Category: art

“As we stand enraptured by the stunning resplendency of Mark Rothko’s Untitled (Yellow and Blue) we bear witness to what can only be described as an unequivocal masterpiece of twentieth-century art history.”

I still contend that the auction catalogue essay is an underappreciated genre of art writing, and the 4,000-word lot essay for Sotheby’s 2015 sale of this prime Rothko feels worth a read. Especially so because Artnet reports that the auction house is selling the painting again this fall. And so we will have another essay with which we can index the way these classical Ab Ex artworks are positioned, and how their sellers, at least, imagine them to be understood.

In 2015 that meant namechecking everyone from Giotto to Niezstche and evoking the physical experience of standing in front of the painting in the most intense language you can muster. This manifestation is quoted after the jump, if you can handle it.

As for how the buyers understood things, we must piece together our own conclusions. Untitled (Yellow and Blue) is one of nine Rothko paintings Bunny and Paul Mellon acquired from Marlborough Gallery beginning in 1970, immediately after the artist’s death, and so right in the thick of the fiduciary malfeasance that prompted Rothko’s children to sue.

This and at least seven other Mellon Rothkos were promptly included in the National Gallery’s first show of modern art, in 1973.

Here it is, installed in the dinner organized by Bunny Mellon, above tables full of Betty Parsons sculptures, which were for sale.

Some time between Paul’s death in 1999 and 2006, when it was shown at the Palazzo Grassi, Bunny, by then in her nineties and rushing to spend several hundred million dollars before she died, sold the painting to François Pinault.

In June 2013, Pinault sold it through his auction house, Christie’s, along with a Fontana, to Eric Tan, a cutout for Jho Low, the Malaysian money launderer. [According to the Feds, the $79.5 million invoice was $36m for the Fontana, and so $43m for the Rothko.] In October 2013, Tan gifted the works, along with a $3 million Calder, to Low, with three copy & pasted “gift letters.”

[Because legal filings are another underappreciated genre of art writing, the excerpts of the gift letters included in the US Justice Dept’s 2020 forfeiture filing against other laundered artworks, a Warhol and a Monet, are also after the jump.]

In April 2014 Low borrowed $107 million from Sotheby’s Financial Services, pledging up to $285 million in artworks as collateral, including the Rothko, then he instructed them to sell artworks until the loan was repaid. Sotheby’s put the Rothko in their May 2015 Modern/Contemporary sale, where it was purchased by Russian oiligarch Farkhad Akhmedov for $46.5 million as part of his attempt to conceal $600 million while divorcing his wife Tatiana Akhmedova.

Tatiana was awarded title to the Rothko, other art, a yacht, and an apartment, in 2016, but some of the assets had been secretly transferred to the feuding couple’s son, and in 2020, she was still suing to receive them. When Sotheby’s publishes the updated provenance, perhaps we’ll know if Tatiana is the present seller. Artnet says the consignment was only just arranged, which may be why Sotheby’s pushed back their Hong Kong sale. But if you need to convert eight figures in a somewhat portable but rather traceable masterpiece, November 8 is your lucky day.

Hero, filmmaker, and longtime greg.org reader Chris was surprised to realize that the hovering biomorphic forms of the screen elements of the set Isamu Noguchi made for the Martha Graham Dance Company’s 1950 production of Judith were affixed, not to chainlink fence after all, but to the much more delicate fishnet.

Unfortunately, when I clicked through to the Isamu Noguchi Collection, Catalogue Raisonné, and Archive to investigate further, I bound myself to some access agreement that strictly prohibits me from using any material from their collection without authorization from the Noguchi Museum, which also prohibited employees so strictly from wearing a keffiyeh [“bearing an abstract black-and-white fishnet pattern and the red and green colors of the Palestinian flag”] in support of Palestinian liberation, that it fired them.

I’d like to think if I were running the archive and museum of an artist who, after voluntarily incarcerating himself in a Japanese American detention camp, found out that oh wait what, what do you mean he could not just walk out when he wanted, I’d be a little more circumspect about dictating to visitors.

[s/o Bryan Hilley for the Noguchi Museum report that made direct mention of the keffiyeh’s fishnet origins.]

In 2014 Herbert Matter’s magnificent photograph of Modigliani’s 1911-12 sculpture Head of a Woman was used for the cover of Andy Stott’s fifth album, Faith in Strangers.

Matter had photographed the sculpture, perched on a radiator in front of a window looking out onto Grand Army Plaza in Manhattan, for a 1956 Vogue Magazine feature on banker/art collector Chester Dale. The photo was made in color, but ran in black & white, and extremely cropped. So Stott’s version is the most magnificent it’s ever looked.

The photo’s caption read, “A Modigliani head, austere, magnificent.” Somehow the next spread in the magazine shows Mrs. Charles Wrightsman: “With her husband, she also collects eighteenth-century French furniture, which they use, magnificently, in their house in Palm Beach, set on the sea’s edge.” In Condé Nast style, then, I have gone back and replaced two lesser words with magnificent.

via @hologramparade via @caravan-dynamics via @wildoute

Untitled (Point Break), 2010, Roe Ethridge’s self-portrait as Patrick Swayze;

Sam McKinniss’s Pansies in a Basket (2019), from a Swiss Institute benefit auction;

and Louise Lawler’s Silent Night (2011/13) are three of the over two hundred artworks and design items included in the inventory of assets of Lisa Schiff and her former advisory firm, Schiff Fine Art. The inventory was filed as part of a bankruptcy proceeding and, as recently reported here, will possibly be liquidated at auction as early as November.

I broke out the inventory from its larger filing [pdf]. It’s after the jump.

