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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”

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.””

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.]

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?

The Gardner Museum heist was 35 years ago this morning, March 18th, 1990.

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?

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”

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,

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]

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.