Untitled (News Coverage), 2021, Fox News marquee signage, garbage bags, tape, dimensions variable, installation view Jan 18, 2021 at 444 North Capitol Street NW, Washington, DC, image: @jimswiftdc
Seeing this work installed for the first time, I am reminded of earlier works, like Untitled (Protestors’ Folding Item) of 2014, an LRAD cover installed on an LRAD;
Installation view: Protestors’ Folding Item (LRAD 500X/500X-RE), ink on Cordura, nylon webbing, LRAD, 2014, Collection: NYPD Order Control Unit
Untitled (Trump Plaza Black) Nos. 4 & 5, 2016, paint on panel, each in two parts, collection: Trump Entertainment Resorts/Carl Icahn, installation photo via Press of Atlantic City
which were hastily installed during the 2016 campaign over the dingy palimpsest of Trump’s name on the facade of the abandoned and bankrupt casino in Atlantic City.
And it reminded me that it very much mattered to the works that they were in the collections of the NYPD Order Control Unit and Trump Entertainment Resorts & Carl Icahn, respectively.
So when this piece went up on the facade of the Fox News studio facing the US Capitol building, in between the white supremacist insurrectionists’ attack on vote certification slash barely thwarted massacre of politicians, and the hastily militarized inauguration, where troops are literally–I hope–protecting the elected president and vice president from the paramilitary mobs of the current/outgoing president, it feels very important to point out that Fox News absolutely owns this.
Bronze plaque commemorating the quartering of US military troops in the US Capitol after the onset of civil war in 1861, image: aoc.gov, which is actually architect of the capitol, not, you know
Whereas the laws of the United States have been, for some time past, and now are, opposed, and the execution there of obstructed…by combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings, or by the powers vested in the Marshals by law…I appeal to all loyal citizens to favor, facilitate, and aid this effort to maintain the honor, the integrity, and the existence of our National Union, and the perpetuity of popular Government, and to redress wrongs already long enough endured.
The headcount, militia structure, and time limit were written into law in 1795 and had not changed, because the US did not have a large, standing army before the Civil War. By 1861, large numbers of officers in the small US Army had already begun leaving their posts to join the Confederacy. Governors from Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, and Arkansas refused, and began seceding.
Volunteers from Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, and the District of Columbia who responded to the call billeted in federal buildings, including the US Capitol. The first troops to arrive, from Pennsylvania, pushed through a mob in Baltimore to reach DC by train on April 18th. They headed straight for the Capitol. As more forces arrived, they fanned out across the District, in buildings rapidly converted to military use.
In the Summer of 1964, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, strengthening Black Americans’ right to vote. The FBI and members of the US Navy searched the swamps outside Philadelphia, Mississippi for missing voter registration activists John Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner. Local media and white supremacist politicians dismissed their disappearance as a publicity hoax. During the two month-long search the bodies of seven other murdered Black men and one Black boy were found in the swamps of Mississippi. Five have not been identified. After receiving a tip, troops found the young men’s bodies buried under an earthen dam on August 4th. Local members of the KKK, the county sheriff, and the Philadelphia police department were all implicated in the kidnapping and killings.
On August 17th, the US House of Representatives passed a resolution to install a plaque inside the Capitol to commemorate the quartering of volunteer troops at the outset of the Civil War. $2,500 was appropriated for the plaque in 1966.
A week after an insurrection beginning January 6, 2021, which was instigated and led by the president and abetted by congressional representatives from Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Missouri, New York, and North Carolina, plus others currently unknown, and which resulted in the storming of the Capitol, the killing of at least two police officers, four mob deaths, and the failed attempted rapes, torture, and public execution of multiple elected officials, and the failed attempt to stop the constitutionally mandated certification of the results of the presidential election, National Guard troops are once again quartering in the Capitol building, as the outgoing president and his collaborators continue to threaten violence against the country and elected leaders. Only this time they’re doing it under this plaque.
