a photo by G. Murray Levick of a fronting penguin, from the front of his book, via
“The first Adélie penguins arrived at the Ridley Beach rookery, Cape Adare, on October 13,” Dr. G. Murray Levick recorded in his observation diary in the Southern Summer of 1911. Levick was the staff surgeon-turned-zoologist on Robert Scott’s Terra Nova British Antarctic Expedition, one of six men who stayed to study the coast. His findings were published in 1914 as Antarctic Penguins: A Study of their Social Habits, which is available in its original, censored form on the Internet Archive.
In Levick’s introduction, he quotes the description of penguins made by Emil Racovitza, the Romanian zoologist on the Belgian Antarctic Expedition in 1897: “Imagine a little man, standing with two broad paddles instead of arms…Have this creature walk on his two feet, and give him at the same time a droll little waddle, and a pert movement of the head; you have before you something irresistibly attractive and comical.”
This kawaii anthropomorphization of penguins is inextricable from the severe moral language Levick used to describe the penguins’ sex-related behaviors, and the subsequent suppression of his observations for almost 100 years. Which is laid out in Chris Coates’ fascinating and disturbing bluesky thread. Levick called the behaviors “depraved,” “crimes,” and the aggressive, unpaired male penguins involved in most of it, “little knots of hooligans.”
The Natural History Museum printed Levick’s findings as a separate, four-page pamphlet, Sexual habits of the Adélie penguin, in 1915. But the 100 reported copies were not published, and only two are known to survive. One turned up in the NHM Library and was published and analyzed for its historical, cultural, and scientific implications, in 2012. Levick’s observation of a complete mating and fledging cycle of Adélie penguins remains unequaled, and the behaviors he reported have all been observed and analyzed in less shocked terms since.
Gerhard Richter, Flasche mit Apfel, Bottle with Apple, 2026, “fine art print mounted between dibond and perspex,” 83 x 62 cm, ed. 25+5AP, via David Zwirner
In 1988 Gerhard Richter made three paintings after a still life photo of a bottle and apple, which is on the same sheet of Atlas as his portrait of his daughter Betty. The Flasche mit Apfel paintings are all the same size, and seem to vary only a little in overall light intensity and the shape of their shadows.
In 2003, Richter made some digital Lambda print proofs of Flasche mit Apfel GR 663-2, facemounted on acrylic, for an edition. But according to the 2017 Phillips auction listing where one of the proofs didn’t sell, “No edition was produced.”
Until now. Maybe? Maybe it’s the improvement of digital printing technology, or the nostalgia of seeing one of the paintings in the massive Richter retrospective last year at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, qui sait, pas moi, but Richter has finally made that edition. Sort of.
David Zwirner is previewing a “Fine Art Print” mounted between Dibond and Perspex at Art Basel Paris. Which sounds like the language of the HENI-era Facsimile Objects, which were rebranded as prints. But instead of 500, there are only 25 of these Flasche mit Apfel, plus five AP. Whether those include the four proofs made in 2003, whether they’re even of the same painting, whether they’re signed or just numbered, and whether a taxonomical consolidation is underway in Richter’s oeuvre, are all questions whose answers might be found in a few days, at the Grand Palais, or by reaching out to your handler at Zwirner.
An undated photo mislabeled as “War Art” on eBay, but which was, in fact, a photo of the JFK memorial wreath sculpted by Louis Féron, acquired by Oak Spring Garden Foundation, via Ploughshares
An absolutely fascinating story about a lost JFK memorial sculpture unfolded in 2022-24 at the otherwise serene enclave of the Oak Spring Garden Foundation, the former estate of Bunny Mellon.
It seems to have unfolded twice, or at least to be recounted twice. So far. And I am enthralled by both accounts, which art historian Andrew Wasserman just laid before me. Except now I must repent of some of my judgments of Mrs. Paul Mellon, or at least allow her more grace.
Jordan Wolfson, 13 (L), 2026, hand-polished aluminum, aluminum spikes, digital UV substrate print on aluminum of a f’ing Renoir he credited in the ingredients even tho it’s public domain, automotive clearcoat, 53 x 88 x 11 1/8 in., ed. 1+1AP, 📷: Owen Conway for Gagosian, obv
“— the Chanel punk jacket spikes Virginie Viard wore in the photo Karl Lagerfeld took in 2011 for his and Caroline Roitfeld’s The Little Black Jacket Book, which was used in most of the stories this week about Viard getting fired by the Wertheimers after 30 years? Yes, yes they are.”
