Looking something up about the history of stained glass, I found this detail of a 13th century window of stained glass makers making the stained glass window, which,
Hi Bart, I Am Making A Stained Glass Window!
l’Ottoman Necessaire d’Hermès
In January I was watching an Hermès making of video for something I don’t remember in the Necessaires d’Hermès collection, I think, and there were brief shots of this incredible-looking object. I scoured the website to figure out what it was, and it looks like it’s not available in the US, which serves us right, frankly.
But it turns out to be an ottoman, but it also has storage, and a handle. The whole top slides off, and it can hold a blanket, as these screenshots show. For something that doesn’t seem that capacious or actually portable, it sure is beautiful. I will keep it in the necessaires column.
Weirdly, the ottoman gets kind of lost or ignored in the Salone 2013 debut of Philippe Nigro’s capsule collection, les Necessaires d’Hermès.
OK, it was a Necessaires video, which is on the product page, and I had to have been watching it for the Groom wardrobe stand, or the Long Bench, a name which loses the sense of the French: Cheval d’Arçon, pommel horse.
Les Necessaires d’Hermes Ottoman, by Philippe Nigro, $CA19,100 [hermes]
Caillebotte: Painting Men [And Dog]
Fellas, is it gay to depict athletic male bodies in form-revealing outfits in suggestive work that makes room for a desiring gaze that is not necessarily male or heterosexual? Is the question not quite asked and not not answered by the Gustave Caillebotte retrospective that has come from the Musée d’Orsay to the Getty. William Poundstone has a rundown of the LA version of the show, its premise, shifting titles—Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men is the Getty’s low-key hilarious variation—and the wall text I paraphrased in the first sentence.
What’s important is, the show also includes Caillebotte’s second best painting of a floor: his 1886 portrait of his dog Paul on a Persian rug, that didn’t sell in London a little while back.
Gustave Caillebotte: “Painting Men” [lacmaonfire s/o bremser]
Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men is at the Getty through May 2025 [getty.edu]
Vija Celmins Postcard
The day after humans landed on the moon, Vija Celmins collaged a photo of a penguin on a rock onto a photo of the lunar surface, onto a postcard of the moon, and she sent it to Wallace Berman.
According to the catalogue for the latest of Matthew Marks Gallery’s 100 Drawings exhibitions, held in 2019, Celmins had reached out to Berman to compliment his 1968 show at LACMA.
But that show ran from April-June, and the entire message on the back of this card was, “Cheers.” So this was not about that. It was just a, “Hey, penguin on the moon!” collage sent to a collage artist who was close to the hallucinatory witches shadowing JPL. Can you even imagine? I cannot.
The Light String Going On And Off
As my comment on Kriston Capps’ insta shows, it’s somehow always a surprise to see a Felix Gonzalez-Torres light string with the lights off. My reaction led Kriston to doublecheck with the National Portrait Gallery whether it’d been OK to post [tl;dr it was, but hold on], and it sent me looking for more.
Of course, it goes back to the beginning, where they were shown on and off, side by side. Gonzalez-Torres’ whole point of his works was that the owner [or exhibitor] was to decide how to display them, and that includes whether to turn them on. The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation has photos of an unlit “Untitled” (Tim Hotel), 1992, in a collector’s home, which feels like the normal, private state. Maybe it gets turned on for company, which raises the question of public vs. private presentation as well as space.
Because obviously, they look the sexiest when they’re on, and it’s understandable for curators of public exhibitions to want that glow. But that allure also underscores the impact and importance of seeing them turned off sometimes.
Continue reading “The Light String Going On And Off”Dominique de Menil’s Cousin Hung Their Rothko Upside Down
Speaking of hanging paintings upside down, a few days ago Claudio Santambrogio shared a link to a Sotheby’s Magazine story by Lucas Oliver Mill about a Franz Kline that Cy Twombly’s brother-in-law had hung upside down. In it he mentioned Pierre & Sã0 Schlumberger “famously [hanging] their Rothko upside down in the entryway of their Paris home out of pure preference.”
Which sounds like new information from last July, when Mill posted Horst’s photos of the Schlumbergers’ hall on his Instagram @collectorwalls. Then it wasn’t famously, but “Curiously,” and it was unclear if the inversion was “by personal choice or perhaps by mistake.”
Well, when Horst shot their house for Vogue in 1974, the Schlumbergers were the life of the party in Paris; São was the biggest single customer of couture in the world; and in 2014, Sotheby’s liquidated their estate, including the Rothko. So no one in that crowd was going to say the Rothko hang was anything but a masterful decorating gambit, sir.
