Jasper Johns Watermark

photo of two open copies of jasper johns artist book in a vitrine, with a thickly printed black cross hatch pattern facing a kind of bodily text by samuel beckett, at gagosian in 2026
two examples from the edition of 250+30AP+20HC of Foirades/Fizzles, by Samuel Beckett, with etchings and lithographs by Jasper Johns, 1976, at Gagosian

It never really clicked for whatever reason, but maybe it was seeing two copies of Jasper Johns’ illustrated collaboration with Samuel Beckett in the Gagosian crosshatches show; the book just blew my mind. What a gorgeous object. And stuffed—absolutely stuffed—with Johns etchings and lithographs, and wrapped in another lithograph.

Foirades/Fizzles got a lot of attention immediately, and its origin story has been retold over the years, its anecdotes mined for insights. [This discussion in 2025 in Gagosian Quarterly is good, if a bit hype.] There was a whole book and show about it, before my time. I somehow missed how different it is from a traditional artist-illustrated edition of a text.

jasper johns 1972 untitled painting in four parts has two panels at the center with red and black flagstone shapes in or on a field of white flagstone tracery. on the far left panel a cross hatch pattern roughly the same scale as the flagstones in orange, green, and purple. on the far right, a cast assemblage of boards and body parts affixed to a tan background. this painting is in the collection of the museum ludwig now in cologne
Jasper Johns, Untitled, 1972. Oil, encaustic, and collage on canvas with objects (four panels), 72 × 192 1/4 in. (182.9 × 488.3 cm) overall. Museum Ludwig, Cologne, via The Brooklyn Rail’s conversation around the 2021-22 Johns retrospectives

Johns asked Beckett for unpublished texts to work with; Beckett’s response was to translate texts he’d originally written in French, only some of which had been published. Johns’s prints used elements of what he considered his most successful painting to date, Untitled (1972), part of his now-recognized process of continuing to explore elements from paintings in other mediums. And he worked with Picasso’s printer, who opened up an etching world to him. The result is its own entirely separate, integrated thing, inextricable from his entire practice.

an open spread from jasper johns and samuel beckett's book foirades-fizzles, with the outline shape of a torso unpainted/unprinted, and the stenciled word torso underneath, and a spraypainted splatter and drip spot that covers it all, except the whole thing is an etching. some beckett text on the facing page. this copy from moma shows how oil from the thickly printed ink was absorbed like a ghostly monotype into the facing page.
Jasper Johns, Torso from Foirades/Fizzles, Folio 17, aquatint with so much ink it made that ghost print on the facing page of MoMA’s copy

Ironically, Foirades/Fizzles‘ distinctiveness comes in spite of Johns using a classic orange/purple/green crosshatch print that appears in the endpapers and box lining for at least two other book covers: a screenprint on a 1977 Brooke Alexander catalogue, and a lithograph dustjacket on the 1977 Whitney exhibition catalogue. So maybe I can cut myself a little slack if I’d mostly seen it in artist book auctions looking familiar, and routine, when it was exactly the opposite.

this example of jasper johns and samuel beckett's artist book sold at sothebys in 2021. the grey fabric box is standing open behind it, with a purple tassel pull that matches the orange, green, and purple cross hatch lithograph lining the two faces of the box. the book is open, with impossibly sexy and tactile edges of handmade paper, to a two-page spread print by johns, with a crosshatch design on the left and a flagstone motif on the right. but this is here really for the paper
ed 44/250 of Johns/Beckett’s Foirades/Fizzles, 1976, sold at Sotheby’s in 2021

And as the photo of an edition sold at Sotheby’s indicates, this book is a deliriously sexy object. It is the paper. A raw sheaf of gorgeous paper with an image surprise on every leaf. And I somehow missed until this weekend that the paper for Foirades/Fizzles, from Moulin Richard de Bas, is watermarked with Beckett’s initials and Johns’s signature. Twenty years before Yvon Lambert had Twombly’s handwriting turned into a watermark—for an On Kawara artist book, which is weirder the longer I think about it—Jasper Johns had paper made with his own signature—AND Samuel Beckett’s. I thought I appreciated Johns’s paper game, and I did not.

