And then you make a post about artworks with arrows, and someone laughs about their thwarted plot to steal Louise Lawler’s sign and sends you images they saved from a five-year-old instagram post.
[Oh wait, do we know that Bacher was actually there? Her not going and there just being a Lutz Bacher-related pizza party sounds almost better.]
As a witness to the historic 2023 rupture in the Pomponiverse, when fifteen people at Sotheby’s collectively decided to pay $279,000 for a life-size painting by Jacques Barthélémy De Lamarre, one of dozens known to exist, of a tiny, bare-ass dog “parfoit dit Pompon,” the utterly undocumented “favorite” of Marie Antoinette, I cannot stay silent about what is happening here.
Because here is a picture of Pompon on a 19th century papier-mâché tray in NYC “being offered in pre-owned condition with noted need of restoration.” Honestly, since De Lamarre supposedly painted it, the French monarchy’s been through four restorations and it is currently defunct, yet is somehow still in better condition than this hapless tray and its gutless dog.
And with an estimate of $7,449-$9,683, and an opening bid of $5,700, which, with the buyer’s premium, is already $7,125, it’s already being priced as an intact, signed, Pompon painting on canvas in normal condition—and as one of the most expensive 19th century papier-mâché trays anywhere. And that’s before spending who knows how much to consolidate the visibly flaking paint—and repaint a whole third of the dog.
And while we’re talking about paint and condition, what is even happening on the entire tray? There seems to be a large field of black surrounding Pompon, which overruns the more brown & gold border designs. It’s almost as if a picture of Pompon was lacquered onto an already extant tray. And then some Marie Antoinette hater dropped a bocce ball on it, or punched it a couple of times.
Local pickup is said to be impossible, but I would love it if someone went to visit this thing and make some sense of it. Maybe the real takeaway here is that if someone’s going to have to paint half a Pompon, they might as well paint a whole Pompon. Maybe we should let this tragedy usher in a Pomponissance, with new facsimiles of Pompon and new interpretations by artists of our time. I can see the group show coming together now.
While poking around on the Laurentian Library yesterday, I came across a 2014 paper on the history of how people tried to make sense of Michelangelo’s puzzling reality: the classical orders he violated, mathematical composition and proportion, and anthropomorphy. Which, given the Vitruvian principle that the ideal proportion is the human body, was sort of the same thing.
Studies of architectural bases for the New Sacristy, c. 1524, 283 x 214 mm, red chalk, black chalk, pen, brown ink, Casa Buonarotti, Inv. 10Ar. via
But I was surprised to see the argument lead off with this drawing from the Casa Buonarotti of column bases with a human face in them. Or so I was told.
I stared at the base on the left in lowkey disbelief. Michelangelo was really out here hiding a stunned Beetle Bailey profile in his architecture, and this is how I find out about it? Should we tell everyone? Should we throw a party? Should we invite Jasper Johns?
Profiles in vases in Shrinky Dink: Jasper Johns, Untitled, 2010, ink on plastic, 29 x 36 1/4 in., via Matthew Marks
No, we should not invite Jasper Johns; he was already here. Reading the Casa Buonarotti curator’s notes on the drawing, I realized I’d been looking for a Johns vase-style negative profile instead of a Michelangelo caricature-style profile, which is in the base on the right:
in his imagination, the upper molding takes on the appearance of a turban, while the base profile transforms into a screaming human face, to which are added, in a caricatured manner, an eye, a nose, and a gaping mouth (for further considerations on this sketch and its possible connection with the Vitruvian idea of ‘architectural anthropomorphism’, cf. ELAM 2012, pp. 94-95, [which I cannot find, btw, but it’s not important now. -g.o]).
Yau: It seems to me that some of your motifs, such as the ones of the faces in profile/vase, are irritating because one sees either the faces looking at each other or the vase between them, but never both at the same time. There is a continuous frustration in the looking. The figure and ground keep changing places, and one becomes aware that one never sees this image in its entirety. The feeling I get from this motif is both satisfying and maddening. Why does this conundrum hold interest for you?
