Camille Drury’s photo of Carl Andre’s work Breda (1986) installed at Paula Cooper Gallery in Jan. 2025
Though he didn’t show in the US in the years between the murder of his wife Ana Mendieta and his indictment for said murder in 1985 and his trial, where he got off, in 1988, Carl Andre did have quite a busy European exhibition schedule.
In late 1986, he had two simultaneous gallery shows, in Brussels and at Konrad Fischer in Düsseldorf, where he showed sculptures made of elongated blocks of the material, “Belgian Blue Limestone,” that gave the shows their titles.
Those were followed almost immediately in 1987 by simultaneous museum retrospectives in the Netherlands, at the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, and the Haags Gemeentemuseum in, obviously, The Hague. There were eight more shows in the next 18 months.
But the point is, as the one-year mark since Carl Andre’s death approaches, Paula Cooper, who helped spring Andre from Rikers, is opening an expansive presentation of his work in both her gallery spaces. At the center of the largest space will be Breda (1986), a work comprising 101 blocks of blue Belgian limestone first exhibited in The Hague.
Like so many things from Carl Andre’s Indictment Era, the significance of this sculpture, and this show, goes without saying.
an undated archival image of Gordon Matta-Clark’s, Rosebush, 1972, on the west side of the entrance to St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, NYC, image via David Zwirner IG
That’s when the artist planted a rosebush inside a small, gridded wrought iron cage at the entrance of St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery on East 10th Street in Manhattan. The work was “reactivated” last September as part of —or “alongside”—Energies, an exhibition at the Swiss Institute on artists collaborating with local communities and ecologies. The reactivation took the form of planting a new bush in the Spring, adding a plaque, and staging an afternoon of readings, music, and dance in collaboration with The Poetry Project and Danspace Project, both of which have long operated at the church.
How could Gordon Matta-Clark’s “only existent work in an outdoor, public space” be so lost for so long that it needed a double-dated (1972/2024) “reactivation”? Reactivation seems, in this case, to be a curatorial conceit to draw attention to the work in its community. But it also connects the rare, extant work’s physical reality with the estate, which seems oriented to handling documentation and the occasional collage or sketch.
That’s the Kimbell Art Museum’s Healing of Lazarus on the right, next to the Transfiguration and Healing of the Blind Man from the National Gallery in London. No explanation why the one is in that lol strip frame, though.
Matsuura Takeshiro’s drawing of one corner of his One-Mat Room, with katakana keys to identify the various pieces of wood or other artifact, as published in Mokuhen Kanjin, and screenshot from Prof Henry D Smith II’s Oct 2024 lecture at the Noguchi Museum
After two decades as an explorer and cartographer, Matsuura Takeshirō, who gave the northern island of Japan its name, Hokkaidō, settled into a second life as an antiquarian. In anticipation of his 70th year (1888), he decided to build a tiny study onto his small house in central Tokyo, and asked his antiquarian colleagues across Japan to each send him a piece of old wood. He called the study the Ichijōjiki ((一畳敷), or One-Mat Room, though it is actually slightly larger than its single tatami mat. Matsuura documented each piece of wood, its source and significance, and its donor, in a tiny, self-published catalogue, Mokuhen Kanjin (木片勧進), which Columbia professor emeritus Henry Smith II translates as, A Solicitation of Wood Scraps.
Willem de Kooning in his jacket in his studio in May 1962, photographed by Dan Budnik; and Megan Craig’s Willem de Kooning jacket, photographed by the artist for The Yale Review
Artist and philosophy professor Megan Craig has written a beautiful and transparent essay about the difficulties and rewards of a life of painting. More particularly, it’s about the difficulties of a life of art when not painting. It’s wrapped in her story of an artist friend giving her an old denim work coat that originally belonged to Willem de Kooning:
I drape the jacket on a chair, then move it to a hook. Everywhere I put it seems wrong. I realize Jay might like a photograph of the garment in its new home, so I study the picture in The New York Times Magazine article, slide out a big canvas I painted many years ago, and lean it against my painting racks, as though it is a work in progress. I moe the chair in front of it and put on the jacket, which is huge on me, half expecting to be struck dead or find my face melting off like in that fateful scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark when they finally pry open the Ark of the Covenant. My back to the camera, I snap a photo as similar as possible to the one of de Kooning from 1962 and text it to Jay. He likes it; I can picture him smiling. But I cannot leave the jacket on for too long. I am unable to even put my hands in the pockets, paralyzed by the thought of de Kooning’s hands having been there. I place it back on the chair.
As someone engrossed with art who does not paint, I am in awe of Craig’s ambivalence, but I also did feel like I wanted to find that jacket. And since greg.org hero Brian Sholis sent Craig’s essay yesterday, it has been a whipsaw journey.