Continue reading “Dominique de Menil’s Cousin Hung Their Rothko Upside Down”Phone It In, Vol. 1: an Art Writing Mixtape
Thanks to everyone who called in, and who shared the word about this little audio experiment, which I’ve called an anthology, a compilation, and now a mixtape. Phone It In, Vol. 1 [mp3] is also a reading list, with sources and links to the included quotes. As you’ll see from the playlist below, there are some classics, some fresh finds, and even a breaking news story.
Whatever it is, if you come across some art-related writing that sticks with you for whatever reason, please call and share a bit of it at 34-SOUVENIR, and I’ll bundle those up, too, and put them out here.
As I was putting the tracks together, I discovered that when I first downloaded the calls, I’d accidentally overwritten Carolina Miranda’s call over everyone who called after her. And for a minute I thought, her call is such a mic drop, I really should just go with that. Instead, I moved it to the end, one of the only chronological shifts in the compilation. [Miranda’s cold open is a lol clapback to my voicemail greeting, which I shortened from a full explanation of the project to “Whadja find??”]
Miranda’s quote, from Annie-B Parson, really laid bare the unspoken essence of what I was hoping for here: not just favorite line, or a moment of memorable or powerful writing, but something that you read now that had an impact now.
It feels like an impossible ask, or at least a daunting one, but I really wanted to hear examples, even snippets, where art-related writing mattered in this dire af moment. I think everyone came through, and I am psyched and grateful.
Play or download Phone It In, Vol. 1, an art writing mixtape from greg.org [mp3, 7.4 mb, 15:20]
Continue reading “Phone It In, Vol. 1: an Art Writing Mixtape”This Is The Time To Hang Your Johns Flags Upside Down
When I first thought of it, it was still within the framework that has dominated art critical discussion of Jasper Johns’ work since the beginning: Is it an upside down flag painting or a painting of an upside down flag?
But this is not the moment for glib rhetorical dualities. Right now an upside down flag does not have to be either “a signal of dire distress in instances of extreme danger to life or property” or a political protest. With active attacks on democratic institutions and the rule of law under the US Constitution, it can be and must be, unfortunately, both.
Continue reading “This Is The Time To Hang Your Johns Flags Upside Down”Johns Flag On Orange Field, 2025
in times of dire distress
Continue reading “Johns Flag On Orange Field, 2025”Cy Twombly—Rainer Speck at Maison D’Art
Paper 1959-1987, which traveled from Bonn to Fondació la Caixa. image: Maison D’Art
I’ve been hearing about it from people in LA and seeing it on various instagrams, and the Maison D’Art exhibition of Dr. Rainer Speck’s collection and correspondence with Cy Twombly sounds like an absolute winner. It runs through May; I bought the little catalogue instantly.
Speck rolled up on Twombly in Rome in 1970 as a young collector, and the two kept in touch:
A selection of letters from Twombly to Speck is the foundation of this project. For Speck, the thrill of collecting lies in interrogating the ways that art, reading, and writing influence one another; these letters are a personal manifestation of this interest. In placing these letters alongside the ephemera and artworks they discuss, this exhibition and its publication strive to materialize these conversations and to create a tangible transcript of their relationship.
With their layers of text and imagery, Twombly’s works function as another kind of transcript, merging poetic and painterly elements and creating subtle visual palimpsests. Twombly’s works evoke the literary, mythical, and historical worlds of Western culture and interweave them with his abstract gestures and contemporary reflections. These works reveal Twombly’s artistic depth and highlight the integral role of language and literature to his process—a pursuit that resonates with Speck’s devotion to literature.
This relationship between drawing and writing, art and poetry, is an endlessly rewarding way into Twombly’s work. Poet Dean Rader talked about this last year at the Nicola del Roscio Foundation; and Tacita Dean spent part of her night in the Menil’s Twombly Pavilion trying to replicate words from his paintings. As with his photographs, bringing Twombly’s letters and books into consideration of his project feels long overdue.
NGL, the way the jpg above was cropped in my browser left me reeling as I imagined Twombly breaking out his sickest, most stripped back letterhead to write Speck the most stripped back letter: “To Rainer, Cy T.” But it turns out to be the title page dedication of an exhibition catalogue. Which is still great, but it does mean I don’t have to jump on a plane to LA this second; I can plan a little.
Rochelle Feinstein Is Over The Rainbow
In her solo presentation, The Today Show, which closed a couple of weeks ago at the Secession in Vienna, Rochelle Feinstein left blue painter’s tape around some works to reveal the process of exhibition making and encased other objects in slabs of acrylic. Obviously, I was very interested.
I was especially interested in the beautiful and slightly inexplicable object on the floor, which looked like a painting embedded in a slab of acrylic. There was no checklist, and no caption. [shoutout @voorwerk for reblogging @peabah on tumblr.]
In the press kit it is called Embedded (2024), and is described only as a “resin floor piece.” In his catalogue essay the show’s curator, Damian Lentini calls it Embedded I, and notes how its “creased, slightly-off-rainbow-coloured dropcloth…appears as an almost fossilised remnant from a bygone era.”