Johns: I am not certain that one can’t see both at once. Has someone who knows about the eye and the brain made a determination?
Not only can I see both of Michelangelo’s faces at once, I couldn’t unsee them if I wanted to.
After Yau works through years of accumulated questions [which, ngl, very relatable now. I should call him. -g.o], there’s an actual [sic] dialogue for a minute, about different aspects of Johns’s use of the term “helpless,” and suddenly:
Yau: Is the helpless behavior of a material, the puddling of the ink when used on plastic, for example, one of the parallels between art and life?
Johns: I imagine that our understanding of the behavior of materials is closely related to our understanding of the rest of what we think of as reality.
Installation view of two Rothko Seagram Mural studies at the Laurencian Library, part of Rothko in Florence, organized at the Palazzo Strozzi, 2026, 📷: Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio via brooklynrail
It’s this line about one of the buck wildest spaces in town, Michelangelo’s ricetto for the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, which had two small studies for Rothko’s Seagram Murals installed facing that trippy staircase [Rothko said the non-windows were an inspiration, and the vibe]: “In the corners of the vestibule, the corbels even seem to melt into each other in a bizarre overlap that is a casualty of classicism’s desperate need for symmetry.”
I have not been in that space for a long time, but I knew exactly what Wilson was referring to, an almost comically sublime architectural gesture in a confounding blizzard of ornament. But I didn’t remember them as melting into each other.
detail of the corner corbels in Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library vestibule, which I’ve also seen called volutes, which, I guess if a corbel doesn’t hold anything up, is it even a corbel? No, they’re volutes. 📷: arttrav
It made me want to look up a picture of the corbels—which are actually volutes. Alexandra Korey has a nice one, with kind of wonky lighting that makes the whole situation feel even more artificial. And I guess I’d say that no, I wasn’t misremembering, but the way the forms come together is varied.
The top striations are interleaved, like shuffled cards or combs’ teeth, which is what, I think, had left its impression on me so long ago. But looking now at the bottom volute, they’re just abutting each other; the lighting makes it look like a clunky photoshop. Such a weird thing, easily lost among the rest, and one which, tbqh, I hadn’t thought about in ages. Read the Brooklyn Rail for Hot Michelangelo Takes, I guess!
Agnès Varda, Nini sur son arbre, 2009, bronze, 33cm tall, installed in the Fondation Cartier’s new Palais Royale space across from the Louvre, and photographed for the Fondation by the epically named Marc Domage. used without permission because, well, keep reading
When the Fondation Cartier moved out of its 1994 Jean Nouvel building on boulevard Raspail into its Jean Nouvel renovation at the Palais Royale last year, it left some art behind. I got no response from the Fondation during the run-up and opening, and figured I’d give it some time, let them sort it out. But they haven’t responded to renewed inquiries, so I just assume their plan is to ignore and erase the works abandoned and destroyed by their move.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled” (Natural History), M, aka 21 Club, 1991
Felix Gonzalez-Torres showed “Untitled” (Natural History) for the first time in Every Week There Is Something Different, his May 1991 show at Andrea Rosen’s second floor gallery in SoHo. As the show’s title suggested, the artist changed the configuration and works on display each week. In Week 1, the twelve black and white photos of words carved into the Theodore Roosevelt monument in front of the American Museum of Natural History were in the front gallery, and the thirteenth picture, 21 Club, the bougie former speakeasy with its wrought iron balcony and staircase full of lawn jockeys, was exhibited separately, in the back room. In Week 2, only three of the twelve photos stayed up—Ranchman, Soldier, and Historian—the others, including 21 Club, came down.
