the making of, by greg allen
“It requires a genuine fight to produce one well-designed object of relatively permanent value,” said George Nakashima on the auction house’s webpage for this “rare” c. 1978 rosewood garbage can.
I think we can all agree he won this round.
20 Jan 2023, Lot 546: George Nakashima, Rare Wastebasket, est. $2-3,000 [update: sold for $4,410. excellent. ragoarts]
In 1989 Gerhard Richter made four large, slush-colored squeegee paintings [CR 706-1 through 4], which he titled Eis/Ice. In 1997, the Lannan Foundation helped give the brightest one, Eis 2, to the Art Institute of Chicago.
In 2003, Richter made a quarter-sized (100 x 80 cm) print edition of Eis 2 for the 40th anniversary of Lincoln Center Editions, a print fundraising operation of the Vera List Art Project. Richter and Robert Blanton’s print studio Brand X created an amazing 41-color screenprint version of the painting, just the kind of medium shifting challenge those guys would love.
Clearly it worked, because Richter put out Eis 2 as a signed edition of 108 (plus 27 proofs) on Somerset. They started popping at auction about three years ago, and in the last year have sold for $56-$90,000.
Brand X also printed 500 copies of an unsigned poster version on slightly taller, narrower Somerset, with the Lincoln Center/List Art Posters caption. Same image dimensions (40 x 32 in.), same screens. These ur-Facsimile Objects sell for just a couple thousand dollars.
So whether you’re a connoisseur of printing technique or spending technique, there’s an Eis 2 for you. In fact, there’s one coming up at LA Modern on January 11th. [update: it sold for a decent $3,024.]
Previously, clearly, in retrospect, related:
2016: Gerhard Richter Facsimile Objects
2014: Cage Grid: Gerhard Richter and the Photo Copy
2013: Gerhard Richter’s Septembers
With his deadpan, mechanically produced, offset printed, unsigned artist book, Every Building on the Sunset Strip, Ed Ruscha upended the art of photography. More recently he upended the art of photographing art. Museums are out there trying every way to depict the 7 inch-by-25-foot accordion-style book accurately on their little websites.
MoMA shows just the cover, blank with the words The Sunset Strip at the top. The Getty shows the title page, plus a single, 14-inch spread, very manageable. The Harvard Art Museums treats it like a rare book, publishing images of the whole thing, in a gallery of 22 3-fold spreads. The Met, which never met a copyright it didn’t maximize, gives absolutely nothing, just the text description.
Last year, the Getty, which holds Ruscha’s archives, went several extra miles by digitizing 60,000 of the over half million photos the artist and his collaborators have taken of the Sunset Strip since 1965. Turns out the book we know was just the first of at least 12 Sunsets spanning fifty years (so far), all of which are available online, for virtual driving.
And then there is the single greatest photo in museum collection digitizing history, and I am 100% unironically serious when I say I hope the National Gallery of Art never replaces it, but uses it forever, in every medium, known or unknown, until the end of time.
The National Gallery of Art acquired Every Building on the Sunset Strip in 2015, when it subsumed the Corcoran. Every institution’s online collection presentation is shaped as much by its choices of software as by its information design and priorities, and the NGA’s even more so. The URL for the image above indicates it is generated to fit within a frame of a certain dimension, in this case 600 x 600 pixels.
Clicking on the image doesn’t just zoom, it ZOOMS, taking the visitor to what may be the largest image of Every Building ever made, a near infinite scroll of more than 5,000 256px square jpeg tiles. Each tile is about 1/2 square inch of the original book, close in enough to see the halftone dot matrix used to render Ruscha’s photos on the offset lithographed page.
I am now trying to figure out how to extract these tiles, which are now the second-to-5000th best images of Every Building on the Sunset Strip ever made. Who knows, I might try to put them in a book.
Edward Ruscha, Every Building on the Sunset Strip, 1966 [nga.gov]
Previously, related, unrealized: A 2005 attempt to replicate Every Building on Amazon’s A9 Local Yellow Pages, an unsuccessful Streetview Precursor
I lost out on everything I bid on in Kenny Schachter’s fourth no-reserve sale at Sotheby’s, which ended today. The one I got outbid on the most, at least percentage-wise, was Fred McDarrah’s October 1964 photo of Paul Thek and his sculpture, titled, “Birthday Cake of Flesh.” Estimated at USD 300-400, the print sold for $4,410. [It is, of course, of Thek, not by Thek. Is this a record price for a McDarrah, though? Three vintage prints of McDarrah’s Kusama photos sold for $5,040 last year]
The print was in a selling exhibition at Sotheby’s London in 2019-2020. Maybe Schachter, who’s been hyping and trading Thek works a lot the last few years, picked it up there.
