Category: johns, rauschenberg, et al

Unfinished Twombly Sculpture

OK, just one more.

a photo of cy twombly's painting studio in gaeta with supplies as he left them on rickety tables, and an unfinished sculpture-like tower of boxes in the center. the view of the bay out the windows is washed out by the exposure. manfredi gioacchini fecit.
Manfredi Gioacchini’s photo of Twombly’s studio in Gaeta, a corner room with views of the bay and the city scape, but those are washed out, so look at this sculpture-like stack on the rickety table.

What’s popping out to me as I keep looking at Manfredi Gioacchini’s photos of Twombly’s Gaeta house & studio is the sculptures everywhere, and things that look like sculptures. It’s the sculpture-like objects here, the things that look like they could become Twombly sculptures, that seem to show him thinking and living with objects in a certain way, not just sitting down and making them.

a detail from manfredi gioacchini's photo showing the unfinished sculpture in cy twombly's studio, a yellow round box of harrods savory biscuits, upside down on a white painted wood box. a green-topped pie plate looking thing is on that, wht these glove and stick, or rib and pouch or who knows what fetishy little objects are perched on top
a detail of the Harrod’s tin, the little things on top, img;

What got me thinking about all this was the little tower of white-painted wood box and upside-down Harrod’s biscuit box in Twombly’s corner studio. When Gioacchini photographed it, it had what I thought were paint brushes in cloths, but which turned out to be little fetish-like pouch & stick combos.

a screenshot of cy dear where the clutter of paint and brushes and an unfinished sculpture comprised of a little ziggurat of wood box, round biscuit tin, plate, and two spare rib-like plastery objects fill sawhorse tables in cy twombly's studio while the bay and fortress of gaeta are centered in the open window
me forced to take a photo of Cy Dear on my television like a savage to show that this unfinished sculpture-like object is still there in Twombly’s studio in 2017 onward

They’re also there in Cy Dear, which was released in 2019, but shot beginning, I think, in 2017. So perhaps a sculpture left unfinished in a studio that seems left largely as it was at Twombly’s death. I had somehow figured Gioacchini’s photos were from 2009, but it makes little sense that the studio would be untouched for two years before Twombly’s death. Now it looks like a deleted tweet announcing the photos came in November 2020, so three years after the documentary, not a decade before. The unfinished sculpture was still there, still unfinished.

Manfredi Gioacchini | Cy Twombly Gaeta [manfredigioacchini]
Gioacchini’s new book Grand Tour, published Oct. 2024 by Quodlibet, includes the Gaeta photos [manfredigioacchini]

What Are These Statues In Cy Twombly’s Library

manfredi gioacchini's photo along the open enfilade doorways of cy twombly's house in gaeta, where the library dominates between two sets of doors. along the left wall are tables and a pedestal with white classical sculptures on them, surrounded by crystals, shells, and other tchotchkes. beyond the library through the farther doors is what looks to be table with hats on it, and another door beyond that. the sculpture closest to the foreground was photographed head-on by tacita dean in 2008, and is the subject of this whole effort. though it is also interesting to look through all the photos gioacchini made for other details.
Manfredi Giaocchini, Cy Twombly Gaeta, c.2009 2020? via

I promise this site is not just a Cy Twombly fanblog, but after greg.org hero Claudio Santambrogio found a previously unknown photo of the artist’s house in Gaeta, I tracked it back to a whole previously unknown set of photos, made by World of Interiors contributor Manfredi Gioacchini in, I think, 2009. [next day update: I remembered this wrong; in a now-deleted tweet Gioacchini announced them as new in November 2020, so almost a decade after Twombly’s death.]

a plaster or white painted terra cotta statue of a male nude figure twisting to hold a tablet while billows of drapery surround him sits on a table in front of a wall of books in cy twombly's living room slash bedroom in gaeta. tacita dean made this photo in 2008 but did not publish it, though poet mary jacobus used it in a presentation, from whence this screengrab was made in 2023, in order to identify the statue.
screenshot from Mary Jacobus’s presentation on her Twombly book, via

