in a Cy Twombly world Horst built. His European dealers made their own versions of via di Monserrato to live in. And whether it’s to identify works in the background, or to copy the floor, we’re all left poring over the same few photos, a dozen or so slivers from which we try to construct some meaning, to conjure a view of a place and a moment. We make do with what history has left.
Except there’s more. Photographer Ugo Mulas was everywhere in the art world in the 1960s and 70s, taking pictures of everyone and where they worked and everything they made there. Mulas published a couple of books early on, hard to find and expensive; fact is, we haven’t really seen Mulas’s world or processed it. And it feels like every one of his thousands of photos could change Art History forever, yet his only apparent option is to try to sell a dozen of the aesthetic ones as editioned prints.
There are a dozen Ugo Mulas photos of c. 1969/70 via di Monserrato in the Cy Twombly Homes & Studios book, including the one above. There’s another photo of the same room in which the large table covered with an unprimed canvas looks like a mattress. In a third photo, there are instead two acrylic coffee tables covered with photos and art tchotchkes, so the mattress was a choice, or a moment.
Those spindly floor lamps are everywhere in Mulas’ Twombly photos, and nowhere in Horst’s. So is non-Twombly artwork. Warhol, Chamberlain, Johns, Alex Hay, Picasso, the Franchettis didn’t just have an artist in the family; they had direct access to Castelli’s backroomâand a guy who could get it for them wholesale.
But when I say every single Ugo Mulas photo could change Art History, this is what I mean:
Bela Lugosi, Bed
Is this where the mattress ended up? The bedroom is not in Horst, and this Mulas is not in Homes & Studios. The carpet, the velvet, the sheets, Twombly’s love affair with green didn’t start in Bassano. The Kiss (Bela Lugosi) is one of Warhol’s earliest screenprints, which he made himself, on paper. On November 22, 1963.
[a few weeks later update] As I was saying…
This photo of the Twombly sofa is apparently from 1969, by Mulas. Which means every photographer at via Monserrato since then decided NOT to photograph this sofa. They’re all implicated. The Mulas interior shots were also apparently for/published in Vogue Italia in 1971 [not Jul/Aug, Nov, or Dec.] Also, here is a 1968 fashion shoot in Twombly’s apartment.
Catherine Opie, Untitled #26 (Skyways), 2001. Iris Print. 11 x 25 inches, ed 5+2AP, via TMN
“I did that big body of work, American Cities, for many years. And I’m definitely going to be going to DC to start again. DC needs to be photographed right now.”
TFW you’ve gone and done it, and now Catherine Opie has to come photograph your kakistocratic, militarized, depopulated cityscape for her 25-year-long series.
Lifetime Judd furniture pieces were initialed and numbered, but not limited: DJ 18 90, via Christie’s
Why do I have this hilarious and embarrassing idea in my head that if I just keep quiet about Barbara Jakobson’s 1990 Judd-era Judd desk coming up at Christie’s next week, maybe no one will notice it, and maybe interest will be so low they have to switch it to no reserve, and maybe I just take it off their hands to help them out with storage? When I’m not even planning on bidding? It really makes no sense at all.
Richard Prince, Eden Rock, 2005-06, eighteen acrylic on canvas, each 24 x 30 in., at Christie’s
The Edlis Neesons are selling a set of eighteen Richard Prince Eden Rock paintings at Christie’s. They’re overpainted appropriations of the covers of a pulp sci-fi book series called Deathlands, sort of butched up, post-apocalyptic nurse paintings. But greg.org readers may know them for their starring role in Eden Rock: The Movie, Prince’s post-apocalyptic sci-fi concept set in St. Bart’s. These Deathlands paintings were one tribe in Eden Rock; the Canal Zone Rastas were another; and the pin-up girls (from a Taschen book) scattered throughout the Canal Zone paintings were a third. [Fun fact: Eden Rock was the movie/pitch. Prince’s working title for these paintings, which read somewhere between a moodboard and a storyboard, was In My Movie.]