Karl Lagerfeld, “Virginie Viard, Chanel Studio Director,” 2011, styled by Caroline Roitfeld
Actually, no, ofc, Roitfeld’s are just off the rack punk spikes, but it did seem weird that it’s happened twice.
I can just imagine the 83-year-old architect now, in 1969, pushing aside the many staffers at his firm who have been working for three years on the many details of what would be Mies’s largest—and last—corporate commission: the 1.3 million square-foot office tower for IBM’s Chicago headquarters, and saying, “No, no, that wall-mounted console is not quite right. Leave it to me. I will design it if it’s the last thing I do”
And then he died, and it was. And when the building was actually built three years later, there this console was.
The Auction (2025), as installed in STY, Nicole Eisenman’s 2025-26 show at 52 Walker
One of the monumental paintings in STY, Nicole Eisenman’s show at 52 Walker last winter was The Auction (2025), in which an artist stood by in a crowded salesroom as a black-robed auctioneer and a sieg heiling bidder faced off over the artist’s work. It was acquired by MoMA. A couple of weeks ago, she told Julia Halperin that The Auction “was partly inspired by collectors’ threats to sell her work at a moment when the art market was being deployed as judge and jury of her actions.” Some dealers and collectors criticized Eisenman and other artists in 2023 for signing an open letter calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, which has since been obliterated in an ongoing genocide, without originally noting Israelis had been killed in the October 7 attacks.
Nicole Eisenman, I.D.F. In a Cage, In a Swamp, 2024, Mixed media on paper, 8 1/2 x 11 in, donated by the artist to benefit the Drawing Center
As Eisenman explained to Shiv Kotecha after STY closed, “My project has always really been about looking at the world and all the abhorrent politics going on in it, seeing how that experience lands emotionally, and then assigning a kind of symbolic language to those feelings. Once you find the symbolic language for the feeling that this shitstorm is producing in you, you’ve got your painting.”
Or, perhaps, your drawing. The small work Eisenman donated to the Drawing Center benefit auction seems like it emerged from the eye of the shitstorm she experienced. IDF in a Cage, in a Swamp (2024) is a printout of a news photo of an IDF tank in Northern Gaza, overpainted up to its turret with a dark blue swamp, and overdrawn in pen with a perspectival cage. The work and the other works at auction, “The World is the Work,” just went on view today.
In addition to the 52 Walker show earlier this year, which is part of the Zwirner organization, Eisenman just opened a show at Sadie Coles in London. Though many artists’ galleries share credit for donating their works to the Drawing Center auction, Eisenman’s is solely “courtesy of the artist.”
Christopher Wool & Richard Prince, My Act, 1987-88, primer and alkyd on paper, 44 1/2 x 34 1/2 in., selling at Sotheby’s Paris
I was gonna say this is buy one get one free, but with this estimate for a work on paper, it definitely feels like you’re paying for both a Richard Prince AND a Christopher Wool. Kinda cool, though, ngl.
There is no skull in Dürer’s Melancholia, although one might have been expected. But this great thing, blind as a stone, closed as a tomb, this geometrical block which seems to have allen into the engraving like a meteor, as a speculation of the most abstract intellect into the midst of what should have been a place of life and confidence, is surely the nearest thing to a death’s head, to a skull. And it induced Alberto to perceive in his own geometrical form, first conceived, who knows, as an innocent abstraction, this head which may be either living or dead, this token of presence but assailed by nothingness, which was increasingly to obsess his mind, exploring like a modern Hamlet, the eternal mystery.
On the same page of Minotaure in 1934, like another apparition on the same dark night pierced by a single moonbeam, there was, moreover, a sculpture that is now, explicitly a skull like poor Yorick’s: the Man’s Head—gender specified, although there is nothing but sexless bone and empty sockets—to be known later as Cubist or Cubical Head.
Obviously, quoting Yves Bonnefoy is never something to be undertaken lightly, but the occasion absolutely demands it.
