greg.org – Page 156 – the making of, by greg allen

How To Make A Giant, Steichen-Style Photomural

Looking through the installation photos for Road To Victory, Edward Steichen’s 1942 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, I find myself asking two things:
Who took these photos, and how did they make them? [Of course, my real question is usually, Where are they now, which really means, where can I get some? But anyway.]
The first question turns out to be harder to answer than I thought. The MoMA Bulletin for the show states that over 90% of the images are from government agencies, military sources, or wire service/news agencies, but they lack any credit line. It’s slightly amusing that most of the photocredits in the Bulletin turn out to be for the installation photos, not the subject photo murals themselves. If Edward Steichen and Carl Sandburg are the creators of Road To Victory: The Propaganda Artwork, then Samuel H. Gottscho is a rephotographing appropriation artist 40 years ahead of Richard Prince. I’ll have to do some digging for an image checklist in the exhibition’s archives.

As for how these things were made, though, there is actually a footnote for that. And the answer is surprisingly painterly:

To make the large murals, the negatives were enlarged in sections upon strips of photographic paper forty inches wide. The museum wall was first sized, then covered with a layer of wallpaper, next with one of cloth, and then the photographs were pasted on the cloth by paper hangers. The seams were lightly airbrushed, imperfections were retouched by hand, and finally the whole mural was painted with dull varnish to eliminate the glaring reflections rendered by the surface of photographic paper.

Fascinating. Photo wallpaper? Overpainted photomurals?
While large prints in the show were mounted on boards, and some murals were affixed to freestanding walls and panels, others were applied straight to the museum’s walls. Given the anonymity of the images, I’m going to guess that approximately none of these prints or murals survived the exhibition, much less the war.

The Road To Victory And Beyond

So in my ersatz zigzagging through the history of photomurals, I kind of skipped from Edward Steichen’s landmark Family of Man exhibition in 1955, where Paul Rudolph deployed enlarged photo prints for content and experience, as well as architectural elements in his exhibition design; to Capt. Steichen’s 1945 exhibition Power in the Pacific, which featured the work of the US Navy photography unit he commanded; to Steichen’s participation in MoMA’s first photography exhibition ever, a 1932 photomural invitational, which was intended to serve as a showroom for American artists, who faced stiff mural competition during the Depression from south of the border.
Sensing a trend here? Wondering what I missed? Wow. Michael from Stopping Off Place just forwarded me the link to MoMA’s bulletin for Road To Victory, a stunning 1942 photo exhibition that rolls up so many greg.org interests, it is kind of freaking me out right now. And the man who is bringing it to me? Lt. Comm. Edward Steichen.

I mean, I kind of stumbled onto the photomural trail last October, when a vintage exhibition print of Mies’ Barcelona Pavilion came up at auction. Its size, scale, and iconic modernist subject suddenly made the photomural seem like a missing link in the contemporary development of both photography and painting. And yet it’s also seeming like not many of these pictures survived, because they were merely exhibition collateral, functional propaganda material, no more an artwork than the brochure or the press release.
And yet these things existed. Is it possible at all that any of these prints still exist in some art handler’s garage?
Anyway, it’ll take me time to process this Road To Victory show, so I’m just going to skip across the most stunning parts: the show’s awesome, explicit propagandistic objectives; the utterly fresh painterly abstraction of these giant prints; the spatial, experiential design of Herber Bayer’s installation; the texts surrounding the exhibit, which traveled around the country in 1942 to apparently wild, patriotic acclaim; and the ironic, complicating aspects of authorship of the show and the work in it.
[Hint: they barely identify, much less mention the actual photographers at all. I, meanwhile, am happy and grateful to credit PhotoEphemera for these small versions of much larger scans of MoMA’s 1942 documentation of the show. Definitely worth diving into.]

Continue reading “The Road To Victory And Beyond”

Bloghdad.com/Issues

April 7, 2003 11:46 AM

TO: Doug Feith
FROM: Donald Rumsfeld
SUBJECT: Issues w/Various Countries
We need more coercive diplomacy with respect to Syria and LIbya, and we need it fast. If they mess up Iraq, it will delay bringing our troops home.
We also need to solve the Pakistan problem.
And Korea doesn’t seem to be going well.
Are you coming up with proposals for me to send around?
Thanks.