National Guard troops sleeping in the hallway of the US Capitol under a plaque commemorating troops sleeping in the US Capitol, image via NYT photographer @erinschaff
If the 103-year gap between the quartering and the commemorating teaches us anything, it’s that it’s probably good to give it at least a minute, history-wise, to see which side everyone ends up on.
porcelain serving tray at the 9/11 Museum Gift Shop, as photographed in May 2014 by Scott Lynch for Gothamist
It is New Year’s Day, and way past time to recognize the significance of the 9/11 Museum Cheese Board in the development of my practice.
Installation view: Protestors’ Folding Item (LRAD 500X/500X-RE), ink on Cordura, nylon webbing, LRAD, 2014, Collection: NYPD Order Control Unit, image: @SeismoMedia
It is true that in late 2014, recognizing the aesthetic resonance of an LRAD and its cover with the work of Olafur Eliasson and Marcel Duchamp, respectively, combined with Olafur’s call to take the tools and methodologies of art beyond the confines of the art world led directly to my idea to create Protestors’ Folding Item, an artwork in the collection of the NYPD, with the intention of using VARA in court to enforce the piece’s exhibition integrity and require LRAD remain covered in public. From there I stepped up a practice of declaring works that involve objects I do not own or situations I don’t control-including some already in museums, which is convenient, conservationally.
But after spending more than six years now looking for them in the wild, and exploring various techniques and approaches for replicating them, it’s clear to me that the complicated condition of these cheese boards helped map the territory where Protestors’ Folding Item would soon be found: the implications of the art/not-art inflection point, the context of those states, and the related issues of authorship, the object, and the exercise of control.
Almost as soon as Jen Chung reported the existence of the porcelain serving trays in Gothamist, I began researching their creation, and identifying their creators. That the trays were significant was immediately obvious. That their significance came entirely from their terribleness was, too, but the immediate media focus on their terribleness made their significance an awkward subject. I never heard back from the designer or the company after sending what I thought was a very diplomatic and persuasive email request for the middle of a sudden PR maelstrom:
Dear Ms. S––,
Thank you in advance for your consideration, and for your assistance in a story on the porcelain platter Rosanna designed for the 9/11 Museum. I am a writer in Washington DC and New York City, and have published my independent art- and architecture-related research at my blog, greg.org: the making of, since 2001. The site was recently recognized by the Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Program.
One of the subjects I covered rather extensively and authoritatively was the design competition for the World Trade Center Memorial. I was impressed by the Cartography platter in the recently opened 9/11 Museum Gift Shop, and the debates it has engendered about the museum, the memorialization process, and different experiences and modes of remembrance.
I would hope that as a company and a designer, Rosanna and Ms. Bowles might be able to share insights on the design and the process of creating it, and to site the platter in a constructive and empathetic context.
If it’s germane to this particular commission, it would also be helpful to hear about other museum or philanthropic projects, or perhaps to expand the context to include the history of commemorative plates, figures, and other objects.
Thank you again, and I look forward to your response, and to answering any questions that can facilitate my research.
Sincerely,
As is clear, though, I was still in research mode. It felt like a delicate balance, a fine line, to acknowledge that attention came from controversy, which is not something a manufacturer of porcelain serving pieces and collectibles is anticipating. But it’s also the case that though I was obviously not going to declare their trays works of art in my interview request, I was not yet ready to do it myself, even in my own mind. So for several months in 2014, these trays existed for me as objects in a state of tension.
The 9/11 Serving Trays are evidence of the historical and cultural reality of our world right then, when an expensive museum at the site of a terrorist attack slash commercial real estate development contracted with a housewares company to design an exclusive product for sale in their gift shop. The object that resulted was not a commemorative plate, which had already been produced in great volume by 2014; it was a ceramic tray in the shape of the continental United States, in cream glaze finish, and blank except for three navy blue hearts to mark the sites of four crashed planes. The box called it not a cheese board, but a serving tray. What could be more honorable than serving, they might have thought when they approved the copy. And when faced by overwhelming criticism, even from The 9/11 Families, a group used regularly until that point as human shields for all manner of capital- and politics-driven decisions at the WTC site, the museum defended its offering of “keepsakes” to a bigger market, “the 9/11 Community,” which could include not just the 9/11 Industry, but anyone who has the “historic experience” of visiting the museum itself.
