It’s A Mirror, It’s A Sculpture: Ellsworth Kelly’s Mirrored Concorde

a circa 1971 saturated color photo of ellsworth kelly's truncated square/hexagonal sculpture, mirrored concorde, is a sheet of chrome plated stainless still with a matching flat base/brace attached behind it. the photo shows light refracting off the ediges, and reflected shadows and such in the surface, via gemini gel and moma
Ellsworth Kelly, Mirrored Concorde, as published in 1971, in the catalogue for Riva Castleman’s show Technics and creativity II Gemini G.E.L. at MoMA

Looking up something else in the catalogue for Technics and Creativity II, MoMA’s 1971 exhibition about Gemini G.E.L.’s process, I was stopped in my scrolling tracks by this excellent full page photo of Ellsworth Kelly’s Mirrored Concorde.

It absolutely looked like the future. And in a sense, it was: Mirrored Concorde was an edition in progress, just entering production with an undetermined edition size. Which, hold that thought. But the image itself, with its dramatic lighting, refractions, and straightforward mirrored materiality really hit.

brooke alexander's photo of ellsworth kelly's mirror finish stainless steel sculpture in the shape of a truncated rectangle sits on a maple stained wood pedestal in a gallery loft space. the angle of the photo is such that the sculpture's mirror surface is entirely neutralized, and seems monochrome grey. via art basel
Before Brooke Alexander brought Mirrored Concorde ed. 2/12 to Basel in 2018, it sold at Christie’s in 2013, with its wood base.

That’s not quite how the work has turned out, alas, though it’s still a beautiful thing. It seems like there were only 16 made by 1972, when the work was officially published: an edition of 12, plus two copies each for Kelly and Gemini.

Unlike the free sculpture above, the examples out in the world have various bases and pedestals that make me wonder if it’s a little top-heavy. Christie’s incorporated the base into the 50 7/8 in. height, but while they broke out the metal pieces, neither Brooke Alexander nor Matthew Marks included the base in the depth.

The truncated rectangular shape is one Kelly used as early as the 1950s; this one feels like it could be the hexagonal outline of a 3-D cube diagram. The mirror finish is very unusual in his work. After cutting, the 1-inch steel plate elements were ground, lapped, and polished on the sides and edges, then nickel- and chrome-plated. Which, I guess that’s ok, but could they not have just kept polishing? [Asked the guy who didn’t make one of these things, much less sixteen.]

ellsworth kelly's untitled wall relief in polished stainless steel is in the asymmetrical shape of a superman logo-like shield, a downward pointing triangle with the top corners cut off unevenly. it's photographed against a plain grey background, and shows light and shadow reflecting across the upper right corner. via gemini nga
Ellsworth Kelly, Untitled, 1985-86, polished steel, 30 x 24 3/4 x 3/8 in., ed. 9+7, image: Gemini GEL

Maybe Kelly did wonder the same thing, because the similarly scaled wall relief edition he made in 1985-86 Untitled (Gemini EK86-2128), was only polished, not plated. [It was only polished on the face and edges, though, and the steel is only 3/8-inch thick. There was also an edition with a sandblasted finish.] The shield shape was in heavy rotation; it showed up in paintings in the late 70s, and then a Cor-Ten steel relief in 1984, which TV producer Douglas Cramer owned.

james mathews' 1971 installation photo of a moma print exhibition is mostly the work of ellsworth kelly. a series of kelly prints is mounted on the white wall along the right, and kelly's mirrored concorde sculpture is on a pedestal, behind a stanchion, and against a darkly painted accent wall on the left.
Mirrored Concorde proof installed at MoMA’s Technics & Creativity II: Gemini G.E.L. in 1971, on a wonky pedestal and roped off, but reflecting the Sculpture Garden, photo: James Mathews for MoMA

So maybe I like the top pic so much because it actually feels like a mirror-finished object. Every other image of Mirrored Concorde makes it look like Featureless Matte Finish Concorde. Seeing James Mathews’ installation photo of the MoMA show, I can confirm.

a detail of james mathew's 1971 installation photo of moma's exhibition, techics & creativity II, showing ellsworth kelly's truncated rectangle-shaped mirror-finish plated steel sculpture, Mirrored Concorde, reflecting a volcano-looking claes oldenburg sculpture of a respiring ice bag, in front of the large plate glass windows by which the gallery connects to the sculpture garden
detail: Ice Bag in Mirrored Concorde

Even on its wonky pedestal, behind its stanchion, and against its painted accent wall, Mirrored Concorde manages to look like a portal to another dimension. Because what it actually reflects is the world in front of it: the museum’s sculpture garden through the Philip Johnson addition’s windows, with one of Claes Oldenburg’s Ice Bag sculptures peeking its motorized head up. Let this be one more argument in support of photographing mirrors to look like mirrors.