What jumps out at me? Well, there are additional views of the (plaster? painted terra cotta?) statue Tacita Dean photographed in Twombly’s library, which I’d wondered about in December 2023. [It’s feeling harder and harder to claim this isn’t a fanblog…]

a dark interior and bright sunny window view in manfredi giaocchini's photo of cy twombly's library in gaeta. in the shadow, two white classical style sculptures stand, the arger one on a pedestal, on the left, and the shorter one, on a tchotchke-filled table, on the right. a dark tabletop in the foreground reflects a little sunlight, but is out of focus
mood lighting in Manfredi Gioacchini’s 2009 photo of Cy Twombly’s library/bedroom, via

Anyway, point is, the statue is one of three. Actually, there are more throughout Gioacchini’s photos of the house, but there are three in this library grouping. At the center, in front of the window, is a larger, dramatically unfinished twisting satyr or something. Maybe it’s leaning on an unfinished stump.

Whether they’re actually a pair, another similarly scaled male figure, with its arm raised, sits on a matching table. The contortion and billowing cloak/drapery make me think they’re connected. From the top photo, the 2023 sculpture in profile shows how deep the drapery goes, too. It would be unusual for this to be on a frieze or in a niche; these may be meant to stand free and be seen in the round. Though here Twombly has arranged them in a triptych, with his view of the bay behind.

Previously, directly related: What Is This Statue in Cy Twombly’s Library?
Manfredi Gioacchini | Cy Twombly Gaeta [manfredigioacchini]
Gioacchini’s new book Grand Tour, published Oct. 2024 by Quodlibet, includes the Gaeta photos [manfredigioacchini]

Gagosian’s First Show At 980 Madison Was Not Cy Twombly

Now that Gagosian is closing their 980 Madison Avenue space with a Twombly show, the line has gone around that it makes sense, because Gagosian always opened a new space with a Twombly show. But 980 Madison did not open with a Twombly show. It opened with a Jasper Johns show.

Jasper Johns: The Maps was Gagosian’s first show at 980 Madison Avenue. It opened 36 years ago today: February 3rd, 1989. Before that, Gagosian, sometimes called “a Los Angeles dealer” in reviews, had a space in Chelsea, at 521 West 23rd St. The first Cy Twombly exhibition at 980, Bolsena Paintings, opened in December 1989. Twombly’s exhibition history includes a show at Gagosian NY in 1986, which is not in Gagosian’s exhibition archive [indeed, none of the W 23rd St shows are.] In the three-year interim, Twombly showed new and old work with five other New York galleries.

Continue reading “Gagosian’s First Show At 980 Madison Was Not Cy Twombly”

Good In Bed, Better Against A Wall

the reid white house, a 19th century red brick house in downtown lexington virgnia, is photographed from this oblique angle because just to the left, behind that hedge, is the post office, which is built on the house's front yard, and so there's no clear view of the house. it has two chimneys on each end, and a white columned porch. the double porch in the background was added later. via vlr
the house formerly known as the Reid-White House, photographed for the Virginia Landmark Register in 2016 by Sarah Traum, in such a way that the post office in the front yard can’t be seen.

What to do with this story from Sally Mann’s memoir?

Every time [Cy Twombly and I] would leave his house and catch a glimpse of the neighboring Reid White house behind the trees, one or the other of us would repeat our favorite line from a story my mother used to tell about the occupant of that house, Mrs. Breasted White. That’s what I swear I remember her saying: “Mrs. Breasted White.” But now, writing that name, it somehow seems highly improbable.

Anyway, we’d say the punch line, sometimes in unison, and then we would both howl with laughter, as if we had just heard it for the first time. Here’s how the story goes:

Continue reading “Good In Bed, Better Against A Wall”

Cy Twombly Homes & Picassos

the cover of cy twombly homes and studios features a photo of the artist in a white suit standing with his hand at his moth, flanked by roman and renaissance busts in front of the marble doorway of his palazzo on via di monserrato, a painting by him barely legible in the room behind, from horst p. horst's iconic 1966 photoshoot for vogue
The cover of Cy Twombly: Homes & Studios, 2019/2020, available for retail at Gagosian and Karma

While the arrival of Carlos Peris’s lovely book did not give me much to add on the subject of Cy Twombly’s photography, the arrival of Cy Twombly Homes & Studios has filled the content pipeline to overflowing.