I’m rambling, obviously, but after the internal debate over whether to post works like the blurred Frida, I am deciding to err on the side of slightly more info. And also, for the first time, my periodic internet sweep turned up this photo on a 3-month-old reddit post, the first evidence of the 9/11 Cheese Board existing outside the 9/11 Museum.
9/11 Cheese Board (2014), aka One Serving Tray, produced by Rosanna, Inc. exclusively for the gift shop of the 9/11 Museum at the World Trade Center, and available for a few days, at most, image via reddit user 13nobody
So there is something that in many other circumstances would be called hope. And that feels very fitting for today, and for this moment in time.
Huguette Clark, Scene from my window – Night, 50×46 in., image via christies
Wow, just when I thought we were having something very special when considering the implications of portraiture and erasure in a found real estate listing photo of a laundry dungeon in an epically gross American University flophouse–and I don’t mean to imply I’m not grateful for The Discourse–but anyway, y’all* were apparently also fine with letting me go yet another year without knowing that forgotten heiress recluse who kept up her sprawling Fifth Avenue co-op and Santa Barbara mansion like she’d be back any minute but actually checked herself and her doll collection into a midtown hospital room and only left decades later when she died in 2011 at 104 Huguette Clark made paintings?
Huguette Clark, self-portrait with palette, image: christies
And that except for a few included in a two-week show at the Corcoran Museum in Washington in Spring 1929–four years after her father’s death and the bequeathing to the Museum of 800 artworks and a Clark Wing–they were only first seen publicly in the jumble of an estate sale at Christie’s in 2014, where they sold for not that much money? Anyway, seventeen paintings by Clark were included in that sale, and she had some moments, mostly that window above, with the geisha lamp reflected in it. [Another four signed paintings, plus a couple of attributions, some prints, and an album of reproductions of her paintings, were auctioned in New Jersey in 2017, leftovers from Christie’s cataloguing. A highlight was this painting of a Dutch doll, which checks a lot of Clark boxes.
Also, though her teacher Tadeusz Styka specialized in painting portraits of socialite women, and once painted Clark appearing to paint a nude man, many of Clark’s surviving paintings are of Japanese women.
Untitled (Blurred Frida), 2020, 10×8 in., digital inkjet print, ed. 1/3+1 AP, Washington, DC installation view via zillow
Sometimes it feels like I find these works, and sometimes it feels like they find me. Now [gesturing around at the world] is definitely one of those times where I’ve been actively not, and yet I see a work like this, installed like this, and srsly, what am I supposed to do?
It first seemed like this 1932 portrait of Frida Kahlo by her father Guillermo Kahlo was blurred algorithmically a la Google Street View. But the absence of peripheral blurring, plus the unblurred shoulder at left, indicates it is blurred in the print.
[update: when asked for theories, the kid pointed out that the photo has a border along the bottom and right sides, but not along the left. Also, there is a shadow along the left corner, cast by the naked lamp below, but the shadow is blurred above. Thus the portrait was blurred in the listing photo. I feel like I’m raisin’em right.]
Frida Kahlo by Guillermo Kahlo, 1932, 6 x 4.5 in., silver gelatin print, via sothebys
It will be hard for the second print from the edition, or the AP, to ever match the grandeur of this original installation, though, the world is welcome to try.
Previously, related: Monochrome House and Untitled (Border), both early 2016 UPDATE: though the property is still for sale, the images have been removed lmao
Beatrice Wood, Folded Vessel, glazed ceramic, to be sold at auction 22 Jan 2021 at Rago Arts
This is a palm-sized ceramic bowl by Beatrice Wood. She began studying ceramics after her Dada phase, and continued working with ceramics until she died in 1998, at the age of 105.