The Lichtensteins’ Little Kelly

a small ellsworth kelly print, vertical in format, is a guillotine blade-shaped trapezoid of monochrome, deep blue, filling the top 2/3 of the tiny 8 x 6 inch sheet. this one, from the edition of 220, is number 43, and is being sold by bonhams from the lichtensteins' house in july 2025

I am slow, but the Ellsworth Kelly print that’s the first lot in Roy and Dorothy Lichtenstein’s estate sale is even smaller than the smallest Kelly prints. Blue Curve, 1999, is just 8 x 6 inches. It was made as a benefit print for the Archives of American Art in a big edition, 220+38AP, so aggregated surface area-wise, it’s probably right in the middle.

Kelly was honored with a medal the AAA’s benefit gala in October 1999, which coincided with an exhibit of items from the artist’s archives in the Archives Gallery. The AAA had a gallery in the lobby of 1285 6th Avenue, the UBS Building with the Scott Burton street furniture.

“It’s the Lichtensteins’ tiny Ellsworth Kelly benefit print, Bonhams. What could it cost? $10?” [bonhams]

Lawler’s Lichtenstein Christmas

a 6 by 8 inch photo in a 20 x 16 inch frame with a giant white matte is a gift from louise lawler to roy and dorothy lichtenstein. the photo depicts a 1963 drawing in black ink by lichtstenstein of a striped glass christmas bulb, in a black frame, installed on a burlap wall at sotheby's in nyc. a blurry label is pinned next to it, and just around the corner, at an oblique angle, is part of a blue and orange warhol painting of mao. lawler titled the work warhol/lichtenstein when she gave it to them as a christmas gift, but when the edition was sold to the public it was called mao and ornament. this example is being sold at bonhams in july 2025.
Louise Lawler, Untitled (Warhol/Lichtenstein), 1991, 6 x 8 in cibachrome mounted at 20 x 16 inches, ed. 1/100, a holiday treat to “Roy + Dorothy!”, which will be sold at Bonhams

The house of Roy and Dorothy Lichtenstein has been emptied into the online showroom of Bonhams, where everything will sell this month. There are so many things that have a bit of excitement because they were the Lichtensteins’, like some rugs, chairs, dishware, books, but come on.

There is art they collected, nothing major, but still interesting. The drawing of his wife’s and the Lichtensteins’ heads sticking out of the water that Dan Flavin made from the shore in 1970. A photocopy edition? Ellsworth Kelly made about Paul Waldman, the artist husband of his Guggenheim curator Diane, who Roy once bought a house with in Southampton. The “DO NOT EVER WORK” brick Dorothy got from Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Chinese brick mill at the 2015 Venice Biennale, which I thought was an edition of 14,086, not 500. (I cannot tell you how much or why it bugs that no one mentions the Chinese characters are stamped backwards.)

But then there’s their Louise Lawler, a small photo, inscribed on the back: “Roy + Dorothy! M.C. + H.N.Y., L.L.” The edition number is 1/100, and it suddenly made me wish I’d been in the top 100 on Lawler’s Christmas card list in 1991.

According to its entry in the Roy Lichtenstein Catalogue Raisonné, that drawing, Xmas Ornament, 1963, was likely a gift from the artist to Emily & Burton Tremaine. Between 1973 and 1976, it rolled through six dealers, collectors, and auction houses before finding someone who wanted to keep it. Until November 1991, anyway, when Lawler photographed it at Sotheby’s. In those short weeks, did it all just come together with that euphoric satisfaction of finding the perfect gift for someone? Of course, she also did kind of plant a stake by declaring an edition of 100.