Anne Truitt Sculptures Are, Too

a scan of an art review published jan. 31 2003 in time out new york, of an anne truitt sculpture show at danese gallery, written by rachel harrison, includes an installation photo of three square columnar sculptures: one hot pink, one dark red and slightly shorter, and the third a deep blue black, in a white walled gallery space.
Rachel Harrison’s review of Anne Truitt’s 2003 show at Danese, as published in Time Out New York, 31 Jan 2003. the small installation photo includes Nouvelle (2001), now at the Buffalo AKG; Kiyomizu (2001), whereabouts unknown; and Twining Court II (2002), at the NGA.

A few weeks ago, when I saw something figural or human-scaled in some columnar Rachel Harrison sculptures in Dijon that also reminded me of Anne Truitt’s columns, I had to also realize I’d been embarrassingly bitchy about Blake Gopnik reading Anne Truitt’s sculptures the same way once in the Washington Post.

Well, since then, a very archivally minded Truitt admirer sent me an even earlier review of a Truitt show that makes exactly the same point. A review written by Rachel Harrison.

I was just going to quote the part where Harrison compared visiting the show at Danese to arriving at a party where the guests were all wearing deceptively monochrome outfits, but then it turns out neither the show, nor the gallery, nor the review, not even the installation photo of three new (2001-02) sculptures are available online. So I’m posting a scan above and the full text after the jump, and will beg Harrison’s lawyers for forgiveness if they come calling.

The irony is, when I received this old review, I was sure I’d blogged about it and forgotten it. I did not. I’d misremembered a Times review about Truitt and Agnes Martin having simultaneous shows across the street from each other. But Time Out was huge at the time, and I’m still convinced it was the beginning of my awareness of Harrison’s appreciation of Truitt, which was in turn instrumental in my appreciation of Harrison.

Continue reading “Anne Truitt Sculptures Are, Too”

Read Black Block at Triple Canopy

Rachel Hunter Himes’ incredible essay for Triple Canopy, Black Block, sat in my tabs for weeks, but after hearing her talk about it with Helen Molesworth on the DZ podcast, I realized it’s not the kind of thing to be sleeping on. It ended up changing the essay I’d been so stuck on in crucial ways.

Working back from the shiny, happy, BTS artist lifestyle genre of art writing, Himes traces out a historic and ongoing failure of critics and institutions to engage substantively with the work of Black artists. It’s thorough and incisive, both then and now, and kind of devastating. But there’s a liberation in the realizations she prompts, even if there’s also a sting of complicity.

It’s her account of the most recent past, where urgency and relevance and representation have dominated, that hit me the hardest right now, as I’ve tried to figure out what difference art, artists, and art institutions can make in the fascistic world we’re inhabiting. The tl;mr [too long; must read], though, is that we’re not gonna get out of this by buying a painting or putting on a show:

Continue reading “Read Black Block at Triple Canopy”

Albert Gleizes, New York Cubist

a cubist inspired painting of a new york skyscraper against a dark brushy background. the bldg is composed of overlapping fragments and traced outlines of various buildings, many painted in different colors and patterns, making a jumbly collage effect. by albert gleizes at the ny historical
Albert Gleizes, New York, 1916, oil on canvas, 21 3/4 × 13 in., a promised gift to The NY Historical

Discharged from the army for medical reasons and too depressed to stay in Paris, Cubist painter Albert Gleizes left for New York City in 1915. He painted this sweet little portrait of the city as a fragmented skyscraper. The NY Historical [Society], which is expecting its real estate developer owner to give the painting as promised, interprets the text elements extensively, but doesn’t mention how the cornice looks kind of like the Flatiron Building.

a painting of a bright pale pink studio filled with stylized, elongated figures in fancy dress variously standing, sitting, and lounging on chairs and sofas, or engaging with paintings on the wall or easels, a depiction of a party in florine stettheimer's studio
Florine Stettheimer, Studio Party (or Soirée), 1917-1919, 28 x 30 in., collection Yale University Art Gallery

Anyway, Gleizes eventually found his way into Florine Stettheimer’s circle—and her painting of a party in her studio. That’s him in the lower left, wearing brown in front of the painting.