During her Dada phase, when she’d gone to New York as a young woman to pursue acting, she got in deep with Marcel Duchamp and French novelist Henri-Pierre Roché, who later wrote Jules et Jim, but not about another, later love triangle he was in, not with Wood.
Alfred Stieglitz photo of Fountain, Apr 19, 1917, with SIA submission tag visible–and also looking like it has been torn off and reattached, but that’s not the issue now. image via wikipedia
Wood published The Blind Man with Duchamp and Roché, the magazine in which Louise Norton, another friend of this tight-knit posse, defended Fountain after it had been rejected from the Society of Independent Artists’ April 1917 show. Like Duchamp, Norton was also involved in the SIA leadership, and in Stieglitz’s photo of it, Fountain‘s submission tag lists Norton and her address as the alternate contact for R. Mutt.
In The Blind Man Wood wrote of Fountain that the only art America had managed by that point was plumbing and bridges. She created her own entry to the SIA show in Duchamp’s studio. It was a drawing of a woman exiting a bathtub with an actual bar of soap collaged over her crotch, which she gave a punny French title. Like Fountain, it was lost after the show, and decades later she made versions referencing it when the need arose. C’est la vie.
Untitled (Lucien Smith), 2020, 8×10 in. digital print in 3-hole, acid-free sleeve, ed. 1/2+2AP, installation shot via sothebys.com
There so many things to catch the eye and tempt the paddle in Kenny Schachter’s second storage-clearing sale at Sotheby’s. One of the most interesting things to me is the veteran collector/dealer/connoisseur’s confidence in attaching shadow box-style frames and tape right over the overflap signatures of his two small (24×18 in.) Lucien Smith Rain paintings.
The next most exciting thing was seeing my newest work, Untitled (Lucien Smith), installed on the back. Believe me, the only person more surprised than me is probably Kenny.
Anyway, the photo, a detail of Smith’s signature on Reality Bites 10, 2012, is inserted in an acetate sleeve, and is an edition of two, with two APs. No. 1/2 is installed on the verso of Lot 35, Lucien Smith’s Reality Bites 10, above, and no. 2/2 is currently installed on the verso of Lot 37, Lucien Smith’s Reality Bites 9, below.
Untitled (Lucien Smith), 2020, 8×10 in. digital print in 3-hole, acid-free sleeve, ed. 2/2, + 2AP, installation image via sothebys.com
Both sales end tomorrow, December 17. The winning bidder of each of these lots is welcome to contact me for a certificate documenting their bonus acquisition, upon verification, of course. Artist proofs reside in copies of Smith’s 2012 exhibition catalogue, Small Rain Paintings. In case you miss out on the 17th.
In 1957 a sculptural ceiling and wall by Isamu Noguchi was installed in the lobby of 666 Fifth Avenue. The composition of undulating aluminum fins survived the purchase of the building by Jared Kushner, and the gutting and renovation of the Fifth Ave.-facing retail spaces. The wall was more dynamic than the ceiling, which was pretty subtle, but it all worked very nicely together.
But now the Noguchi Museum is reporting that the work has been removed and destroyed. The only bright spot is that the components were donated to the Museum. If anyone has a block-long elevator lobby that needs a space age drop ceiling, hit them up, I guess.
It reminds me of Wade Guyton’s 1999 show at Andrew Kreps, Against the New Passeism. Understanding that this is only the beginning, hope for the end. Build, Destroy, Do Nothing.
Against the New Passeism. Understanding that this is only the beginning, hope for the end. Build, Destroy, Do Nothing. installation shot by Jerry Saltz via artnet
Wade installed a rough, fireplace-size, plexi&ply sculpture in the back room, and put the entire back room on display in the main gallery, including a much bigger Ricci Albenda text piece below:
Wade Guyton installation at/starring Andrew Kreps, with Albenda, Robert Melee, Rob Pruitt, Hiroshi Sunairi, Lawrence Seward?… via jerry saltz’s 1999 artnet review
I’d say stay outta my bidding way, but we’re all gonna do what we’re gonna do. I have thought, though, many times, about [bringing back] these early, destroyed Guytons, but just haven’t found the right space yet.
