Continue reading “Such Coup. Many Unconstitutional. So Thwart. [5 Feb — ongoing]”
946-3 Is The New 724-4

Once every 36 years, a new Gerhard Richter squeegee painting comes along that changes everything. For a long time it was (CR 724-4) (1990), which went on to become at least eleven editions, two artist books, four tapestries, a Facsimile Object, all the Strip paintings, and a movie. (CR 724-4) has been in fourteen museum exhibitions, including all the venues for Richter’s biggest retrospectives at MoMA and Tate Modern, and his COVID-shortened show at the Met.

Now there is (CR 946-3), a 2016 painting that’s already been exhibited six times, including Richter’s last show at Marian Goodman in 2020, and his Foundation’s extended loan to the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, where it’s on view through at least 2026.
Continue reading “946-3 Is The New 724-4”“Hey We Got A Computer! Oh No, We Had A Fraud.”

The Spring 1984 newsletter for Crown Point Press [pdf] was notable not just because it was the first in two years. Or because they reflected on their 20th years of enabling contemporary artists to engage with intaglio. Or because they announced their principled expansion into woodblock prints through a collab with master artisans in Japan. Or because they launched their artist-designed silk lingerie collection, which, well. Or because they got a computer, and a new sales director. Actually, let’s stop there and have CPP director Kathan Brown expand on that:
One thing (totally unexpected) the computer has done for us is uncover fraudulent activity perpetrated by our former Sales Representative, Thomas Way. We have a warrant out for his arrest in connection with the theft of many prints. It appears now that he even took home some rejected prints during projects before the printers had a chance to destroy them. These were Diebenkorn’s and the RD signature was easy to forge-one print that we have recovered was even hand-colored (not by Diebenkorn)! Way apparently had a side business going the whole time he worked for us. If you bought anything from him personally, or have any other information, please call.
So wow, while it seems slightly wild to put the guy on blast like that, I guess that’s how print market justice worked in the 80s? Brown’s letter to the editors of Print Collector’s Newsletter ran in the May-June 1984 issue, and contained more details of the caper and the hot, forged prints:
Continue reading ““Hey We Got A Computer! Oh No, We Had A Fraud.””Lingerie & The John Cage Kimono

Is it really chance operations if a seemingly tangential Google search leads me to The John Cage Kimono?? From the Crown Point Press Archive, a gift to the de Young and/or Legion of Honor Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco?
And then an immediate follow-on search turns up the Crown Point Press Spring 1984 newsletter [pdf] which, the contemporary editions drama! I’ll get to the computers and fraud later, but first the “lingerie business”:
Continue reading “Lingerie & The John Cage Kimono”Torn From Today’s Headlines
![a robert rauschenberg screenprint of a collage made of clippings from newspapers in 1969, includes [clockwise from top left] a photo of cars stranded in the snow; a white woman in a miniskirt with a longer skirt drawn over her; a comet; ted kennedy, some racist judge nixon tried to put on the supreme court who eventually got voted down because twelve republicans still had enough conscience left to be shamed over unalloyed white supremacy, can you even imagine? anyway, several articles and photos of gm assembly lines and the threat of robots and depleted pensions; a chevron tanker truck overturned on a freeway; a hand holding a case of birth control pills; a sideshow entrance with the world's largest rats; a coal mining ship and a truck being craned onto a ship; more assembly line; and a ship docking on the hudson pier. from the 26-print portfolio known as Features from Currents, being sold at Wright 20 in apr 2025](https://greg.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/rauschenberg_currents_portfolio-wright20-202504-283-1001x1024.jpg)
Though Our Most Important Art Historians disparage the practice, I could not resist zooming in to read the specific newspaper clippings that Robert Rauschenberg included in just one his 26 Currents prints. Honestly, I did not expect them to hit so hard, one after the other:
The threat of robots taking union jobs
The threat of executives taking union pensions
Gas tanker overturned on a freeway causing mayhem
WORLD’S LARGEST RATS
Birth control
Woman’s outfit-shaming
A problematic Kennedy
A criminal president’s supreme court nominee being exposed as a mediocre southerner whose only firm conviction is white supremacy, getting defended by an unperturbedly anti-semitic republican senator saying, “Even if he were mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren’t they, and a little chance? We can’t have all Brandeises, Frankfurters and Cardozos.”
Even the auction itself, a couple of loosies being stripped and sold off piecemeal, feels topical: people don’t buy 26-print portfolios these days anymore than they read newspapers. And yet the politics and the challenges remain the same.
3 Apr 2025, Lot 283: Robert Rauschenberg, from the [Features from] Currents Portfolio, est. $1,000-1,500 [wright20]
Related: Features from Currents, 1970; Surfaces from Currents, 1970 [moma]
The Knowledge of Tree