The photo was at the Stable Gallery, where Thek had his first show, which McDarrah covered for the Village Voice. The notes and stamps on the back of the print relate to the caption and size for printing the photo in the paper. So this print’s seen some stuff.
Birthday Cake is, of course, made of pigmented wax that resembles a pyramid of slabs of meat, part of Thek’s Technological Reliquaries series. According to Cynthia Hahn’s The Reliquary Effect, Thek also titled the work, Josef Albers Homage to the Square. And though I can see how the top-down view of a 4-tier pyramid by itself would work, the strong diagonals of the vitrine’s steel, and the horizontal bands etched or painted into the sides seem like they’d obliterate the reference. Is the cake even a pyramid? Or is it a ziggurat?
NEXT MORNING UPDATE: Bryan Hilley’s search for other photos of Birthday Cake turn up a mystery that is a problem. This color photo of Birthday Cake by D. James Dee ran in black&white in Holland Carter’s 1991 Parkett essay on Thek, one of the first reassessments of the work after Thek’s death in 1988. [pdf] And it’s given the date of 1967.
All the other Technological Reliquaries are listed as 1965-66, which would make Birthday Cake a late Reliquary, even a culmination. Also, Cotter reads the glassed off meat as wistful commentary on the liberation of the Summer of Love, which, at 35, had just passed Thek by. Obviously, Cotter’s take is more involved than that, and boomers can bemoan the telescoping passage of time all they want. But it seems important to understand Thek’s work to know the time and place he made and showed his work, and for Birthday Cake and other meat works, it was October 1964 at the Stable Gallery, six months after Andy Warhol showed his Brillo boxes there.
I think he was up to something else.
Jayson Musson’s show, His History of Art, continues at the Fabric Workshop & Museum until the end of the year. It’s not clear, though, whether this 30″ plush version of his pothead rabbit sidekick Ollie, from his kids sitcom-looking, three-channel video installation will last that long.
There are only 90 in the edition, and they’re the wackest art world plush toy since Mike Kelley’s emotionally needy Little Friend, which dropped in an edition of 850 in 2007. Collect’em all!
Jayson Musson: Ollie, Certified Emotionally Fulfilling! $300 [fwm]
The first work on the National Gallery of Art’s Artle quiz yesterday this Berthe Morisot painting of a vase of peonies, which, you have to admit, looks rather Manet-ish. I figured it wasn’t Manet, because if it was, I’d have already seen it–unlike the dogs, which–we’ve been over this–are occasionally incredible, basically every [late] Manet painting of a little arrangement of flowers is, as far as I’m concerned, a masterpiece, and I can’t imagine the National Gallery holding out on me by never showing this masterpiece. But I guessed Manet anyway, as a compliment.
Not that this is a masterpiece, ofc. Obviously, it’s a bit of a mess, with some moments of greatness. And some meaningful echoes of Manet, who Morisot met in 1868. Morisot’s family became close to Manet’s, and she modeled and sat for him. And let him rework her paintings. And married his brother.
So Morisot would have known the peonies Manet liked to grow–and paint. Some of the half dozen paintings of peonies Manet made around 1864 had been shown repeatedly by the time the Morisots came to call.
What’s more amazing about this Morisot, though, is that it was unknown until 1980, when it was discovered underneath another painting, Un percher des blanchisseuses, from 1875. The title translates as a perch of laundresses, but the apparent English title is Hanging The Laundry Out To Dry. The combination of picturesque rural life and factory smokestacks encroaching on the horizon make the likely site of this painting Gennevilliers, a village outside Paris where the Manets owned property.
Morisot included the laundry scene in the second Impressionist exhibition in 1875, where it was one of at least four works by the artist purchased by Dr. Georges De Bellio. It passed through various heirs and dealers until Paul Mellon bought it in 1950. Given that timeline, it seems the most likely explanation is Morisot stretched a new canvas over the existing painting.