Giacometti’s Man’s Head (Cubist Head) and Nocturnal Pavilion (The Cube) in Minotaure no. 5, 12 May 1934, as reproduced in Yves Bonnefoy’s Giacometti (Flammarion, 1991)
This is not about The Cube, which Georges Didi-Huberman addressed, and which has been addressed here before. It is not about The Cube, except it is. Because in the pangs of realizing Cube, and grappling with abstraction, Giacometti, Bonnefoy writes, also saw Cube as a head, a skull. Or saw that there was a skull inside it, waiting to be excised. The other apparition caught in Minotaure‘s moonbeam.
Alberto Giacometti, Tête-crâne (AGD 4814), 1934, plaster with insular coating for molding, 7 1/4 x 8 x 9 1/4 in., slightly bigger than all the rest, I think, selling at Sotheby’s Paris
.A Head Skull, or Tête-crâne, is coming up for sale in Paris during Art Basel. has been in the family of a friend of Giacometti’s since 1935. It was exhibited once—”probably”—in 1946, though let’s be real, auction house research is not what it used to be. Every publication or illustration of Tête-crâne listed is of “another version.” Which, how many are there? The Fondation Giacometti has one, and lists this one and two more, all in plaster. They do not seem to mention the plaster at The Met. Or the one the Kravises have promised to MoMA. Or the terra cotta at the Pompidou. Or the marble at the Nasher. Or the bronze in Bonnefoy, which may be the one promised to LACMA? But you get the idea:
The museums have enough; this one belongs in my house.
Gerhard Richter, Pane of Glass/Glasscheibe, aka Antelio Glas GR 876-5, 2002, glass and steel 95 x 100 cm, selling soon at Sotheby’s
Like a wind rattling the windows in their aging frames, a decent auction result can shake loose other Gerhard Richter Pane of Glass from their storage spaces.
With its dark steel banded frame, GR 876-5 seems completely different from the other [also retitled] Antelio Glas works, which only have tiny steel prongs, too small to sign and label. And all apparently too precarious to install and photograph anew. Truly, with the auction houses’ help, we’re gonna bring zombie gerhard-richter.com back online one scavenged jpg at a time.
Gerhard Richter, Grauer Spiegel, GR 766, 1992/2025, pigment on glass, 300 x 400 cm overall, selling at Sotheby’s
Meanwhile this whole four-panel mirror work from 1992 was refabricated last year under the artist’s direction, and now has a double-date. See it during Frieze Week, and lmk if those panels are each angled slightly like a set of shutters left slightly ajar.
Andy Warhol, Portraits of the 70s, signed six times, from the estate of Mrs. Beverly Chalfen Grossman, late of Minneapolis, selling at Freeman’s in Chicago
It hit me: David Whitney’s Andy Warhol’s Portraits of the 70s is a foundational text for a clearer, bleaker postwar art history. Bleaker than the one Robert Rosenblum thought he was writing when he compared the “upper-income virtuosity” of rainbow sherbet brushstrokes’ to the “lower-income austerity” of Brillo boxes and Most Wanted Men:
With Warhol’s gallery of contemporary faces, the decade of the 1970s high society is instantly captured. In this glittering realm, light and shadow are bleached out by the high wattage of spotlights; colors seem selected from the science-fiction rainbow invented by the likes of Baskin-Robbins, and brushstrokes offer an extravagant, upper-income virtuosity which appears to be quoting, for conspicuous consumption, a bravura tradition that extends from Hals through de Kooning. By comparison, the look of Warhol’s 1960s paintings was often of lower-income austerity and dreariness, of Brillo boxes and Campbell’s soup cans, of the faces of criminals, innocent victims, or remote superstars who could barely sparkle through the smeared newsprint. On more than one level, Warhol has wrapped up two decades for our social time capsule.
But that wasn’t the moment. It was 84 lots into the auction of her Chanel sweatshirts and It Bags where Mrs. Beverly Chalfen Grossman’s personalized copy of the Whitney catalogue appears. Warhol signed it on five different pages and the cover. I wondered why.
Brice Marden, Three Deliberate Greys for Jasper Johns, 1970, oil and beeswax on canvas, 183.2 x 382.8 cm overall, purchased in 1971 by the National Gallery of Canada
“In 1970, the minimalist painter Brice Marden painted a monumental canvas, Three Deliberate Greys for Jasper Johns, and called Johns to ask him if it was OK to use that title. Johns replied: ‘Sure, as long as the greys are deliberate.’”