About 36 minutes into their pre-opening conversation with the artist last December, Justin Lieberman and Stephanie Weber asked Feinstein about the resin-embedded work [tl;dr I’m not interested anymore]:
Continue reading “Rochelle Feinstein Is Over The Rainbow”Calling it: lmk a great bit of art text
What’s a bit of art writing that you loved? That stuck with you? That made you think? That made you cringe? That made you want to see something? That made you want to say something? Something in a review? A critique? An essay? A blog post? A social media post? A press release? An auction catalogue? A wall text?
If you read an amazing, short piece of art-related writing recently, why not hold up to the light, so we can all marvel at it together?
Call the greg.org voicemail at 34-SOUVENIR (347-688-3647) and leave a message with:
* your name or handle [optional],
* you reading one brief art-related text [e.g., a sentence or two, 200 hundred or so words, a paragraph max, not the whole thing]
* the writer and source.
You can quote yourself, and if you’re sitting on a gold mine of great texts, you can call more than once, but please keep it to one quote per call. And no slop, bots or twitter.
When I get enough, I’ll edit them together and post a compilation here with links to the sources. Will that be in a day? A week? A month? Never because the idea of making a voice call is ridiculous? I have no idea!
So your recording may be used [unless it’s hateful or absolutely sucks, obv, editor’s call], but any other info goes nowhere and nothing is done with it.
For mine I’m gonna go with either a couple of lines from My night with Cy, the notes Tacita Dean made while spending the night in the Menil’s Twombly galleries, which are inserted in Cy Dear, her new book from the Menil & MACK books, or nine words I could never have imagined before, and which I now can’t imagine being without: “This copy of Ulysses belongs to me, Marsden Hartley.”
[NEXT MORNING UPDATE: After living with this expectation for a few hours, I see that it cannot be a crowdsourced panning for art writing gold, which is anxious and stressful. Instead, I’m treating it as a note to myself, a way to mark, remember, and share a good quote or idea as I find them. So if you read something that makes you think, stop, lol, or smdh, take a second and share it by calling 34-SOUVENIR.]
Hitting Frieze Like Peak Drone Strike Obama
I already mentioned it on social media, but am archiving it here for the future, but Nate Freeman calling Benjamin Godsill’s remote navigation of Frieze LA via an on-the-ground assistant, facetime, and a desktopful of preview PDFs “Peak drone strike Obama” was just about perfect. The Nota Bene boys truly are the chroniclers of this, our historic art world moment. [chef kiss emoji] [target emoji]
For History—and for Carolina Miranda—I made these explanatory graphics.
Mies Kampf
On this, the anniversary of Rosa Luxemburg’s birth, I recalled the memorial erected to her and other anti-fascists, constructed out of the bricks taken from the walls against which they were shot in 1919. It was designed by Mies van der Rohe, built in 1926, and torn down by the nazis in 1935.
I have not yet found the testimony Mies gave in front of Joseph McCarthy’s House Unamerican Activities Committee, but I did find this paragraph from Dietrich Neumann’s foreword to his 2024 biography, Mies Van Der Rohe: An Architect in His Time:
“Politically, Mies was the Talleyrand of modern architecture,” historian Richard Pommer sarcastically noted, referring to the famously opportunistic diplomat Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, who was active under different masters before, during, and after the French Revolution. And indeed, a series of projects by Mies seem to suggest his indifference to political persuasions, be they the Bismarck Memorial, the Monument to the November Revolution [above], the Barcelona Pavilion, or the design for the Brussels World’s Fair pavilion for the nazi regime. Mies’s stand was hardly a profile in courage, but rather driven by opportunism and a desire to maintain the respect of his many left-leaning friends, while keeping his options open with conservative clients or the nazi regime. In the United States, he was suspected both of being a nazi spy and questioned by Joseph McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee about Communist leanings due to the Monument to the November Revolution.
Wait, what? Mies van der Rohe, whose most famous building was the German Pavilion for the 1929 Barcelona World’s Fair, also designed a German Pavilion for the nazis at the 1935 Brussels World’s Fair? Was this not mentioned in Mies in Berlin, Terry Riley and Barry Bergdoll’s 2001 MoMA exhibition on the architect’s work through 1937?
Continue reading “Mies Kampf”The Whole World + The Work = ?
Looking at some art from a year or two ago, and the irrelevance really hits hard.
Reading a 70s catalogue essay trying to make the case for a then-difficult artist—an artist whose work I love—and it sounds so banal and uncompelling. Is that what really mattered then? Was that the best you could do? Is that really what all this art history was built on, and how we got here?
The world is always changing, and art with/ahead/after it. But there are times when it shifts so much, it feels like it’s thrown the relationship between art and the world out of whack.