Richard Prince, Untitled and Untitled (Ulysses), 2011, at Kunsthaus Bregenz in 2014, photos: Rudolf Sagmeister and Dietrich Gehring, via Contemporary Art Daily
Talking this morning with Matt, our book man in Venice, about the intense passions of collectors of James Joyce’s Ulysses, and he reminded me that Richard Prince’s own bibliophilia covered Ulysses, too.
In Prince’s birdtalk texts from 2014, there’s a bit about yearning for the copy Joyce inscribed to Ezra Pound. And another about going to Dijon to see where Ulysses was first printed, and hunting down the Greek flag blue that appeared on the cover of the 1st edition.
Which was the same moment Prince opened It’s A Free Concert, a show at the Kunsthaus Bregenz, which included a large, book cover lithograph-shaped monochrome diptych, Untitled (Ulysses), in Joyce’s—and Greece’s—blue. It’s dated 2011, so he’d had it on his mind for a while.
Maurice Darantiere, Cover for Ulysses [final proof], 1922, lithograph, Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo, the State University of New York, via The Morgan Library
I knew the story about Joyce wanting the cover for Ulysses to be the blue of the Greek flag. But I did not know that he ended up giving the little Greek flag hanging in Shakespeare & Co. to his artist friend, Myron Chester Nutting, to match the color.
At first the bleed around the edge and the brushmarks made me wonder if there was an ur-monochrome painting, a Nutting original, but I think not. The stone or the plate was painted with a solid field, which Darantiere printed using ink prepared to Nutting’s specification. The title seems to be set in negative, masked so the unprinted paper shows through.
Maybe I must now make the entire cover, as printed, not just the front. I feel like it should match the dimensions of the book, and the page inside, but those bleeding edges do call to me. Either way, I obviously must make it like this now.
Study for Untitled (This copy of Ulysses belongs to me, Marsden Hartley), 2025, prints of some kind, 4to, 242 x 190 mm [still trying out titles, obv]
And I have to get the color right. Is it best to match the modern color of Marsden Hartley’s copy? Is it even possible to match the original, given that they’re all 100 years old, too? Do I try to match the proof? Is it a Ulysses conservation standardbearer? Nutting apparently warned Joyce that the blue would fade, and it did?
Administrative Flags of Greece (1934) via wikipedia
I’ve seen discussion of Joyce’s Greek flag blue not actually matching the Greek flag’s blue, that perhaps the Shakespeare & Co. flag had faded, as well as the books. But Ulysses matches the color of the Greek flags reproduced in this 1934 encyclopedia plate. Honestly, I can see the appeal.
Jonathan Monk X Vier5, The Billboard Book Project (Paris), 2010, ed. 40, installation view at Three Star Books
Jonathan Monk’s Billboard Book Project with Three Star Books has at least four iterations. It is a billboard entirely about the making of itself, both as a billboard and as a book. The first iteration’s billboard appeared in “Week 47 of Year 2009” in Paris, while the limited edition book, made of cut down billboards—and documentation of an installed billboard—is dated January 2010. Which makes the subthemes project management and the hermeneutics of verb tenses.
Also:
Jonathan Monk X Vier5, The Billboard Book Project (Paris) – The Green Book, 2010, ed. 15, the colophon with signed photodocumentation, via Three Star Books
Three Star Books announces an immediate and surprising sequel to “The Billboard Book Project (Paris)”…During Monk’s recent sojourn for the launch of this project, the artist noticed that posters in the Paris Métro were occasionally covered with green printed paper during the interval between commercial advertisements.
Jonathan Monk X Vier5, The Billboard Book Project (Paris) — The Green Book, 2010, 26.5 x 43 cm, ed. 15, via Three Star Books
The Billboard Book Project (Paris) — The Green Book is a companion book—though in a much smaller edition, so a companion to only a fraction—of offset printed monochrome green billboards.
There were The Billboard Book Projects in London and New York after this, and I’m happy for all involved. But it’s no disrespect to say—and I’m sure the fifteen people or institutions who own both Paris volumes will back me up on this—The Green Book is the project’s greatest aesthetic success.
2018 real estate listing photo of the Rockefellers’ E 65th St living room with a Bonnard [L] and a Corot [R] obscured
In 2018, while I was still in my late blur and middle monochrome and real estate eras, I conceived a project that would realize all the blurred artworks in the real estate listing for Peggy and David Rockefeller’s extrawide townhouse on East 65th Street. I’d seen digitally blurred art from MoMA before. I’d seen significant art obscured in real estate listings before. But I had not seen the same art that had been photographed in situ before, being blurred in a real estate listing, at the same moment it was being promoted and sold in the biggest private collection sale in Christie’s history.
