If you need me, I’ll be filling up my reading list, starting with Jupiter Magazine, one of the art publications Miter namechecked. The theme of Jupiter’s latest issue, The Theater of Refusal, revisits and renews Charles Gaines’ foundational 1993 exhibition of contemporary Black art and its critical context. Its form was a series of readings and screenings throughout the summer, which I will now try to approximate in my head.
“Beginning October 17, and spanning three rooms of the Pavilions, Glenstone will share a presentation of works by Cady Noland. Developed in collaboration with the artist, this presentation will mark the first major survey by a U.S. museum of her decades-long career.”
Reader, the presentation has been marked. Last year I poured one out for anyone who’d hoped to buy a new Cady Noland work. But now I feel for anyone who’s been trying to buy a major Cady Noland the last 17 years. Because Glenstone got them all. Look at that map; Glenstone has Cady Nolands even Glenstone doesn’t know about.
Three of the six open pavilion spaces are Noland’s work. [The others are two galleries of works by Lorraine O’Grady and Melvin Edwards, and the little library.] The first thing you see as you go down the stairs is not a Noland sculpture, but a Noland architectural intervention. At first it read like an Ellsworth Kelly, if only because architecture-scale Kellys were just on view here. Up close, no, closer, inside it, it read like an Anne Truitt, of the back of the Anne Truitts that had backs.
The no photography proscription is excruciating, and I find myself trying to no spoilers my way through this post, as if it’s feasible to say, let’s discuss it after you’ve seen it. The artist adjusted the space to minimize distraction and focus attention on her work, and it works. They borrowed Clip-on Man. Charles Gatewood’s book with the source image is in the library.
The Raleses purportedly acquired Noland’s entire show last year at Gagosian, but it also somehow fills a space three times the size. There is a lot less tape, except when there isn’t.
There are pallet plinths that are not elements of the work, except when they are. There are foam and carpet blocks that precede an installation, except they’re still here. It’s at once pristine and provisional.
The paper labels remain on the white wall tires. You may not ride the tire swings. The internal gear to lift the massive stockade is freshly lubed, but the crank is padlocked. The chain that connected the bench is gone. Oozewald has its corrected and copyrighted stand. The wear on the corners of one (non-mirror-finish) aluminum panel propped on the floor is enough to make the owner of Cowboys Milking weep.
It’s like this survey surveys not only the range of Noland’s work as she made it, but as it was presented, processed and purchased since. Maybe being cast in acrylic and thoughtfully placed in the contemplative suburban art temple of benevolent billionaires is not, after all, all bad.
While looking for John Singer Sargent’s entangled octopus painting at the Smithsonian’s vast Photography Study Collection, I could not help but notice this painting he made of a dog. I really, really am not a dog painting guy, but apparently I am dog painted in Paris by one of two artists. Or three. Okay four, max.
Pointy was the dog of Louise and Valerie Burckhardt, the daughters of Swiss-American friends of the Sargent family, and Pointy (1881) is one of at least three works young Sargent made as a gift for the family. [It says “to my friend Louise” on the back.]
Make that four works. Sargent’s full-length portrait of Louise Burckhardt was a hit at the Salon of 1882. Sargent inscribed it, “to my friend Mrs. Burckhardt”. If auction lot texts are to be believed, Mrs Burckhardt was trying to spark a romance between the painter and his subject. Or maybe we only know this story because someone in Sargent’s publicity department told it. He never married because he was so dedicated to his work, insisted the family members and academics gatekeeping his CR.
Anyway, auction texts. The Burckhardts kept Pointy until 1991, when they sold it at Sotheby’s, and then it sold again in 2007 at Christie’s in an auction literally titled, “The Dog Sale,” which I am absolutely not clicking on.
Seeing it in color, it’s enough to know that the Grand Central Gallery, which hosted a Sargent’s greatest hits show in 1924, did not literally paint their copyright claim on the face of the picture after all. But it also makes me think that Sargent, whose elegant, eel-like initials J.S.S. are on the bottom right, did not paint POINTY on the top, either.
Move over Turkey (1879), there’s a new favorite Sargent I’d never seen nor heard of in town.
Maybe Turkey can be my favorite Sargent I’ve ever seen, and Two Octopi can be my favorite Sargent I haven’t.
Sargent, a student at the Beaux-Arts, was 19 when he painted Two Octopi, a scene from the deck of a fishing boat in Brittany. The first paintings Sargent showed and sold were seaside scenes from Brittany, but that wasn’t until 2-3 years later. This is Sargent’s only documented oil from 1875.
Meanwhile, though the discussion and quotes are mostly references to eels, Alison Mairi Syme’s mention of Two Octopi in her 2010 book, A Touch of Blossom: John Singer Sargent and the Queer Flora of Fin-de-siècle Art, as a 19th-century queer-coded handshake, is now impossible to unconsider. And there was a fisherman involved in this picture, too.
[later in the day update]:
From the Juley Photos collection at the Smithsonian, we can see Sargent signed this work, titled simply Octopus, at least when the Juleys photographed it. The collector at the time was either a Connecticut painter or a Mayflower descendant, but perhaps not both.