“Twombly reviewing his photographs at Schirmer/Mosel’s office”, Munich, 2010 Courtesy Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio, photo by Nicola Del Roscio via cytwombly.org
Spanish artist/art historian Carlos Peris wrote a dissertation, and a book, on Cy Twombly’s use of photographs as a core part of his creative process. Here is a quote from a conversation he had with poet Dean Rader at the Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio in the summer of 2024:
[…] there are some photographs from the archive that show Twombly with all the Polaroids arranged on a table. So he used to play games like memory games with them and stacking them and reorganizing them, like for more focused to less focused on, from more specific content to a more abstract one. And all this kind of games played with this kind of card game or tarot card or something like that, so this kind of trying to recall or to go back, it’s a kind of souvenir. Of course. Yeah. These photographs, what they did was to take these specific moments, so he could come back to them and think again about them and feel them again. And I think that happens all the time with his paintings. As you said before, you feel when Twombly is making that scribble, making that gesture of that paint or over the materials having there. So that motion, I think with photographs he was trying to reconnect with that moment, with that state of mind, with that specific moment.
That includes two additional documentary shorts by Andrea Bettinetti, the director of Cy Dear. One is about a 2023 exhibition, Cy Twombly, A Journey to Morocco, 1952-53, and the other is a making of video of Un/Veiled, an exhibition and events program staged at the Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio in Rome in 2022 and 2024. The whole thing is under the umbrella ofIn Perspective, which focuses on other artists, poets, musicians, etc., who have been influenced or inspired by Twombly’s work.
The conversation between Peris and Rader, whose focus is on the relationship between seeing and reading, image and text, went up a couple of weeks ago. Peris’s book, meanwhile, From State of Mind to the Tangible: The Photograpic Cosmos of Cy Twombly, has been around since 2022. I will probably write more about it when it arrives.
[after the book arrived update: I will not. It’s nice, but Peris’s text is more poetic than revelatory. The important idea that Twombly used photos as tools for revisiting details or atmospheres remains to be expanded upon. Also, they reproduce Twombly’s Polaroids at like 80% scale, when it would have been just as easy and more impactful to print them full-scale.]
There are apparently more than 5,000 Polaroids in the Archive. Did Twombly take all of them? Did he point and Del Roscio shoot? Is one question that occurs to me about Twombly’s process. But more interesting rn is the trajectory of a moment: the making of a mark, the making of an instant photo print of it, the sorting and accumulation of photos, and the revisiting and re-experiencing of moments.
It makes me think of three inapposite things at once: Andy Warhol making Polaroids and turning some of them into paintings. Willem de Kooning painting atop projections of details and gestures from earlier paintings. And Cady Noland making Polaroids of “non-existent” works. In the painters’ cases, the artist uses a record of a moment, whether an image or a mark, to fix it in paint. Instantaneity is not just a tool, but a subject. But Warhol only did that with a tiny fraction of the Polaroids he took. The rest of those moments, Like Noland’s sculptures, are long gone.
Matt Johnson, Sleeping Figure, 2023, installed at Marfa Invitational, photo by bsky/Stacey Burns
The only thing I’ll say about Desert X is Jamal Khashoggi. But since Matt Johnson installed Sleeping Figure (2023) at Marfa International Foundation‘s sculpture ranch, I think it’s now OK to say it is an absolute banger.
That’s what crossed my mind this morning when I checked into Bluesky and saw Stacey Burns’ photo of the new year’s first sunrise landing on the dozen decommissioned shipping containers.
And what’s this? Under the clear Texas light of the cloudless day we can see that someone has painted a sleepy face on the head/container. I guess because it’s a figure, and it’s sleeping? Did a convoy of literalists just cross the border? Did they paint “Not actually a store” on the front of Prada Marfa?
screenshot from Part 5 of Logistics (2012), on YouTube
Logistics (2012) is a 37-day-long film by Erika Magnussen and Daniel Andersson that tracks in real time the route of a cheap, electronic pedometer from its warehouse in central Sweden back to its factory in Shenzhen. While it does answer the question of where the stuff in our world comes from, it is primarily concerned with how it gets to us, via truck, train, ports, and most of all, container ships.
Logistics first screened in Uppsala in 2012 and has streamed on various platforms, but since Spring 2024, it has been available on YouTube in 107 8-hour segments. It feels right at home.
President Jimmy Carter’s 1977 statement to the cosmos, above, was encoded as an image, like a photostat, on the Golden Record attached to the Voyager space probes. A similar statement image was included from Kurt Waldheim, then secretary general of the United Nations.