I kept catching myself being attracted to the thick impasto schmears of paint in Laura Owens’ show at Matthew Marks. There was one metallic gold paint object—some of them almost seem to substantial to call them brushstrokes—that sat atop a seam in the panels of the main room, and yes, it turns out she kept working on it after it was installed.
So this tree in the center of the main room felt like the centerpiece, the bravura moment in an already almost unfathomably impressive painting installation.

But even the instant after I took the photo above, I realized that the tree next to it is just as impressive and alluring; it just did it by not standing out [literally]. Should I retake a picture of them together? The combination of silkscreen and painting, the composition, the visual layering—the actual layering? How does this even work? There’s fluidity, or viscosity, on one hand, and precision and control on the other, but fluency all around.
I’m barely able to process the experience of seeing Owens’ show once; but I keep wondering what the experience of making it was like, and the experience of conceiving it, and marveling at it at every turn.

[It’s a contrast, in a way, with the artist books in their cabinets next door. Every single one felt like an understandable achievement, but it was possible to grasp the reality of their creation, even the mindblowing ones that were drawn by hand in unique editions. What is hard to grasp is the scope of her overall book practice. Even as someone who makes art objects that are books, it sometimes feels like she’s inventing entire new genres. Her 2019 work, West Wing Reads, for example, a scraping or compilation of right-wing news reports during the Trump presidency, was like a slab of malevolent poison in the innocuous form of a banal airport book. The sequel, which is probably being written by AI as I type this, will be even worse.]
Overpainted, Underhyped
Just WTEFAF? Look at this thing.

Let’s stipulate that it is wild that objects survive for hundreds of years, so each one is a little miracle and marvel of its own. But how did this painting come to be, and how did it come to be in Simon Dickinson‘s booth at TEFAF?
At least I can understand how it showed up in front of me: artnet published a TEFAF highlights roundup, which pwlanier posted on tumblr. Tracking it down beyond that only turns up Dickinson’s press release, some instagram shoutouts, and a brief youtube video of Dickinson son Milo discussing the painting.
Basically, it’s a 17th century Dutch seascape painted over a slightly earlier 17th century Dutch portrait of an unidentified man. As artnet reports, the head was only uncovered after a recent cleaning. So for centuries, the painting had looked like a regular, little seascape, c. 1685-1690, which Dickinson attributes to Ludolf Backhuysen, Amsterdam’s leading marine painter at the time.
The cleaning also apparently revealed the seascape painter’s meticulous, intentional preservation of the portrait—which Dickinson attributes to Isaack Luttichuys, with a date of 1655-1660.

