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After overcoming the shock to my psyche of seeing an art world moment I very much lived right in and through turned into an historicized theme for a summer group show at David Zwirner—who, let’s be clear, was also there the first time, and so is, for some reason, partly doing this to himself—I did wonder what the Rubells’ Luc Tuymans painting of Jesus was doing there.

The first time I saw this, I wondered about Tuymans’ source image; a few years after this he’d made some works using Mormon imagery—actually, he took Polaroids of the screen while watching a show on Belgian TV in the late 1990s.

In the 1990s the LDS Church had begun using a newer, more naturalistically painted picture of Jesus with a red cloak, like this one, but the angle was different. It still made me wonder. If Tuymans had used it for source/inspiration, it seemed odd that he’d change the angle and entire composition so significantly. And he did not.

This painting was from a Feb. 1999 show at Zeno X in Antwerp titled “The Passion.” It was a series related to the Passion Play performed every ten years at Oberammergau, Germany.

Turns out Tuymans used the photo from the catalogue of the 1970 production of the actor who played Christ, Helmut Fischer. [update: while I knew the foundational anti-semitic history of the Passion Play, on Bluesky Jörg points out how that anti-semitism persisted, even after Oberammergau’s biggest fan (Hitler) was defeated. Turns out the 1970 production, the first since Vatican II, was specifically condemned by the Pope for keeping newly disavowed bigoted portrayals of Jesus-era Jews. They’ve been working on it ever since.]

While that clears that up, I do still wonder about Zwirner revisiting Circa 1995 New Figuration just as the Rubells are divesting it. This could be driven less by art history and more by estate planning.

I believe we are in crisis. The distance between what is said today and what is known to be true has become an abyss. Of all the things at risk, the loss of an objective reality is perhaps the most dangerous. The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil. When truth leaves us, when we let it slip away, when it is ripped from our hands, we become vulnerable to the appetite of whatever monster screams the loudest.

On 11 April 2025 Christie’s announced that Andy Warhol’s Big Electric Chair from the Matthys-Colle collection will highlight Christie’s 20th century evening sale, with a low estimate in the region of $30 million.

On 25 April 2025, Christie’s published, “Christie’s specialists talk 9 standout lots at auction this May,” including Lot 55A, Andy Warhol’s Big Electric Chair.

These Big Electric Chair works are very rare at auction because most of them are in major museum collections like the Centre Pompidou and the Art Institute of Chicago, so they have taken on an almost mythical quality within the art market, Chairman of 20th and 21st Century Art Alex Rotter said.

On 12 May 2025 the Matthys-Colles withdrew Andy Warhol’s Big Electric Chair, which did not have a guarantee, from the sale. The lot listing was deleted. Christie’s published, “Christie’s specialists talk 8 standout lots at auction this May” with a date of 25 April 2025.

Here, the image is cropped more tightly, which not only makes the chair bigger but almost abstracts it. He’s isolated the chair from the context of a room, so it becomes an everyday object that is elevated as a still life. And what could be a more ultimate still life than a chair that will take the life out of you? It becomes a traditional painting in the vein of 17th century vanitas; a memento mori of sorts.

And yet, the chair is also this transformative object of ending. It can end someone’s life, yet when isolated, is just a chair with electricity running through it. I think that’s the play Warhol wanted to get at. He’s putting this within the canon of still lifes, and the electric chair is the most poignant of all. That’s a very Warholian thing to do, to explore multiple meanings of an object depending on how it’s presented, Alex Rotter no longer said.

In one sense, one might say, it deeply doesn’t matter. It’s just auction house marketing. But things happened.

The painting’s sale was announced. The specialists talked. The painting was marketed. The collectors were praised. The advisers and reporters discussed it. The potential bidders balked at it. The owners withdrew it, and then Christie’s not only erased its traces and actions and publications, it altered them retroactively with no notice.

At this moment this important painting whose comparables are in major museums around the world was put up for sale at a price no one wanted to pay, and so it was withdrawn from sale. The switch was not thrown, the painting was not burned, but it’s perniciously ridiculous to act like it wasn’t strapped in the chair.

Yesterday art historian Michael Lobel posted Sheila Hicks’ bas relief panel of embroidered silk, four meters wide, which MoMA says is the only survivor of the 19 panels Hicks made for Air France between 1969 and 1977. Lobel has jokingly assigned me the case for tracking down any other remaining panels. So instead of not finding one Jasper Johns Short Circuit flag, I can now not find eighteen back walls from the upper deck first class lounges of Air France’s first generation of Boeing 747s. I am ON it.

Continue reading “Sheila Hicks Mile High Club”

It’s kind of a hectic week, and there are artists I don’t know in The Brooklyn Rail’s New Social Environment series and will catch up with afterward, but Thursday May 15’s hero-packed conversation about the Artists Speak Report commissioned by Anonymous Was A Woman is a must-join.

“For about a year,” Gober explained in 1990, “between 1982 and 1983, I painted on a small board. Over this board I had mounted my camera, and as I changed the painting I would take slides of the process. So that in the end nothing remained but the photographic record of a painting metamorphosing.”

Gober first showed Slides of a Changing Painting as a 3-screen slide projection work for just one week [??] in May 1984, at Paula Cooper Gallery. I saw the work first at the Walker Art Center. It’s been central to major retrospectives of Gober’s work, and to understanding his larger project, many, many seeds of which are contained in the Slides.

But it’s the extraordinary book version of Slides of a Changing Painting, coming out in a few days from Primary Information, that has been looming so large in my present. It was shipped early to annual subscribers, and it gives an unprecedented chance to see Slides slowly, one phase at a time, in a way that the actual work avoids by design. But the sheer heft and density of the book— it is small, beautiful, and nothing but images—also gives a chance to get lost in the world Gober painted into—and then out of—existence.

Slides of a Changing Painting is somehow just $30, and it’s $25 on pre-order, but it feels like it should be $50 or $100. Which, about that. Executive director Matthew Walker just sent out an email announcing that Primary Information is one of the many arts non-profit organizations that suddenly had their NEA grant canceled, blowing a $40,000 mid-year hole in their tiny budget.

For nearly 20 years, Primary Information has been publishing and republishing highly important artist texts, bringing them back into the discussion at cost. They have an entire slate of books to come. So when you order, if you’re able, why not pay double, or triple, of 10x, with a donation at checkout, and help keep Primary Information’s work going? Or buy some solid and yet not exorbitant fundraising editions. Or just straight-up slip them a tax-deductible donation.