Three of Edlis/Neeson’s paintings were begun in 2005, and all were completed in 2006. Of those three, this one with the skull has the lowest inventory number, so maybe it was first? Prince was on it for a while, though; sixteen 0thers in the series that Prince showed at the actual Eden Rock Hotel over Christmas/New Year’s 2007-08 were listed as 2006-07. [FWIW, in an Eden Rock inventory filed in the Cariou trial, the walk-in price was $150,000, and all sixteen had buyers listed. At least one re-soldâmaybe by David Ganekâfor $87,500 in 2020. Christie’s estimates the Edlis Neesons’ set at $500-700,000.]
Deathlands 45, Starfall, cover
I thought that Canal Zone connection would be the most interesting thing about these paintings, but I’m turning out to be wrong. From the low-res images I’d seen, I’d always assumed these were paint-for-hire copies of the covers, which he then whited out by hand. But they’re stroke-for-stroke matches, which means they’d have to be inkjets. Except unlike the nurse paintings, they’re listed only as acrylic, and they’re on pre-stretched canvases. Also, Prince’s painting contains elements cropped from the cover. So either Prince extrapolated, or he was working from the original painting. Around the same time, Prince created a series called Untitled (Originals), which paired a pulp novel with its original cover art. Maybe the Eden Rock paintings are similar. In any case, they may not be what they say, and they are definitely not what they seem.
The door they assassinated Fred Hampton through wasn’t the first Black Panther door the heat shot through in 1969. In October, during the trial of Panthers co-founder Bobby Seale and seven others for conspiring to incite anti-Vietnam riots during the 1968 Democratic Convention, the FBI and Chicago PD raided Black Panthers’ Chicago headquarters, blasting through the steel door with shotguns, and then arresting six people inside for attempted murder, which, does that just mean they shot back?
Bad Bunny y su bandera de la independencia Puertoriqueña, una captura de pantalla del SĂčper TazĂČn
During the anglo excitement over Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl show, his use of a light blue flag as a symbol of Puerto Rican independence made me wonder about another Puerto Rican artist’s use of light blue: Felix Gonzalez-Torres.
Gonzalez-Torres was, of course, not from Puerto Rico, but he was soaking in it. He was born in Cuba and evacuated to Spain as a child. He went to college in Puerto Rico in the late 1970s and early 1980s and began his art practice there before moving to the USA. And he traveled back and forth while participating in the Whitney Independent Study Program.
“Untitled” (Loverboy), 1989, blue curtains as installed at Dia:Beacon, photo Bill Jacobson Studio
Light blue is a color Gonzalez-Torres used oftenâin mirrors and a stack, on painted walls, the go-go dancing platform, and especially in the curtains. There was a lot of talk about how the light blue Puerto Rican flag had been banned on the island for a while. In 1988 Gonzalez-Torres made Forbidden Colors, a work explicitly about the Israeli ban on the Palestinian flag.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Forbidden Colors, 1988, acrylic on panel, 20 x 16 in. each, collection MOCA
Gonzalez-Torres had spoken at length to Tim Rollins and others about the particular blue he chose for his artworks, and its associations with the Caribbean. And I wondered if there could have been a specific Puerto Rican political reference as well.
Screenshot of touchtone7’s video of “Untitled” (Go-Go Dancing Platform) where the dancer, coincidentally, decided to show up for her five minutes during the opening at Hauser & Wirth last night
âUntitledâ (Go-Go Dancing Platform) is still for sale, I guess, and is now on view at Hauser & Wirth. It’s been on permanent loan to a Swiss museum, and has seemingly been available any time a museum wanted to show it, but there’s still something weird about this work being in a private collection, and being for sale, first in an art fair, and now in a gallery:
As Humberto Moro, Deputy Director of Program at Dia Art Foundation, said in a recent film on the work, âIt reminds us that beauty can be ephemeral, that performance can be a private act, and that care, like memory, requires effort.
