Gagosian Quarterly, Fall 2017 by Gagosian Quarterly

he passing of time affects us all. In this issue we take a moment to think about legacy: connections to the past, ruminations on the future, traces left behind. For this Fall season we visit Perry Green, Henry Moore’s family home for over forty years, where the director of his Foundation and Moore’s grandson share thoughts on new initiatives and on adapting to the evolution of Moore’s expansive reach. We focus on an intense period of fascinating innovation for Helen Frankenthaler, from 1959 to 1962, to shine a light on a lesser-known group of paintings she made as a young artist and to ask questions about how an artist’s history gets written and then rewritten. We investigate the formative years of Zeng Fanzhi’s painting practice, in China in the 1980s and 1990s, as a way to celebrate the first volume of a catalogue raisonné dedicated to the artist that will be published this winter. We visit Brice Marden in his studio as he prepares to premiere a new body of monochrome paintings this October in London, building on ideas that have permeated his practice since early in his career. Edmund de Waal ruminates on the inspirational paintings of Giorgio Morandi and how their impact is reflected in de Waal’s own artmaking. And we discuss philanthropy with Jeff Koons, who for close to twenty years has been dedicated to making the world a safer place for children. The arc of history permeates the art world in infinite ways. And while iconographies shift, some sense of the eternal typically remains—of where we are, who our ancestors were, and what we can hope to bring to the generations that follow. Alison McDonald, Editor-in-chief

42 In Conversation Elton John in conversation with Derek Blasberg.

70 The Bigger Picture: Jeff Koons Jeff Koons speaks with Alison McDonald and Maura Harty about his longstanding commitment to protecting the rights of children.

100 Innocence II A photography portfolio by Roe Ethridge with The Story of L, an accompanying text by Saul Anton.

Kate Nesin visits the artist’s studio in advance of an upcoming London exhibition.

Sydney Stutterheim guides us through the artist’s street lamp sculptures.

Work in Progress: Brice Marden

Spotlight: Chris Burden

116 Adriana Varejão: Interiors Lilia Moritz Schwarcz explores themes that are central to the artist’s oeuvre.

122 Zeng Fanzhi: The Early Years Gladys Chung investigates the formative stages of this artist’s career.

132 Witness A text by Edmund de Waal on inspirations from the work of Giorgio Morandi.

An Evolving Legacy A look inside the Henry Moore Foundation, their new initiatives, and what’s next.

TABLE OF CONTENTS FALL 2017

138 William Forsythe The world-renowned choreographer discusses his mindful objects with Louise Neri.

144 Fire and Water Y.Z. Kami and Peter Marino discuss the power of bronze, the current state of architecture, and the infinite.

152 SPF-18 Alex Israel discusses his feature-length film with Derek Blasberg.

Helen Frankenthaler John Elderfield and Lauren Mahony discuss a period of daring experimentation and innovation for the artist.

158 St. Kit of New York, Part 3

Cover by John Currin Photo credits: Top row, left to right: Brice Marden, 2017. Photo by Eric Piasecki

By Christopher Bollen.

Image of Lamps that were later used by Chris Burden for Urban Light (2008). © 2017 Chris Burden/licensed by The Chris Burden Estate and Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Photo courtesy Chris Burden Estate

164 Book Corner: Henri Matisse

A special focus on two rare publications by Henri Matisse. Text by Lauren Mahony.

184 Game Changer

Bottom row, left to right: Henry Moore working on Two Piece Reclining Figure, 1960. All images that include artworks by Henry Moore reproduced by permission of The Henry Moore Foundation. Photo by John Hedgecoe

Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Untitled (L.A. Painting) (1982) by Derek Blasberg.

John Currin, Untitled, 1991, gouache on paper, 12 × 8 ¾ inches (30.5 × 22.2 cm). © John Currin. Photo by Rob McKeever

Drawing Is a First Date John Currin discusses his drawing practice with Brett Littman from The Drawing Center.

Gagosian Quarterly, Fall 2017

Editor-in-chief Alison McDonald Executive Editor Derek Blasberg Managing Editor Shannon Cannizzaro Text Editor David Frankel Associate Editors Emily Florido Darlina Goldak Production and Marketing Coordinator Wyatt Allgeier Design Director Paul Neale Design Alexander Ecob Graphic Thought Facility

Cover John Currin

Contributors Saul Anton Derek Blasberg Christopher Bollen Gladys Chung John Currin Guston Spencer Danowski Edmund de Waal John Elderfield Roe Ethridge William Forsythe Maura Harty Alex Israel Y.Z. Kami Jeff Koons Brett Littman Lauren Mahony Peter Marino Alison McDonald Louise Neri Kate Nesin Zoë Santa-Olalla Lilia Moritz Schwarcz Sydney Stutterheim Godfrey Worsdale