Roberta Smith included it in her posthumous assessment of Marden’s legacy for the Times on August 14, 2023. But it originates from Smith’s sometimes colleague at the Times, Deborah Solomon, who, on August 10th, the day after Marden’s death, shared the story on a cursed social media site. Rather than link to it, I have copied it here:
Brice Marden once told me that when he painted his monumental canvas, “Three Deliberate Grays for Jasper Johns,” he phoned Johns to ask him if it was okay if he used that title. Johns replied, “Sure, as long as the grays are deliberate.” R.I.P. Brice.
Solomon is working on a biography of Johns, so I expect she has many more such stories saved, in classic Times writer’s fashion, for the book.
Installation view of Brice Marden’s Three Deliberate Greys for Jasper Johns [L] in Eight Contemporary Artists at MoMA, 1974, 📷: MoMA/Kate Keller
What strikes me is that when Marden was included as one of Eight Contemporary Artists at The Museum of Modern Art in 1974, Three Deliberate Greys for Jasper Johns was exhibited upside down. Or backwards, whichever is more applicable with a Marden. Or maybe you can install it either way, as long as it’s deliberate.
[Only a couple of days later update] In response to my question to the NGC about the hanging order for this Marden triptych, Dr. Christopher Etheridge, Associate Curator/Conservateur associé explains: the three panels were originally bolted together when the NGC acquired the work in 1971, but were later taken apart to alleviate structural issues. Also, an inscription on the verso of the darkest panel supports the dark-light-medium order, and the NGC has always shown it that way.
Brice Marden’s Three Deliberate Greys for Jasper Johns installed OG style in MoMA’s 2006-07 retrospective, 📷: Jonathan Muzikar for MoMA
Whether Marden knew of approved of MoMA’s 1974 installation of the now-freewheeling canvases is not known, but when MoMA borrowed the work again for Marden’s 2006 retrospective—which the artist was closely involved in—it was hung in the original NGC order. I am deeply grateful to our neighbors to the north for their ready and thoughtful engagement, and for their careful stewardship of our shared culture.
Hiroshi Sugimoto, Trees, 2022, pigment print on rice paper, two eight-panel screens, 71 3/8 x 686 5/8 in. overall? 57 feet? Astronomy missions have been destroyed by imperial/metric confusion like this. how about 181.3 x 686.6 cm, Fraenkel Gallery?
The thing with screens, as with Hiroshi Sugimoto, is that there’s never enough. And so it goes with Hiroshi Sugimoto screens.
I thought I got at least a sense of Sugimoto’s engagement with the byōbu form, of the arc. But there’s more. Fraenkel Gallery has a portfolio with eight examples of what they call photographic screens, mostly from 2021-2. Most are landscapes. One, Lightning Fields, is composed from an earlier series. And one is both. Pine Trees, which was inspired by a screen, finally became a screen itself. Though it seems that the original six-photo compositions have been transformed to eight-panel screens. I’m sure it’s glorious, even if it is only 686 cm instead of 686 inches.
But that’s not where this started, or picked up. While looking for video of the 2001 Sugimoto-produced Noh performance at Dia, I found #NohClimaxSeries, eight video shorts Sugimoto produced with the Japan Foundation in 2022. Sugimoto was initially stuck, then remained in Japan for the first three years of COVID. And eight videos of one- or two-performer scenes from various Noh plays staged on the grounds or in the empty halls of Himeji Castle feel like a pandemic production.
Screenshot of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Ebira from Noh Climax, 2022, with the artist’s 2014 screen, 《月下紅白梅図》via Japan Foundation/youtube
Sugimoto’s concept was the Noh version of a classical music period performance: “I have always dreamed of seeing the premodern world. A time when people danced in natural settings and played natural, unamplified music under natural light. Electricity has robbed the performing arts of their original spirit.” Performers in antique costumes and masks from his own collection followed a traditional program of plays keyed to the time of day, and performed in natural light. The first one I clicked had a 2014 screen by Hiroshi Sugimoto, Purple and White Plum Blossoms under Moonlight.
Cady Noland, Untitled, 1991, screenprint in artist’s frame, 40 x 32 1/8 in., selling at Native, BRU
How is it that the estimates on the Pannier Collection in Brussels are all so freaking low? Don’t they know that might attract extra attention and interest in the extremely on point Cady Noland screenprint with the perfect juxtaposition of Patricia Hearst images that the Panniers bought at FIAC from Paula Cooper?