Albert Gleizes, New York, 1916 [nyhistory.org]

The Sculptures Have Had A Tendency To Disintegrate

a block of yellowed foam is curled up like a cinnamon roll and held into an uneven spiral by a cord, embedded in its folds, a sculpture by john chamblerlain that is disintegrating and covered with cat hair, sold at freeman's auction in march 2026
John Chamberlain, Liu Ting, 1966, foam and cord, 17 x 22 x 24 1/2 in., sold yesterday at Freeman’s

John Chamberlain’s foam sculptures are some of my favorite works of art in existence, partly because they are crumbling before our eyes. The pace at which they will cease to exist is fascinating. What could possibly be done to thwart it? Nothing? What’s being done? Nothing?

Yesterday a Chamberlain foam sculpture that belonged to Seth Siegelaub sold in Philadelphia. It was $11,520, which was within the estimate, but whatever. It feels impossible to say what it is worth [sic], but that’s not so interesting. A bottle of wine or a superbowl ticket could cost that much, and it’s tedious to hear about.

The point here is, this is an artwork whose fate is known, and finite, and whose condition is extraordinary. From Freeman’s [emphasis added because holy smokes]: “As noted in the catalogue raisonné, because of the vulnerability of the material to light and air, the sculptures have had a tendency to disintegrate. Piece has yellowed with age and is crumbling throughout, as expected. There is an approximately 5 inch wide crater and some other, smaller areas of loss. Scattered surface soiling and hairs throughout. Areas of discoloration throughout, possibly inherent to medium. Inscribed with inventory number “Dwan 1990” and “G SS-15″ in ink. Please request additional images.”

I am not an uptight person, not easily grossed out or shocked, I’m pretty go with the flow, I think. Until I read the phrase, “hairs throughout.” Did I request additional images? Oh, absolutely.

Because hairs throughout notwithstanding, these disintegrating, crumbling sculptures demand to be seen in the round, from every possible angle. And they reward that exploration by almost always refusing to disclose how they were made, or what their constituent parts–a block of foam and a cord—began as. This opacity is often missing in Chamberlain’s car part sculptures, which somehow reveal their sources more readily.

Plus they stay bent. With these foam chunks and a lasso, I feel like Chamberlain executed a virtuosic sculptural gesture, and froze it, trapping a tension inside. Have any of them ever been released and unfurled? Have any been rebound? Refabricated?

These extraordinary, ephemeral sculptures, made of a simple, even banal operation that is nonetheless unspecifiable, unknowable, unrepeatable, are all disintegrating. How many are already gone? What is being done to study and document and understand them while they still survive? It’s like waiting until someone’s in hospice to ask for their oral history. There should be an international mission to scan and model and record Chamberlain’s foam sculptures, systematic experiments to repeat the form and fold and tension of their wrapping, mapping the choreography, building the vocabulary, live performances by Chamberlain re-enactors. So much that could be done before they…

Too bad no one’s gonna do any of that for an $11,000 sculpture.

Lot 20, 24 Mar 2026, John Chamberlain, Liu Ting, 1966, est. $8-12,000 [freemansauction]
Previously, related: The Making of A John Chamberlain Sofa

Cy Twombly, Gre

an invitation postcard with a large graph paper grid is overprinted with a jankier than usual handwrittent text by cy twombly announcing an exhibition from 16 oct to 18 nov 82 at yvon lambert 5 rue grenier st laz 75003 paris, as preserved by the design gurus of present and correct dot com of london and the internet

The Bloomsbury design gurus of Present & Correct just posted this c. 1982 invitation Cy Twombly made for his fifth—and last—solo show at Galerie Yvon Lambert.

The galerie was near the Pompidou, on Rue du Grenier-Saint-Lazare, which puts me three letters closer to a collaged greg.org watermark in Twombly’s handwriting. Although I will keep searching for less jagged examples that don’t look like Twombly wrote them on his lap while riding the Métro.

Cy Twombly, 1982 [presentandcorrect, shoutout @Artologica.net aka Michele Banks for the heads up]
Previously, very much related: Cy Twombly Watermark

Antonello da Messina Pocket Painting

I’d been thinking about the idea of ditching the frame before this Roy/Rashid Johnson/Rubens situation came up a couple of weeks ago.