As a work from a historically important show, blanchisseuses was exhibited often over the years, and obviously included in the Wildensteins’ 1961 Morisot catalogue raisonné. But it was only thirty years later, when the Mellons were getting ready to donate it to the National Gallery that the peonies painting was discovered underneath it.
The Mellons ended up donating Morisot’s Hanging out the laundry in 1985. But they kept Peonies until 1994, which, wouldn’t you? For all this, I’d expected more study of this double painting, and how it came to be. Despite decades of Morisot and Impressionist popularity, Peonies has never been exhibited outside the National Gallery.
I see at least five other paintings from the period, mostly around 1875, of the same dimensions, including two other Gennevilliers landscapes. Were these pre-stretched canvasses from the art supply store? It’s now been 40 years; has anyone checked under them?
Previously, related: Not a Manet Facsimile Object [Manet painting of Morisot’s violets]
Today Artforum’s Lloyd Wise mentioned a project Jeff Koons did for the magazine in November 1987. Titled Baptism, the seven-page spread ran a year before his Art Magazine Ads series in the same magazine, which promoted his unprecedented, three-venue Banality show. Unlike the Ads, though, which were released as a print portfolio, Baptism seems to have been its own, standalone thing.
Anyway, as one of the sites, George Washington’s restaged pew at St. Paul’s Church on Broadway [right], has since become an object of fascination here, I thought I’d look up the rest.
I haven’t gotten very far because I was surprised by this first object, a porcelain figurine of Don Quixote by Enzo Arzenton for the Italian manufacturer Capodimonte. Actually what surprised me was the image, which is the same one found on the website of this Staten Island Capodimonte importer almost forty years later.
Koons appropriated this image from some catalogue, brochure, or ad, and it’s still in circulation. I don’t know why that seems wild to me.
I was absolutely certain I’d written about this, but I guess I’ve just been thinking about this wild Cartier necklace mounting, minus most of the diamonds, which the Doris Duke estate sold for $54,000 for 18 years. It was truly a standout in the auction of Duke’s jewelry.
The preposterously scaled necklace was purchased by Duke’s boyfriend, a couple of years before they got married. She raided the necklace over the years, and remounted 79 of the diamonds in other pieces, leaving a gorgeous, platinum husk.
A jewelry aficionado with an absurdly advanced appreciation of historical accuracy, and possessed of a conceptual sophistication rivaled only by their access to money, apparently spent years assembling period-correct cushion and Old European-cut stones to reconstitute Doris Duke’s Depression-era diamond fringe necklace. This zombie necklace was offered for sale at Christie’s in 2017, with an estimate of CHF 3-5 million. It did not sell, at least publicly.
Out of respect for the time and effort required to assemble them, I don’t want the diamonds to be released back into the wild; put them in a little bag. But definitely take them out, and let the necklace be restored to its perfect, skeletal state. It’s what Doris would have wanted.
At some point in the late 18th century, it is believed Sir Joshua Reynolds painted extensions to a portrait of Queen Henrietta Maria, wife of Charles I, painted by Sir Anthony Van Dyck in the 1630s. The portrait was in the collection of the 2nd Earl of Warwick, who wanted to decorate his castle with identically sized, full-length portraits of the highest quality.
Reynolds is argued because of the quality of the execution, the importance of the portrait and the collection, and the importance of Warwick as Reynold’s patron. The attribution is not universally embraced, however.
The conjoined paintings by Van Dyck and his 18th century collaborator were sold in 1978, in situ, along with Warwick Castle, to the Tussauds Group, which was acquired by Blackstone in 2006, which did not sell them at Sotheby’s in 2015, but did sell them in 2016.
The paintings were decoupled and the resulting Van Dyck, restored, was loaned to Yale for five years. It sold at Christie’s last night. The location and status of the possible Reynolds, and its original frame, and stretchers, is unknown.
2022: Lot 11: Property of a Gentleman, sold for GBP 2.442 million [christies]
2015: Lot 28: Property of a Private Equity-Controlled Amusements Operator, I guess, didn’t sell for GBP 1.5-2.5m [sothebys]
Previously, related: On The Execution of Maximilian
2018: Van Dyck before and after – Royal Edition [arthistorynews]
Charles’s Queen Gets The Chop [adamfineart]
I think I understand most of the issues around the Restitution Study Group’s unsuccessful attempts to get an emergency restraining order to stop the official transfer of the Smithsonian’s Benin Bronzes to the Nigerian government–everything except the timing. Why is this story dropping now, almost two months after a judge denied the motion? The RSG is insisting reporters note that its lawsuit is still active, even though the judge’s refusal of the ERO seems to find every argument in the Smithsonian’s favor. Going public now is somehow part of a strategy to amend their complaint and add new theories to the public debate over what to do with Benin Bronzes. Or more interestingly, to add a new constituency to that public and new voices to that debate.