After that, Gonzalez-Torres decided that 21 Club should not be exhibited, although it should remain as part of “Untitled” (Natural History). Which is an edition of three, and ed. 3/3 was broken up and sold separately, someone has only 21 Club, and they’re not supposed to show it. This, the moment when I look to see if that orphaned 21 Club has turned up anywhere, is when I realize I’d already written this entire post about “Untitled” (Natural History), including the part I was going to mention next, that Carol Bove defied the artist’s instructions and showed 21 Club in her historical re-creation of Every Week There Is Something Different at the Beyeler in 2011, in 2020, when the AMNH announced they were taking down their racist Teddy Roosevelt statue.
The point of all this now, though, was to look at how Gonzalez-Torres developed a strategy of invisibility; of work existing but not being shown, or seen; of absence; and of absence transfigured into presence.
“One night I dreamed that I painted a large American flag, and the next morning I got up and went out and bought the materials to begin it,” Jasper Johns has been quoted saying for decades.
Well, last night I dreamed I destroyed a large painting, and the sound of the scraping of the painted surface woke me up the next morning, and I was horrified at having done it, and it seemed like an Agnes Martin painting, but in other moments it was the craggy surface of Jasper Johns’s Fragment of a Letter bronze I was peeling off, except that was all part of the dream, too, and then I got up and blogged the draft to begin it.
Somehow maybe the Jasper Johns ASL works I’d fallen asleep trying to write about collided with the paintstripping reels I get served on instagram.
Screenshot
And I can’t tell if the Agnes Martin connection was her destructive tendencies or her geometry:
Agnes Martin, White Flower, 1960, oil on linen, 72 x 72 in., collection Guggenheim Museum
Or if the geometry was actually Caillebotte’s Raboteurs,
which, while it would be a sultry dream, might actually be part of the waking up flailing to explain the jagged scraping . Which did not, upon fully awake reconstruction, sound like actual paint scraping, à la Gerhard Richter’s squeegees. But which, I suspect, was actually my own intermittent snoring, which could also explain the repeated sense I’d had that I’d woken up when I had not, or had not quite.
As I sat down to post this late last night, I was falling asleep, which will be an important detail for the next post. It’s called Chekhov’s gun, look it up.
Jasper Johns, Untitled, 2009, 20 3/8 x 34 1/4 in., ink on plastic, sold to benefit Artists for Haiti
In September 2011 Jasper Johns & Matthew Marks Gallery donated this ink on plastic work to Artists for Haiti, a benefit auction organized by Ben Stiller & David Zwirner to support non-profit organizations working to help recovery efforts in Haiti after the January 2010 earthquake that killed 230,000 people, injured 300,000, and left one million homeless.
[SIDEBAR/ENDNOTE: There is a large chunk of poking around content on what happened to the $13.67 million raised, and the many (mostly actor-driven) non-profits involved at the bottom of this post.]
I’m always a sucker for ink on plastic, but I love this one for the sign language, which appeared in many formats across Fragment of a Letter, a body of work which contains a quote from a letter Vincent Van Gogh sent to his friend, Emil Bernard, which he signed, “with a hearty handshake.” Johns included the works in his 2011 show at Matthew Marks, which I remembered most for the appearance of works on and about Shrinky Dink. [That intaglio print, and a related ink on plastic drawing Johns made in St Martin, both have cameo appearances by those little stick figures. The combo of drawn line and brushed/poured gesture in this drawing is an incredible moment in a drawing absolutely packed with them.]
Little Guys in the royal profile vase and Shrinky Dink heads: a detail of Untitled, 2010, a 29 x 26 1/4 in. ink on plastic work Jasper Johns showed at Matthew Marks in 2011
Anyway, Johns made a whole stamp set of ASL alphabet signs, but here he stamps his own inked hand, spelling his own name. The letters run from right to left, and though they didn’t have to be, the extended pinky of the Js are cut off. Also, J is made by drawing a J in the air with that pinky, which in its unmoving state, represents the letter I. So not only do these incomplete marks lack the indexicality of finger prints [which Johns also uses], they don’t convey the motion needed for their intended meaning. As Johns told Terry Winters, “that’s the nature of language, and the gestures here imitate sign language, where meaning is conveyed by gesture.”