But maybe they weren’t all Christmas gifts after all. Marion Lambert’s AP2/10, with a new title, Mao and Ornament, and an impossible date of 1990/91 on the label, came from Metro Pictures. It was sold in 2021 to benefit charity. Ed. 40/100 was acquired from Metro Pictures in 1993. It didn’t sell in 2023 in Cincinnati. So plenty more out there for you, let this one go by, if not unnoticed, at least unbidden. I will take it for $10.

“It’s the Lichtensteins’ Lawler photo of a Lichtenstein, Bonhams. What could it cost? $10.” [bonhams]

The Arc of William H. Johnson

a self portrait of william h johnson in his mid-20s reveals a very light skinned man with thin features, brown hair, and a red and black patterned robe or shirt, lit by a single strong source amidst a very shadowy black background. collection saam
William H. Johnson, Self-Portrait, 1923-26, oil on canvas, 29 3/4 x 23 3/4 in., collection SAAM

William H. Johnson left South Carolina for New York when he was 17, and began studying painting at the National Academy of Design. He painted this self-portrait in his early 20s, giving himself lighter skin than in later portraits.

a range of spiky purple mountains poke up into a vivid yellow sky with a clearly drawn sun circle at the top center. some green in the lower valleys in the foreground and trenches of white merging into all white glaciers or snow along the left side all feel representative of lofoten norway, where william h johnson depicted the midnight sun in 1937. collection saam
William H. Johnson, Midnight Sun, Lofoten, 1937, oil on burlap, 41 5/8 x 59 1/8 in., collection SAAM

He went to Europe in 1926 to study modernism, married Danish artist Holcha Krake, and spent a decade working, showing, and traveling in Scandinavia. He painted several extraordinary, expressionistic views of Lofoten, Norway. These landscapes and his European-era figure paintings feel like they could have evolved from Soutine, or Hartley.

a radically simplified linear style with a modern, limited palette of chartreuse, purple, yellow, orange, and brown skin tone all come together in a scene of a black family fixing a flat tire on their older car. the father is working the jack while the mother holds a baby and a kid stands next to them. the vernacular style feels as much like african mask-inspired features as picasso, which would be apt. collection saam
William H. Johnson, Breakdown with Flat Tire, 1940-41, oil on plywood, 34 1/8 x 37 1/2 in., collection SAAM

Johnson returned to NYC with Krake in 1938, and began painting in an African American vernacular mode that feels as close to Horace Pippin as to Picasso. After Krake’s death from cancer in 1944, Johnson moved back to Denmark, making American and African American history paintings for a while, but a mental health crisis led to his return to the States, the end of painting, and hospitalization until his death in 1970.

The Smithsonian American Art Museum holds over 1,000 works by Johnson, and has two dozen on view at the moment. The SAAM bio makes it sound like they rescued these works after Johnson’s death, but I think most, if not all, were donated upon the dissolution of the Harmon Foundation in 1967.

The Harmon Foundation was established by a white real estate developer named William Harmon to collect, promote, and exhibit art by Black artists. There are some problematics in the Harmon Foundation’s story—they removed portraits of W.E.B. Dubois and Paul Robeson from exhibitions because of their communist sympathies, for example—and it’s not clear if Johnson’s reputation suffered from his association. It does feel like he’s been sort of stuck at one museum, though.

There’s a lot that doesn’t immediately make sense. But the most important thing—besides donating its large collection of art to HBCUs and the Smithsonian, and besides Johnson’s own work, of course—is that William Harmon created his foundation after years of pseudonymous philanthropy and non-predatory student loaning—under the name of an ancestor, Jedediah Tingle.

Twombly’s Warhol Electric Chair

a warhol painting of an electric chair is black silkscreen ink on ultramarine blue ground, with a lot of black. sold by the twombly foundation in 2014
Andy Warhol, Little Electric Chair, 1964-65, oil and silkscreen on linen, 22 x 28 in., acquired by Cy Twombly and sold by his Foundation in 2014

The electric chair paintings are some of Warhol’s absolute best, but the little blue electric chair owned by Cy Twombly is a standout. The Christie’s lot description for the Twombly Foundation’s unloading of the painting extols this specific painting’s heavily inked contrast:

Housed for many years in the private collection of the artist Cy Twombly, it was this divergence between shadow and light that attracted the artist to this particular painting—an admiration bolstered by his understanding of chiaroscuro gained from his detailed study of Italian Renaissance painting undertaken during his time in his adopted homeland.