Gerhard Richter, Cage Grid I, 2011, 303 x 303 cm installed, 16 giclée prints mounted on aluminum panel, ed. 16+4AP
My old qualms about the capitalist reality of Gerhard Richter making photo copies of his greatest paintings were rendered quainter than the Geneva Convention by the introduction of an entirely new category, “facsimile objects.” These mass- and masterfully produced giclée prints, numbered and unsigned, and mounted on aluminum composite panels, are the creation of a print foundry founded by Joe Hage, Richter’s lawyer/collector/OG webmaster, Heni Productions.
Now known as Heni Editions, the firm makes stunning prints for other artists as well. [My favorite non-Richter Heni has to be their full-scale print of Hans Holbein’s the Younger’s The Ambassadors, published to benefit the National Gallery, which is still on my Christmas list.]
P12, “Annunciation After Titian,” 2015, facsimile object, 125x200cm, ed. 50+3AP
Heni got its start in 2011, when it made Cage Grid I, a giclée edition of Richter’s monumental squeegee painting Cage 6, divided into a 16-part grid. The panels were sold in the gift shop of the artist’s retrospective at Tate Modern, both as a set, and individually (as Cage Grid II).
Though facsimile objects initially seemed like they were designed to exist outside Richter’s art, they now appear alongside it. Gagosian included at least two facsimile objects–(P1) and (P12), above–in a Richter prints show earlier this year.
They’ve been installed in my head even longer. In 2016 for Chop Shop, a show where large-scale works were sliced up or parted out to order, I used this grid mode to create Destroyed Richter Grids, full-scale recreations of lost squeegee paintings.
Cage Print (P19-6), 2020, 100x100cm, Diasec-mounted giclée print on aluminum composite panel, ed. 200, image via Heni Leviathan.
Time being a flat circle, Heni has now announced the drop of Cage Prints (P19), facsimile objects in editions of 200 (each) of all six of Richter’s Cage paintings, but at 1/9th-scale, or 100×100 cm. Applications for purchase are currently being accepted (decisions are made on Dec. 6), though with no guarantee of Christmas delivery.
Untitled (Heni Cage Grid), 2020, 103 x 103 cm, Diasec-mounted giclée print on aluminum composite panel, in 16 25 x 25 cm parts, ed. 16+4AP
And so I, too, must, compelled by fate, announce a new work, Untitled (Heni Cage Grid), in which a Heni facsimile object of Cage 6 is cut into 16 pieces, each 25×25 cm. Like Richter’s Cage Grid I, it will be available in an edition of 16, plus 4AP. Each piece will be labeled and numbered, and a couple will include fragments of the original label. Some may be sold separately.
Unlike Heni, I can guarantee it will not be available before Christmas.
The four-part cyanotype/photogram that is Matson Jones’ masterpiece will be offered for sale in a few days at Christie’s.
Previously known as Jasper Johns Blue Ceiling when it was being offered for a variety of mid-seven-figure prices a few years ago, the work, by Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns is now untitled. The duo made it in 1955 for a window display at Bergdorf Goodman. The design director who hired them, Gene Moore, held onto the prints for several decades, until they were acquired in 1978 by the current owner.
Roberta Bernstein included an illustration of them in the chronology of Johns’ catalogue raisonée (v5, 8.), but not in the works section.
The estimate is $600-800,000 but seriously, who even knows? I just know I want them, and/or I want to see them in a museum somewhere, away from direct sunlight.
Takashi Murakami, Mr. Wink, Cosmos Ball, aka Oval (Peter Norton Family Christmas Project), 2000, image via Bukowski’s, where this one sold for SEK15,000 ($US1739) in 2016
Every one was an unexpected and generous delight and a thoughtful and cherished memento, but the hottest Peter Norton Family Christmas Project was the Takashi Murakami figurine, Oval Sitting Atop A Cosmos Ball (Mr. Wink) (2000).