First, don’t sleep on such a book when it first comes out; I missed the hardcover edition by my own negligence.

Second, Nicola Del Roscio is an international treasure, and he should not be forced to write to share his insights and experiences alongside Twombly; sit him down and record him talking, Hans Ulrich Obrist-style, for as long as it takes. For every buck wild story about how much Twombly loathed studio visits, and when a Qatari royal made an unexpected visit to Gaeta via helicopter, he scrambled to set up a decadent luncheon in the courtyard is included, how many treasures and priceless memories are left out?

We just need to get it all while we can, and while he can. [And while recounting this history, may someone will ask Nicola how, while making this book in the midst of the first public disclosures of sexual predation against him, it was decided to use Bruce Weber’s 1994 photo of Twombly’s studio for the frontispiece.]

a page from homes & studios with a large blurry 1991 photo by deborah turbeville, printed beyond its resolution capacity for aesthetic effect. it depicts what is called in the caption a picasso drawing on a chair. the drawing of the head of a woman in profile is in an extremely ornate carved frame, and the chair is also ornately carved with a dark upholstered velvet seat. it sits between two stone doorframes on a marble floor, in the palazzo cy twombly bought in bassano, italy. except it turns out that twombly made this copy of a picasso drawing, nicola del roscio probably knew that when he put this caption in the book in 2019, but it's not clear whether turbeville knew it when she made the photo.
“Picasso drawing on chair,” reads the 2019 caption of 56 Bassano, a 1991 photo by Deborah Turbeville listed as 56 Bassano in Homes & Studios, which, well,

Homes & Studios, 2019, contains fleeting mentions of the following (non-exhaustive): the palazzo purchased in Tonnicoda, which Twombly felt guilty for abandoning, so he named some works after it ; the castle Twombly almost impulse-bought in the name of either Nicola or his studio assistant Viorel. And at least the third cringe mention (all, I think, posthumous), of Twombly’s closeness with his former nanny, a Black woman named Lula. There is a dissertation or ten to be written about Twombly’s relationship to the South (and Rauschenberg and Johns, for that matter; Twombly told Sally Mann their joint biography should be called, Dickheads from Dixie. Mann also noted that Lula was barely a decade older than Cy; she began working for the Twomblys when she was just thirteen.)

Anyway, point is, my most urgent takeaway from Homes & Studios is that we need more information on Twombly’s Picassos: How many are there? And are they actually Picassos? Because the one above, in Deborah Turbeville’s 1991 photo from Bassano, captioned in 2020 as “Picasso drawing on Chair,” was revealed in 2023, at least, to be a 1985 drawing by Twombly, either of a Picasso or in Picasso’s mode. If this can be mislabeled as a Picasso, what about the others?

Continue reading “Cy Twombly Homes & Picassos”

Qu’est ce que c’est Cy Twombly Sketches?

a sketch by cy twombly on a sheet of perforated notebook paper has three landscape oriented boxes filled with marks, notes, preparatory sketches for working out a composition that involves mount olympus. not sure how he used these, but they were at his friend willie's paris apartment and sold by artcurial in 2022
Cy Twombly, Untitled, 1961, pen on note paper, 9 x 6 1/4 in., sold and then deleted from Artcurial

Maybe you’re different, but I confess, I never imagined Cy Twombly making sketches. Like his marks, or his line, which Barthes described as “without goal, without model, without telos,” his compositions always feel like they just happened, products of the moment of their execution.

this framed 1960 work by cy twombly called study for school of athens has some cloud like forms above, and a cluster of bar charts vertical elements, and some roughly drawn texts or mountains or something on the bottom. in various later works, those volcano like mountains stood in for penises, but that'd be a lot of penises, even for twombly. via hauser & wirth
Cy Twombly, Study for School of Athens (R0me), 1960, photo John Etter via Hauser & Wirth

He called some works studies, of course, but those always seemed like iterations, or versions, which were things he made a lot of. Hauser & Wirth brought one to Basel a few years back, and it very much feels like a version.