The release of this memo by warrior/wrestler/poet Donald Rumsfeld made me wonder what I was writing about in early April 2003, when the Iraq War was just underway.
And it turns out I was writing about the devastating poetry of Donald Rumsfeld.

Know Hope

Producer Ted Hope is at least three installments into his solid post-Sundance, post-Toronto explication of what he’s calling “The New Model of Indie Film Finance.” It’s a pretty clear-eyed look at the challenges even a celebrated, experienced filmmaker faces in realizing a project–and a profit.

Clearly we are at a point in US film culture where the infrastructure is not serving either the investors, the creators, or the audiences. Good films are getting made but not being delivered to their audience. Last year I went to a film investor conference. Several other producers were invited and we all asked to pitch projects. None of us left with funding, but the investors said to me that I was the only one that addressed how we would deal with the reality of not just getting our film to market, but bringing it to the ultimate end-users — the audience. As artists build communities around their projects in advance of actual production, they are developing a plan to give domestic value to their films. It is hard to imagine that any artist will be able to do enough pre-orders to predict 20% of negative costs from the USA — unless they are working on microbudgets — but taking a step forward is still a better plan than surrender to the unknown.

With uncertain economic conditions, shifting revenue streams, and a continued reliance on admittedly outmoded valuation metrics, Hope describes indie finance as being in “an era of risk mitigation.”
Twas ever thus, though, no? Frankly, if 7500 features were actually made in 2010, the vast majority of which will never make back their production cost, much less turn a profit, it sounds like the film financing business could use more risk mitigation, not less. But I’d guess that exponential increase in production volume over the last decade correlates to the drop in digital/HD production costs. It’s just that those losses are distributed across many more microbudget filmmakers’ uncles than ever before.
Hope hasn’t gotten to the profit part yet, but I expect it has something to do with microbudgets, non-theatrical distribution, and filmmaker audience/community-building. And that the answer has something to do with scrappy, groupie-friendly directors like Ed Burns and Kevin Smith. Stay tuned.
Part 3: The New Model Of Indie Film Finance, v2011.1 Domestic Value & Funding [hopeforfilm.com]

La Tour Eiffel Vu En Ballon

In 1909, balloonist/photographers André Schelcher and Albert Omer-Décugis took this picture from about 50m above the top of the Eiffel Tower. It is one of 40 images they published that year in a book titled, Paris vu en ballon et ses environs.
I just found it in my new Leon Gimpel catalogue, but it turns out to be included in Thierry Gervais’ 2001 article on the beginnings of aerial photography, which I posted about before.
With that angle, I would’ve said Schelcher’s photo looks more Bing than Google Maps, but Google’s got it.

Previously: Le début du point de vue Google Mappienne

Gerhard Richter Subway Station

It’s hard enough for me to wrap my head around the fact that Gerhard Richter and Isa Genzken were married for 13 years. Now I find out they made a subway station together. A subway station about their relationship.
In a 1993 interview, Hans Ulrich casually asks Richter, “What works of yours exist in public spaces? The Underground station in Duisburg; the Hypo-Bank in Dusseldorf?”
And at first, I’m like, “Oh, right, besides the underground station in Duisburg.” But then when I looked it up, I see that it was only completed in 1992, so the Duisburg Metrocard in Hans Ulrich’s suit pocket probably still had two weeks left on it.

Anyway, the work seems remarkably undocumented. These are about the only pictures I could find. Genzken and Richter received the commissioned for the König-Heinrich-Platz U-bahn station in 1980. All the pieces of the project seem to be enamel on steel wall panels installed throughout the station.
Genzken made two murals facing each other on the train platform, with arcs from circles with radii of 3 and 5km, which relate to scaled down diameters of certain planets,” according to the Google cache of one mobile travel site.

