In addition to watercolor studies and renderings of A Subtlety, Walker also showed An Audience, a 27-minute video of audience reactions to the sculpture. It was recorded by six cameras during the crowded final hours of the last hot, July day of the installation.
This show came to mind because the rich colors of Walker’s 2014 watercolors felt connected to the even more baroque colors of the watercolors in Walker’s current exhibition at Sikkema Jenkins, whose abbreviated title is The High and Soft Laughter…
Andrew Russeth’s photo of Francis Cape’s 2013 catalogue, We Sit Together: Utopian Benches from The Shakers to The Separatists of Zoar, via bluesky
I was surprised to have never heard of a book Andrew Russeth just called, “one of the great art books of this century.” Now I am enthralled with Francis Cape’s project, book, and exhibition of benches from America’s utopian societies.
Cape had begun researching, documenting, and reproducing examples of historical benches from several utopian communities in 2010, when Richard Torchia of Arcadia University learned of the project and proposed an exhibition.
Installation view of Francis Cape’s Utopian Benches at Arcadia University, 2012, photo: Greenhouse Media via Arcadia.edu
FC: I was and am interested in the intent the communes share, rather than their differences. They share [an emphasis on] communal living, and with that, they chose to value sharing over individual profit or pleasure. This required a degree of separation from the mainstream, so another thing [they have] in common is their setting themselves apart physically as well as in intent from that mainstream.
As to the transformative moment, it was more the visible moment in an ongoing transformative time. It began when Bush was re-elected in 2004, and I found I could not go on making art about art. The Bush White House’s use of language to conceal rather than to reveal led me reject all falsehood: false wood in the form of the mdf I had been using; cover ups in the form of painting; and most of all, illusion. I was talking with a colleague whose thesis is that artists have found illusion to be anathema since the early twentieth century. I guess I’m a late starter.
So for the benches to be real, they had to be sat upon . . . what better way [for them to be used] than to be shared while talking about sharing?
In February 2024 Jenny Saville spoke on Twombly’s work and her connection to him at The Menil Collection. After acclimating to her regularly not mentioning the gallery she shared with Twombly, it turned out to be a fascinating talk, full of insights on painterly technique and reference and inspiration. Which, hold that thought.
At the moment cued above, though, Saville describes Twombly’s “banging together” of avant-garde modernism and the ancient world through “the Duchampian act of writing ‘APOLLO’ on a piece of paper or a canvas.” I’ll need to sit with it a minute, but I guess if anything can be a readymade, then so can the 4,000 years [sic] of human association with that word.
Saville’s illustrated discussion of Twombly is full of painterly details found in artists from Leonardo to Cézanne, and it feels rare to hear and see these references. Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve felt Twombly’s painting and mark-making has been considered alone, if not sui generis, or in the context of his poetic sources, and not so much in relation to art of the world/past. Not for Saville, though.
screenhsot of Jenny Saville discussing Cy Twombly and Turner in February 2024 at The Menil Collection
One artist she comes back to more than any other is Turner, and the juxtapositions of Turner’s and Twombly’s atmospheric and spatial and abstract pursuits are fascinating.
Most of the talk is a close look/walkalong of the Menil’s Twombly centerpiece, Untitled (Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor). But she ends with an expansive read of a blackboard painting [Untitled, 1971] filled with figure eights descending from left to right, and she didn’t mention Duchamp. And it still made sense.
William Williams, attr., Francis Williams, The Scholar of Jamaica, prob 1760, not c.1745, 66 x 50 cm, in the V&A
What an extraordinary piece of research, and an equally amazing finding.
For at least a century, an 18th century portrait in the V&A of a free, Black Jamaican man named Francis Williams was considered to be a racist caricature of Williams cosplaying as a gentleman. But after a team of experts and conservators imaged and studied the painting anew, Fara Dabhoiwala discovered Williams was demonstrating not only his rare mastery of then-new Newtonian astrophysics. He was documenting his observations and calculations of the first documented return in 1758 of Halley’s Comet, at a moment when he was one of the only people alive who’d known Newton and Halley at the time they’d first published their theories.
If this feels like a spoiler, you can still read Dabhoiwala’s account in the LRB to see how he pieced Williams’ history and the painting’s history together from the most hostile sources and the barest archival traces.