I do not have the connoisseurial chops to raise any issue with the Dickinsons’ attributions; for what it’s worth—nothing—they look solid to me. Backhuysen was already a leading painter by 1665, receiving commissions from local burghers and studio visits from foreign kings. He was not scrimping, scavenging for a used panel to paint on in 1685. Luttichuys, a generation older, was well-known in Amsterdam as a portraitist, and he died well-known in 1673, presumably content in the belief that this and his many other portraits would survive him.
In Judith Benhamou’s video, Milo mentions that this surreal composition is exceptional, but that they’d seen some things like it, or kind of similar to it. And I guess it’s true that overpainting is extremely common in the history of paintings: fig leaves get added, draperies get touched up, windows get painted out. But reading through the 1995 catalogue of the National Gallery’s 17th Century Dutch painting [pdf], overpainting is equated with chasing fashion or botched restoration; it’s a scourge to be obliterated on the way back to a painting’s earlier, more authentic state.
And that is very clearly not what Backhuysen was up to when he painted on top of Luttichuys’s head, turning it into a darkened storm cloud that hovers over four civilian boats. Was it perhaps a philosophical gesture? A reference to the giant on the frontispiece of Hobbes’ Leviathan [published in Latin in 1668]? Did it relate to the war in which William III of Orange set sail to seize the English throne from James, his father-in-law?
I guess I’m fine with not being able to know for sure. But I do wonder why we have to rely on the serendipity and close reading of a single gallery to discover incredible objects like this. I mean, TEFAF is good at surfacing rarities and lost masterpieces, but it still feels hermetic and almost random. What else are we missing?
About That Robert Irwin Documentary
I watched the Robert Irwin documentary, A Desert of Pure Feeling, and it is good. [It is currently on Kanopy for free, support your local public library.]
Some things stand out:
Irwin’s mystical-sounding development of his pursuit of perception was fascinating: posting up on Ibiza and not talking to anyone for eight months? wandering around the desert or whatever, painting dots for 16 hours/day, 7 days/wk? But he was not, in fact, alone in that pursuit. Some art world context would have been more helpful than repeating his refusal to allow his work to be photographed.
The Whitney installation was nice, but it felt somehow confusing, which is weird because there was even a real reinstallation of it, with footage and everything. The filmmakers did somehow manage to shoot other phenomenological aspects of other installations coherently.
Evelyn Hankins, who curated Irwin’s spectacular Hirshhorn retrospective, was thoughtful and present—but that show was somehow not, at all.
Which, wtf, the MCA San Diego’s masterpiece, 1° 2° 3° 4°, was done dirty here. Is it the ultimate “you had to be there” Irwin? Except for the Chinati building, which took up the last third of the film?
The dynamics of shooting and interviewing around Marfa and Chinati was weird. Marriane Stockebrand, the inviter, I guess, was everywhere, but Jennie Moore, the director who dragged that project across the finish line was airkissed in one crowd shot? Maybe that is #chinatiworldproblems, I guess I’ll demur. The weird caginess over whether he’d attend the 2016 ribboncutting was eerie, too; it made it sound like he died in production. [Spoiler: he stuck around for seven more years.]
For a documentary about perception and reproduction, it did shoot Irwin’s own dot paintings immaculately. But the shimmering moiré of halftone dots and pixels during pans across archival photos was hilariously distracting.
Seeing Arne Glimcher as a producer both makes sense and raises some flags, but how is that any different from anything the Glimchers have done all this time? It is what it is.
For such a singular thinker, who’d done so much work on his own mind and being, maybe give the film a title that reflects something he said, not just something he quoted?
David Diao, Barnett Newman, and Books

Speaking of books derived from Barnett Newman paintings and paintings derived from Barnett Newman books, David Diao’s got both. Barnett Newman: Chronology of Work (Updated), 2010 [above], turns Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow & Blue into an infographic tallying Newman’s output, as recorded in the artist’s catalogue raisonné.

BN Spine (2), meanwhile, makes a zip from the cracked and worn spine of Diao’s copy of the 1966 Guggenheim catalogue for Newman’s Stations of the Cross. Diao worked as an installer on that show, and meeting Newman and his work had a foundational impact on Diao’s own project.

After Diao’s 2023 show at Greene Naftali, the gallery and Gregory P. Miller published a catalogue about his decades-long engagement with Newman’s work.
Previously, related: just look at the David Diao tag.
But also: Diao’s 2013 talk on Newman for Dia’s Artists on Artists series
Happy Where’s My Vermeer? Day To All Who Celebrate

The Gardner Museum heist was 35 years ago this morning, March 18th, 1990.
Oh, Barnett, We’re Really In It Now

When I first made a modest proposal of cutting up Barnett Newman’s Voice of Fire, it was to make it more manageable to live with. I knew its purchase by the National Gallery of Canada in 1989 was controversial. When I suggested cutting it up to save it, though, I really did not have any idea of where the nihilist authoritarian government threat might come from:
So should Canadians ever face an arts crisis where, say a Taliban- or ayatollah-style regime takes over that is decidedly unsupportive of the kind of painting Newman practiced, I’d think cutting it down and dispersing the painting would be far better than burning it. Or bombing it, Buddhas-of-Bamiyan-style, out of existence.
When I actually did start cutting it up, in early 2016, as part of Chop Shop, it was a direct critique of the exploitative market machinations of Stefan Simchowitz. And again, who could have known where that year would end up?