In other filings from May, the bankruptcy trustee is seeking to recover deposits paid to two galleries by Schiff Fine Art of nearly $1m for work whose sale was never completed. $575,000 was paid to Thaddeus Ropac for a $750,000 Cory Arcangel work, Topline (2019). [idk, but Arcangel lists Topline as the title of a 2019 show in which none of the works have that title. Maybe it’s me for not keeping up with his prices, but that does seem like the price of an entire show?] And $398,000 was paid to Gladstone for a $650,000 sculpture by Wangechi Mutu, The Seated IV (2019), which was installed on the facade of the Met.

Though not identified in the filings, both purchases were initiated on behalf of Candace Carmel Barasch, the collector and former client who sued Schiff in 2023 for $6.3 million in undelivered art. It must suck to have a million dollars of your money sitting somewhere, and to have it classified as the assets of a bankrupt company, and you’re classified as a creditor, not an account holder. Has Barasch’s and others’ lawsuits prompted people to change the fiduciary or custodial agreements they made with their agent/art advisers?

In 2012, in her new post as director of the Tensta Konsthall, a community-focused art center in suburban Stockholm, power curator Maria Lind tried to figure out if there is ethical abstraction under capitalism. From “Abstract Possible: The Stockholm Synergies,” her four-month, three-venue exhibition and art economics report, the answer can only have been: lmao no.

How can there really be only five of these Ming Dynasty tiles known?

Christie’s dates this one to the Zhengde-Jiajing period, the first half of the 16th century (1506-1566), which splits the difference between the British Museum (Ming, c. 1500) and the Palace Museum in Beijing (Jiajing, 1521-67). The V&A has the same Jiajing date on theirs, but their early registrar log for the tile says it came “from the Porcelain Tower, Nanking [Nanjing], completed in 1430.” It’s an association that didn’t make the cut for the digital record.

Despite the specificity of Christie’s bibliographic references, the V&A’s was the only tile I could find online. Like the Christie’s tile (13 X), it has a number incised on its edge (11 Front), that does make them sound like part of a larger project. But the Porcelain Tower? It was a nine-story pagoda of porcelain brick that rose 79 meters tall, and was considered a marvel of the world, and then it was destroyed in the Taiping Rebellion in 1856, and rebuilt in 2015 with a billion yuan donation from Wang Jianlin.

It was, unsurprisingly, Alain Truong who first put a spotlight on it, but I first saw it lighting up my tumblr timeline this morning [where pwlanier posted it, and punk-raphaelite reblogged it]. My immediate thought was that such an exquisite object should be considered alongside a comparable painting, like a panel from a Christian altarpiece or something.

Then I took a closer, slower look at its incised surface and the hasty way the glaze spills across the design, and maybe it calls for a more modernist, abstract aesthetic context. Which, never mind, I realize what I’m thinking is I just really, really want it.

Lot 1044, 20 Sept 2024: A RARE YELLOW AND GREEN-GLAZED RECTANGULAR ‘DRAGON’ TILE, est. USD 40-60,000 [update: it didn’t sell? weird!] [christies]

Having recently experienced a difficult displacement and resettling himself, conceptual fragrance artist and greg.org hero Chris Rusak devotes his new studio zine to the topics of home and loss. It is titled HOME, and it is a beautifully made reminder of our connection to the people we see in the terrible news of the day.

Rusak is donating all proceeds from HOME to organizations providing mutual aid to Palestinians displaced by the war in Gaza.

Zine: HOME, $5 [chrisrusak.com]

Reader, when I say I was not prepared,

when I clicked through the BravinLee email announcement of the new artist carpet design by Rashid Johnson—an Anxious yet handsome rug that manages the sometimes tricky balance of artist’s credible aesthetic and conceptual rugness, and also manages to be “a meditation on race, class, identity and the essential human struggle with isolation, meaning and anxiety,”

only to discover I’d missed the introduction this year of a new artist rug by Willie Cole, and no, the stark but small rug with Cole’s familiar motif of an iron mark, which was released in 2019, did not prepare me,

For the 12×10 foot, hand-knotted monument that is Original Sin. Cole has gone from abstract to searing representation with the 1789 abolitionist drawing of conditions of the Middle Passage. First published by Thomas Clarkson as “Stowage of the British Slave Ship ‘Brookes’ under the Regulated Slave Trade Act of 1788,” the drawing quickly became an an abolitionist staple on both sides of the Atlantic.

The question immediately arises: do you have a space hallowed enough to put this on the floor? And I think the answer is, if you put this on the floor, you will.

In an essay excerpted by BravinLee [and published in full], noted art advisor Halima Taha rhapsodizes on the creation and impact of Cole’s Original Sin carpet:

Just as a rug lays a foundation for a room, offering a canvas for intricate designs and patterns to unfold, the thread of American history serves as a foundation for contemplation, weaving together the diverse threads of the nation’s past to create a complex and rich narrative.  Each thread in a rug represents a different culture, event, or individual, much like the various elements that have contributed to shaping America’s identity. By examining these intricate weavings of history, one can better understand the complexities, challenges, and triumphs that have defined the American experience.  The rug created by  Willie Cole, entitled Original Sin, challenges the viewer to decide if the rug should be on the wall or the floor. 

So I guess the question that should have arisen is, do you have a wall big enough to install a 14-foot carpet? Because if you do, you will be turning it into a Sistine Chapel of Black history and liberation, so don’t screw it up.

Taha suggests, though, that there can be hope underfoot. Walking on the carpet depicting this inhumane history “could also be interpreted as attempting to stomp out that pain, to reshape and transcend it, or to dance in jubilant celebration akin to Juneteenth, evoking the spirit of resilience and triumph over adversity or standing on the foundations of American prosperity.”