Cezanne’s Boy in a Red Waistcoat, a 1955 gift to MoMA, but not yet; the Rockefellers kept an interest in the work until their deaths, and it came home with them from time to time. via Christie’s, I think
So I went through the listing, the auction, and other documentation of the Rockefellers’ house to identify everything, so that each work would be the correct dimension and appearance. No slapdash conceptualism here; authenticity rules. So the Bonnard Interieur over the fireplace and a Corot to occupy the spot between the windows when the Cezanne is at the Modern. [The Rockefellers retained a life interest in the works they donated to museums, so they could keep them around.]
2018 real estate listing photo of the Rockefellers’ foyer with ten blurred out artworks including a Picasso by the stairs and a Redon on the right.
Though I mapped out the project, 30 works, I was undecided on the best way to realize the blurred works. Transmuting such digital-first source material into another medium has been a challenge since the first blurred and pixellated and pano-torqued images appeared on Google Maps and Streetview. But the Facsimile Object-style dye sublimated prints on aluminum seem promising. I just found my 2018 spreadsheet this morning, though, so it’ll take me a minute to reorient myself to this project.
One of my favorite things to discover about Maria Lind’s 2012 Abstract Possible: The Stockholm Synergies show was the Wade Guyton narrative arc. And how Guyton’s massive, black painted plywood floor in the Konsthall raised the profile of the his black printed plywood edition in Lind’s controversial selling show at Bukowskis auction house. And how that very example did not sell then. And it did not sell in 2019. And it did not sell again in 2022.
And so the “Distinguished European Collector” who’s been stuck with it—I like to think it’s the Lundins—has had to keep enjoying what is truly, as far as these things go, an iconic work. How would it be?
Well, for a brief shining moment, now you can find out.
One reason I thought of for why this excellent example of Guyton’s work didn’t sell was the volume. Not just that it is an edition, but that there are actually two editions. When Guyton made this 8×4 ft plywood edition of seven in 2008, he also made a Parkett edition of 60 [38 numbered, XXII proofs].
But as I’ve noted before, what matters about the works of Guyton’s Black Paintings Era, which were all produced using the same monochromatic bigblack.tif file, is that they exist as a series. The editions, even more so. I’m getting shivers just imagining them being made all at once, 22 sheets of ply pumped into the inkjet printer, and admiring the the little differences.
Like being little. Though it elegantly maintains the proportion and scale of the ed. 7, Guyton’s untitled edition for Parkett 83 is a quarter of the size [4 x 2 ft., 15 sheets/4 = 60.]
Think what it’s like to move it around, perhaps in your car, or even in your pickup, or to store it, or to ship it. What the Parkett edition may lack in surface area, it more than makes up for in convenience.
And now, somehow, Parkett has one left, the “last available work from a previously sold-out edition.”
Artist Keith Haring takes a break from work in his studio making paintings for an upcoming art exhibit.
Poking around The Broad’s Keith Haring show, which is at the Walker for another week or so, led me to this photo of Haring at work. It was taken in late 1982 by Alan Tannenbaum. I feel like I’d seen images of this moment before, but this time, what caught my attention was Haring’s t-shirt.
Paint Fair, in carnival lettering with a circus tent and a frilly, scalloped, tent-like border.
Cady Noland with Diana Balton, Nuts’N’Shit, 1990, screenprint on metal, 28 3/4 x 42 1/8 in., fabricated by Big Apple Printing, collection: MoMA
I noticed it because it looked very similar to Nuts’N’Shit, a screenprinted metal work by Cady Noland and Diana Balton. The one at MoMA [above] is listed as a screenprinted edition of one, but the one in Frankfurt was enamel, framed, and from the Brants. I will trust the artist to sort that out.
The designer and colorist of the TGV, Jacques Cooper, passed away at the age of 93. An industrial and auto designer, Cooper created the distinctive wedge-shaped face of Alstom’s prototype high speed train for SNCF, the TGV-001, in 1972. Cooper picked the orange color. In 1977 a brighter orange, known as SNCF 435, was approved for the livery of the TGV Sud-Est.
TGV Orange col0r sample, Cité du Train, Mulhouse, photo: Aurélien Vret
The TGV Orange SCNF 435 livery was retired in the 1990s, but was brought back for a nationwide tour in 2020 for the 40th anniversary of the TGV. Otherwise it lives on in the model train painting community.
Joshua Smith, Untitled (Forbidden Colors), 2024, via IG/@joshuasmith1983
Untitled (Forbidden Colors) has been realized again, this time as a work by Joshua Smith. The parallelogram of Los Angeles sunlight coming in might be my favorite thing about this photo, after the work itself. It would be great if it draws out the Felix Gonzalez-Torres original from MOCA’s storerooms, and even better if there can be a stop to the killings in Gaza.
