greg.org

The other day @octavio-world posted this startlingly spare etching by Boucher, which is a set of words that very much did not compute for me.

Part of what struck me was the frame, not just outlined, but incorporated into the composition, the ropes on the swing attaching or extending perhaps? as she hangs in this empty space.

From the Internet Archive, I learned the print is at the Cleveland Museum of Art, a 1927 gift of The Print Club of Cleveland. But when I tried to find other examples of the etching around, I kept coming up empty. From The Metropolitan Museum’s history of 18th century etchings, I learned that it was made after a c. 1715 sketch by Jean Antoine Watteau. The Met’s book has a brief analysis of the changes Boucher made to translate a small chalk drawing into ink.

When Watteau died in 1721, one of his greatest collectors and friends, Jean de Jullienne, enlisted Boucher, then just 19, and several other artists to make a monumental catalogue of Watteau’s work, including the hundreds of sketches Jullienne and others had amassed.

Boucher ended up making over 100 of the 351 etchings in the first two volumes: L’Oeuvre d’Antoine Watteau (1726) and Figures de différents caractères, de paysages, d’études dessinées d’après nature par Antoine Watteau (1728). The Swing is plate 260 in the second volume. Together with two additional volumes of prints after paintings and ornament designs completed in 1735, the entire compendium project is known as the Recueil Jullienne. The massive set, 50cm tall, was published in an edition of 100, authenticated by Jullienne’s signature, by license of the king, who took ten copies for himself.

By 1912, barely 30 surviving copies had been identified. The Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art got their copy in 1913. Harvard’s copy, acquired in 2017, is actually sort of a zombie album with only 185 etchings. When Juan de Beistegui’s copy sold in 2018, Christie’s, citing the same 1912 source above, lamented that of the original 100, “moins de la moitié ont probablement échappé aux marchands d’estampes qui ont souvent préféré vendre les gravures à part.” Less than half have probably escaped the print dealers who often preferred to sell etchings separately.

So screw 19th and 20th century print dealers generally, and the Print Club of Cleveland specifically.

Granted, I’ve never looked, but I have never seen an actual Bob Ross painting for sale. I thought they were all locked up in some corporate vault. Well, there are two on the loose, and now they’re being auctioned at Bonhams. This one has that iconic palette knife mountain flanked by happy trees; the other one’s asymmetrical, and snowy, with a cabin.

Oh wow, there are actually five at Bonhams in two different sales. The two above are from a private collection. Three other paintings—two from Ross’s TV show, and one from a book—are being sold by the company with proceeds to benefit American Public Television.

In 1968 in Addis Ababa, Rirkrit Tiravanija’s father took a photo of the young artist and his sister. As Christopher Wierling’s press release text explains, Rirkrit Tiravanija has used the photo in his work at least twice: for self-portrait (1993), and untitled 1968 (Mr. Spock) (1968/1998). The latter was actually/also the title of a 2023 exhibition in Hamburg surveying Tiravanija’s long collaboration with Klosterfelde Edition. Of the homemade Spock ears, Wierling writes, “Spock was the only extraterrestrial crew member aboard the Starship USS Enterprise—he is described as half-human, half-Vulcan—and it’s precisely his pointy ears that signify his otherness. The artist would later cheekily refer to those pieces he made from modelling clay at age six or seven, as his first sculpture.”

[Update: There is another. Tiravanija made an edition of the photo as untitled (silver Mr. Spock) (1968) in My Kid Could Do That, a 2017 fundraising exhibit of artists’ childhood work. AND THERE WAS A T-SHIRT.]

Tiravanija presents the photo again, as untitled 2025 (2025), in his current show at Chantal Crousel in Paris is titled, IN ALIENS WE TRUST. It is a collaboration of sorts with Danh Vo. He “added elements.” Tiravanija’s photogravure is framed in “McNamara walnut wood,” from trees planted by the US Defense Secretary who drove the Vietnam War, Robert McNamara, which Vo obtained from his son Craig McNamara. The glazing is engraved with the show’s title, IN ALIENS WE TRUST, in the calligraphic script of Phung Vo, Danh’s father.