So far 105 artworks donated to the Artists for Kamala fundraising campaign have been sold. The remaining 67 works will remain available through October 18th. Because the purchases are subject to campaign donation laws, buyers must file donor statements. Also, they can’t be foreign nationals or lobbyists.
Also they may not want to be Republicans. 100% of the proceeds goes to the Harris Victory Fund, which allocates it to Harris for President, the DNC, and the state Democratic parties.
Dianne Feinstein’s incapacitated inaction at a critical moment in US history and her to retire from the Senate long after she lost the mental and physical capacity to function is a stain on her legacy.
If there’s anything to be noted about the sale of her personal collection of mid jewelry, maybe it’s the single Tiffany sapphire and diamond earring whose companion one could imagine was lost in a demented haze, or maybe even stolen by a careerist hanger-on in her waning days. Yes, buy this orphaned earring today, which is small enough to sew into the hem of your clothes if you find yourself fleeing across a border anytime soon.
On the New Books Network podcast, library scientist Jen Hoyer has an invigorating conversation with Eunsong Kim about Kim’s new book, The Politics of Collecting: Race and the Aestheticization of Property. Kim looks at the structural inequities of the systems that determine what gets preserved and valued: archives, museums, philanthropic ventures.
In the raking light of her critical literarary scholarship, Kim examines the contours of Henry Clay Frick’s art collecting after the 1892 Homestead Strike, and the intensive campaigns by Marcel Duchamp and the Arensbergs for the most advantageous museum placement of their collection. And much more!
Loring calls them both “A motif of unknown origin” and “a crudely rendered Picasso-inspired trio,” seeing a similarity to the figure in Picasso’s 1958 UNESCO mural, The Fall of Icarus. I don’t see it, but sure. Except while other Picasso references appear in Johns’ work sooner, this so-called Icarus doesn’t turn up in Johns’ work until 1992, a full decade after the stick figure trio.
In 2019 the United States Postal Service really did put out a stamp named Gaza. It’s on the lower right, no. 5391, a 1956 four-canvas painting by Ellsworth Kelly in the collection of SFMOMA called Gaza.
SFMOMA’s page says more about the donors than the painting, and has the date as just 1956, while it has otherwise been dated 1952-56. The difference feels relevant, because it spans Kelly’s formative sojourn in Paris and his 1954 move to New York City.
It has turned out to be an enlightening pleasure to listen to the interviews with the recipients of this year’s Rabkin Foundation awards, and none moreso than the conversation with Emily Watlington.
With Mary Louise Schumacher, she talks about some of the nuances and challenges of writing about art and disability. They also talk about Watlington’s attuned sensibilities brought to bear on the Venice Biennale, which purported to bring attention and critical consideration to many historically marginalized artists. Watlington’s diaries and in-depth review reveals that it often did just the opposite.
While it is true that Jeff Koons website did suck, he did not need to go to the trouble of partnering with the sponsor of every podcast in the world, Squarespace, to make his new one. But here we are.
I have not clicked through, I have not downloaded the custom templates, I have not gotten to the end of the artnet sponcon article about the website refresh. I was stopped cold by the two sentences below, which are perfect in the way the mirror finish stainless steel puckers and creases on Koons’s own balloon animal sculptures are exactingly, terribly perfect:
“What this amounts to is organizing the entire Koons universe into a single domain. It is essentially a minimalist black-and-white world with sharp images that glide past pleasurably.”
Catching up on Sean Tatol’s always invigorating takes at The Manhattan Art Review, including his review of Jasper Johns’ drawings show at Matthew Marks. Which, like his previous show, includes variations on his 2020 painting, Slice, that got a lot of attention during his double retrospective.
And this line caught me off guard: “He’s apparently announced that Slice is his last painting, and as far as last works go I can’t imagine a more eloquent invocation of mortality and infinity.”
So before getting to the “Wait, what??” let’s cover the, “Yes, and”: Slice certainly is a helluva painting to end on. With themes Tatol observed, rich source images across the board, and a popping backstory that’ll keep people talking, it delivers on multiple planes at once.
And after its star turn in the Whitney/PMA show, Slice was made an anonymous promised gift to MoMA, where the credits for Johns’ reference images expanded in 2023 to include not just ACL doodler Jéan-Marc Togodgue and astrophysicist Margaret Geller, but all Geller’s scientific collaborators on the 32yo Slice of the Universe map she sent the artist unbidden.
But all that said, Wait what? I could neither imagine nor find any context in which Johns would have made such an announcement. So I asked Sean where he’d heard it. And he mentioned a post artist and editor Walter Robinson made last month to two social media platforms: “Jasper Johns (b 1930): ‘MoMA got my first work and MoMA got my last work. Now I’m done.’ A drawings survey opens at Marks on West 24th on Sept 12.”
When reached, Robinson did not say from whom he heard this, or when, but only clarified he didn’t hear it from Johns. Meanwhile, the sound of it is still ringing in my head. “Now I’m done.”
Did Johns decide that after finishing Slice? How’d that go down? How done is he? The newest drawings in the current Marks show date from 2021, the year of the anonymous gift. Is he done with making altogether? The show also includes older works that have never been seen. Has Johns moved to curating? Maybe he’s decided to focus on just revealing stuff now? Let’s start with those little guys, but there is a long list.