Jasper Johns, Fragment of a Letter, 2009, bronze, 38 5/8 × 24 3/8 ×1/2 in., via Matthew Marks Gallery
The meaning conveyed and lost in these gestures is even more evident and frustrated in the double-sided bronze sculpture Johns showed at the back, behind an even larger gallery filled with cast sculptures. Like a personal Rosetta Stone, Fragment of a Letter, 2009, has Van Gogh’s text in classic Johns stencil alphabet on one side, and in his ASL stamps on the other. Then in the upper right quadrant of the ASL side, Johns set impressions of his hand signing his own name into the cast matrix. I don’t know why I find this gesture of the 80-yo artist making these gestures so moving, when he’s been doing things like this all along. But there he was, making them, and there they are. And all of this in a work that’s only 1cm deep, and that, depending on where you’re standing, almost disappears from view.
oh no, @arthistory.bsky.social succumbing to the allure of the selfie in LACMA’s glare and reflection machine
Or maybe let’s not. Maybe an $800 million museum designed to deracinate you from the constructs of history, culture, and reality, and optimized for objects of distraction and reflection and selfie production is actually a bad idea in an era where everything else is already a screen, a mirror, or both.
That’s the sense I’m getting after reading John Paul Brammer’s extraordinary essay, “Your Reflection Is Not You,” a cautionary plea to avoid the dissociative, narcissistic magic of our own images that threaten to drown us in our screen-based world.
Liz Deschenes, Untitled (Claude glass 1), 2023, Glass with wood artist frame, 21 1/2 x 36 3/4 x 1 1/8 in., image via Miguel Abreu Gallery
Just minutes before, I’d set out to find a list of works that could not just withstand the light of LACMA, but that could thrive in it. I looked at Liz Deschenes’ Untitled (Claude glass), a contemporary interpretation of the smoky, handheld mirrors used as landscape viewing tools in the pre-photography era. That led to Aztec obsidian mirrors which turn out to play a pivotal role in Brammer’s terrible, dark history.
And that’s when I stopped. And turned around to face the array of high gloss Facsimile Objects on the shelf behind me, and look me right in the eyes, all of me, and ask myself what—oh wait, right: that’s not even me. They’re my reflections. Now what??
Look, I think we all get it: the light in LACMA sucks for paintings.
It’s modernist curtain walls and curtains all the way down: 📷 @arthistory.bsky.social on LACMA
But if there’s one work in the whole blasted out place where a reflection so strong you can take a selfie with Peter Zumthor’s wall of artisanally curtained windows in the surface doesn’t support the critique, it is Veronika Kellndorfer’s giant 2007 triptych photo, Ocean Vista.
Veronika Kellndorfer, Ocean Vista, 2007, screenprint on glass, 293 x 357 cm or so
Kellndorfer’s photo of the south-facing wall of artisanally curtained windows of the Eames House, one of the most iconic modernist houses in Los Angeles, screenprinted and annealed on glass, is such a perfect embodiment of the Geffen Galleries Experience, I’m sure it’s spent 20 years on Zumthor’s museum moodboard.
The perception of the viewer changes while moving around the work as the glass reflects its surrounding environment of visitors, artworks, windows and skylights. These reflections become integral to the experience of understanding the work on its own terms.
James Turrell describes the experience of his work as seeing yourself seeing, creating an awareness of perception, the constructed nature of our reality, and the systems and phenomena that enable or manipulate it. Producing this self-awareness is part of the project of modernism, and several generations in, it is water to artist fish, whose objectives for their work can be just “understanding the work on its own terms.”
installation view In This Light at LACMA, via kellndorfer
Ocean Vista is in a gallery/space/grouping titled, “In This Light”, whose subject is actually the building and the experience of it: “Natural light is a vital element of the David Geffen Galleries—the first building in the United States designed by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor,” and “This gallery, suffused in north-facing light, brings together artworks that respond to and reflect this light.”