Dietmar Elgar’s bio of Richter quotes Genzken’s project statement: “One curve corresponds to the curvature of Mars on a scale of 1:1,000, another curve to VEnus on a scale of 1:30,000.” Elgar then notes these references were “no coincidence. She was alluding to her romance with Richter.” [Richter apparently painted two abstracts, titled Juno and Janus, in response. Which is adorable.]
As for the station, Richter’s abstract mural adorns the west lobby, while in the east station entrance, the couple installed 24 enamel signs with historical facts about Duisburg. Frankly, I’m not feeling it. Maybe if someone were to go to Duisburg and shoot a flickr photoset of the station, we could get a better sense? Bitte-schoen?
Or maybe the thing to do is to stop looking for art, then you can see it. Here are some photos of the station from the web which happen to show some of Richter or Genzken’s works:
fotocommunity.de

by R + G Team Dülmen, via fotocommunity.de

by ati sun via flickr
U-Bahn Kunst [duisburg.de]
Previously: giant Richter triptych commissioned by BMW

I’ve Got Mail

I order so many random books, usually from random independent or used booksellers on Abebooks, that don’t arrive with anything like the robotic precision and up-to-the-minute email notification of Amazon, that I never know what’s come in the mail until I open it. And sometimes I’ve forgotten what I even ordered.
Today’s haul was exceptional, though:

Centerbeam is the 1980 report/documentation for a project that, as far as I can tell, was the largest contemporary public art event ever undertaken on the National Mall: Centerbeam and Icarus, a collaborative experiment/performance organized by MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies, under the direction of Otto Piene.
Centerbeam was unveiled at documenta 6 in 1977, and restaged on the Mall in the summer of 1978. It involved video, lasers, giant inflatable sculptures, smoke machines, sound art, a technotopian extravaganza that was apparently a raging success, but also, from the pictures, might have been a hot mess. Not that those are mutually exclusive. Anyway, I thought I’d bought this book a year and a half ago when I first wrote about Centerbeam, but I had not.

The catalogue for the Musee d’Orsay’s Leon Gimpel exhibition arrived, from Italy, and wow, it’s beautifully produced. The images that get widely reproduced are some of the most arresting, but just a quick look makes me very excited to study Gimpel’s work more closely. The text is only in French, which probably means it won’t get the US distribution presence it deserves. [It looks so easy to buy on Amazon.fr, though.]

And last, whoa, what an incredible surprise: Enclosure 3: Harry Partch? What the hell is this? Experimental composer Philip Blackburn is the last in a series of Partch devotees who labored to publish the visionary composer/ex-hobo’s archive. Most of the Enclosure series is video and audio of performances of Partch’s music, but Enclosure 3 is a dense, daunting, but engrossing facsimile edition of the notes, drawings, clippings, photos, manuscripts, and correspondence Partch kept for himself. It looks utterly fantastic.
I think my version was published in 2005, but the copyright is also from 1997, and there’s only the barest hint at the process of putting the book together. It’s pretty raw. But gorgeous. I’d seen it mentioned on some hip curation webshop, one of those Nieves-type outfits, but when I couldn’t figure out which one it was [turns out it was collectionof.net], I ended up ordering it [much more cheaply] via some Amazon merchant.
Well, my copy arrived, it’s awesome, and it turns out to have come from Squidco, an “improvised, composed experimental music” specialty shop based in, of all places, Wilmington, NC. Who knew, right? Squidco publishes a lot of writing and reviews of experimental music on Squid’s Ear, wow, reaching back to 2003. I had no idea, but now I do, and I’m glad.

Shiny Balls, By Gerhard Richter

Oh no! I mean, oh yeah!

Gerhard Richter did do other steel balls. At the end of his 1973 interview with Irmeline Lebeer, he complains about my favorites of his series, the grey monochromes:

the only problem with them is that they are so beautiful.
And that bothers you?
No, but it’s like a blank canvas. A blank canvas is the most beautiful thing, and yet you can’t just leave it like that. You have to add other elements to it. If it were only a question of perfection, we wouldn’t do anything any more.
You need dynamics and a certain tension.
Without those, everything would be dead. We would all come to an agreement, once and for all, on the sphere. At home, I have these particularly beautiful steel balls.⁴ But it’s impossible to get any closer to perfection. But we start down that path, it’s all over.

