verso – Page 2 – greg.org

Albrecht Dürer Facsimile Objects Redux

Dürer verso diptych as installed and hyped by the National Gallery, London, via twitter

I cannot emphasize enough how much I did not imagine being at this point in the Facsimile Object universe. An Albrecht Dürer exhibition opened in London at the National Gallery, just as an Omicron tsunami crashes around the world.

I mean, by the museums in Germany and the UK reopened last May, and the Dürer Facsimile Objects in that first diptych were discontinued, I did bleakly anticipate their related Dürers might become unvisitable in person again. I was also naively relieved to not be in the business of selling Tastily Painted Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah pictures. And here we are.

What I did not anticipate, however, was that at a moment when travel restrictions were returning, the National Gallery would title its new Dürer show, “The Credit Suisse Exhibition: Dürer’s Journeys.” And I definitely did not imagine that they’d promote the show using a literal diptych of verso paintings. Why, just look at A Heavenly Body[? A Heavenly Vision?], on the back of the National Gallery (London)’s own St. Jerome; and the Lot and His Daughters painted on the back of National Gallery (DC)’s Haller Madonna, together at the very center of the awkward and weirdly empty exhibition photo up top. We’ve come a long way, and yet we have not.

The thing I’m most appalled by, though, is that despite a 60% jump in COVID case levels since I started *writing* this post, to the highest levels of the entire pandemic, and 10x even New York’s current spike, it appears that the Her Majesty’s Government is dragging their feet on issuing any restrictions, for fear of what impact a negative public reaction might have on Boris Johnson’s hold on power.

Dürer Diptych: *Albrecht Dürer Facsimile Objects (D3.38)* and *(D1)*, together for the first time, thanks to the omicron variant surging into The Credit Suisse Exhibition

So while previous Facsimile Objects mitigated art encounters you couldn’t have, this new Dürer Diptych based on the National Gallery’s exhibit is meant as a hedge for an experience you shouldn’t have, at least right now. And so, The Credit Suisse Dürer Diptych: Dürer Facsimile Object (D1) A Heavenly Vision is available along with Dürer Facsimile Object (D3.38), The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, a full-size detail of 38% of the original painting, conceptualized last spring when the NGA reopened, that focuses on the painterly joys of fire, brimstone, vegetation, and that brushy, little black pillar of salt that used to be Lot’s wife.

Albrecht Dürer Facsimile Object (D1), 2021, 9 x 6.75 in., dye sublimation pigment on (obv) high gloss aluminum panel, available again, only as part of The Credit Suisse Dürer Diptych

If you think about it, a fiery meteorite crashing to earth and sulfur and fire raining down from heaven go together quite nicely; the apocalyptic symmetry was surely not lost on a young Dürer who, with the year 1500 fast approaching, was already thinking about the end of the world.

*Albrecht Dürer Facsimile Object (D3.38)*, 2021, 9 x 14.5 in., dye sublimation pigment on high gloss aluminum panel, available as part of a Dürer Diptych, or separately, while Omicron rages

[For those who really, really need the full image to stand in front of, try one of the Lot and Daughters Flee The Destruction of Sodom and Gommorah tea towels in the National Gallery shoppe. They’re not to scale and out of stock, but I’m sure they’ll be back soon.]

The National Gallery Dürer Tea Towel, featuring the destruction of Sodom & Gommorah, £8.95

In consideration of those who might have acquired an AD FO (D1) already, AF DO (D3.38) will be available separately. Each Facsimile Object is accompanied by a full-scale, certificate of authenticity handmade in India ink on Arches. ADFO(D1) certificates will be distinct from those produced last spring, as a treat.

If the National Gallery actually does close to slow the spread of COVID, these Facsimile Objects will be available only until it reopens, or until, like with the Vermeers, it becomes official that the show will not reopen. If the National Gallery and its partner Credit Suisse don’t do anything, and just take their couple of days off during Christmas break, I will probably end this futile folly when that becomes clear, either on January 27th, or January 2nd. What a world.

2 January UPDATE: Turns out making shiny facsimiles of paintings or parts of paintings available is not enough to defeat the omicron surge. If only I’d sent them to every house in the UK instead. Or even to every Credit Suisse client.

Meanwhile, In Sodom,

Old English Hexateuch Facsimile Object (H1), the Destruction of Sodom, 8.5 x 7.5 in., with wonky cropping

There was something beautiful and haunting and unexpected about the depiction of the destruction of Sodom from a medieval manuscript that got tweeted across my timeline the other day. Medievalist Dr. Erik Wade’s thread highlighted the blissed out, same-sex residents comforting each other, even as the city burned around them. I was also taken by the delicate line drawings, more refined than marginalia, but clearly less than fully filled in. I hesitate to say it is unfinished, though. The tangle of figures look so similar to each other, for a minute I wondered if the illuminator was tracing them.