Time goes on. The Norton Family reconfigured and eventually stopped their Christmas Project (I think? Or is it just me?). Some people started flipping their Mr. Winks, but he has been an elf on our shelf for 20 years. And for most of that time, I’ve been low-key trying to listen to the mini-CD inside the flower ball again, and rip it to mp3.
When I got it, I just popped the mini-CD into my Sony Discman Sport, enjoyed the track by zakyumiko, the duo Zak Onpa and Yumiko Ohno, a couple of times, and then carefully put it back. Then in between attempts to get the mini-CD to play in a couple of DVD players, I searched in vain for someone to post this thing as an MP3.
Last summer, Murakami announced he was making a music video of his poem, ‘Let’s Go See the Nuclear Reactor,’ which was set to music by zakyumiko. It’s being shown at the Mori Art Museum, but that’s it, afaik.
Just this spring, during lockdown, I dug the Discman out, ordered a new power adapter for it, in order to play the mini-CD, and found out the problem was not the power.
It is an accretion of a quiet ringtone, some electronic chime, and the ambient sounds around a small water feature. It is very soothing, but also very short, less than 2min of the 15min track. But it is still great. Here is a longer, unrelated snyth session Ohno, Zak, and Jeff Mills performed in 2017 or so.
Now I just need to record my Christian Marclay music box for my plinky throwback ringtone.
UPDATED 2022: THANKS AGAIN. Longtime greg.org reader/hero filmmaker Chris Nanos pinged me a few weeks ago to see if I ever got the whole zakyumiko Mr. Wink track ripped, which renewed my efforts. I dragged my very state-of-the-art-at-the-turn-of-the-millennium Sony component hi-fi system out of storage, and found out the tiny rubber O-rings that operate the CD changer and double tape deck had broken. I dragged out a region-free DVD player from an early 2000s video art installation, which supposedly plays and records from newfangled USB sticks, and it played but it did not record. And our TV is apparently too smart to get involved. So I emailed my dad to see what archaic computer setups he had, and could I borrow one, and he was like, “Oh, I’ll just send you an external drive with a tray. [two minutes later] Oh, it’s cheaper to buy one than to mail you one.” “Cool send me the link and–” “Oh, I just bought it, it’ll be there tomorrow.” And it was, and now I ripped that whole thing, and it’s great. So thanks again to zakyumiko, Takashi Murakami, the Norton Family, and Chris–and my dad–for this format transfer adventure.
One side of one of the blankets Keith Haring made for a 1982 Vivienne Westwood show, coming up at Rago
This blog will not become a Keith Haring fanboi blog. This blog will not become a Keith Haring fanboi blog. This blog will n–
It’s just that there happen to be interesting Haring-related materials flowing through the auctions at the moment. Like this blanket, which Haring apparently made four of for a Vivienne Westwood fashion show in 1982. It’s screenprinted on both sides, with a little border. At 95×146 cm, it’s more of a lap blanket? Maybe the show was cold? But still, not enough even for the front row, just the collaborators. According to Rago, where this is for sale next month, it was originally given to Ted Muehling, whose jewelry was used in the show.
[UPDATE] Vivienne Westwood expert Leslie Dick notes that this was not crowd swag, but an actual runway look. It was featured in the 1983 Witches Collection as a shawl, or perhaps a wrap. Here’s an image from the show, as archived by TheBlitzKids:
A silkscreen would imply the possibility of more than four, of course, and on media other than blanket. So if you miss this one, maybe there’ll be another chance.
The Ann Smith School’s Christmas 1953 performance of The Comet, with backdrop painted by Cy Twombly. image: The News-Gazette via Sarah I. Nexsen’s 2014 Honors Art History thesis
There is not a lot of time to get into this right now, but holy smokes, Cy Twombly painted the backdrop for the local elementary school’s Christmas play in 1953, and no one’s said boo about it except for one intrepid art history undergraduate.