As I try to manage my news intake, I have been rescued and refreshed by First Light Radio, artist Man Bartlett’s monthly music show on East Village Radio. It’s live on the third Friday of the month, from 8-10AM, and the archive is growing, but it’s still early, so it’s small. Fortunately, there is a whole discography to fall back into. I confess, I’ve never opened my cassette tapes of any of the Space On Earth recordings; I just use the mp3 technology.
As someone who spent more than two years tracking down the greatest lost Jasper Johns painting, you’d think I would have already identified all the other lost Johnses. But I had not.
Though the list of destroyed Johns works is certainly longer and more mysterious—the artist is famous for destroying things he made before 1954, and the fire in his Edisto Island, SC home in 1966 wiped out many works Johns kept for himself, including many early sketchbooks—there are not that many lost or missing Johns works. There are only four, and all date from 1955-64.
Besides the Flag (1955) inside Robert Rauschenberg’s combine, Short Circuit (also 1955), and the Figure 4 (1959), there is another number painting, Figure 2 (1963, P138), whose trail goes cold after entering Karl Ströher’s collection in Darmstadt.
Jasper Johns, Gastro (CR P138, 1964, 5 x 5 in., encaustic and collage on canvas,
But the last one, and the second most interesting lost Johns, is called Gastro. It’s one of four paintings Johns made during his stay in Tokyo in the summer of 1964. It is an encaustic collage of a coaster from the Bar Gastro [バー ガストロ], which was a gift to the bar’s owners, Kiyo and Shōichirō Miyagaki. [宮垣 昭一郎,キヨ] .
Miyagaki Shōichirō [top row, right corner] and gang at a 1967 launch party for Takiguchi Shūzō’s Poetic Experiments: 1927-1937, photo: Funaga Mitsutoshi via Keio U
Gastro was a hub of the Tokyo contemporary art community, and I assume it was in Ginza, near Johns’ temporary studio at the Artists Hall. It was decorated with artworks by regulars, who were known as the Gastro-ren「ガストロ連」, or Gastro-gang. Johns must have become an honorary member, and his little painting, just five inches square, remained in Gastro until Shōichirō’s death in 1988. According to the CR, the whereabouts of the entire Gastro-ren art hoard is unknown.
Given the prominence of Miyagaki and other Gastro-ren members like poet-critic Takiguchi Shūzō, I’m surprised some enterprising art historian hasn’t tracked everything down yet, but here we are.
Cy Twombly, apparently not titled Study after Duchamp: Nude Descending a Staircase after all, 1968, oil and crayon on paper, 30 x 40 in., sold yesterday by the estate of Lothar Schirmer at Sotheby’s
When it was published in the 1999 catalogue of his own collection, Cy Twombly’s publisher Lothar Schirmer listed the title of this amazing 1968 drawing, which he’d acquired directly from the artist in 1968, as Study after Duchamp: Nude Descending a Staircase.
Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase (N0. 2), 1912, collection Philadelphia Museum of Art via Sotheby’s
When Schirmer (RIP) sold it yesterday at Sotheby’s, however, it was listed only as Untitled. And whoever wrote the lot essay for the Twombly wanted to connect it to Duchamp’s painting so bad, they began the essay with a picture of it.
And they said, “Untitled also pays homage to art historical forerunners and their attempt to capture movement in space and time,” without naming Duchamp. And then they quoted Suzanne Delehanty,
Like shadows of Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, figure eights, frequent personages in Twombly’s cosmos of signs, borrowed perhaps from the mathematical symbol for infinity, multiply, recede and climb through the surface of a 1968 oil and crayon on paper to express, as does the 1912 nude, an abstraction of motion in space-time.
trying to call Twombly’s symbols and signs personages without surrendering their status as abstract marks. [Delehanty’s text is cited as coming from the collected writings on Twombly edited by Nicola Del Roscio in 2002, which elides its origin as a catalogue text for Twombly’s 1975 show at the ICA in Philadelphia, the city of Duchampian love.]
Discussing this and a couple of other related works on paper in his catalogue for Twombly’s 1994 MoMA retrospective catalogue, Kirk Varnedoe mentioned Duchamp exactly once, before going on at length about the Futurists:
That language of flow and fracture draws directly on the early modern fascination with the “cinematic” decomposition of forms in motion, in Duchamp (Nude Descending a Staircase,1912) and most notably among Italian Futurist artists, particularly Giacomo Balla.