Nothing embodies this better than Kellndorfer’s work. Which is actually a different problem. Though the wall text also mentions “light’s counterpart,” Shadow, “In This Light” seems to involve only four works: Kellndorfer’s, a Roni Horn cast glass sculpture, an Uta Barth triptych photo, and a James Turrell print. While the last two are very much about light, as a medium, they are at best indifferent to the Zumthor-Geffen Light Experience. If anything, they should be wary of it. That Turrell—an aquatint of a drawing of a spotlit corner sculpture—and the Barth’s inket prints should be kept away from it. [I have to hope conservators were consulted.] And while Horn’s monumental sculptures always revel in the changing lights of day, the parenthetical title of this one, at least, undercuts any curatorial claims for its visual momentousness: Untitled (“The sensation of satisfaction at having outstared a baby.”)
Surely—surely—there are other objects in the collection, or in the world, that will respond to and reflect Zumthor’s Geffen Light in an inspiring way that causes you “to take your time and slow down—to consider your surroundings in a different light [sic].” Until they find them, I guess we should be glad they found at least one.
Mike Kelley, Street Signs, 2004, silkscreen and enamel on aluminum, 15 x 24 in., ed. 72/100, published by CELA/LACE, selling 10 Sept 2026 at LA Modern
This sweet Mike Kelley edition at LA Modern next month reminded me of the sweet Louise Lawler edition in a two-artist show with Hans Haacke at Maxwell Graham last spring.
Louise Lawler, Alizarin (Terrorists are made, not born), 2023, Dye sublimation print on plywood Installed in any direction, 7 × 9 inches, ed. 30 + 10 AP
Which is a little deceptive, since the Lawler’s less than a quarter the size. So for scale, here’s what they’d look like if you hung them both next to a looted Chandigarh chair:
Auditions to the right, looting to the left: image adapted from LA Modern
The Kelley is titled, Street Sign. The Lawler is titled, Alizarin (Terrorists are made, not born). When Lawler first showed Alizarin &c., in 2023, at Sprüth Magers in Los Angeles, there was an actual street sign:
Screencap from a woozy video made for Louise Lawler’s 2024 show at Sprüth Magers Los Angeles
I did not see that show in person, but based on the dimensions of Lawler’s edition, I guess the Sprüth Magers gallery in Los Angeles is three feet tall.
screencap of what I assume is Louise Lawler’s 7-inch tall edition mounted on the pedestrian bridge of a diminutive Sprüth Magers LA gallery
“The times when an artwork is made and the times when it is exhibited is important,” said an ad with the arrow that Lawler bought in Artforum between the LA and NYC shows. The statement is also in Graham’s press release. Though the times of the postcard edition is unmentioned, it is also important.
Installation view of “Untitled” (Portrait of Austrian Airlines), 1993, the green painted text frieze along the wall, and other Felix Gonzalez-Torres work at Museo Reina Sofia, photo: Roberto Ruiz
There’s a lot to consider inDulce Venganza, Sweet Revenge, Nancy Spector’s exhibition of Felix Gonzalez-Torres at the Reina Sofia in Madrid. But let’s start with one of the most unexpected things first, at least to me: the inclusion of “Untitled” (Portrait of Austrian Airlines), 1993, a commissioned corporate portrait which, uniquely, can be shown as a frieze portrait or a billboard.
Quick, guess which one its subject chose in 1993? 3,000 billboards. Comprising an alphabetical list of the cities and the year Austrian Airlines began flying to them, I’d kind of settled on this work as a co-optation of a recognizably artistic graphic strategy for marketing on one side, and a large check-cashing operation on the other.