Continue reading “Not Standing For It”It’s the time of year when people are publishing lists. And here’s mine. Starting with number 2:
2. Letter to Peter Norton
When Peter Norton joined the Board of Trustees of the Museum of Modern Art, he apparently asked Douglas Cramer, who chaired the Committee on Painting & Sculpture, if he could sit in on the Committee’s acquisition meetings, to see how they worked. Cramer wrote back to express his utter bafflement at such a request, the audacity of which neither The Modern, nor the art world at large, had ever known, and that such things were not done, so no. Norton had the letter framed and hung it in the front hall of his Central Park West apartment, where he hosted many collection visits.
1. Joan Collins Visits Gemini! Postcard from Ellsworth Kelly
On Tuesday, March 26, 1985, Joan Collins, star of the Douglas Cramer-produced Dynasty, was photographed meeting Princess Diana at a charity fashion show in London. The wire service photo of their meeting ran in the Los Angeles Times a few days later, on Friday the 29th. Did Kelly see it there? That weekend he had back-to-back shows in New York; a painting show closing at Blum Helman, and a wall reliefs show opening at Castelli.
Christopher Knight wrote an essay for Ellsworth Kelly at Gemini 1983-85, a catalogue/brochure of four series of editions now listed as being published in 1984. The cutout paper collage on the left of the card[-shaped piece of paper] above is similar in composition to Cupecoy Relief, from one of the 1984 series. Cupecoy is the name of a nude beach on St Martin, where Kelly & Jack Shear, and Cramer, would visit Jasper Johns. Was there an announcement card for the book or the works? Was there an exhibition? Was there an ad clipped from an art magazine and trimmed to postcard-size? Does the collage cover the text details of the series/book/show? Does the up-do’d head of Joan Collins cover a photo of the artist, as the caption says, at Gemini?
The card is inscribed on the back, “Joan Collins Visits Gemini!” Maybe because now it looks like Joan Collins is looking at an Ellsworth Kelly at Gemini. It is also signed, “EK 85.59,” which makes me think that Kelly revisited the card after giving it to his collector/friend Cramer, and gave it a catalogue number. Or did Kelly keep a running registry in his head at all times, ready to sign and number whatever cleared the artistic bar? You see the layers of awesomeness involved here.
But the work was also signed, “Love, Joan Collins.” The ultimate Cramer flex? Or did Kelly get Collins to sign a card when she visited Gemini? The making and sending and signing of this card hangs on the answers to these chronological questions.
If you are the person who practically walked away with this Ellsworth Kelly Rosetta Stone for one thousand two hundred and seventy five dollars [?!], please share your insights-and let me know when you’re ready to sell.
[2025 update: The buyer is indeed ready to sell, and I am sure you won’t find this Joan Collins Visits Gemini! postcard collage at a better price anywhere.]
Previously, related, what even is this arc:
2013: Ellsworth Kelly Postcards: Wish You Were Here!
2015: Untitled (Joan Collins Toile de Jouy), 2015
2017: Ellsworth Kelly Dancing Monkey
2022 Wish I Was There! Ellsworth Kelly Postcards
I went for the watercolors, but I could look at John Singer Sargent’s paintings of other artworks all day long. The first gallery of the Sargent and Spain show at the National Gallery is almost entirely copies of paintings Sargent made in the Prado, mostly Velásquez and El Greco.
I can’t believe we’ll have to some day go to George Lucas’s museum to see Sargent’s copy of Las Meninas. But at least that day is not yet.
The show was crowded, and I mistakenly figured I could look up everything I needed to know afterward, but I guess they’re saving it all for the book. From the room full of Sargent’s studies of Spanish religious painting, sculpture, and architecture, I wrongly assumed that the watercolor above of an altarpiece was related to the Gardner Museum’s study of the Caananite goddess Astarte/Ishtar for the Boston Public Library, which was hanging next to it. But the altarpiece dates from 1895, after that section of the library murals were completed. [Revisit update: it definitely informed Sargent’s depiction of the Virgin at the other end of the library, though, including the arrangement of candles in front of it.]