April 15, 1964, publicity photo of Thirteen Most Wanted Men released by the World’s Fair
This morning Michael Lobel brought some art historically significant mug shots to the social media discourse, including one of my long-time favorites, Andy Warhol’s Thirteen Most Wanted Men, a grid of 22 mug shots mounted on the facade of the New York State Pavilion Theaterama at the 1964 World’s Fair. Within two days of its unveiling, the work drew complaints from officials, and the 25 panels were painted over with silver aluminum paint.
It seemed so bold and promising. Bettmann dates the release to the press of the image above to April 15, 1964. The original caption gives the piece a different title, but it also had World’s Fair officials—and Johnson—on record explaining and promoting Warhol’s project—for one day:
A Place at the Fair. Flushing Meadow, N.Y.: Photos of New York City’s 13 Most Wanted Criminals -resplendent in all their scars, cauliflower ears and other appurtenances of their trade, unabashedly adorn masonite facade of the New York State Pavilion at the World’s Fair. The display an arrangement of official Police Department “mug shots,” forms a 20×20 foot mural mounted on the pavilion. Philip Johnson, a designer of the pavilion, said the mural is “a comment on the sociological factor of American life.”
Whoops, not me having to change the folksy billboard lede to past tense when I found a 2022 Google Streetview shot from the highway
You know the gravel pit on the east end of town? Where there used to be the big vinyl billboard you could see from US-40, that says Welcome To Moffat County? The one that made Gail from the Chamber of Commerce tear up with delight first time she saw it because it “really says Moffat County”?
Well that wedge-shaped building, which the Chamber helped paint white a ways back, wasn’t always a billboard. It used to be the screen for a drive-in movie theater. On the other side, of course. And til the projection booth and snackbar burned down, and 3B Enterprises expanded the pit.
from @fromkindra’s western photolog, as regrammed by @ndybeach
In fact, this used to be a typology: drive-in movie screens with interiors. Do a reverse Google image search of @fromkindra’s Instagram road trip posts if you don’t believe me; they’re all over.
Yves Klein: With the Void, Full Powers, installation view at the Walker Art Center, 2011
In the 2010-11 retrospective of Yves Klein’s work organized by the Hirshhorn and the Walker Art Center, there was a wall (in DC) and a nook (in Minneapolis) filled with early, small-ish monochromes in a variety of colors that weren’t blue. They surrounded a vitrine with Klein’s amazing 1954 catalogue for an imaginary monochromes exhibition, Yves Peintures.
Yves Klein, untitled (M 109), 1955, 10×10 cm, oil on gauze on panel, being sold at Christie’s Paris
This little red square was not among them, but can you imagine if it was, looking like an emergency button in its gigantic, beveled frame?
Mural With Girl With A Pearl, 2023, paint on plaster, Vermeer, dimensions variable (installation view via @BMPMurphy)
I’m not sure I could think of a greater honor than to have work in a two-artist exhibition with Vermeer. I certainly didn’t think of anything before today.
But now I am beyond thrilled to announce my site-specific installation, Mural With Girl With A Pearl is on view at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. It comprises a painting on the wall holding Girl With A Pearl, and the painting Girl With A Pearl itself. It’s hard to say how long it will be there; certainly this incarnation won’t go past March 30th, when Girl With A Pearl goes back to The Hague. Tickets to see it are definitively not available. [But if you do go, SEND PICS!]
Like Vermeer’s work, which it incorporates, it is an exploration of the subtle effects of light captured in built up layers of paint. And like those light effects, it may be fleeting, perceived only in the periphery of vision, occupying the liminal spaces around the older work that is the predictable draw of our attention.
Mural With Girl With A Pearl, 2023, paint on plaster, Vermeer (installation view via @blogexhibitions)
But for now, if you look up, and the gallery lights hit at the right angle, you will feel your field of view, and with the close looking you’ve exercised, you’ll recognize the changing world beyond the frame.
Mural With Girl With A Pearl, 2023, paint on plaster, Vermeer (installation view via @BrothersCammy)
You’ll see the new horizon coalesce just above Girl with a Pearl Earring‘s head. The loose grid of brusquely brushed forms —pearls? lights? ships? celestial figures? yet too big to be stars?—shimmering in formation in the graying sky.
While the current installation involves Girl with a Pearl, I am happy to discuss how to make the piece work for your Vermeer, too. Or, if you’re at the Mauritshuis, we can recreate the Amsterdam magic. Just because the Vermeer show is once-in-a-lifetime doesn’t mean this collab has to be, too.
Mural With Girl With A Pearl, 2023, installation view via @worldelsewhere/ig
April Update: Thanks to @worldelsewhere, I am able to say that the installation stayed up until Girl With A Pearl left for the Mauritshuis. Thank you all for your engagement.