Publisher Jorge Garcia

Founder Larry Gagosian

Advertising Manager Mandi Garcia

Business Director Melissa Lazarov

Advertising Representative Michael Bullock

Thanks Suzanne Bennett Mike Bruce Charlotte Bullions Daniele Dorili Tyler Drosdeck Douglas Flamm Leah Fraley Mark Francis Xiao Hu Delphine Huisinga Jacqueline Hulburd Elton John Annabel Keenan Freya Klein Matthew Krajewski Brice Marden Rob McKeever Liza McLaughlin Deborah McLeod Sarah Mercer Adele Minardi Crystal Ming Eric Piasecki Lauran Rothstein Rebecca Sternthal Emma Stower Andie Trainer Adriana Varejão Kelso Wyeth Zeng Fanzhi

For Advertising and Sponsorship Inquiries Advertising@gagosian.com Distribution David Renard Distributed by Pineapple Media Ltd Distribution Manager Kelly McDaniel Prepress DL Imaging Printed by Pureprint Group

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CONTRIBUTORS John Elderfield

Kate Nesin

John Elderfield, Chief Curator Emeritus of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art, and Allen R. Adler, Class of 1967, Distinguished Curator and Lecturer at the Princeton University Art Museum, joined Gagosian five years ago as a consultant for special exhibitions. Here he discusses Helen Frankenthaler with Lauren Mahony.

Kate Nesin is an art historian based in New York. She spent four years as associate curator of contemporary art at The Art Institute of Chicago, where her exhibition Helena Almeida: Work is never finished just closed. Nesin’s book Twombly’s Things was published by Yale University Press in 2014.

Jeff Koons

Christopher Bollen

Louise Neri

Since his emergence in the 1980s, Jeff Koons has blended the concerns and methods of Pop, Conceptual Art, and the readymade with popular culture to create his own unique iconography, often controversial and always engaging. Working with everyday objects, his work revolves around themes of self-acceptance and transcendence. In this issue he speaks about his long-time involvement with the International Centre for Missing & Exploited Children. Photo by Branislav Jankic

Christopher Bollen is the Editor at Large of Interview magazine. His third novel, The Destroyers, was published by Harper Publishing in June of 2017. Here Bollen writes the third part of his four-part shortstory series, St. Kit of New York. Photo by Alexei Hay

Louise Neri has been a director at Gagosian since 2006, working with artists and on exhibitions, editorial projects, and communications across the global platform—this fall, Adriana Varejão: Interiors at Gagosian Beverly Hills, and William Forsythe: Choreographic Objects at Gagosian Le Bourget. Photo by Lin Lougheed

John Currin John Currin’s ambitious paintings seduce, repel, surprise, and puzzle. His masterful technique is achieved through the scrutiny and emulation of the compositional devices, graphic rhythms, and refined surfaces of sixteenthand seventeenth-century Northern European painting, while his eroticized subjects exist at odds with the popular dialogue and politics of contemporary art. Here he discusses his drawing practice with Brett Littman. Photo by Richard Prince

William Forsythe William Forsythe has been a radical innovator in choreography and dance for more than forty years. In redefining the very syntax and praxis of his field in groundbreaking choreographies for professional dancers, he has also created installations, film works, and interactive sculpture. This fall Forsythe will have his first gallery exhibition at Gagosian Le Bourget. Photo by Dominik Mentzos

Guston Spencer Danowski Henry Spencer Moore’s oldest grandchild was born and raised near his grandparents’ home in Much Hadham, Hertfordshire. He worked as a professional actor in London and New York before retraining in food and wine. Gus lives with his young family in West London.

Saul Anton Saul Anton is former Senior Editor at BOMB Magazine and writes frequently about contemporary art and culture. He is the author of Lee Friedlander: The Little Screens and Warhol’s Dream. He teaches at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute.

Edmund de Waal A potter since childhood and an acclaimed writer, Edmund de Waal is best known as an artist for his large-scale installations of porcelain vessels, which are informed by his passion for architecture, space, and sound. Photo by Ben McKee

Gladys Chung

Godfrey Worsdale

Gladys Chung is a specialist and consultant in Asian art with ten years of experience in major auction houses including Christie’s, Poly Auction, and others, and has lectured at several universities in Hong Kong. She is the Hong Kong-based and Beijing-based director for the Fanzhi Foundation for Art and Education.

Godfrey Worsdale is Director of the Henry Moore Foundation, overseeing the artist’s Studios and Gardens in Hertfordshire and the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds. He was previously Director of the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Founding Director of Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art and Director of Southampton City Art Gallery.

Y.Z. Kami

Lilia Moritz Schwarcz

Brett Littman

Y.Z. Kami was born in Tehran. He lives and works in New York. His work reflects a diverse range of interests, from portraiture to architecture, from photography to sacred and literary texts. Kami’s work has been featured in public collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the British Museum, London; and many other institutions worldwide. Photo by Sueraya Shaheen

Lilia Moritz Schwarcz is a Full Professor in Anthropology at the University of São Paulo and a Global Scholar at Princeton University. She was a Guggenheim Foundation fellow in 2006–07 and a visiting professor at Oxford, Leiden, Brown, and Columbia universities.

Brett Littman has been the Executive Director of The Drawing Center since 2007. He has contributed news and commentary to a wide range of international art publications and critical essays to many exhibition catalogues. Photo by Mari Juliano

DIOR.COM

Sydney Stutterheim

Derek Blasberg

Sydney Stutterheim is a doctoral candidate in art history at the Graduate Center, CUNY, and a Presidential Research Fellow. In this issue she discusses Chris Burden’s street lamp projects.