A lot of these works were definitely not made to be shown. Sargent was making them for other reasons: For himself. Maybe like how Richter just wanted a Titian, Sargent just wanted a Velásquez. Or he was trying to figure something out. To capture a moment, a detail, a lighting effect, a space, an experience, a turkey.
I will have to go back to see if there is any explanation at all for why Sargent went approximately 100x harder in the paint on this photobombing turkey in a Spanish courtyard than on the courtyard itself. This may be my new favorite Sargent ever.
[Revisit update: there is zero mention of the Turkey in the weirdly sparse catalogue, even though Sargent returned to paint the same 16th century Granada courtyard 30+ years later, and included some donkeys.
Wait, is that a turkey standing exactly in the painting’s vanishing point?? Put there the same year he made the turkey bronze below? Please do not make me need to write a paper on Sargent’s turkeys. It’s Sargent; how has this scholarship not been done to death already?]
[Completely unrelated, I’m sure: Turkey, c. 1913, a nearly life-size [?!] bronze the Corcoran Gallery acquired out of Sargent’s estate sale in 1925.]
Sometimes it’s just impossible not to love a Betty Parsons sculpture. Just look at this little thing. The date on the back’s hard to read, but what if Parsons was 76 when she painted these eyes [?] on this rock. This is definitely one of those situations where I blog about it so I don’t buy it. But ngl, I do want it.
update: Parsons in a double exposure in her studio on the invitation for a 1975 exhibition at Studio Gallery in DC is not quite how I imagined her painting this little rock owl or whatever, but it’s probably closer to how it went down.
Also a good time to remember that in his architect phase, Tony Smith designed Parsons’ studio and guest house on the North Fork.
Lot 332, Dec. 8, 2022: Betty Parsons, Untitled, est. $300-500 [doyle, update: sold nicely for $1,512]
Previously, related: Rothko & Parsons at the National Gallery, curated by Bunny Mellon
In 2013 artist Jayson Musson created a sculpture live on Vine & Twitter, and offered it for sale. Though I was in DC at the time, I saw it, bought it, and rallied some friends on the ground to pick it up before it got scooped or tossed. That saga was capped in a blog post. And now, on the moment of decoupling this site from the site of the sculpture’s creation, I have finally installed it. It’s a little dusty, but it holds up.
via Prof. Erin Thompson comes the story of Katja Meirovsky, who in 1940 wore a red dress to her Berlin art school which she made by cutting the swastika off a stolen nazi flag. She became part of the Red Orchestra, the largest civilian resistance movement against Hitler. The group and its members are the subject of an exhibition at the German Resistance Memorial Center by artist Stefan Roloff, which Thompson reviewed at Hyperallergic.
In other problematic textile repurposing news, Droog designer Tejo Remy, who has always made custom Rag Chairs from the client’s bags of old clothes, has collaborated with Demna. Remy made Re-Benches out of deadstock and offcut fabric for Balenciaga, which were installed this month in ten boutiques worldwide. After two weeks on display, they went up for sale online. Artnet says the drop on the 22nd was a surprise, and sold out immediately. But there was time to put out press releases to the hypesphere. Balenciagattention was then promptly devoured by the rightwing vortex of shit, when online q-trolls fed the latest ad campaign through the p3do conspiracy outrage machine in the stupidest way possible. The company responded by loudly suing itself and its creative team.
None of which is the point here. The point is that Demna, too, is recycling. Remy made a Rag Chair last September at the Musée des Arts Decoratifs as a performance. He used linen panels left over from the exhibition, « Luxes », the hometown version of « Dix mille ans de luxe », with the Musée programmed for the Louvre Abu Dhabi in 2019, sponsored by the Confédération Européenne du Lin et du Chanvre, the European Confederation of Flax and Hemp.
The video recap very much does not look like a performance, but it does work as a how-to for making your own Rag furniture. Whether you use the leftover scenery from your pandemic-era exhibitions or your bags of damning fits by suddenly outré designers, you can tell your own story! Or maybe you have a lead on those giant bins of cancelled Yeezy x Gap joints you can turn into at least ten of the dankest Rag Chairs ever.