We all try to live in the present, making more or less sense of the world created by those who came before us. But I honestly do not know what to make of this work. Maybe I should have had my dad write this blog post instead.

Fear not, from now on no auctioneer or dealer will ever forget to mention that in May 2023, one of an innumerable supply of Jacques Barthélémy DeLamarre paintings of a shivering, shaved-ass little lion dog, sold for $279,400.

And until we can somehow find proof otherwise, despite the absence of any evidence to support it, they’ll similarly never not mention that this dog, «parfois dit Pompon [sometimes called Pompon]», was a purported favorite of Marie Antoinette.

And so it is, with the example that just turned up in Berkshire, England, where this little dog painting, identical in many large details to the Sotheby’s version, but missing the exuberant eyebrows, will be sold from the august halls of Dreweatt’s Donnington Priory, on November 18th.

At some point I’ll have to reckon with the fact I made a facsimile object of a facsimile object. In the mean time, I guess I’ll just keep blogging every Pompon I see.

Lot 6: JACQUES-BARTHELEMY DELAMARRE (FRENCH, 19TH CENTURY), PORTRAIT OF A SMALL POODLE, est. GBP 4-6,000 [dreweatts]
Previously, related: Somehow Pompon Returned [and sold for just EUR 9274]
Did anyone make more Pompon Facsimile Obects than DeLamarre himself? Non.

I had a long drive this week, and put Andrea Fraser’s 2004 Dia Artists on Artists talk on again, “Why Does Fred Sandback’s Work Make Me Cry?” because someone recently mentioned the video version of the talk she gave at MAMFW in 2012.

And it still makes me cry.

Previously, related: Why does Andrea Fraser’s work make me cry?

After the immediate bafflement of whatever Eva Hesse is covered with, I find my eye rushing to the isolated, geometric certainty of Robert Smithson’s untitled ziggurat sculpture. And only then does it head to the cluttered table, filled with items obscuring a painted grid, which turns out to be a gift from Hesse’s friend, Sol Lewitt.

Anna M. Chave made a close read of the objects, works, studies, and models on the table in her 1996 book, Three Artists (Three Women): Modernism and the Art of Hesse, Krasner, and O’Keeffe. I’m gonna be real, right now I’m here for the table itself, and mostly for the table it replaced.

In 1967, Hesse made Washer Table out of a low-slung, plywood table that had been given to her by Lewitt. It began as part of a Lewitt table/sculpture he made for a group show in 1964. After that show—curated by Dan Flavin—Lewitt tried it in another sculpture, then cut it down to coffee table height and gave it to Hesse. She, in turn, covered its grid-painted surface with thousands of rubber washers and a sheet of glass, and gave it back.

It’s recognized as one of Hesse’s first sculptural objects now, and one of the first to use rubber, but Hesse herself considered the placement of around 5,700 washers to be a form of drawing. Lewitt explained to art historian Kirsten Swenson that Hesse “only used the surface of the table as a drawing surface before returning it to me.”

The timeline is not clear here, but the table sure is. Swenson opens her 2015 book, Irrational Judgments: Eva Hesse, Sol Lewitt, and 1960s New York, with this 1968 snapshot of Washer Table being used as a table in Lewitt’s Hester St. studio. It, too, is covered with studies, models, objets, tchotchkes, an ashtray arranged, as Swenson puts it, “as if fixed to points on an invisible grid.”

The tchotchkes—and the glass—were gone by 2011, when Washer Table was shown at Craig Starr Gallery in 2011, in a Hesse/Lewitt exhibition curated by Veronica Roberts. Amy Whitaker has a nice account of visiting the show on art21, and meeting Lewitt’s widow and Hesse’s sister.

Among the Eva Hesse Archive at Oberlin’s Allen Art Museum [donated by Hesse’s sister Helen Hesse Charash] is the best photo of Washer Table. Where it looks even less painted than in Lewitt’s studio. In fact, it looks downright unpainted. Lewitt had already painted or stripped it at least twice, and some time after 1968, it seems someone painted it again.