According to Christie’s Lisa Paulson’s youtube feature, Twombly & Warhol traded works “in the mid-60s,” through Leo Castelli, who also was Italian, with an admiration for settling his artists’ accounts in kind.

Away From A Slant Step Theory of Postwar Sculpture

a child-sized plywood chair with a slanted seat, and a back, seat, and front lined in dark speckled linoleum, that was originally created for lifting your feet up while sitting on a toilet to improve your shitting, became an object of fetishized mystery among several generations of male post-minimalist and conceptual artists after it was acquired at a thrift store, is here depicted in black and white on the cover of a catalogue for the third exhibition it inspired, in 1983.

It’s been told and retold enough that even if you’ve somehow never heard it or seen its inspiration, it’s clear that several generations of artists ascribe to the Slant Step Theory of post-minimalist and conceptual sculpture: In 1965 William T. Wiley bought a plywood & linoleum stool with a steeply slanted seat at a Bay Area thrift shop. Installed in the studio of his student at UC Davis, Bruce Nauman, the Slant Step’s nonfunctional mystery and alluring form made it an aesthetic fetish object. It inspired at least two shows in the 1960s and several more since. It got passed around, stolen and rescued, surviving as an intentionally absurd teaching prompt until it entered the collection of UC Davis’s museum.

As far as I can tell, the first time it was publicly recognized as a stool for helping you squat on the toilet and take a better shit was only in 2014, well into the Squatty Potty era. Even so, it’s not clear that later shows have addressed this fundamental reinterpretation of an enigmatic totem as a highly specific, utilitarian, biological tool.

It reminds me of the novel-for-some-mundane-for-others theory of paleolithic tally sticks as lunar or menstrual calendars. And of Ursula K. Leguin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, where human experience can be understood through narratives other than violence and conflict, and motives other than competition, killing, or subjugation. The Slant Step Theory may be similarly narrow and incomplete. It’s not a mystery; it’s just you.

a bruce nauman sculpture in dark grey green resin and fiberglass cast from a plywood chair-shaped box with an angled seat and back, it belonged to cy twombly, then his foundation sold it off in 2014
Bruce Nauman, Device to Hold a Box at a Slight Angle, 1966, fiberglass and polyester resin, 29 5/8 x 23 1/2 x 30 in., acquired by Cy Twombly in 1969, and sold by the Foundation in 2014

Nauman made Device to hold a box at a slight angle in 1966, with the Slant Step in his studio. It had already been shown twice before Philip Johnson’s partner David Whitney curated it into Nauman’s first show at Castelli in 1968. It went from there to documenta 4, and when it came back, Cy Twombly bought it, in 1969.

The Cy Twombly Foundation sold it in 2014. What happened to it in those 45 years? I don’t know of any photo of Twombly interiors in which Nauman’s Device appears. Did Twombly study it? Contemplate it? Respond to it? Store it away? If a revision of the Slant Step History of contemporary sculpture is in order, who knows what might be learned by tracing Twombly’s connections to and from this Nauman he kept for so long?

Sotheby’s Man & The Moon

a middle aged white guy with a close cut balding head and salt & pepper beard and glasses wearing a blue checked dress shirt is holding a grapefruit-sized sphere made from a lunar meteorite, which he is selling in his natural history auction at sotheby's new york in july 2025. the sphere is dark grey, mottled with lighter grey spots.

Look at it this way: if you were selling the biggest known lunar meteorite sphere in your auction, and you needed to show how much bigger it was than all the other lunar meteorites that have been ground down into spheres, would you photograph it next to a grapefruit you got at the Sotheby’s banana cart on York Avenue?

No, you absolutely would not. You would do exactly what Dr. Matthew Hoffarth is doing here, and so would I.