It’s from a late 11th-century manuscript known as The Old English Hexateuch, the earliest known English translation of six books of the Old Testament (basically, the Torah plus Joshua). Cotton MS Claudius B.iv, a name derived from one of the founding collections of the British Library, includes almost 400 illuminations in various states of detail. They depict the stories of the Bible set in the contemporary Anglo-Saxon milieu the manuscript’s lay audiences would recognize immediately.

Detail from *Dürer Facsimile Object (D3.38)*, 2021

I did not plan on making a Facsimile Object of Dürer’s verso painting of the Destruction of Sodom, but the brushy allure of the flames raining down on the cities proved irresistible. Now again, I find that the delicate lines depicting the victims, and especially the sketchy flicks of flame everywhere, made me want to hold the manuscript in my hand. As this was impossible, I made another Facsimile Object. Now I have an unlikely diptych, from centuries and countries apart, of an unlikely and terrible scene.

Depressing but beautiful: Facsimile Objects of the Destruction of Sodom

Not gonna lie, they hit a little differently now, when wildfires are raging across three continents, than in May, when I made the first one. So far Facsimile Objects have engaged with the present only temporally, by marking a (lost) moment in time: a missed auction preview, a pandemic-closed museum, the sale of a painting, a surprise Summer show. But with some religionists repeating the medieval model of blaming a conflagration on the existence of gay people, this pair of Facsimile Objects connects on a content level as well.

Cotton MS Claudius B.iv [bl.uk]
The Old English Hexateuch [wikipedia]

Albrecht Dürer Facsimile Objects

Verso: Heavenly Body, aka Cosmic Phenomenon, attributed to Albrecht Dürer, c. 1494-7, 23 x 17cm, oil on pearwood panel, collection: National Gallery, this low-res image, of the unframed panel, is via casaforte.blogspot.com, but originated on tumblr before 2013. I would really like to know the source, because the National Gallery’s image is cropped, and loses the wax seal in the upper right corner, as well as the general sense of objectness.

There are no more than two paintings by Albrecht Dürer in a public collection in the United Kingdom. One is this swirling, brushy depiction of an explosive, cosmic phenomenon on a small pearwood panel. The other, a meticulous devotional picture of St. Jerome in the wilderness, is on the other side of the same panel. The panel was only attributed to Dürer in 1957, and was acquired by the National Gallery in London in 1996.

Like all England’s museums, the National Gallery has been closed to visitors since December 2020, when a Tier 3 lockdown went into effect to reduce the transmission of the COVID-19 virus. According to current government indicators, museums will remain closed until at least May 17. So assuming it’s really by him, England’s only Dürers will remain inaccessible for at least several more weeks.

While considering whether an Albrecht Dürer Facsimile Object could offer even a partial experiential hedge during this challenging, Dürerless time, another, similar Dürer suddenly became similarly inaccessible.

Albrecht Dürer, painting of a slice of agate, c. 1492, oil on panel, 30.1 x 18.4 cm, collection: kunsthalle-karlsruhe.de

Another small oil, c. 1492, depicts a swirling abstraction of sliced agate or other hardstone, painted with a transparency that permits the grain of the fir panel to show through. On the other side of this panel is another small devotional painting, a gold ground picture of Christ, Man of Sorrows, which was attributed to Dürer a few years before 1941, when the Nazis’ favorite art dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt sold it to the Musée des Beaux Arts in occupied Strasbourg. It subsequently crossed the Rhine, and is now at the State Kunsthalle in Karlsruhe, which was closed on March 22 when German health officials abruptly declared lockdowns to thwart a “third wave” of the pandemic. The government then changed some restrictions after a backlash, but I think the Kunsthalle is closed until at least April 18.

Verso: a flaming color spectacle? c.1492-3, oil on panel, 37x26cm, collection State Gallery in Karlsruhe, via Google, obv

“If a work is on Google Street View, does it even need a Facsimile Object?” is a question that came to mind. But then I wondered what would happen if these two works were decoupled from the paintings they are physically twinned with, the works they were fated to be “behind,” always understudied and overshadowed by? Facsimile Objects might hit different with this not-quite-a-pair. So let’s see.

Untitled (Lucien Smith), 2020

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.

