Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp birthday cake and rotorelief-looking dishware, vers 196o, photo negative at the Centre Pompidou
I love everything about the Centre Pompidou’s let it all hang out presentation of photo negatives in their collection, except the lack of metadata, and the inability to right-click.
There are ten candles, and what looks to be the remnant of the number ten written in icing. Was this maybe his tenth summer back, so his last birthday, in 1968? Will this be one of the many mysteries Ann Temkin will solve for us later this year?
R.B. Kitaj, Marlborough (Mark Rothko), 1969-70, screenprint, 19×17 in. on 23 x 30 sheet or so, from a 50-print portfolio in an ed. 150, image via MoMA, who photographed the whole sheet
While factchecking for a panel, I stumbled across this wild screenprint, Marlborough (Mark Rothko) (1969-70), by R. B. Kitaj.
It’s from a portfolio of 50 screenprints Kitaj made in London, In Our Time: Covers for a Small Library After the Life for the Most Part, that reproduces book covers from Kitaj’s own library. In Our Time includes some rare edition deep cuts, but overall, Kitaj seems to select covers as both aesthetic and found objects, rather than [just] for literary reference.
David Diao, BN Spine (2), 2013, acrylic and silkscreen, 72 x 100 in., image via Greene Naftali
But nothing else matched the manipulated, mirroring of this Rothko print, which seemed to have its own ghostly Rothko composition, turned sideways. Until I realized that Kitaj didn’t manipulate anything. The print depicts, not the cover of Marlborough’s 1964 exhibition catalogue, but its printed mylar dust jacket.
Marlborough Mark Rothko (Feb-March 1964) via abebooks
Cy Twombly, Note I, 2005-07, acrylic on three wood panels in artist frame, 98 x 146 in., photo by Ian Reeves, collection SFMOMA
Thierry Greub’s research on the inscriptions in Cy Twombly’s work fills multiple volumes. Dean Rader wrote an entire book of poems from experiencing Twombly’s work. Reading Greub’s essay on Rader’s book and being caught in the flow of Twombly’s writing, I found myself suddenly stuck on the marks on this painting, Note I from III Notes from Salalah (2005-07).
They look like letters—Greub calls them, “lasso-shaped ‘ls’ and ‘es’ of Twombly’s writing-evoking traces of painting.” When the Art Institute showed the series in 2009, James Rondeau made reference to the “pseudo-writing” of the blackboard paintings, and to how the loops and apostrophe-like strokes interpreted “the calligraphic nature of printed Arabic.”
Honestly, I’m fine either/or/and/also, but I am just stymied by how they were made. The strokes on the right seem to start from the right, but each loop/stroke seems to start from the left. And the strokes on the left seem to start from the left. The point is, I think the strokes and drips tell this entire story of their making, yet they are not written. They look like letters or calligraphy, but they’re not made by writing.
vs. Cy Twombly writing: Three Notes from Salalah exhibition poster from Gagosian Rome, 2008, via Gagosian Shop
The Art Institute goes on, “Although ostensibly based on writing, the paintings are also specifically indebted to place,” and then heads straight to the lush, green, tropical landscape of Salalah in Oman. Meanwhile, the only place I can picture is Twombly’s tiny storefront studio in downtown Lexington, Virginia where the series was painted. Because each Note is three wood panels, each 8×4 feet, like sheets of plywood, joined together, into a massive wall. Did he join them first? Or join two and add one later? Could the studio even fit all three Notes at once? Twombly made these when he was 80. The mind may reel, but it’s nothing compared to Twombly’s arm.
The little A5 magazine had four sheets of rasterized potato images, and instructions for scaling them up to A4 for pasting. With the print issue long unavailable, Pot has made an A4 PDF available on his studio website.
one of four sheets of Free Potato Wallpaper, an A4 pdf as a resized jpg, via bertjanpot.nl
Because the paper is printed basically as tiles instead of rolls, the trick to getting a more random potato effect is to turn some sheets upside down. Of course your desire for some respite from an uncertain world may also inspire you to paper your wall in elaborate potato patterns. Quick, while you still have the freedom to choose.