He also worked in series, groups, and it’s impossible not to imagine he mapped those out ahead of time, or at least planned them in some way.

a notebook sheet drawn by cy twombly shows one landscape composition in a rectangle, with indecipherable marks and text in it, and then a full-scale drawing of mount olympus surrounded by clouds and such, more representational than you'd expect for twombly. sold by artcurial
Cy Twombly, Untitled, 1961, pen on note paper, 9 x 6 1/4 in., sold and then deleted from Artcurial

But here are five what look like preparatory sketches on two sheets of little notebook paper. They are from 1961 and belonged to Robert William Burke, a dealer in Paris whose books from Twombly were inscribed to “Willie.” On the back of these sheets, though, Twombly dedicated them to “My K… 2” and “My K… 3,” and honestly, “Who is K?” is a less urgent question right now than, “So that means there’s also a 1?”

Actually, the real question is what these actually are. I don’t have Twombly’s complete oeuvre handy to see if these relate to some specific c. 1960-63 works, but I can’t find any that map to the narrative. And to the map. There is geography and place—landscape—in these sketches, with Mount Olympus towering over all. The last one looks like Mordor. It’s the one Burke apparently kept in the foyer.

a snapshot of a chic cluttered interior of paris art dealer robert william burke's apartment. art books stacked on antique tables and chairs are pedestals for little artworks. shopping bags by lichtenstein and warhol are framed on the wall between or below two black charlotte perriand sconces, and one of burke's twombly sketches sits on top of a stack of books in a gilt frame. via artcurial, though i think it actually came from barnaby's or someplace, because artcurial started deleting its burke and/or twombly-related content.
Robert William Burke installation view, via Artcurial

There is also time, sequence: that top one literally goes left to right, start to end, with battles and places in between.

That Twombly planned, or worked out, or imagined, such traditional compositional structures for his paintings feels almost as anachronistic and radical as his antique, classical, and poetic references. Even if they get buried by his marks and signs, or even if they just remain in his head, or his eye.

Little Guys Show Trials

In 2010 the National Gallery of Art acquired hundreds and hundreds of trial proofs from Jasper Johns. They document, if not easily reveal, the intricate process of making Johns’ prints, a process Johns has brought into the center of his practice from almost the beginning.

Searching through proofs on the NGA’s website is a bit of a slog, but when this sketch for Leo Castelli’s Little Guys print turned up, I thought I’d better go through the stacks.

a trial proof by jasper johns for a 1990 print titled the seasons includes three plates: the top two are tiled together into a wonky boomerang shape and contain the head and part of the arms of a stick figure johns quotes from picasso; the bottom landscape rectangle contains three stick figures, a motif he first used in 1982, in a little group, each holding a brush or two. there is an x on what seems to be the ground of the space they inhabit. this tria print is in the colleciton of the national gallery of art.
Jasper Johns, The Seasons (Trial Proof), 1990, etching & aquatint, three plates on a 29 3/8 x 21 1/4 in sheet, collection National Gallery of Art

And so I found this trial proof for The Seasons, a 1990 ULAE print that is one of the earliest print appearances of the trio of stick figures. And it looks like they travel by themselves. The proof is actually three separate plates from what would be a much larger composition. Coincidentally or not, the other plates contain part of the other stick figure Johns uses, from the UNESCO Picasso.

the seasons, 1990, by jasper johns, is a 50 inch tall print published by ulae with a jumble of motifs relating to the series of paintings of the same name: angled ladders and shaded areas form an indistinct cruciform arrangement, with a figure of some kind in each arm: a shadow of the artist, a shadow filled with dots, a silhouette of a small child standing like the aliens in close encounters, if you ask me, and a stick figure from picasso. other motifs johns likes to use are sprinkled around, and below them all are the three little stick figures that are the most interesting to me. ymmv obv
Jasper Johns, The Seasons (ULAE 0249), 1990, intaglio, 50 1/4 x 44 1/2 in., ed. 50, via ULAE

Whether all prints, or all Johns’ prints, are made this way, I have no idea. But now that you mention it, this print in particular feels very much like that: composed by assembling and setting multiple, prepared plates together like an old timey newspaper publisher. That certainly takes away much of the stress of working images into a 50-inch plate without error or change, I guess.