In the run-up to the Old Masters sale in February, Sotheby’s dropped this video of the incredibly named Christopher Apostle, SVP, International Head of Old Masters, with the star lot, a double-sided devotional painting by Antonello da Messina.

a sad millennial looking jesus in pain is painted shirtless head tilted, against a black background in a small devotional painting by da messina, here in a tasteful but rather thick gold frame, because it is double sided and small enough to fit in your pocket ig
Antonello da Messina, Ecce Homo; St Jerome, c 1463-65, oil on panel, 8 x 5 7/8 in., sold but not auctioned at Sothebys in February 2026

The tiny panel with Christ, Ecce Homo, on one side and St Jerome in Penitence on the other, is smaller than an iPad, and dates from 1463-65. Which would be several years after Antonello returned to Messina from Naples, where exposure to van Eyck and his circle brought oil paint to his attention. [Though this panel is made in tempera grassa, a transitional medium in which oil is added to egg-based tempera.]

screenshot of a video over the shoulder of a white bearded white guy in a dark suit cradling a frameless panel painting of jesus suffering, while he's trying to sell it at sotheby's
screenshot of Sotheby’s Christopher Apostle rawdogging Antonello da Messina’s Ecce Homo, via

Which is not the point right now, the point is Apostle is sitting in some church, rhapsodizing on the painting while spinning it naked, in his hands, and honestly.

The video ends with Apostle in full render unto Caesar mode, talking about how 500 years of devotion have imbued this panel with a spiritual charge:

“If Christ could speak in this painting, he’s saying, ‘I’m just like you. I am you.”
[cut to]
OLD MASTERS
presented by
QATAR EXECUTIVE

EXPERIENCE LUXURY WITHOUT LIMITS

ULTRA-MODERN JETS

BESPOKE SERVICE

SEAMLESS CONNECTIVITY

BOOK NOW

Incredible stuff. Then just a few days later, after Italy intervened, and the painting had been withdrawn, it came back. Ben Luke asked Danh Vo his penultimate question, what one work of art would he live with? Vo replied:
“I’m not that type. I need to live with a lot of things. But you know, the Messina. Thank goodness the Italian state bought it, but recently the last privately held Messina painting was on auction. And, I tell you, I was calling all my galleries, ready to prostitute myself. And that was actually interesting, I would sell everything I have if I could live with that pocket painting, I thinking that would be enough. Did you see that the Jerome on the back was kissed so much that he disappeared!”
“Yes, what an amazing fact!”
“Oh, my God. So good. So good.”
“Wonderful.”
“A painting kissed away. You can’t get it better.”

screenshot of an over the shoulder shot of a white bearded white guy in a dark suit cradling a frameless wood panel painting by da messina, this is the back of the painting, which depicts a kneeling st jerome in the wilderness beating his chest with a rock. the detailed grotto-based landscape is apparently evocative of sicily, says the sotheby's guy trying to sell this incredible thing.
screenshot of Christopher Apostle and the faceless Messina St. Jerome, via Sotheby’s

“Pocket paintings” “A painting kissed away.”

As if I didn’t love a great verso painting before now. To live with art out of the frame is all I ask. And double sided. And in my pocket.

A Brush With…Danh Vo [theartnewspaper]
05 Feb 2026, Lot 18, Antonello da Messina, Ecce Homo; St Jerome [withdrawn][sothebys]

Margiela Homeschool Drip

the paris gallery space of three star books with high ceilings, a curved mezzanine, and high windows above a display wall has two racks of upcycled clothes, and several outfits on mannequins, all by the artist cheryl donegan.
Installation view, Cheryl Donegan, Margiela Homeschool, at Three Star Books,

Some people made sourdough to get through the pandemic. Cheryl Donegan went through her closets and Margiela’d the hell out of what she found: 90s-era Dries van Notens, her grandmother’s doilies, her kids’ soccer kit. Six years into her one-of-one fashion upcycling project, Donegan has opened Margiela Homeschool, an exhibition at Three Star Books in Paris. It runs through April.

a screenshot of the instagram account of margiela homeschool with a post of a pair of black nylon ultimate frisbee shorts with a red and white patterned silk scarf pinned asymmetrically to each hip, crossing the front of the shorts like a bandana, the creation of cheryl donegan for her son
Screenshot

For those unable to rifle through the racks IRL, the collection is also documented piece by piece on the Margiela Homeschool instagram account. There are skirts made from dress shirts. dresses made from track pants. Lagerfeld tuxedo pants and an antique tablerunner turned into a loincloth. And the Ultimate shorts with accent scarf she made for her son, perhaps as penance for chopping up all his old t-shirts. Parents. Kids.

