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I liked it well enough for itself, but after arguing with the Sotheby’s essay in my head over what’s actually going on in this Ellsworth Kelly oil on paper, I love it even more.

It mentions “a single, vibrant and amorphous green form set against a flat, saturated red ground,” and says “The green shape, defined by sweeping, confident brushstrokes, floats within the field of red with a quiet, commanding presence.” Yet it feels like there is neither a ground or a field to float on. These two colors and the forms they make are side by side on a sheet of paper.

The visible brushstrokes absolutely do reveal how Kelly made the picture, how there might be a bit over overlap of green on red paint along the right side, but also how the vertical strip where the slightly angular green neck goes was narrowed with red. Rather than surrounding a form, or coloring in a void, it feels like Kelly made the picture as a whole.

It’s got borders like a print, too, which echoes the series of lithographs he was making for Galerie Maeght at the time. It also seems Kelly held onto this until 2007.

16 May 2025, lot 323, Ellsworth Kelly, Green and Red, 1964 [update: did not sell] [sothebys]

In the latest Irving Sandler Essay in The Brooklyn Rail, artist Alexi Worth lays out a fascinating theory about the revulsion contemporary critics expressed about Manet’s Olympia when they first saw it at the Salon in 1865: they were confounded by Manet’s depiction of full frontal lighting. Worth extends his observation from a 1971 essay about the “lantern gaze,” in which Michel Foucault reads Manet’s paintings as lit from where the viewer—and before that, the painter—stood:

Why was frontal light invisible—or uninteresting—to scholars? One reason is simple: Manet himself never “authorized” the topic. A secretive artist, Manet left few records, and never said a word about his reliance on frontal light. But Manet’s silence is only half the explanation. Perhaps more important, frontal lighting just seems unremarkable. Familiar. Normal. All of us, scholars and non-scholars alike, are habituated to bright frontal light. We see it all around us: in the faces of fashion models and TV anchors, in images by Andy Warhol or Nan Goldin, or for that matter in any flash-lit photograph.

“You could say,” Worth goes on, “to put it too simply, that frontal lighting looks like early Manet.” I’ll try to remember this the next million times I can’t unsee the ring lights reflected in the eyes of every youtuber and influencer.

Olympia‘s Wrongness, by Alexi Worth [brooklynrail.org]
Previously, related: On the first photographs of Manet’s Olympia
Previous Sandler Essay, unfortunately relevant: On Art & Autocracy

As I was thinking of ephemerality, handmade paper, and Japan, and artists who should have been asked to make an Art Kite for Lufthansa in the 1980s, who should drift into view but James Lee Byars.

And as I was looking to see if Byars ever made a kite, I stumbled upon this sculpture of lacquered bronze. It’s melon-sized, 10 x 9 inches, but only half that high, flattened, like a giant Junior Mint. In a sculptural oeuvre full of marble, gold leaf, handblown glass and giant spheres, it is not the most remarkable object.

But what a history. It has been around. It was in the collection of Robert Mapplethorpe. Then in 1989, while the AIDS crisis and rightwing attacks on the arts—and on Mapplethorpe—raged, it was sold at Christie’s by the artist’s estate. And it was acquired by the American Medical Association. What its existence was like at the AMA is a mystery. Was it in the president’s office? On a pedestal? In a nook? In a closet? What we can know, presumably, is that after a couple of decades, someone looked at this giant, bronze Junior Mint and decided the organization would rather have $10,000. So they sold it at Wright, the local auction house in Chicago—where it actually brought in $31,250. Which probably left them feeling pretty good about their decision. No word on it since.

I guess I’ve never actually asked, but all this time I assumed that the books Jacob Kassay inserted his prisms into were all on an undisclosed reading list of some kind. An esoteric phenomenology syllabus, ex libris Alain Robbe Grillet, whatever, some kind of over-arching epistemology that may have been invisible on the scale of a lone volume, but that cohered in some way of the artist’s devising.

And that the glass prism was then crafted to fit precisely in a certain spot in the book—or at least in a certain volume—that, when you looked in, distorted and perhaps simultaneously revealed one piece of a larger informational puzzle.

And now I wonder if I have it exactly backwards, and it’s the wedges that are the drivers. Kassay has donated a glass & library book sculpture to the upcoming Printed Matter benefit auction [less than four days left to bid!], and the winning bidder will receive, “a dummy book and wooden dummy wedge to be used only to procure the correct format of library book.” So maybe there are instructions of genre or title, but it sounds like the determining factor is “correct format”? Which you test with a dummy wedge and dummy book?

Indeed, it’s right there, in the artist packet from Galerie Art Concept in Paris, which characterizes the wedges as glass sculptures, and the books as support:

“The positions of the glass wedges inside the library books are necessarily temporary. The wedges don’t belong to any particular book but rather shift from book to book like a hermit crab, finding the other book that precisely fits it. This is why I chose to house them in library books – as a kind of format logic which focuses on their qualities as objects, rather than as texts with specific content.”

And now the image of distorted texts is replaced by roaming wedges, ever in search of a new book—or at least ready to trade up if the fit is right.

Also, I found this comment from Kassay’s glass fabricator, that the wedges are “inspired by the façade of the Beinecke Library at Yale.” which, I assume is a reference, not to the translucent marble, but to the beveled granite lattice that holds it. Maybe I should just ask.