16 July 2025 Lot 74 | Lunar Meteorite, Tisserlitine 006, est $300-500,000 [update: sold for $825,500, so everyone’s gonna be making moon balls now I guess] [sothebys, h/t jack]

The Caretakers of Walter De Maria at Dia

Dia has released a video about Walter de Maria and his work there. It’s specific in many interesting ways. If someone is polishing the top of Vertical Earth Kilometer in Kassel, we don’t hear about it, but there are interviews with the longtime caretakers of Dia’s permanent De Maria installations in the US: Bill Dilworth (New York Earth Room); Patti Dilworth (Broken Kilometer) and Robert Weathers (Lightning Field). Bill Dillworth died in December 2024, and the project is dedicated to his memory. [h/t Chris Nanos]

Related, somehow not previously: In 2023 Jeffrey Weiss wrote about the history, changes, and poetics of De Maria’s Earth Room after it had been removed, renovated, and remade. HVAC and new windows substantively changed the character of the work and the visitor’s sensory experience of it. But the implications extend far beyond questions of aroma, humidity, or ambient sound, toward permanence, aesthetic and the nature of the art experience.

[later that day update]: @octavio-world’s post adds new context: the Dilworths both left/retired in 2023, after the renovation/alteration, and were replaced by a rotation of minimum wage workers. So while extolling both the primacy of the physical experience of De Maria’s works, and listening to the singular people who have experienced it, that connection was broken. I mean, yay oral history, but that feels like an important thing to have omitted from the story, especially when it makes it sound like a memento mori and not a corporate/conservatorial decision.

[update: I’d had the Dilworths’ name spelled right, then I changed it after doublechecking a quote, and seeing it spelled wrong in the video captions. I’ve changed it back. Dia could do the same. Thanks for the correction.]

Art Baby, Contemporary Bathwater

There’s a lot going on in the July/August issue of The Brooklyn Rail. A bunch of people respond to Bob Nickas’ obituary/autopsy of the contemporary, which has apparently been dead art walking lo, these 25 years.

I think Rhea Anastas’ argument is useful, that the frame of the contemporary, and the art industry and auction and product trends associated with it have obscured the view of the art in our midst.

Barry X Ball is not the only one looking to the past. In arguing against a myth of progress and nowness, Jason Saager puts it simply: “the way forward is going further backwards.” Which, sure, I, too, loved the Siena show. [AND Caravaggio, though I have not seen this show]

a side by side comparison of two photos of a 14th century painting of the virgin mary by daddi; the black and white image on the left is earlier, when the virgin reaches down, across a railing, to a large decidedly not divine baby painted at the bottom foreground of the composition by someone else, probably 100-150 years later. the color photo on the right is the same painting, minus the baby, in color, so it is dominated by the gold background. the getty museum via the brooklyn rail
Bernardo Daddi, The Virgin Mary with Saints Thomas Aquinas and Paul (det.), ca. 1335, Getty Museum. [L] prior to the Getty’s acquisition; [R] after the Getty’s removal of the baby, via The Brooklyn Rail

In her fascinating and sobering Irving Sandler Essay, conservator Annika Svendsen Finne looks at a controversial 1993 acquisition by the Getty of a 14th century gold ground painting of the Madonna by Bernardo Daddi, “contingent upon the removal of a large painted baby from the work’s surface, which had been added by a later artist.”

Svendsen Finne looks back across the mere decades since the baby’s erasure; at the reflections of the conservators involved; at other contemporary examples of the genre; and the interpretive advances of art historians since, and wonders if maybe the Getty should have slowed their roll, and recognized the constraints of context of their own decisions.

Look, the 21st century’s been rough on everyone, including art. It does sound like it’d be better, though, if we just step back for a minute before throwing it all out. A minute, or a generation, whichever.

Cy Twombly Watermark

At one point in my life I decided instead of just normal engraved stationery, I wanted a watermark. So I went to Mrs John L. Strong, and sat down with Mrs Lewis. Mrs John L. Strong has its own watermark, so surely they would know a paper mill that could accommodate my plan, I suggested. Mrs Lewis explained very tactfully, in as positive and genteel a way as possible, that no. Mrs Strong would certainly be able to help design a beautiful paper that evoked the subtlety of a watermark. I was glad to hear it, that we would be able to produce a paper with a watermark.