Is Limited
Still, how is it only when I saw Kristjan Gudmundsson’s artist book, 200 Pages on Barnett Newman, THIS MONTH, that I finally computed the terrible implications of chopping up a Barnett Newman painting? Because Gudmundsson surely knew it in 2001 when he made the book.
Continue reading “Oh, Barnett, We’re Really In It Now”Hi Bart, I Am Making A Stained Glass Window!

Looking something up about the history of stained glass, I found this detail of a 13th century window of stained glass makers making the stained glass window, which,

l’Ottoman Necessaire d’Hermès

In January I was watching an Hermès making of video for something I don’t remember in the Necessaires d’Hermès collection, I think, and there were brief shots of this incredible-looking object. I scoured the website to figure out what it was, and it looks like it’s not available in the US, which serves us right, frankly.

But it turns out to be an ottoman, but it also has storage, and a handle. The whole top slides off, and it can hold a blanket, as these screenshots show. For something that doesn’t seem that capacious or actually portable, it sure is beautiful. I will keep it in the necessaires column.

Weirdly, the ottoman gets kind of lost or ignored in the Salone 2013 debut of Philippe Nigro’s capsule collection, les Necessaires d’Hermès.
OK, it was a Necessaires video, which is on the product page, and I had to have been watching it for the Groom wardrobe stand, or the Long Bench, a name which loses the sense of the French: Cheval d’Arçon, pommel horse.
Les Necessaires d’Hermes Ottoman, by Philippe Nigro, $CA19,100 [hermes]
Caillebotte: Painting Men [And Dog]

Fellas, is it gay to depict athletic male bodies in form-revealing outfits in suggestive work that makes room for a desiring gaze that is not necessarily male or heterosexual? Is the question not quite asked and not not answered by the Gustave Caillebotte retrospective that has come from the Musée d’Orsay to the Getty. William Poundstone has a rundown of the LA version of the show, its premise, shifting titles—Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men is the Getty’s low-key hilarious variation—and the wall text I paraphrased in the first sentence.

What’s important is, the show also includes Caillebotte’s second best painting of a floor: his 1886 portrait of his dog Paul on a Persian rug, that didn’t sell in London a little while back.
Gustave Caillebotte: “Painting Men” [lacmaonfire s/o bremser]
Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men is at the Getty through May 2025 [getty.edu]
Vija Celmins Postcard

The day after humans landed on the moon, Vija Celmins collaged a photo of a penguin on a rock onto a photo of the lunar surface, onto a postcard of the moon, and she sent it to Wallace Berman.
According to the catalogue for the latest of Matthew Marks Gallery’s 100 Drawings exhibitions, held in 2019, Celmins had reached out to Berman to compliment his 1968 show at LACMA.
But that show ran from April-June, and the entire message on the back of this card was, “Cheers.” So this was not about that. It was just a, “Hey, penguin on the moon!” collage sent to a collage artist who was close to the hallucinatory witches shadowing JPL. Can you even imagine? I cannot.
The Light String Going On And Off

As my comment on Kriston Capps’ insta shows, it’s somehow always a surprise to see a Felix Gonzalez-Torres light string with the lights off. My reaction led Kriston to doublecheck with the National Portrait Gallery whether it’d been OK to post [tl;dr it was, but hold on], and it sent me looking for more.

Of course, it goes back to the beginning, where they were shown on and off, side by side. Gonzalez-Torres’ whole point of his works was that the owner [or exhibitor] was to decide how to display them, and that includes whether to turn them on. The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation has photos of an unlit “Untitled” (Tim Hotel), 1992, in a collector’s home, which feels like the normal, private state. Maybe it gets turned on for company, which raises the question of public vs. private presentation as well as space.
Because obviously, they look the sexiest when they’re on, and it’s understandable for curators of public exhibitions to want that glow. But that allure also underscores the impact and importance of seeing them turned off sometimes.
Continue reading “The Light String Going On And Off”