Chopped: “Untitled” (Portrait of Austrian Airlines), 1993 installation, one of 3,000 billboards in Vienna, image: Museum in Progress, Vienna, via Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation
Even if that was true, the power of Felix’s work is that whatever it was, it can become something else the next time it’s manifest. When I wrote about the changes made to the text portraits, it was at the moment the Foundation was just publishing transcriptions of various text versions, and I did not notice that “Untitled” (Portrait of Austrian Airlines) had ever been changed.
It has, once barely [added a couple of new routes], and once shockingly. [In In Focus, an all outdoor, text-based show in June 2020, Contemporary Copenhagen exhibited a version of “Untitled” (Portrait of Austrian Airlines) that included the dates the airline said they would resume flights to their various destinations, after shutting down all scheduled flights for four months for the COVID-19 pandemic.]
Which is fascinating, but the point is, it is changed significantly at the Reina Sofia, and in ways that leverage its subject: a corporation in a globalized world. According to El Confidential’s report from the preview of Dulce venganza, Spector—I assume it’s Spector— has added two categories of entries to “Untitled” (Portrait of Austrian Airlines): “‘lugares de asedio de 2026 como Teherán o Caracas’ y el nombre de empresas tecnológicas globales con el año en el que salieron a Bolsa.” “’sites of siege in 2026, such as Teherán or Caracas,’ and the names of global tech companies with the year they went public.”
Beirut 2026 Caracas 2026 Dubai 2026 Gaza 2026 Kyiv 2026 La Habana 2026 Minneapolis 2026 Tehrán 2026 Washington D.C. 2026
Amazon 1997 Anthropic 2021 Apple 1980 Google 2004 Meta 2012/2022 Microsoft 1986 NVIDIA 1999 OpenAI 2015 Palantir 2020
Which is, again, a fascinating jiu jutsu move that resonates all the more for keeping within a certain subject constraint. It works even better when the cities are listed twice, with two dates, as both Austrian Airlines destinations and cities under siege [e.g. “Beirut 1960 Beirut 2026“].
And while I get the inclusion of the network of companies marching us all toward a technofascist consolidation, I do have to point out that Anthropic and OpenAI are not publicly traded; the dates they’re listed with are their founding dates. On the bright [sic] side, they are both pushing and/or filing for IPOs as quickly as possible, so maybe change them to 2026? Also the omission of SpaceX makes me wonder if Spector drives a Tesla.
Tobias Wong, Bulletproof Quilted Duvet, 2004, ballistic nylon, cotton, 86 x 86 in., collection SFMOMA via Dwell
Seeing an uncredited version of Tobias Wong’s Just Another Rich Kid Cokespoon #2 on social media this morning hit a bit harder than I expected. I’d forgotten that Henry Urbach shopped a bunch of Tobi’s work for SFMOMA from CITIZEN Citizen [whose online store looks like it’s been zombified by comment spam and turned into a crpyto/cas1no spam factory; our online world is not aging well.]
It’s not clear how many people realized it in 1975 or 1984 when Andy Warhol made these portraits of her, or in 2012, when Christie’s sold them as a “prime example of American Kitsch” for failing real estate developers dodging a collateral call,
Andy Warhol, Dolly Parton, 1975, Polaroid, 4 1/4 x 3 3/8 in., sold at Christie’s in 2015
or in 2015 to clear out the Warhol Foundation’s balance sheet. But the world was better because Dolly Parton was in it. Now, we’ll have to see how it does without her.
The removal of Kehinde Wiley’s 2015 painting, Young Artists After Siamesas 1960, from the US Embassy in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic was part of a whole graphic makeover of the building unveiled in July 2026, which vinyl wraps every flat surface in patriotic slop.
Wiley’s painting, commissioned in 2013 for the new embassy, depicts four Dominican art students in poses referencing paintings by two Dominican modern artists.
If by hiding the painting behind a tarp they mean, “pretending there are no Black people,” I guess that is indeed a value that unites DR and the US.
The current ambassador, Leah Campos, is a former CIA employee whose sister was on Real World: San Francisco and is married to Sean Duffy, who was on Real World: Boston.