She said, “What part of ‘no’ did you not understand?” only it was the Vanderbilts’ stationer on Madison, so it came out like, “It’s interesting when two people have a conversation about the same thing, how they understand it differently.”

a black cloth covered clamshell box lies open on a featureless table. on the left side are loose sheets of handmade paper, face down. on the right, are more loose sheets of handmade paper, face up, revealing one sheet of on kawara's code drawing, except it's a print, a text rewritten in cipher where two differently colored hashmarks replace each letter of the alphabet. published by yvon lambert in 1996
Zooming in, zooming in, where is the Twombly watermark on these CODES prints at Yvon Lambert

The point is, yesterday I read that in 1996, not so far from the time I was pursuing my watermark, Yvon Lambert published On Kawara’s CODES in an edition of 150 “on 180gr/m2 pure rag paper made especially for the book by the Moulin de Fleurac* and watermarked by Cy Twombly.” And I realized I’d been doing it wrong. But to know how wrong, I needed to figure out wtf is going on with why Cy Twombly is making and watermark paper for On Kawara.

He did not, and it was not. The listing for CODES in the Bibliothèques de Paris clarifies: “Chaque feuille porte la signature d’Yvon Lambert en filigrane (réalisé par Cy Twombly)” So the watermark is Lambert’s, as written by Twombly.

And Twombly also made his bookplate. So far I can find images of neither. But we do have two versions, four years apart, of Twombly’s ex libris for Dr. Reiner Speck, courtesy of Dr. Speck’s show of Twomblyphemera at Maison d’Art.

a detail of a page in the maison d'art catalogue for the 2025 show, cy twombly reiner speck: fragments of an adoration, where two versions of the bookplate twombly designed for speck are displayed side by side. a draft from 1974, and the real deal, from 1978, which, we read, was published as an edition of 1000. both bookplates say ex libris dr speck, etc., in twombly's messiest handwriting
Cy Twombly Ex Libris draft, 1974, and Ex Libris, 1978, ed. 1000? via Maison d’Art’s catalogue for Fragments of an Adoration

Do I need to check the prints CR to get a full bookplate inventory? Is a watermark a print, a drawing, or a sculpture?

*Lambert’s choice of mill for his small batch watermark paper is instructive. He did not ask Arches. Though Moulin de Fleurac sounds prized, specific, and ancient, it only started in the 1970s.

Hotdog Dog, Dawg

a craggy cast aluminum sculpture titled hot dog dog has the rough shape of a dog, or a wonky sawhorse barricade, with a painted urethane hot dog in a bun perched where its heasd would be. a 2011 edition by rachel harrison, this one is being flipped by kenny schachter in july 2025
Rachel Harrison, Hotdog Dog, 2011, aluminum and urethane, 22 5/8 in. tall, about as tall as a Dingo or small Saluki, ed. 15+3AP, selling 17 Jul 2025 at Phillips

I’m reluctant to be a dog painting person, but I have no problem being a dog sculpture person. As long as it’s Rachel Harrison’s Hotdog Dog, a 2011 edition in, of all things, cast aluminum. Conservators are smiling.

There is one coming up at Kenny Schachter’s latest binge & purge auctions, this time at Sotheby’s.

17 July 2025 Lot 28 | Rachel Harrison, Hotdog Dog, 2011, est $18-25k [update: sold for $19,050] [phillips]

On Kawara Codes, Codecs, Codex

a black cloth covered box with the word codes in all caps debossed large and vertical on the cover, standing in a featureless white space. this is an edition by on kawara published in 1996 by yvon lambert
On Kawara, Codes, 1996, three code works in screenprint, letterpress, and braille, with a text by Jacques Roubaud, published in an edition of 150 by Yvon Lambert on paper made with a watermark comprising Lambert’s name as written by Cy Twombly, which feels like an entirely other blog post about to spiral out of the first caption

In the 2015 Guggenheim catalogue for On Kawara — Silence curator Anne Wheeler wrote that there were eight Code drawings: three made of hash marks in colored pencil; two typed texts of extremely large and small numbers; two pictograms; and a poem printed in braille.