In any case, the plate with the Little Guys is 4 1/2 x 12 1/2 inches, and notably includes another element, an X marking the spot over to the left, and a line defining their ground.

The Picasso stick figure is embedded in the center of the composition, and all the other figures—the child silhouette, the shadows and inverted shadows from the Seasons paintings read as Johns himself, the Duchamp profile, even the snowman—are integrated as well. But these three stick figures at the bottom seem to still be set apart and doing their own thing, in their own space, even with their own ground to stand on—while still a part of the entire image.

Jasper Johns, The Seasons (trial proof), 1990 [nga.gov]
Previously: Jasper Johns’ Little Guys: Origins

Jenny Saville On Twombly Looking And Working

Via Wayne Bremser comes a shoutout to Cy Twombly’s Duchamp references, but not the ones I’d thought, and not where I’d expected it to come from.

In February 2024 Jenny Saville spoke on Twombly’s work and her connection to him at The Menil Collection. After acclimating to her regularly not mentioning the gallery she shared with Twombly, it turned out to be a fascinating talk, full of insights on painterly technique and reference and inspiration. Which, hold that thought.

At the moment cued above, though, Saville describes Twombly’s “banging together” of avant-garde modernism and the ancient world through “the Duchampian act of writing ‘APOLLO’ on a piece of paper or a canvas.” I’ll need to sit with it a minute, but I guess if anything can be a readymade, then so can the 4,000 years [sic] of human association with that word.

Saville’s illustrated discussion of Twombly is full of painterly details found in artists from Leonardo to Cézanne, and it feels rare to hear and see these references. Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve felt Twombly’s painting and mark-making has been considered alone, if not sui generis, or in the context of his poetic sources, and not so much in relation to art of the world/past. Not for Saville, though.

a youtube screenshot of two brushy, obscured blobs, as jenny saville would call them, details from cy twombly paintings, and a detail of a brushy, blurry, atmospheric painting by turner of a dark cloud dumping rain into a darker sea, with jenny saville to the right in a little inset box, from her feb 2024 lecture at the menil collection in houston
screenhsot of Jenny Saville discussing Cy Twombly and Turner in February 2024 at The Menil Collection

One artist she comes back to more than any other is Turner, and the juxtapositions of Turner’s and Twombly’s atmospheric and spatial and abstract pursuits are fascinating.

Most of the talk is a close look/walkalong of the Menil’s Twombly centerpiece, Untitled (Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor). But she ends with an expansive read of a blackboard painting [Untitled, 1971] filled with figure eights descending from left to right, and she didn’t mention Duchamp. And it still made sense.

Marion Barthelme Lecture: Jenny Saville on Cy Twombly [youtube, s/o @waynebremser]
Previously: Send More Twombly Duchamp Nudes

The Lost Jasper Johns

As someone who spent more than two years tracking down the greatest lost Jasper Johns painting, you’d think I would have already identified all the other lost Johnses. But I had not.

Though the list of destroyed Johns works is certainly longer and more mysterious—the artist is famous for destroying things he made before 1954, and the fire in his Edisto Island, SC home in 1966 wiped out many works Johns kept for himself, including many early sketchbooks—there are not that many lost or missing Johns works. There are only four, and all date from 1955-64.

Besides the Flag (1955) inside Robert Rauschenberg’s combine, Short Circuit (also 1955), and the Figure 4 (1959), there is another number painting, Figure 2 (1963, P138), whose trail goes cold after entering Karl Ströher’s collection in Darmstadt.

black and white photo of jasper johns' lost 1964 painting titled gastro after the name of the bar owned by miyagaki shoichiro and his wife kiyo, which is printed on the round coaster affixed to the 5-inch square canvas by brushy blobs and drips of encaustic. one of four missing or lost paintings by jasper johns, it disappeared when gastro closed in 1988.
Jasper Johns, Gastro (CR P138, 1964, 5 x 5 in., encaustic and collage on canvas,

But the last one, and the second most interesting lost Johns, is called Gastro. It’s one of four paintings Johns made during his stay in Tokyo in the summer of 1964. It is an encaustic collage of a coaster from the Bar Gastro [バー ガストロ], which was a gift to the bar’s owners, Kiyo and Shōichirō Miyagaki. [宮垣 昭一郎,キヨ] .