Lot 35 Lucien Smith, Reality Bites 10, 2012, est. $5-7,000, currently $3,800, no, $4,200! $5,500! Sold for $10,080 [sothebys]
Lot 37 Lucien Smith, Reality Bites 9, 2012, est. $5-7,000, currently $2,000, no, $2,500! $4,200, or $5,292 with premium

The Madoff Provenance Project In ‘Tell Me What I Mean’, @ To_Bridges_ Thru 10/23

installation view, “Tell Me What I Mean,” at To_____Bridges_____ 11 Sept – 23 Oct. 2016, image: John Garcia
I’m psyched to announce that The Madoff Provenance Project is included in a group show, “Tell Me What I Mean,” at To_____Bridges_____ in NYC, which opened Sept 11 and runs through October 23rd, 2016. The show, curated by artist John Garcia, considers the way context and metadata affect the way an artwork is experienced and understood.

study for MPP-014-KEL, 2016, recto, 12×9 in., ink, pencil, and watercolor on Arches
John was thoughtful and intriguing in his invitation to include the Madoff project, which did not have any obvious physical manifestation. But meeting that challenge, and having the work seen among an interesting group of artists, made me say, “Hell, yeah” pretty quickly. Besides me, the show includes work by Sophie Calle, Sara Cwynar, Robert Heinecken, Rose Marcus, Alex Perweiler, Peter Piller, Michael Bell-Smith, and Colin Snap.

study for MPP-020-MAT, 2016, recto, 12.875 x 9.25 in., ink, pencil, and marker on Arches
Unsurprising to most, no owner of an authenticated Madoff-provenance artwork has yet agreed to have their work stamped with the “ex collectio MADF” stamp I created. So for this show I made “studies,” 1:1 facsimiles of some Madoff works, properly stamped. In their stripped down nothingness, they definitely turned out more Stephen Prina’s The Complete Paintings of Manet than Vik Muniz’ Verso.

“Tell Me What I Mean,” Installation view, The Madoff Provenance Project, 2014- , image: John Garcia
I also put together a few binders of court data and auction records, which serve as a comprehensive reference to all the artworks in the Madoff Provenance Project. I feel confident that if Mel Bochner could have had Zazzle custom print the binders for Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to be Viewed as Art, he totally would have.
To____Bridges_____ is a year-long project space in the Bronx run by The Still House Group. A second show of photographer Gary Perweiler’s 70s and 80s advertising images, recontextualized by his son (and TSHG member) Alex Perweiler, runs concurrently. The space is open by appointment.
To_____Bridges_____ [to-bridges.info]
Ex Collectio: The Bernard Madoff Provenance Project

In The Palm Of Your Hand

Jasper Johns, Untitled, 1954, collection hirshhorn
I went to a gallery talk at the Hirshhorn by Amy Boyer, of the museum’s education department, on their rare, early Jasper Johns work, Untitled (1954). It’s one of just four known Johns works to survive destruction by the artist in 1954, because it was in someone else’s possession. That someone was Rachel Rosenthal, an important friend and collaborator of Johns, whose face is cast in plaster there in the bottom. [Rosenthal sold the work to the Hirshhorn in 1987.]
In his 1996 conservation interview at the Menil with Carol Mancusi-Ungaro Johns noted that the collaged element in Untitled, probably shared paper and stationery from various “exotic,” foreign sources with the work he made next, Untitled (Green Painting), which first belonged to Rosenthal’s mother. [Asked her name, Johns replied with a laugh, “Mrs. Rosenthal.”] The torn printed bits are overlaid with similarly sized fragments of brown tissue paper that veils but doesn’t obscure the texts. A piece of glass is fitted over the collage, held between pairs of tiny nails in a fashion similar to Star, the Star of David-shaped painting Johns made for Rosenthal.

bad photo of a laserprint of a 2006 photo of the back of Johns’ Untitled, 1954 via hirshhorn
But today the party was definitely in the back. Bower presented images taken at the Hirshhorn in 2006, which showed two images Johns had affixed, one to the canvas, and one to a wooden backing. They were identical white-on-black palm reading diagrams printed with the caption, “Hand of Accidents and Travels.” Bower wondered if this indicated the work was originally intended to stand, like a sculpture, or possibly to be handled.

same, a detail: “Hand of Accidents and Travel”
Seeing the palm reading hands, along with the shape of the Untitled collage (16.4×7-inches), made me think of the Shirtboards collage/drawings Rauschenberg made in 1952 while traveling through Italy and Morocco with Cy Twombly. Bob would glue etchings and illustrations he found or bought in street stalls onto the leftover cardboards folded inside his laundered shirts. Hopps wrote that because Rauschenberg never framed the Shirtboards, “they exist potentially as hand-held objects.”

Robert Rauschenberg, Shirtboard collage with palm reading diagram, 1952, lost or destroyed, image: Walter Hopps’ Rauschenberg: The Early 1950s
Of the eleven elongated (14×5-in.) Shirtboards included in Walter Hopps’ 1990 catalogue, ten were in the collection of the artist, the Sonnabends, or Sue Weil. The other one was listed as “lost or destroyed.” It had a palm reading diagram, in black on white, the inverse of Johns’s.
Did Johns bury Rauschenberg’s Shirtboard palm down under the collage of Untitled, only to bring it back as an X-ray, or was he just giving Bob a secret high five?
Jasper Johns, Untitled, 1954 [hirshhorn.si.edu]