Duncan McLaren counts nine Code works: there are actually four Code hashmark drawings, with varying titles. But then he says there are eight, because two pictograms are the same. Except the two pictograms McLaren references seem to be just two sides of one of the pictograms Wheeler mentioned, in a catalogue; the other was a poster in a window. And he notes that braille is only a mystery if you don’t know braille. Honestly, I’m taking braille and pictograms off my Code list.

a 1965 black and white photo of on kawara's studio wall, which is filled with large format paintings, dark with a white english word painted at the center: untitled, cipher, art. and small paintings along the floor, similar style. three of the paintings are encoded texts replaced with dashes of varying lengths and spacing. it is believed that kawara destroyed all the paintings depicted here.
1965 photo of On Kawara’s studio, with unfamiliar subjects painted in a now-familiar way, plus at least four encoded text works, all destroyed, apparently. (via the Guggenheim’s 2015 exhibition catalogue)

And I’m adding back the Date painting-style, graphically encoded paintings Kawara made in 1965, before starting the Date paintings, which he destroyed. The surviving Code works begin in 1965, and cluster in the 1960s. But except for a 1996 artist book, most of Kawara’s Code works were unpublished and almost entirely unconsidered until his Guggenheim retrospective in 2015. One filled sixteen pages and the cover of a massive, major 1996 catalogue, and yet seems to have gone unacknowledged. In 2015 Ben Slyngstad, a gallery guide at the Guggenheim, deciphered Kawara’s last Code drawing, Voice from Moon (2011), which turned out to be the transcript of the July 20, 1969 moon landing. Unaware of Slyngstad’s achievement, McLaren also deciphered it in 2022, and identified the source of the title and the transcript as the front page of the NY Times.

duncan mclaren's worksheet decoding a page from on kawara's 2011 drawing, voice from moon, in which differently colored pairs of hashmarks were substituted for roman alphabet letters. spoiler alert, though the title gives a big hint: it's the transcript of the 1969 moon landing, as published in the nyt, via onkawara.co.uk
Duncan McLaren work in progress deciphering On Kawara’s Voice from Moon (2011)

Which is all prelude to the mindboggling realization that in 2024 McLaren, Anders Delbom, and Tommy Wrede deciphered all but one of On Kawara’s surviving Code works. McLaren’s account of the deciphering extends over seven parts, and it is quite a journey, and it ends with a call for help in cracking the last Code. Which is the first, but first:

The hashmark drawings—one of which, Les Lettres d’Amour/ Love Letters (1965), was also reproduced as a seven-page screenprint in the Codes (1996) artist edition—end up being straightforward enough susbtitution ciphers, where a pair of colored hashes represents a letter from the Roman alphabet.

One drawing, Traveler’s Song, or Traveler no Uta (1965) turned out to be a partially translated Japanese folk song, with the mix of English and romanized Japanese lyrics complicating typical pattern/frequency recognition.

the cover of whole and part, a 1996 on kawara catalogue, is covered in typed out numbers of extraordinary size, both large and small. it turns out to be the beginning of a code work, though it was not acknowledged as such anywhere, only recognized later, by curators, and then decoded in 2024. via onkawara.co.uk
On Kawara, Whole and Parts, 1996, les Presses du Reel edition, with No Title, a typed work of encoded text on the cover, photo via Duncan McLaren

The two large number Code works, include Eight Quintillion… (1969), six pages of typed out numbers, and No Title (1996?), in which each typed out number corresponds to a sentence or line? And thus the constituent digits substitute for letters. Kawara gave a clue to the [most unlikeliest] source of the 1969 text in a rare 1970 interview. Fortunately the same cipher key was used for the sprawling 1990 text, too.

The last Code work to decode is the earliest, Code, or Colored Cryptogram (1965), in the collection of the National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo. The hashmarks appear to encode Japanese phonetic syllables. And as the surprise at what McLaren and his collab have accomplished wears off, it’s replaced by surprise that they haven’t cracked the Japanese code, too. I mean, come on, it’s been a year!