a group of japanese men in suits and one woman seated in a rock walled bar in harajuku in 1967, celebrating the completion of takiguchi shuzo's proof of poetic experiments: 1927-1937. looks like quite a party
Miyagaki Shōichirō [top row, right corner] and gang at a 1967 launch party for Takiguchi Shūzō’s Poetic Experiments: 1927-1937, photo: Funaga Mitsutoshi via Keio U

Gastro was a hub of the Tokyo contemporary art community, and I assume it was in Ginza, near Johns’ temporary studio at the Artists Hall. It was decorated with artworks by regulars, who were known as the Gastro-ren「ガストロ連」, or Gastro-gang. Johns must have become an honorary member, and his little painting, just five inches square, remained in Gastro until Shōichirō’s death in 1988. According to the CR, the whereabouts of the entire Gastro-ren art hoard is unknown.

Given the prominence of Miyagaki and other Gastro-ren members like poet-critic Takiguchi Shūzō, I’m surprised some enterprising art historian hasn’t tracked everything down yet, but here we are.

Send Twombly Duchamp Nudes

a framed cy twombly work on paper, 30 x 40 inches, is a medium grey background with noticeable brushstrokes, and a cascade of figure eights and fragments thereof in white crayon, descending from the upper left to the lower right, the same direction as duchamp's nude descending a staircase, of which this was once considered a study, which would make it kind of figurative, which might explain why it was de-titled when it sold at sotheby's in nov 2024
Cy Twombly, apparently not titled Study after Duchamp: Nude Descending a Staircase after all, 1968, oil and crayon on paper, 30 x 40 in., sold yesterday by the estate of Lothar Schirmer at Sotheby’s

When it was published in the 1999 catalogue of his own collection, Cy Twombly’s publisher Lothar Schirmer listed the title of this amazing 1968 drawing, which he’d acquired directly from the artist in 1968, as Study after Duchamp: Nude Descending a Staircase.

marcel duchamp's nude descending a staircase tracks the cubist, overlapping, fractured motion of a human figure painted in beiges as it descends from upper left to lower right, against a darker brown background. at the philadelphia museum of art
Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase (N0. 2), 1912, collection Philadelphia Museum of Art via Sotheby’s

When Schirmer (RIP) sold it yesterday at Sotheby’s, however, it was listed only as Untitled. And whoever wrote the lot essay for the Twombly wanted to connect it to Duchamp’s painting so bad, they began the essay with a picture of it.

And they said, “Untitled also pays homage to art historical forerunners and their attempt to capture movement in space and time,” without naming Duchamp. And then they quoted Suzanne Delehanty,

Like shadows of Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, figure eights, frequent personages in Twombly’s cosmos of signs, borrowed perhaps from the mathematical symbol for infinity, multiply, recede and climb through the surface of a 1968 oil and crayon on paper to express, as does the 1912 nude, an abstraction of motion in space-time.

trying to call Twombly’s symbols and signs personages without surrendering their status as abstract marks. [Delehanty’s text is cited as coming from the collected writings on Twombly edited by Nicola Del Roscio in 2002, which elides its origin as a catalogue text for Twombly’s 1975 show at the ICA in Philadelphia, the city of Duchampian love.]

Discussing this and a couple of other related works on paper in his catalogue for Twombly’s 1994 MoMA retrospective catalogue, Kirk Varnedoe mentioned Duchamp exactly once, before going on at length about the Futurists:

That language of flow and fracture draws directly on the early modern fascination with the “cinematic” decomposition of forms in motion, in Duchamp (Nude Descending a Staircase,1912) and most notably among Italian Futurist artists, particularly Giacomo Balla.

It feels like a confluence of aversions: to figuration, to referencing other artists’ work, or to referencing Duchamp’s works specifically, but it feels acute in the detitling of this particular drawing. Looking at Duchamp’s painting had an impact on Twombly’s most significant body of work, which he apparently referenced many times. And Twombly went to great lengths to make sure his work was permanently installed down the hall from Duchamp’s. I, for one, would love to see something more on this connection than a passing namecheck.