This is apparently Enzo Mari’s fireplace, where it looks like he burned a postcard of Julia Louis Dreyfus in effigy every month? I have no idea, but the only other domestic images I can find from his studio are from this apartamento magazine interview from 2009, when I was deep in Enzo Mariology. [Everything else for this image is unattributed fluff. And do you know how hard it is to search for Enzo Mari’s own house? This is ridiculous.]
I will update this post with more info when I find it, and if it turns out to be all locked away for two generations in Mari’s archive, I’ll post an update about that, too.
nell’angolo il camino, uno ziggurat domestico con le foto di nipoti sorridenti. «Questo è uno degli interventi fatti nella casa, come la cucina-corridoio. Non ci sono disegni, l’ho pensato e fabbricato insieme al muratore. Per ogni piano due strati di mattoni, poi intonacati. Per me è stato un gioco, un passatempo, la realizzazione di un sogno dopo aver spiato le case dei contadini. Sarebbe bello potersi occupare solo di mantenere vivo il fuoco»
“in the corner the fireplace, a domestic ziggurat with photos of smiling grandchildren. This is one of the interventions made in the house, such as the kitchen-corridor. There are no drawings, I thought it and manufactured it together with the mason. For each level two layers of bricks, then plastered. For me it was a game, a pastime, the realization of a dream after spying on the homes of peasants. It would be nice to be able to take care of keeping the fire alive.”
Incredible. MoMA will close the latest installment of its film preservation series, To Save and Project, with a mountain of never-before-seen footage from Andy Warhol and The Factory. There were more than eighty 100-ft rolls of exposed black & white film in Warhol’s archive that had never been developed. Turns out it includes several Screen Tests, material from the shoots of several films [including, I guess, the shot above, of Jack Smith in Batman Dracula], some explicit goings-on from the Factory, and Warhol around town in 1964. Tickets for the February 2nd screening will be released for members on Jan. 19th.
Roy Lichtenstein posing with his Swiss Cheese freight elevator doors to his loft studio, which appears to be just part of the whole Lichtensteinworld painting scheme.
Swiss Cheese Day was yesterday, and Peter Huestis celebrated on Bluesky by posting about the swiss cheese freight elevator doors Roy Lichtenstein painted in his 29th St. loft in 1984. The loft was sold, probably in the 90s, and the buyer, unsurprisingly, wanted to keep the doors, and so they were entered into Lichtenstein’s catalogue raisonné. The most important part to me, though, was the security bar, painted to match, which did not get a CR entry separate from the doors. If that was all a trip into the Lichtenstein Foundation website yielded, it would have been enough.
I traded the rights to everything I’ve ever written and my firstborn to the Lichtenstein Foundation so that I could properly celebrate Swiss Cheese Day by illustrating the existential reckoning Roy Lichtenstein left behind with these polished brass and glass doors (1993)
But no. There is another. And another. And another. Lichtenstein made THREE more sets of Swiss cheese doors. They’re dated to 1993, fabricated in 1993-97 [by Jack Brogan, Robert Irwin and Larry Bell’s guy], and only installed, posthumously, in 1998. They were mirror finish bronze, and they were made for two entrances and an elevator in the atrocious house Hugh Newell Jacobsen built in Bel Air for Betsy and Bud Knapp, one-time owners of Architectural Digest and Bon Appetit.
After another artist praised them, I had to reconsider the bronze doors, and I found an explanation that lets me agree: Lichtenstein created these doors so that every time the Knapps entered their 15,000 square-foot home made of fifteen 1,000-square foot post-modern pavilions, they were faced with their own reflections, and compelled to remember that they were people who commissioned three sets of mirror-finish bronze cartoon Swiss cheese doors.
It makes a village: the wetted motor court of Hugh Newell Jacobsen’s Brobdignagian mutation of his House Pavilion, with a Lichtenstein brushstroke sculpture and a pair of bronze and glass Swiss cheese doors, from the 2011 MLS, still somehow on Zillow in 2026
The Knapps could only endure the self-scrutiny for so long. They put the house on the market in 2011 for $24 million. Nobu bought it in 2013 for $15m, said not my existential terror, and got rid of the doors.