Out of The Wreckage A Masterpiece

a copper etching plate withe holes drilled into the four corners and four etchings printed with this and three other similarly canceled printing plates, all by mark tobey, all donated to albright college, who was like, sure, we'll take whatever you're not throwing out! and now it's for sale at pook & pook, whose watermark is in the corner
“Should we throw it away or give it to Albright?” A canceled Mark Tobey etching plate and four cancellation prints, being put up for sale at Pook^2 by Albright College

Srsly, we cannot call it a collection. The liquidation of the art accumulated by Albright College is an epic non-event. The most compelling things are the flat files. Unfortunately you have to wait till the random-ass contents of those files are cleared out before you can bid on them. A huge chunk of the 500+ lots are the leftovers, scraps, work product, random proofs, and even the cancellation prints of one random 70s print dealer. Scrolling Pook & Pook in a visual fugue of repeats of various prints sold one at a time lulls you for the desperation of the last lots, where prints are grouped in increasingly large, but unrelated, sets. And then, finally, the flat files. Three lots, six cabinets. It would have cost Albright College a dollar to store this stuff in the corner of one fired professor’s office. But honestly, what for? In a world less on fire, it might be useful to be outraged at the collapse of this little art outpost in a place most of us hadn’t heard of before clicking, but even the ARTnews report is like, “The real problem here is not the donor wishes; it’s that Pennsylvania just has too many colleges.”

But there is one masterpiece. And it must be saved. Oh, look. It has a bid. $100. So it WILL be saved. Something is right with the world after all. Me, I will not bid on it, because I already have one.

Continue reading “Out of The Wreckage A Masterpiece”

Vija Celmins Painted Surfaces

a vertically oriented painting of the cracked faded and unevenly worn indigo cover of a japanese book, with a slight border around it, and shadows and a bit of a crease in the corner, all giving a hint of an object in space, not just a picture of it, by vija celmins via matthew marks gallery
Vija Celmins, Japanese Book, 2007-10, oil on canvas, 18 x 12.5 in., via matthew marks

When Vija Celmins spoke to Tyler Green in 2013 about her painting Japanese Book (2007-10), she called it “an object and a painting, but with a much closer relationship than I had in the 60’s, which was obviously a painting of an object.”

Which is kind of wild because the thing that immediately registered on seeing this painting at the Met Breuer in 2019 was how clearly it was a painting of an object. Unlike Celmins’ paintings of sand, stars, or waves, Japanese Book does not fill the entire canvas. It sits in a space, with depth and shadows—like a book on a scanner bed—and with its extraordinary, textured, indigo cover. Painted.

Celmins’ works are so often paintings of photographs, which are objects in their own way, and maybe that’s what she was referring to from the 60s, when she’d paint clippings, or envelopes, alone or in stacks. Japanese Book‘s a painting of a surface, an object, so not an image. She told Tyler, in discussing Shell (2009-10), “that kind of surface that’s very, very fractured with small areas make it kind of retinally engaging and physically engaging.”

a vertically oriented painting dominated by concrete grey color depicts the tiny cracks and crazings on the glazed surface of a chinese porcelain vase, including the darker lower right corner, where the curved form of the vase seems to recede, a 2017-18 painting titled vase by vija celmins via matthew marks gallery
Vija Celmins, Vase, 2017-18, oil on canvas, 18 x 13 in., via matthew marks

Which she would go on to paint, literally, in Vase (2017-18), also at the Met. The craquelure surface of a Korean celadon vase fills the canvas. But with the shadowy corner that seems to map the curved form of the vase, the object-painting relationship is even closer. Yet this scale of detail requires magnification; this is, again, I think, a painting of an image, if not a photo.

[a few minutes later update]: Sal Randolph shouted out The Stars, the extraordinary artist book Celmins created with Eliot Weinberger in 2005 for the MoMA Library Council. One of Celmins’ three etchings in the book is on the book: a 10 1/2 x 17 inch depiction of the entire cover of the Japanese book.

an artist book with an etching of a worn indigo cover of an early japanese book sits in a cream colored clamshell box, the stars by vija celmins and eliot weinberger was published by moma's library council in 2005
The Stars, 2005, published in a limited ed of 130+20AP, a deluxe edition of 26+7 artist copies, and a facsimile edition for the masses, via MoMA Library Council

I was going to say the four-plate etching was a facsimile, but I don’t know that is the case. Also, there is a facsimile edition of the book, which is widely and affordably available. The signed limited edition of 130 went to the Library Council and various institutions, who are not big flippers. The deluxe edition, which includes an additional loose copy of one of the bound etchings, does turn up.

If it took Celmins three years to make a painting of this book cover, I think it’s safe to assume the etching was made from a photographic reproduction.

Japanese Book (the painting) is on view in the Fondation Beyeler’s Celmins retrospective through 21 Sept 2025 [fondation beyeler]