Al Ordover’s Johns’s The Figure 8

a 10 by 8 inch painting of the figure eight in messily blended black, grey, and white, without a distinct background or foreground object, but an overall abstract painting that also happens to depict a figure 8, was made in 1959 by jasper johns, and is being sold in november 2024 at sothebys
Jasper Johns, The Figure 8, 1959, 10 x 8 in., oil on canvas, [NOT?] being sold 20 Nov 2024 at Sotheby’s

In 1960, Leo Castelli’s gallery director Ivan Karp estimated that there were no more than fifteen people seriously collecting contemporary art. One of them was Al Ordover, who was one of the first people Karp took to Warhol’s studio.

Ordover bought this amazing little 1959 Jasper Johns painting, The Figure 8, from Castelli. One minute it’s obviously an 8, and the next it feels like it barely holds the 8 together.

Its only public exhibition was a December 1959 fundraising exhibition to benefit painter Nell Blaine, who had contracted polio during a summer trip to Mykonos. [Since vaccines are in the news, Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine was introduced in 1955, and was still in early distribution stages in 1959. Blaine’s paralysis left her in a wheelchair for life and unable to paint for several years.]

Why none of the history or context of this painting, as opposed to Johns’ use of numbers as a form/subject generally, is in Sotheby’s lot text, is a mystery to me. But with generalities, unrelated quotes, hyperbole, and a single jpeg are how six-figure paintings are sold these days, I guess. [update: OR NOT.]

20 Nov 2024, Lot 34 : Jasper Johns, The Figure 8, 1959, est. $3-4m [sothebys]

Wants vs Needs

the cover of Gregor Stemmrich's Robert Rauschenberg's Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953), Modernism, Literalism, Postmodernism is off white with blue text, like a museum wall label, above an empty gold but not metallic rectangle that might allude to the work discussed within for 1,028 pages
Gregor Stemmrich’s Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953), Modernism, Literalism, Postmodernism, 2023, from Hatje Cantz

I was like, this is it, I am going to finish Gregor Stemmrich’s 1,028-page monument of a book on Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing on this plane, and I put it in the bag.

And I ended up bingeing all six hours of the BBC Pride & Prejudice instead.

All The Erased de Kooning Drawings

The first wall at Glenstone that used to have Hilma af Klint drawings has been rotated. Now there is a whole row of stunning Willem de Kooning drawings of women, each, I thought the other day, more tantalizingly erasable than the next.

Mike Bidlo Erased de Kooning Drawings, installation view, Francis Naumann Fine Art, Sept-Nov 2005

While contemplating this embarrassment of targets and what Duchamp guru Francis Naumann had to say about the shovel, I was primed yet unprepared to know that in 2005 Naumann staged an entire show of Mike Bidlo’s Not Rauschenberg Erased de Kooning Drawings.

Mike Bidlo, Not De Kooning Woman, c. 1951, 12 1/2 x 9 1/4 in., as published in Francis Naumann’s 2005 catalogue, Mike Bidlo Erased de Kooning Drawings

According to Robert Rosenbaum’s essay in the catalogue I just got—and which seems like the only source for images of the actual works—Bidlo’s NREdKD began as almost a performance, when he erased what looked like a de Kooning in front of his shocked fellow guests at an artsy retreat in Maine in 2003. When a collector couldn’t buy it, he appealed to Naumann, who appealed to Bidlo, who agreed to make a whole show of them.

Mike Bidlo’s Not Robert Rauschenberg: Erased de Kooning Drawing, 2005, 22 1/4 x 18 3/8 in., ibid.

For each work, he made a beautiful Not de Kooning drawing, which he erased into a Not Rauschenberg. Each got a Johns-style label, and a facsimile FRAME IS PART OF ARTWORK frame, in a variety of dimensions. The show included documentation of the drawings, but also all the eraser crumbs, under glass, which, ngl, seems kind of corny.

Still as someone who, as I’ve already confessed here, thinks about erasing de Koonings whenever I see one, I can do naught but stan.

Mike Bidlo Erased de Kooning Drawings, Sept-Nov 2005 [francisnaumann]
previously, related riffs on Erased de Kooning Drawing: Archival Bühler-Rose