People really did be having their Jasper Johns Target (1992) in their 2011 LA real estate listings. TBH except for the early Irwin, the art all looks like it was bought new for the house. Which feels very Bel Air.
At least until then they were contained. They now roam the earth who knows where, just waiting to strike again. The Knapps’ Jasper Johns, meanwhile, has, after a couple of stops, been safely ensconced in Larry Gagosian’s place since at least 2021, when it was loaned to the Philadelphia Museum’s half of the retrospective.
It’s been a minute, but the latest edition of Phone It In: An Art Writing Mixtape is here. Thanks to all who called in to 34-SOUVENIR to share something you’ve read recently. As much as I could, I linked and namechecked people below.
It’s kind of wild how these end up reflecting a moment, even when they pull sources from across decades:
Jane Birkin in an undated photo with one of her at least five Birkin bags, with a Médecins du Monde sticker on it, via Sotheby’s
I misremembered the connection, and thought that Jane Birkin had originally sold her original Hermès bag to benefit Médecins du Monde. But no.
I just looked it up, and Birkin put Médecins du Monde stickers on her Birkin to show her support. But she donated her original 1985 Birkin to an auction in 1994, “Les Encheres de l’Espoir,” to benefit Association Solidarité Sida, the leading French AIDS support charity. Whoever bought it sold it in 2000, and whoever bought it in 2000 sold it last year at Sotheby’s for EUR8.6 million, all proceeds to them.
It came up because Médecins du Monde is one of 37 international aid groups Israel has now banned from operating in Gaza.
Rolywholyover: A Circus, MOCA, 1993 t-shirt, recto
For many years I couldn’t find this quote from John Cage anywhere; it only existed on the t-shirt I bought from Rolywholyover: A Circus, a 1993 show I saw in all its venues, and which continues to live in my head. When it was at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1995, there was a period when I went to see it every day.
Anyway, the quote is, “Indians long ago knew that Music was going on permanently and that hearing it was like looking out a window at a landscape which didn’t stop when one turned away.”
As I remembered it, Cage’s point was that Music was like Nature, and extended beyond the frame of the window, the device which defined a landscape. But reading it now/again, I see that it’s not the window he was talking about, but the looking, or rather, the turning away. That Music exists independent of our experience of it.
Cage’s buildup to this quote is a critique of the structures—musical and otherwise—we inherited, adopted, moved into without thinking, like furnished apartments:
The thing that was irrelevant to the structures we formerly made—and this was what kept us breathing—was what took place within them. Their emptiness we took for what it was: a place where anything could happen. That was one of the reasons we were able when circumstances became inviting changes in consciousness etc. to go outside where breathing is child’s play. No walls not even the glass ones which though we could see through them killed the birds while they were flying.
Even in the case of object, the boundaries are not clear. I see through what you made. If, that is, the reflections don’t send me back where I am.
I’m going to need to sit with this a bit, and it probably won’t be right now.
Art historian David J. Getsy has a new essay out, a long-brewing consideration of Scott Burton’s public sculpture practice in the context of the AIDS epidemic, and as a subtle, determined resistance to the silencing and erasure of people with AIDS. Everything was going down at once in the 1980s, and Getsy argues that Burton’s furniture-like public installations, readily overlooked, were an early example of an artist grappling with the communal and individual experience of AIDS.
What somehow caught me off guard was how at odds Burton’s public project was to the rest of the art world he was so enmeshed in, a world where the fearless artist’s place in public culture was being thrashed out in the battle over Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc.
In 1985, while speaking from within “this minority culture that is avant-garde art,” Burton told Richard Francis that, though he supported Serra’s effort, he saw things differently: “I feel the world is now in such bad shape that the interior liberty of the artist is a pretty trivial area. Communal and social values are now more important. What office workers do in their lunch hour is more important than my pushing the limits of my self-expression.”
This difference is central to Getsy’s analysis: “Burton relinquished the recognizability of his role as artist and creator—a role that was so central to Serra’s project and the art world’s defense of it.