For whatever reason, neither image is included in the lists of 115 or 116 images that Carl Sagan and his committee selected for the Golden Record. According to Wikipedia, these are the 117th and 118th images on the record.
This Voyager spacecraft was constructed by the United States of America. We are a community of 240 million human beings among the more than 4 billion who inhabit the planet Earth. We human beings are still divided into nation states, but these states are rapidly becoming a single global civilization.
We cast this message into the cosmos. It is likely to survive a billion years into our future, when our civilization is profoundly altered and the surface of the Earth may be vastly changed. Of the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, some–perhaps many–may have inhabited planets and spacefaring civilizations. If one such civilization intercepts Voyager and can understand these recorded contents, here is our message:
This is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination, and our good will in a vast and awesome universe.
The groundbreaking for the Yoshio Taniguchi addition to The Museum of Modern Art took place in May 2001 under a tent in the demolished Sculpture Garden, which had been repurposed as a staging area. I was sitting on the outer edge of the first bay of seats, stage right, and Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s security detail was standing behind me, on the aisle, while he was on the low dais with everyone. Architect Yoshio Taniguchi was on the far side of the arc of trustees and dignitaries. There were silver MoMA Builds hardhats and shovels for everyone, arranged in rows on edge of the dais next to the dirtbox.
David Rockefeller and Rudy Giuliani ceremonially breaking ground for MoMA’s renovation in May 2001. Architect Yoshio Taniguchi talks with Agnes Gund in the background, image: bizbash
When it came time to do the ceremonial groundbreaking, there was some not completely scripted bustling around, as everyone got their hardhats on, and when someone tried to hand a hardhat to the mayor, his security guards sprung forward and hissed to each other intensely: “Oh shit, not the hat, not the hat.” because Giuliani was still in his combover era. He ended up not wearing a hardhat.
After the photo-opp broke up and the mayor left, gladhanding and milling about began, and I grabbed one of the unclaimed hardhats from Taniguchi’s end of the dais. [A shovel seemed a bit much.]
Gothamist‘s November 2004 photo of the inaugural installation of the atrium, with Barnett Newman’s Broken Obelisk looking great, and Monet’s Water Lilies looking flat af
The dedication of the Taniguchi addition took place in November 2004 in the Marron Atrium. I brought the hardhat in my eight month-old daughter’s stroller. As the event was breaking up, I took her to meet the Taniguchis, and presented the hardhat to him to sign, which he graciously did. I’ll post a pic of it when I can.
This was originally called the Matisse Stairwell. My 2004 copy of this Timothy Hursley photo is 250 pixels wide.
The stairway with the window on the atrium; the separate window onto the atrium that gathers dust beautifully; the windows onto the city; the restored entrance of Goodwin & Stone’s building; the porches on the Garden; and the corner where he resolved Cesar Pelli’s otherwise unrooted tower in the lobby and the Garden, are my favorite elements of Taniguchi’s design. They’re all moments where Taniguchi sought to integrate his space and structure with its context and history.
The galleries have always been fine for me; I think I was cured of misplaced nostalgia for the Pelli-era or earlier galleries by a conversation with Terry Riley, where he relayed a conversation with Taniguchi. After the finalists had been selected, Riley suggested to Taniguchi that he reconsider his more reverential approach to the existing galleries. He showed plans of the evolving museum, and how the galleries echoed the dimensions and plans of the rowhouses that had been demolished with each expansion. This constraint was long gone, Riley showed, and the new building could—and should—take its program from the art and the curators who would use it. I remember thinking this was profound and correct. But over time, I’ve also come to recognize that those phantom townhouses didn’t just impact the floorplan, but the kinesthetic experience of viewing art in the spaces they influenced. MoMA’s galleries felt a certain way, and that has changed as the building and the institution evolved.
Taniguchi and Serra and St Thomas Church, 2005
Taniguchi delivered beautifully on what he was asked to do, opening up the museum to the city as a spectacular stage for the likes of Richard Serra and Marina Abramovic. It set the stage for what followed, too: the real estate maxxing, the Nouvel supertower, and Diller + Scofidio turning the townhouse-sized Folk Art Museum into a void. [No bronze tables yet, though.] I wonder how often Taniguchi visited.
Painting is not photography, so the date of 1930-40 for a painting that includes a reference to a broadway show that only ran in 1925 is plausible, given other evidence. Merry Christmas and Happy Hannukah.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Cy Twombly, V Day(s) Wait at Jianyuguan, 1980, one of only two images of one of only two copies of this artist book documented online, one at the Menil, and the one from whence I ganked this image, a 2023 catalogue by the London rare book dealer Reed Sims
In the fall of 1979 Cy Twombly traveled through the Soviet Union and Afghanistan, which seems unexpected, though probably not as unexpected as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December. The suite of works on paper inspired, we’re told, by this trip, Five Days Wait at Jianyuguan, was exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1980. Twombly also published a little artist book of the same name, a portfolio of sixteen mounted reproductions, in an edition of 50.