It feels like a confluence of aversions: to figuration, to referencing other artists’ work, or to referencing Duchamp’s works specifically, but it feels acute in the detitling of this particular drawing. Looking at Duchamp’s painting had an impact on Twombly’s most significant body of work, which he apparently referenced many times. And Twombly went to great lengths to make sure his work was permanently installed down the hall from Duchamp’s. I, for one, would love to see something more on this connection than a passing namecheck.
I found myself driving through Laramie, Wyoming today, and wondered what the memorial legacy of Matthew Shepard was. tl;dr: basically nothing.
Ten years after his murder, the University of Wyoming put a plaque with Shepard’s name and dates on a park bench, like he’d donated a hundred dollars to the alumni fund.
As for the site where he was beaten, tied up, and left to die, “Residents of this neighborhood have been especially anxious to bury the past and even petitioned local government to change the street names in order to confuse pilgrims to the murder site.”
The most prominent marker remains the town’s name itself.
James Bridle responds to the Schelling Architecture Foundation’s rescinding of an award because of Bridle’s public support of a cultural boycott of Israeli institutions that support genocide.
Getting Hannah Arendt quoted back at you should be a wakeup call for Germans, but I guess not yet.
Germany is far from alone in this situation. The far right, and the denial of genocide that accompanies it, are on the march everywhere. But the logic of Strike Germany is simple: if it is illegal in Germany to call for cultural change in Israel, then it becomes necessary to call for cultural change in Germany itself. Late enough to be ashamed, but never too late, I sign my name.
Jasper Johns, The Figure 8, 1959, 10 x 8 in., oil on canvas, [NOT?] being sold 20 Nov 2024 at Sotheby’s
In 1960, Leo Castelli’s gallery director Ivan Karp estimated that there were no more than fifteen people seriously collecting contemporary art. One of them was Al Ordover, who was one of the first people Karp took to Warhol’s studio.
Ordover bought this amazing little 1959 Jasper Johns painting, The Figure 8, from Castelli. One minute it’s obviously an 8, and the next it feels like it barely holds the 8 together.
Its only public exhibition was a December 1959 fundraising exhibition to benefit painter Nell Blaine, who had contracted polio during a summer trip to Mykonos. [Since vaccines are in the news, Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine was introduced in 1955, and was still in early distribution stages in 1959. Blaine’s paralysis left her in a wheelchair for life and unable to paint for several years.]
Why none of the history or context of this painting, as opposed to Johns’ use of numbers as a form/subject generally, is in Sotheby’s lot text, is a mystery to me. But with generalities, unrelated quotes, hyperbole, and a single jpeg are how six-figure paintings are sold these days, I guess. [update: OR NOT.]
janky screenshot of Marsden Hartley, Fig Tree, 1926-27, 24 x 20 1/2 in., as reproduced in the exhibition catalogue for the Wadsworth Atheneum’s 2003 Hartley retrospective.
Marsden Hartley moved from Vence to Aix-en-Provence in 1926, at the invitation of the Kuntzes, and set to working in Cezanne’s old studio.
According to the chronology in Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser’s 2003 retrospective, which originated at the Wadsworth Atheneum, this is when Hartley began working on Fig Tree.
The Google Books preview does not include the text about Fig Tree, but earlier texts seem to date it earlier, to 1924, when Hartley was in New Mexico. I will need to find out more about this buck wild painting, which seems to have nothing to do with channeling Cezanne.
Marsden Hartley, White Yucca (Memorial to Charles Kuntz), 1928-29, 31 3/4 x 25 3/4 in., selling today at Sotheby’s
After meeting him on the street in St Paul de Vence, Adelaide and Arlie Kuntz befriended Marsden Hartley and persuaded him to move to Aix-en-Provence with them in 1926. For the spring and summer of 1927, they painted together in Cezanne’s old studio, which was surrounded by flowering white yucca plants.
In 1928, Kuntz, 30, was killed in a motorcycle accident before ever having a public show of his work. For the remainder of Hartley’s life, Adelaide remained a significant patron of Hartley’s work, and some time around 1933, Hartley asked his dealer to get this painting to her.
In 2014, the Greenville County Museum of Art and Driscoll Babcock Gallery organized a two-artist show of Kuntz and Hartley, with works acquired from Kuntz’s daughter’s estate. She had long since sold off White Yucca. And Driscoll let his domain name expire.
[update: there were two other Hartley flower paintings at Sotheby’s today: some roses, and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller’s Pansies—not sure who that’s a portrait of.]