This position of passivity (however critically engaged) clashed with the masculinist presumptions of sculpture as a space-dominating occupation.”
installation view of a Shaker desk; two George III sauce tureens which are at least stamped; and a portrait where the date, title, attribution, and depicted age of the sitter, who I think is Benedict Arnold’s lawyer, Ward Chipman, do not line up, but at least it all belonged to some Rockefellers
Maybe it’s because it’s an online sale in January. Maybe it’s the no reserve, low estimate, leftover furniture from the third guest room. But lot descriptions of American furniture at major auction houses used to overflow with material detail, construction analsys, and connoisseurial judgment behind the dating, attribution, and origin of an object.
But now, literally the only thing that matters about this “elder’s desk” Christie’s says is made in the “19th century,” “possibly” by a cabinetmaker, at an unidentified Shaker community, is not those shockingly lyrical, but also justifiably structural, curved leg braces, but that Mr & Mrs John D. Rockefeller 3d bought it, and their daughter is selling it.
what happened to the communion with God in that Shaker village that these curved brackets were added, and the slides for an entire second drawer were just tacked onto the legs like that? It feels like there is a whole story in this thing, and it is not being told
Of course, it’s not a watercolor of a Soutine, but a watercolor of a reproduction of a Soutine, yet another flattening step removed from the intense painterly construction of Soutine’s portrait.
The Aspen Museum had a whole show of early Sherrie Levine this past summer, and it’s worth remembering that rephotographing reproductions à la After Walker Evans was just one of Levine’s techniques for exploring the reproduction and circulation of images. Others included buying and framing posters of paintings; framed plates from art books; drew photos of drawings; and painted photos of paintings.
Back in the day, these watercolors were discussed in terms of their declarative absence of the original’s structure and painterly action, and as a thin, even surface on a thick paper ground. But they’re paintings of photos, so whatever flattening is there counts as documentation.
Anyway, I’m not finding a ton of stuff about Levine’s watercolors, nor of her exploration of Soutine. What I do see, though, makes me wonder why Bucksbaum, of all people, matted this picture this way, when it feels like it should be floated on its sheet.
Gerhard Richter, Brǔcke (am Meer), CR-202, 1969, 93 x 98 cm, collection: Neues Museum, Nuremberg, image via gerhard-richter.com
Martin Herbert writing on Gerhard Richter for Apollo
For three decades, he could increasingly do anything, while coolly suggesting that perhaps none of it mattered in the grand scheme of things, even as his paintings also persistently whispered that maybe it did. Like so much great art, his can be endlessly revisited due to its fathoms-deep ambiguity. Look at an earlyish, unassuming canvas like Bridge (at the Seaside) (1969): a spit of land and outstretching bridge forming a horizon line under a delicately blueing, star-dotted evening sky, nobody around, the lower half fuzzily ambiguous: maybe it’s water, maybe beach, maybe half of each. Here is a casual, banal, snapshot-style update of the German landscape tradition, a knowingly minor thing. Yet it’s also somehow hushed and beautiful, almost tender—everything and nothing swirling together for you to tease apart or accept, finally, as indivisible.
Chaïm Soutine, le Petit Garçon, 1934, oil on canvas, 20 1/4 x 14 7/8 in., sold at Christie’s in 2016
Chaïm Soutine was one of the first artists I found instead of being taught, and I am still enthralled by the intense, uphoved world of his paintings. [His real life, kind of a bummer, tbqh.]
Anyway, after @pg5-ish reblogged Soutine’s Two Children on a Tree Trunk (1942-3) into my tumblr dashboard this morning, I went looking for it, and found instead this great little painting of an unsettled little guy, which sold at Christie’s in 2016.
![cy twombly's loopy dgaf handwritten poster for his show, 3 notes from salalah at larry gagosian galley [heh] via crispi 16 dec 15, feb 16, all in fat blue india ink brush, and then roma written in like ballpoint pen in the bottom right corner, in case you didn't know where via crispi was, loser. this poster from 2008 is now for sale at the gagosian shop for 1250 us dollars](https://greg.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/three-notes-salalah_gagosian-shop-765x1024.jpeg)