Installation view of Noh Such Thing As Time, a performance of Yashima daiji, Oct 3, 2001 at Dia, stage, warōsoku lighting, and photo backdrops by Hiroshi Sugimoto, image via sugimotohiroshi.com [update: ok now I have questions because 蝋燭能, “candle noh,” is a thing, but those candle holders are not the traditional stage floor lights, which look like little paper cones of frites. Is there really only one photo of this event?]
Tickets for Naohiko Umewaka’s performance at Dia 25 years ago today of Zeami’s classic 14th century Noh drama, Yashima, with lighting, stage, and set by Hiroshi Sugimoto, went on sale September 12, 2001. I was not in the mood then, and the punny title, Noh Such Thing As Time, didn’t help. Also something about the two monumental, multipanel photos of pine trees did not sit right with me then or since. I did not like the book. So despite my absolute transfiguration by his 1995 Time Exposed (Buddha Series), it took me a while to accommodate Sugimoto’s explorations of traditional Japanese art and culture into my understanding of his practice.
Hiroshi Sugimoto, Pine Trees, 2001, six-panel silver gelatin prints, I think, via sugimotohiroshi
Hasegawa Tōhaku, Pine Forest, Momoyama era (c. 1590), pair of six-panel byōbu, ink on paper, each 157 x 386 cm, National Treasures in the collection of the Tokyo National Museum
Sugimoto explains his Pine Trees photos, in Japanese artistic terms, as copies of Pine Forest, a pair of 16th century six-panel screens by Hasegawa Tōhaku at the Tokyo National Museum, which are revered as national treasures. Maybe he felt creating photos for a classical traditional context like Noh required this more explicit referential framework. But these are not copies. If only because Sugimoto’s rather stuffed composition–he photographed trees singly or in pairs, I think, on the grounds of the Imperial Palace, and then aligned them in contiguous scenes—lacks the power of Hasegawa’s emptiness.
Hiroshi Sugimoto, Pine Trees in Coffin of Light, 2009, Bennesse House Park, via sugimotohiroshi
But it’s the reference to screens as a medium of scale and space that feels fruitful, with more potential, frankly, than the hyper-tastefully melodramatic 2009 installation of Pine Trees in Naoshima, Coffin of Light, which feels like the Minimalist language Sugimoto explored so richly with his Seascapes hit a decorative dead end. [There’s a whole Sugimoto Gallery on Naoshima now, designed by the artist, which I mention—along with this whole post, frankly—because DC is about to get another node in the Unified Sugimoto-verse when the Hirshhorn’s redesigned sculpture garden and Mall tunnel entrance open in a few days.]
Hiroshi Sugimoto, Wisteria of the Kasuga Grand Shrine, 2022, pigment print on rice paper on six-panel byōbu, 200.7 x 518.2 x 41.9 cm, ed. 3, installation view via Fraenkel Gallery
Now about the screens. Sugimoto has now produced at least three monumental photographic editions, pigment printed on rice paper, as six-panel folding screens. He showed two of them at Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco in 2023. [Next morning update: there’s at least nine, a whole medium.] The dimensions would indicate that they’re intended to be shown standing free on a ground, not extended flat on a wall. The accordion shape echoes in the best way—though the direction of the reference is probably the opposite—the leporello foldout artist book, Sea of Buddha. [By now I guess I’ll note that fine, the Noh Time Like the Present or whatever book was also accordion-style.]
Hiroshi Sugimoto, Pine Trees spread in NOH Such Thing as Time, 2001, this copy at Ursus Books
The one above, of the Kasuga Taisha (Grand Shrine) in Nara, was also shown at the shrine museum in 2021-2, alongside an exhibition of Shintō relics and artifacts curated by Sugimoto. The exhibition marked the journey of the spirit of the shrine to a newly dedicated Shintō shrine on Sugimoto’s oceanview Enoura Observatory in Kanagawa.
In his explorations of time, Sugimoto’s architectural and material paths usually end up at the antique or the archaic, if not the downright prehistoric. He was and always has been an admirer and collector of artifacts, but he’s been making objects and structures not for the now, but for the far future as discovered ruins. Maybe this weaving of his practice into the centuries-old traditions of Japan is, like his embrace of the explicitly spiritual, part of his attempt to, if not necessarily be remembered, then to at least leave a trace.