In 2014, the interest of Washington & Lee art history student Sarah I. Nexsen was piqued by an archival photo in Lexington, Virginia’s local newspaper, The News-Gazette. It showed the December 1953 production of The Comet, a Christmas-themed play written by the Rev. Thomas V. Barrett, for the Ann Smith Elementary School. The backdrop was credited to local boy Cy Twombly, and that was all anyone wrote. The backdrop had never been mentioned in Twombly literature. Nexsen wrote about it for her senior thesis, titled, “The Land of the Stars: The Origin of Cy Twombly’s Aesthetic.” An ambitious project, to be sure.
Near as Nexsen can tell, Twombly got the gig while on leave from the Army, over the Christmas break. Twombly’s former art teacher attended the church where Barrett, the playwright, presided.
According to Nexsen’s research, which included interviewing the star of the show herself, The Comet tells the Nativity story from the point of view of a comet which becomes the Star of Bethlehem. But first it travels through The Land of Stars, meeting planets, raindrops, and Mary & Joseph along the way. Twombly’s backdrop depicts this Land of Stars.
The backdrop was in three panels; the largest, in the center, was approximately 7 x 12 feet wide. The stage right panel, showing Saturn, is partially visible in the only known photo; the stage left panel depicting Mars and Neptune is not documented. Nexsen says the backdrop was discarded and destroyed after The Comet‘s single performance on December 19.
We all owe this young scholar a great debt for bringing this massive, lost, early work to light, and for conducting vital, on-the-ground research to learn its history before the march of time robbed us of its witnesses. So let’s just say that it would indeed be amazing if this lost painting proved to be the momentous source for Twombly’s entire practice: his combination of text and graphic; his classical sourcing; his giant scale; his Lexington influences. 1953 was in the middle of Twombly’s emergence: after he and Rauschenberg ran off to Italy together, and showed at Stable Gallery together, and before he moved back to New York, and then on to Italy.
So it could totally be! But I am going to say it’s unlikely. And Twombly’s own apparent jettisoning of this work and any information about it into a black hole means the case is that much harder to make.
And anyway, rather than depicting Roman gods and their symbolic meanings, it seems more likely that Twombly’s painting of The Land of Stars shows stars, constellations, and planets. If I had the time–when I get the time–I feel like it would be possible to locate the star chart or vintage astronomical map that Twombly used as a source.
1956 hardcover edition of H.A. Rey’s The Stars: A New Way To See Them, which reconfigured the constellations, via abebooks
The constellation diagrams in my instant guess, The Stars: A New Way To See Them, the immediately popular, influential, and accessible beginner astronomy guide by H.A. Rey, the creator of Curious George, which was published in 1952, don’t really match. But whenever I get to recreating this destroyed Twombly, the deep blue night skies of Rey’s book will be as much inspo as the artist’s own blackboard paintings.
Cy Twombly, Panorama, 1955, around 8×11 ft, image ganked from the internet
He also painted at least two other theater backdrops while a student at Lexington High School, in 1945 and 1946. The first, for Gilbert & Sullivan’s “The Mikado,” was executed by Twombly, but designed by a sergeant at the School for Personnel Services, the wartime training facility that was (and would be) Washington & Lee University. As Japanese satire or caricature, “The Mikado” was considered suitable wartime entertainment. No photos of this production have surfaced.
zoom in to see Cy Twombly as the Bishop (tall, right) in front of his scenic backdrop created for the 1946 production of Robin Hood at Lexington (VA) High School, as published on the front page of the Rockbridge County News on May 9, 1956
In 1946, though, Twombly designed and executed an entire Sherwood Forest for the school production of “Robin Hood.” And he played the Bishop. He’s the tall one stage left. Images of his prize-winning paintings and sculptures he showed in Richmond as a high school student have also not surfaced.
Gallerist Stephanie Theodore was there for the unveiling of Wade Guyton’s new election aftermath-themed windows at Bergdorf Goodman. Though it clearly feels like a scaled up version of his #monochrome-on-plywood 2008 edition for Parkett, it also references the matte-black-OSB sculptures he made in 1999, which have since been #destroyed [cf. Guyton OS, 13.]