Which is an odd place to put a footnote saying that “Indeed in 1989 and 1992 Richter produced three editions of balls made of gleaming stainless steel.”
The largest was the last, Sphere III [above, via g-r], which was done in an edition of 11. In addition to the title, signature, number and date, each ball is engraved with the name of a Swiss mountain.
Spheres I and II are 8cm [ed. 25] and 5cm [ed. 11], respectively, with no mountains involved. According to the Dallas Museum of Art, which has all of Richter’s balls, they were all published by Anthony d’Offay and fabricated by FAG Kugelfischer, which I will assume is a company. Indeed, under the Schaeffler Group’s guidance, FAG has been a leading German manufacturer of ball bearings for over 120 years.
search results: kugel [gerhard-richter.com]
Previously: Richter’s Balls, Regrets

Art Poster

Honestly, I don’t know why I didn’t see it before. The answer‘s staring me right in the face. And I was so close with the Serra, too.

Annunciation After Titian, 343-1, 1973, Gerhard Richter [image via g-r]
This morning I just cracked open my Richter Bible, and started reading a 1974 interview of the bemused Richter by an insistent Gislind Nabakowski, who pressed the artist for his reasons for implicating himself in the “hackneyed language of symbols” of “the power of the hypocritical Renaissance,” and “sexual domination,” of the painting he’d recently copied, Titian’s Annunciation:

With regard to your approach to painting, you seem willing to encumber yourself with the concept of traditional symbolism, but you don’t illustrate it; you seem to be searching for your own symbolic references. Can you elaborate on this ‘illustrative realism’? Does it represent what the painter sees, or does it reveal his ‘reflections on what he has seen’ i.e., are his paintings platforms for the production of reality?
It certainly doesn’t show what one sees, because everyone sees something different, and what one sees isn’t a painting; it can only remind us of a painting. But, on the other hand, I don’t accept the principal difference between ‘pure’ pictures that only represent themselves and others that just illustrate something. If you take Ryman, Palermo or Marden, for example, in a away their paintings are also illusionistic, and you can only just identify the actual paint or the material if you have the eyes of a paint salesman.
Why did you paint over Titian’s motif and dissolve it?
Oh, I’m sure I didn’t initially plan it that way; I wanted to trace him as precisely as possible, maybe because I wanted to own such a beautiful Titian… [laughs].
That can’t be true. Not even the very first painting is a copy; you intended something else.
Sure. I only copied it from a postcard and not from the original as such. Although I must say that it is indeed possible to reproduce a painting from a postcard that is almost as beautiful as the original. Those few little details that would have been different really don’t matter–but that’s another issue.

Maybe for Richter.
Because when it comes to posters, what do people want to see more than beautiful works of art? The art poster has developed into a genre all its own. A genre and, as every museum shop, dorm quad, and Upper West Side laundry room can attest, a market.
Here is a poster I saw yesterday, Lot 270: Jasper Johns Flag I, which LA Modern is auctioning next month, with a description, “Poster based on the print,” a signature [!], a provenance, and an estimate of $1000-1500:

We demand a lot from our art posters. Posters signal our tastes and aesthetic identifications even more purely than the originals, which, by their scarcity, can only be possessed by a few, and thus can’t escape the aura of investment. Posters can also embody a history. You were there in Greenville in 1974, and Jasper signed your poster. That’s how it could look, anyway. We like our posters to faithfully approximate the experience and presence of the original.
And they must also have a significant, authentic presence–poster qua poster–of their own. Which can limit the works available to those that best fit the poster format. So you can blow up Matisse Jazz cutouts, or shrink a Rothko.

Gursky: 99 Cent, $24.95 [via momastore.org]
Like this powerful work,” Gursky: 99 Cent, a “MoMA Favorite” which pushes up against the dimensional limits of the poster medium [56″ x 34″] just as Gursky’s 207x337cm original tested the most advanced photo printing technology of its day [1999].
But that, as Richter says, is another issue. Just as you can paint a beautiful painting from a postcard, you could use a photo, tiled and transferred to silkscreens at life-size, then taped and folded into a box, to provide the authentic, transformative experience of being in the presence of the original. Assuming you open the box, that is. And that you have enough wallspace. Or maybe that’s what museums and exhibition copies are for. And your copy stays MIB.
So what’d work at that scale? Gursky, of course. But if you’re gonna do Gursky, do the 99 Cent II Diptychon, which unfurls to a positively Bus-like 207 x 682 cm:

99 Cent II Diptychon, 2001, at Philips de Pury in 2006 [image via thecityreview]
Or:

Continue reading “Art Poster”

On Frieze At 20

Frieze has been around 20 years? That’s crazy. I feel so old.
I’m really liking the dips into the archives by invited Big Thinkers. Jens Hoffmann’s picks focus on biennials and such. My favorite has to be Jenny Liu’s firsthand report of the Sixth Caribbean Biennial, a giant critique-in-a-boondoggle-in-a-biennial organized by Maurizio Catteland–and Jens Hoffmann:

The idea of a biennial without art could have been cool in a marvellously vacuous sort of a way, puncturing the self-importance of the art world by grotesquely aping it. What we got was a furtive and ungenerous gesture, a covert V-sign flipped at the art world behind its back, when more balls could have made it a divinely impudent mooning in its face. As a critique, the Caribbean Biennial was neutered when the organisers and some of the artists felt the need to prescribe the biennial’s public perception and hide the vacation at its heart. The art was so profoundly and deafeningly absent that some artists took to thinking of themselves as both art stars (whose reputations needed protecting) and art civilians (with commensurate expectations of privacy), while curators took on the role of embarrassed publicists and the spectators of poor cousins at a wedding. There’s something sad about so cynical and ambivalent a gesture as the Caribbean Biennial: one would think that a critique of one’s own practices would be ethical, even idealistic. Here, the humour was both a performance of aggression and a weapon of despair, another cheerless rehearsal of irony and parody.

I still talk to people about the Caribbean Biennial all the time, though as time passes, I have to keep reassuring myself that it actually happened. Or didn’t, as the case may be.
But I still remember it as a sly, subversive prank, and Liu’s obviously generous but disappointed review reminds me that it was less romantic than I want it to be. Seriously, guys, how could you let Jenny down like that?
Trouble in Paradise [frieze]
frieze.com/20/ [frieze.com]

What Other Photo Of A Giant Thing Would You Turn Into A Life-Sized Silkscreen Poster?

It’s true, I like Mason Williams’ 1967 Bus for what it is.
But right now I love it for how it was made, the whole ridiculous, unanticipated, dogged, improvised, and ultimately successful process: the 4×5 negative; the 16×20 print; the 16-tile silkscreened billboard; the one-ton palletful of paper on the driveway; the cases of Scotch tape on the borrowed dance hall floor, the giant folding by hand; the warning not to open the box in the wind; the realization that after all that, most people are never gonna open the box in the first place.
That last point should negate the question I’ve been pondering, then, which is, if you were to make a giant photomural poster this way today, what image would you use? Assuming–or asserting–that it mattered, and that even though you’re doing it for the process, you’re not just going to use random image noise. [Though that is one option.]
Anyway, a bus is obviously out; you might as well do a reissue of Williams’ original. And though a whole host of large vehicles would be interesting–a dump truck, a train, a plane, perhaps a collector’s G5 as a commission–it might also be a little derivative.
Mondo-Blogo suggested “the ‘dirtbergs’ all over the city now. Facinating how the snow gets so black, and so filled with the most disgusting things.” And I do like their scale, ephemerality and banality, and the combination of abstraction and landscape.
You can’t go too architectural without treading on William Anastasi’s toes, or without aping Urs Fischer’s totalizing wallpaper. But an interesting structure or storefront does have its appeal, even though the idea is a print that feels more like a picture of something, and not an environment or space. It’s objectification through photography, and in turn, turning that photo into an [ultimately, probably] unseen object in a box.
Cheyney Thompson’s epic lifesize painting makes me want to do a newsstand, though.
And since these are objects, why not a large sculpture? Like the gilded Gen. Grant at Grand Army Plaza? Or Simone Bolivar on Sixth Avenue, for that matter? Why not a Torqued Ellipse? Imagine all the ink that silkscreen’d take.
Or maybe a rock or a tree.
What am I not thinking of? I’d be interested to know. What would you like to see? If I make one of them, I’ll be glad to send you a copy. Though if involves a shipping pallet, I may ask for your FedEx account number first.