Jianyuguan, or Jianyu Pass, is a fortress at the western end of the Great Wall, , and the Silk Road’s historic gateway to China. For Chinese people, meanwhile, Jianyuguan evokes exile, where the desert awaits those expelled through the “gate to hell.”
Nothing in Twombly’s chronology or the texts for the Biennale works make mention of the artist going into China, and I cannot imagine a less plausible route into China for an American artist in 1979 than traveling overland from Khazakhstan, across the Gobi Desert, to Jianyuguan. The westbound route is even less plausible, and not just because what lay on the other side, Xinjiang province, was now a part of China.
It’s safe to assume, then, that Twombly was not the one doing the waiting. So this title, and perhaps all the works, reference a literary source, perhaps an adventurer’s travelogue from a bygone era. The titles of the various works in the portfolio do sound like captions: “Uygur taking tea on arrival”; “Harem”; “Leaving the land of men”; “Preparing for departure.” So maybe Twombly was referencing a set of images or illustrations.
And speaking of preparing for departure: the Jianyuguan works will be reunited for the first time since Venice, and the artist’s book will be reissued in facsimile (of a facsimile), for an exhibition next month at Gagosian’s 980 Madison gallery. It seems likely that this will be the last exhibition in this soon-to-be-bygone space, as the building will become the headquarters of the Bloomberg Foundation.
[day after update: Claudio traced the Reed Sims example to the Paris estate auction of dealer and friend of Cy Robert William “Willie” Burke, where it sold for EUR1529. Nice return on a four-month investment.]
January 24, 2025 Update: .the exhibition is open. The facsimile is released—in an edition of 500—as is a catalogue/folio. And an account by Nicola Del Roscio of the Russia/Afghanistan leg of the trip with the artist and ten unnamed Sicilians, presented at a 2012 Twombly symposium at the University of Cologne, and published in 2014 in the proceedings, Cy Twombly: Image, Text, Paratext, is online. It sounds precarious in the extreme. Del Roscio mentions several sculptures Twombly made in response to the Afghan trip, after the Russian invasion. But there is no mention of Jianguyuan.
More interesting, perhaps, actually extraordinary, is Thierry Greub’s project to index and map out all of Twombly’s inscribed poetic and literary references throughout his career, tracking his volume, sources, and shifts therein. One work cited as evidence of Twombly’s engagement in the 1980s with Arab poets is the flagship work for this Gagosian show, a 1986 acrylic on wood titled Paesaggio, which contains a quote from the 10th century poet al Ma’arri.
[February 2025 UPDATE: Five Day Wait has arrived, it is beautiful, bound and cased, but very slight, a slim volume of visual verse, with a tipped in plate per page, and the works list, and the colophon, and that’s it.]
Lorenzo Monaco (Piero di Giovanni), Saint Jerome in the Wilderness, c. 1398-1400, tempera and gold on poplar, 23 x 34 cm, put up for sale at Sotheby’s in 2005
In 1965, during its 50-year disappearance into a private collection beginning in 1929, this painting of Jerome in a stylized grotto-like cave was reattributed from Pietro Lorenzetti to Lorenzo Monaco, and proposed as one of five predella panels from an altarpiece/polyptych Lorenzo executed for a chapel at Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence between 1398 and 1400.
Piero di Giovanni’s Carmine Polyptych as it would look if everyone lent their pieces to the Galleria dell’Accademia like they were asked. via wikipedia
It turned up at Sotheby’s in 1988, then again in 2005, and was to be part of the first reuniting of the polyptych in the 2006 Lorenzo retrospective at the Galleria dell’Accademia. It didn’t sell, and I don’t know that it was lent to the show, but the wilderness geology of the various predella panels would look great together.
from Mark Leckey’s Carry me into the wilderness, 2022, via bandcamp
When Mark Leckey made a gold-ground painting for his 2022 audio work, Carry me into the wilderness, he gave a shout out to Lorenzo Monaco, where he got the cave, but he squared it up, and added a hilltop city or citadel. And the hermit saint who wasn’t there was Saint Anthony, the Desert Father and ur-Hermit. While the possible theological nuances of Leckey’s saintswapping are lost on me, I find this image of the empty hermit’s cave resonates with the central sample of Carry me into the wilderness: a recording Leckey made of himself being overcome by a moment of natural beauty while in a park during the lockdown phase of the COVID pandemic. The liberated hermit here, was him, and us.