Rirkrit Tiravanija in Milano

the colorful but horribly lit interior of a childsized house with yellow ikea play table and chairs, blue scalloped wallpaper, and a couple of stuffed animals on the yellow table is the interior of an artwork by rirkrit tiravanija in sweden in 1995. beyond a row of windows, actual adults mill about, indicating the scale of the space, and the fact that it's inside a museum space of some kind. this photo is from the pirelli hangar, another art space where this house will be installed, this time in milan

The Pirelli Hangar Bicocca in BF industrial Milan [but in a different BF industrial Milan from the Fondazione Prada, so plan accordingly] is about to open a show of Rirkrit Tiravanija’s architectural projects.

The pic above is from Untitled, 1995, which was a half-scale version of a modernist house by Sigurd Lewerentz which Tiravanija built at the Rooseum in Malmö. MoMA’s 1997 caption described the interior decorations as “by the children of the Storken day care center ages 5-7,” but that was clearly preceded by a trip to Ikea.

eight swedish 5-7 year olds hang out in front of or in the second floor window of a diminutive modernist box-style house, created at half-scale in a gallery in malmo in 1995. the house is clad in unfinished pine and the four kids outside, at least, are clad in matching aprons with bears on them. they're all presumably taking a break from decorating the inside of the house as part of rirkrit tiravanija's art project. the caption under the photo says as much, as this whole thing is screenshot from a 1997 moma brochure
Collaborators: photo of Rirkrit’s 1995 Malmö installation from the brochure for his 1997 MoMA Project

Which makes Ikea founder Ingvar Kamprad, whose connections to the nazis were first disclosed in 1994, a more tangential nazi than Philip Johnson, who designed both the Glass House Tiravanija replicated at half-scale and MoMA’s sculpture garden where he put it, but anyway. I’m excited to see the show.

Rirkrit Tiravanija, The house that Jack built, 26 mar – 26 jul 2026 [pirellihangarbicocca.org]
Projects 78: Rirkrit Tiravanija [moma.org]
Previously, related: Transactional Aesthetics, or the highly collectible Rirkrit Tiravanija

William Doriani Loved Flag Day

a very naive style horizontal painting of a flag day parade in which 3 columns of identical white boys in blackshirts carrying identical us flags march along the bottom half of the picture, while the top half is filled with yellow and red pompom like trees or flowering shrubs or decorations i don't know. by william doriani, in moma's collection now
But they’re OUR goose-stepping blackshirt: William Doriani, Flag Day, 1935, oil on canvas, 12 1/2 x 38 5/8 in., donated to MoMA in 1967

In the 1930s Sidney Janis was a garmento and an art collector who joined the junior committee of The Museum of Modern Art, which actually organized and sponsored shows, including one of his own collection, which the museum people did feel weird about, so he agreed to take his name off it. And there was a show of what Janis called Primitive Art, because, as the Modernist thinking of the time went, self-taught painters had access to individualist intuition and aesthetic purity untainted by History and the Academy and the pollution of ever having stepped foot into a museum. And Janis became known for scouring the countryside and the outer boroughs, running down tips on self-taught artists, whose work he either bought up en masse, or whose careers he quietly shepherded into the galleries of his friends.

Anyway Janis found William Doriani’s paintings on a handrail on MacDougal Street during an art street fair in the Village, then he set him up with a show, and started hyping him as one of his Primitivist finds. Others include Morris Hirshfield and Grandma Moses [who, tbf, was getting art world recognition before Janis began promoting her.]

According to the only thing I can find instantly, Janis’s 12-page chapter on him in the 1942 exhibition catalogue They Taught Themselves: American Primitive Painters of the 20th Century, Doriani had been an opera singer, and—oh hey, just like Jasper Johns—he had a dream to make a painting, and then he woke up and painted it. That was in 1931. Many of Doriani’s paintings depicted theater, performance, and spectacle.