Warhol Invented Twitter?

My Twitter feed is so complicated right now.

Bus, 1967, Mason WIlliams

A 1968 NY Times review of Robert Rauschenberg’s giant Autobiography edition by Hilton Kramer was titled “Art: Over 53 Feet of Wall Decoration.” And the abstract mentioned simultaneous installations at the Whitney and MoMA, so I was interested to see what else Kramer hated. Turns out it wasn’t a Rauschenberg or a Broadside Art project at all: it was Mason Williams’ Bus.
Mason Williams’ Bus is one of the most awesome photomural/artist book/oddball objects of the Los Angeles 1960s. I love it. It is a life-size photo of a Greyhound bus, folded up and put into a box. It was made in an edition of 200, but existed primarily as a joke, or a poster, or a decoration, and only rarely has it been perceived as an art object.
Which is hilarious–and hilariously wrong–because Williams is a childhood friend and longtime collaborator/co-conspirator with Ed Ruscha, whose deadpan artist books were busy not being recognized as art–or as proper books–at the same time.
This lack of critical appreciation may have something to do with Williams’ primary occupation, which was TV writing and composition; he was the head writer for The Smothers Brothers and wrote “Classical Gas.” Bus was an irreverent stunt, though he took it very seriously.
[For a rare, serious look at Bus, there’s no place better than Design Observer, where Lorraine Wild wrote about it in 2008; Michael Asher had donated his copy of Bus to MOCA, and the museum had just installed it. Wild has Williams’ making of story, the hilarity of which is only hinted at in the parodic text Williams included with each numbered edition:

Actual size photograph of an Actual bus.
10 ft. 3 1/2 in. x 36 ft. 2 in.)
Weighs 10 pounds, 7 ounces.
Conceived by Mason Williams.
Photograph by Max Yavno.
Enlargement made from a 16×20 print of a 4×5 negative. Printed on billboard stock in 16 sections by silk screen process. Printed by The Benline Process Color Company of Deland, Florida and Pacific Display of Los Angeles, Califfornia. [sic] Hand collated, rolled and transported early in the morning by three people (two men and one woman) in one car over a period of several days. Each copy individually hand assembled by three people, using hands, feet, tape sissors [sic] and a Barlow knife. Assembled with 120 ft. (per copy) of Scotch Brand double-faced tape (No. 666).
Folded by hand and foot by three people.
Assembled and folded quietly on television sound stages on Saturday mornings in Los Angeles, Califfornia [sic]. Assembly time, nine man hours per copy.
Cover concept by Bob Willis. Designed from a box found under his bed by his wife. Cover constructed of corrugated fiberboard, 200 lb. test, #1 white. Printed and fabricated by Nehms Company of Los Angeles, California.
Published on the 24th of February, 1967 in a limited edition of 200 copies.

Love that so much, I want to start silkscreening and double-taping life-size photos of things.
Anyway, MoMA installed a copy of Bus in the lobby in Jan. 1968, and then invited graphic designers participating in the Museum’s upcoming poster show to tag the bus with graffiti. Here’s a photo of the result, as seen on the cover of Go Greyhound magazine.

100%, Lorraine Wild [designobserver]
Art Projects by Mason Williams [masonwilliams-online]
Awesome LIFE Magazine photo of Bus at Reference Library

Recognition Models

Air Training Corps cadets building recognition models, via CollectAir
Looking for the “Plaster of Paris Aircraft Corp.” and coming up empty [stay tuned], I did find plenty of aircraft made from Plaster of Paris: WWII-era recognition models used to train military personnel and civilian planespotters to distinguish between friendly and enemy aircraft. Though recognition models and plane silhouette posters and such were used as early as planes themselves, planespotting efforts surged during World War II.
Models were needed to train millions of soldiers, for whom distinguishing planes was a matter of survival and victory on the battlefield, and to train millions of volunteers in the Ground Observer Corps, who were manning towers and outposts all along America’s coasts. [British planespotters actually ended up having much more to do.]