…
Over the past three decades, âUntitledâ (Go-Go Dancing Platform) has been realized in numerous institutional contexts, each presentation shaped by its particular time and place, allowing the work to unfold anew with every iteration.
But this is a paradox of Felix’s work: the public aspect feels incompatible with typical ideas of private ownership. Unless you have a steady stream of visitors, a candy pour in your house will go stale or get bugs. Why would you take a sheet from a paper stack if you already have them all? To wrap charcuterie? There is, of course, “Untitled” (1991), a box containing objects Felix sent to a private collector, which is intended never to be exhibited publicly.
“Untitled” (Go-Go Dancing Platform), 1991, on view at Art Basel 2025 via Hauser & Wirth
But what is the private realization of “Untitled” (Go-Go Dancing Platform) like? Does it just sit there? If there’s not a dancer coming every day, that just seems wrong. So do you just give a dancer a key to your house, and they show up whenever tf they want for their five minutes? That could be chaotically fantastic, stressful, or awkward. And you better pay them, and give them vacation, and so you need substitute dancers, or a roster. And I assume they’ll need background checks or NDAs. And suddenly you need a dancer manager/producer. But you still need to leave the dancer’s schedule up to them, and the discretion to share it with you. What if they get into a routine, stopping off for a dance on the way to their other dayjob? That also feels wrong somehow.
“Untitled” (Go-Go Dancing Platform) has been realized in numerous institutional contexts, sure, but performance can be a private act. So imagine it realized in numerous private contexts: is it a ritual? A break? A chore? To you take a go-go break instead of a smoke break? A daily practice of go-go dancing? A quick go-go before going out? Does the whole family take turns? Is go-go dancing on the job wheel on the fridge, along with walking the dog or mowing the lawn? Are you notorious for go-go dancing during dinner parties, or is it a rare treat? Do you take a break when the work’s on loan somewhere, or do you keep it up?
Should “Untitled” (Go-Go Dancing Platform) be considered alongside other works of daily practice, like On Kawara’s date paintings, or Byron Kim skies, or Rob Pruitt’s sunsets or Obamas? Or should it slot in along the maintenance and labor works of Meyrle Laderman Ukeles? Should the yawning gap between the eight-figure value of the work and the wage value of the dancers’ daily labor be a subject of critical evaluation? Does the owner/dancer change that?
What if the next owner of “Untitled” (Go-Go Dancing Platform) decides to never loan it again, and just keeps it for themselves? These questions are all we’ll have left. I guess we all better hoof it over to 22nd street while we still have a chance.
[10 minutes later update: of course I know the Foundation’s core tenets for the work (pdf) only say it “may” include a dancer, not that it “must.” It also says “bikini or briefs,” though I think no non-cis male-presenting dancers ever performed in Felix’s lifetime. If the work can accommodate questions of gender, it can certainly withstand scrutiny of the rights (sic) and responsibilities (sic) of its owner, and that person’s relationship to the agency, labor, and body of someone involved in realizing the work.]
When Derek Jarman’s Blue premiered in the UK in September 1993, it was broadcast simultaneously on TV (Channel 4), and radio (BBC 3). Channel 4 produced a booklet of the film’s text in a letterpress edition of 2,000 [plus, perhaps, a limited edition with a signed monochrome screen print?], which was available for ÂŁ3. Radio listeners could request a blue postcard to stare at during the broadcast.
The beautiful booklet is everywhere all the time. The postcard, not so much. Examples have been included in various Jarman-related exhibitions, but I suspect very few ever made it into the wild. There could be a swag closet at Basilisk Productions absolutely stuffed with unsent Blue postcards, or maybe they were used to take phone messages with a silver Sharpie. Anyway, I got one, and it’s sweet. A little glossy.
Though I once agonized over the correct aspect ratio for a Blue print, I never considered the postcard. It is A5, 148 x 210 mm, or â2:1, a ratio that has absolutely nothing to do with any screen, and everything to do with the ISO216 paper size standard. Whatever the original aspect ratio might be, it seems the correct ratio is whatever the format demands, whether film, video, radio, or print.