But the reason he painted Flag Day in 1935 was because when he returned to the US after studying and singing in Europe for 13 years, the day he got home was Flag Day. And he just loves America and a parade and the flag and Flag Day . “And,” Janis concluded, “if the marchers resemble French school boys doing the German goose-step, it is immaterial, for the flags they carry are unmistakable.”

Janis went on to become an extremely influential dealer—the only dealer, I think, who was also a MoMA trustee—and he and his wife donated around a hundred works to the museum in 1967, including Flag Day.

This dealer/trustee/donor thing, I knew all about, but not the Janis’s prewar history. Or Doriani, who I saw for the first time in a tumblr post a couple of weeks ago. [ZOMG look at this one some Janis heirs just donated to the Folk Art Museum, it’s title is Two Flags, but one of them is somehow not the Ukrainian flag of Doriani’s birth.]

I just wanted to post one quick blurb about one interesting painting, and now the rickety shallowness of this entire historiographic process just really bugs me.

School Bus Yellow Corner Piece

a square drawn with a thin line of yellow pencil near the edge of a square sheet of paper, a sketch by fred sandback, selling at rago in march 2026
School Bus Yellow Corner Piece, 6′ x 6′, 1970, 24 x 24 cm, selling at Rago

I don’t think Fred Sandback drawings automatically serve as diagrams for a sculptural installation. But if the angry ghost of Fred Sandback haunts the buyer of this sketch for stretching a six-foot square of school bus yellow elastic cord across a corner, at least they get to meet the artist, right?

Lot 205, 25 Mar 2026, Fred Sandback, School Bus Yellow Corner Piece, est $3-5,000 [ragoarts]
Related: Yellow Corner Piece, 1970, gift of Virginia Dwan, 1986 [walkerart]

For Sale: The Spiral Jetty, 16mm

a pale grey plastic film case for a single reel 16mm film, with a white, typed label affixed to it that reads, the spiral jetty by robert smithson, selling at rago arts in march 2026
The Spiral Jetty by Robert Smithson, in the can, selling on 18 Mar 2026 at Rago

I never thought I’d be back in the bidding on The Spiral Jetty business, but here we are.

A 16mm print of Robert Smithson’s film, The Spiral Jetty that belonged to a retired art history professor is selling at Rago next week. The condition of the 50-year-old film seems fine, but who knows if it’s playable? How many film prints are there? Does it matter? Is this an artifact people want [to spend $6-8,000 on]? [update: Rago responded that the film has not been tested on a projector but that the acetate looks to be in good condition, with no physical impediments to playing. Also, by the morning of the sale, it had a bid of $4,500, so it’s an artifact somebody wants to spend money on! update: it sold for $11,520.]

Is it 20x better than just buying the DVD from EAI? Oh, wait, now you really have to be an educational institution to buy it? Are any retired art professors selling the DVDs, too?

Benning x Bess x de Maria

a james benning photo of the end of a circular brass rod flush with the speckled grey pavement of the platz in kassel germany is framed in a handmade wood slat frame such that it resembles a forrest bess painting of a cosmological star or sun or something in the night sky. a photo of this object is in turn matted and framed in a wide margin, slim profile maple frame befitting a standard conceptual photo edition published in germany in 2020, as this one is.
James Benning, after Bess (solid brass round rod), 2020, digital photo print of a framed photo, framed, 17,3 cm x 20,3 cm, ed. 10 + 1AP, 1HC, eur 1500, somehow still available

We’re probably all off the hook for seeing it because the Fridericianvm’s Forrest Bess retrospective opened in February 2020. But we should all be very aware of the related edition made by James Benning.

Benning loves an extreme pursuit of solitude where he finds it. And in Kassel, he found it in Walter de Maria’s Vertical Earth Kilometer, which he turned into one of Bess’s mysterious, little cosmological pictures, complete with a handmade frame.

Any further similarities to Bess or connections to de Maria’s rod, I leave buried in the platz.

[breaking tumblr update] @voorwerk proposed it, and measurements confirm that Benning’s print is a life-size image of de Maria’s 2cm-wide rod. A Vertical Earth Kilometer Facsimile Object, if you will.]

James Benning: After Bess (solid brass round rod), 2020 [fridericianum.org]