Official StromBecKer model kit of the Boeing Flying Fortress, via CollectAir
To source all these models, manufacturers developed injection-molded cellulose plastic technologies to crank them out, and schoolchildren were enlisted to build them from kits of wood, or to carve them to spec from other non-strategic materials. Like Plaster of Paris.
Like the Civilian Camouflage Council mobilized by New York artists and art directors in 1942, and these insane canvas-and-stilts bomber trainers, these recognition models are an awesome melding of militarism and craft, cutting edge technology and ad hoc bricolage.

Walt Disney with reconition models, and the diagram for a Naval flight training film on the wall, from LIFE, via Collectair
They’re interesting and novel to me, but also esoteric and esthetic. For the folks who grew up during the war, they were life and death, vital, formative to their world.
And they’re apparently being forgotten. The images here [and the information, basically everything I know about recognition models that didn’t come from the opening of Empire of the Sun] come from Steve Remington’s CollectAir Friend or Foe? Museum, an extraordinary collection of recognition models and related training material located in Santa Barbara. There’s much, much more on the website, including the planespotting training kites, gorgeous shipspotting models, including one British Razzle Dazzle model, on and on.
Friend or Foe? Museum [collectair.com]

Provenance

Wow, so I’m just throwing Jasper Johns’ name into the archives of New York Magazine, and up pops this wild story from 1982 about Frank Waxman, a Philadelphia doctor who amassed a blue chip collection of tiny artworks by stealing them from galleries.
He was on the Friends of the Philadelphia Museum committee, hosted collection visits, and basically stole 170 artworks in four cities before he was caught.
Waxman got a Johns Flashlight sculpture from Irving Blum’s desk in SoHo; a couple of Joseph Cornell boxes; an Agnes Martin from Robert Elkon Gallery; here’s Herbert Palmer’s 2004 account of having a Picasso bronze stolen from his Los Angeles gallery:

MR. PALMER: And one Christmas, I left a few days early to go skiing. And I get a phone call from the young lady who was working here then; she said, Mr. Palmer, did you put the Picasso away for safekeeping? I said, I don’t think so. She says, well, it isn’t there.
DR. EHRLICH: [Laughs] Oops.
MR. PALMER: I said, do you think someone might have taken it? She says, no the case is screwed down. I [She] went back there and after 10 minutes on the telephone, she comes back; the screws are not in the case. She says, I know who took it. I said, do you know his name? She said, no. The man with the trench coat, he came in twice. Once he came in, and he looked around. The second time he came in, he asked me to show him a picture, and I had to go to the back of the gallery to get the picture.
DR. EHRLICH: Oh.
MR. PALMER: And at that time, he took the Picasso and slipped it into his coat, which was designed specifically for stealing small sculpture. It had big pockets.
DR. EHRLICH: Wow.
MR. PALMER: Big, padded pockets. She says, he took it. I said, you have no clue as to his name or anything? No. I said, call the insurance company, call the police, and don’t you leave – Christmas Eve – don’t you leave until the police come. They came and they wrote it up – you know, the paperwork.
While they’re writing up my case, the police get a phone call. A woman is screaming. He took my Rodin, she said; some crazy woman is yelling, hey, somebody took her Rodin. I said, I know who it is. If you’re quick, you can catch him. It was Feingarten, Mrs. Feingarten. She had a gallery on Melrose, and this guy – same guy who stole from me, went down there and did the same thing – sent her to the back; while she was in the back, he took this Rodin hand she had, and put it in his coat, and walked out with – and she saw him do it. And she screamed at him, put that down. He said, don’t come close – threatened her, so she didn’t; she called the police.
And she said, wait a minute – I have a clue. He left a phone number, because it was Saturday, and I had to open the gallery for him out of hours.

Cops finally cracked the caper, Waxman was eventually arrested, got the psychiatric help he needed, all the artwork was returned, and now people get to tell fun stories about how their stolen Picasso was on the cover of New York magazine. It’s win-win. The only loser here–since Waxman didn’t get started until the late 1970s, and was thus too young to have been involved in the Johns Flag caper–is me.
Oral history interview with Herbert Palmer, 2004 Dec. 6-22 [aaa.si.edu]