Derek Blasberg is a writer, editor, and New York Times best-selling author. In addition to being the Executive Editor of Gagosian Quarterly, he is Vanity Fair’s “Our Man on the Street” and the host of the television show “CNN Style.” Photo by Pier Guido Grassano

Alison McDonald

Zoë Santa-Olalla

Alison McDonald has been the Director of Publications at Gagosian Gallery for fifteen years. During her tenure she has worked closely with Larry Gagosian to shape every aspect of the gallery’s extensive publishing program and has personally overseen over 400 publications dedicated to the gallery’s artists.

Zoë Santa-Olalla joined Gagosian Gallery in 2006. She has worked with the Henry Moore Foundation on several exhibitions, notably Henry Moore: Late, Large Forms, which traveled from Gagosian London to Gagosian New York. Photo by Selin Ben Mehrez

Roe Ethridge

Maura Harty

Alex Israel

Roe Ethridge works in both editorial and fine-art photography. Drawing on the descriptive power of photography and the ease with which it can be accessed, duplicated, and recombined, Ethridge composes visual fugues within a constantly evolving visual landscape.

Ambassador Maura Harty is President and CEO of the International Centre for Missing & Exploited Children (ICMEC), an organization working worldwide to advance child protection and safeguard children from sexual abuse, exploitation, and abduction. In this issue she speaks with Jeff Koons and Alison McDonald about the organization.

Alex Israel was born in Los Angeles, where he continues to live and work. Israel has recently been the subject of solo shows at The Jewish Museum, New York, and the Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo. Here he speaks with Derek Blasberg about his newest project, the film SPF-18. Photo by Rachel Chandler

Peter Marino Peter Marino, FAIA, is the principal of Peter Marino Architect, the 160-person, New York–based architecture firm founded in 1978. Marino’s work includes residential, cultural, hospitality, and luxury-retail projects worldwide. Marino’s third series of sculptural bronze boxes, Fire and Water, was exhibited at Gagosian in London (June 25–August 11, 2017). Marino was named a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the French Ministry of Culture in 2012 and named as an Officier in 2017. Photo by Manolo Yllera.

SPOTLIGHT

BURDEN

The story behind Chris Burden’s Buddha’s Fingers (2014–15) and its connection to all of his street lamp installations. Text by Sydney Stutterheim

One of the most iconic images of performance artist and sculptor Chris Burden’s Topanga Canyon studio is a photograph taken at dusk in 2005. The warehouselike building is aglow, its external surface taking on the mauve hue of the sky, yet the primary source of illumination comes from an unlikely source: an extensive array of antique street lamps—painted a uniform gray and rewired to emit a cool bright light—is arranged in rows around the structure’s perimeter. In this configuration the lampposts serve as both visual signage for the studio and a protective blockade. Yet questions remain: what are these objects, and how do they relate to Burden’s practice? In December 2000, while perusing wares at the iconic Rose Bowl Flea Market in Pasadena, Burden came across a vendor selling two antique street lamps from the 1920s, each broken down into a complete set of parts. Burden, ever the collector, quickly immersed himself in the history of ornamental street lighting, which became a nationwide phenomenon in the 1920s and ’30s. As in many cities, the proliferation of decorated street lamps in Los Angeles became increasingly specialized and specific to local neighborhoods. These regional variations in ornamental design made the lamps serve not only the functional purpose of providing visibility at night but also a symbolic one, marking a particular community and giving character and respectability to the burgeoning residential areas of American suburbia. Over time, Burden established a relationship with the dealer and eventually purchased his entire collection. Once the lamps were in Burden’s possession, he began the process of sandblasting and coating them and replacing their hardware, updating them to use high-performance bulbs. After exploring these materials in a series of outdoor installations, he exhibited a unique iteration titled Buddha’s Fingers (2014–15). One of his last works before his passing in 2015, this sculpture comprises thirty-two cast-iron street lamps arranged in a honeycomb formation and set on a two-inch steel base. Where visitors could weave in and out of the earlier installations, this arrangement of twelve-foot lampposts is grouped tightly enough to be impenetrable. The title Buddha’s Fingers refers to the Asian citrus fruit known as Buddha’s hand, whose shape is a cluster of elongated digitlike segments. Indigenous to the Himalayas, the fruit symbolizes happiness, longevity, and good fortune and is traditionally used as a temple offering in China and as a New Year’s gift in Japan.1 The reference to temples may have its most striking analogue in Urban Light (2008), in which Burden installed over 200 of his cast-iron street lamps, of sixteen varying heights and styles, in the open-air plaza, designed by the architect Renzo Piano, at the entrance to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).2 Referencing the neoclassical architecture often found in governmental and institutional buildings, Burden arranged the fluted lampposts into a series of pathways for visitors to navigate on foot, approaching a contemporary temple of art as if through the colonnades that led to the religious structures of ancient Greece and Rome. He positioned the tallest street lamps at the center of the sculptural composition and the shortest at the outer edges, so that when the work is viewed from a distance, the radiant bulbs create an abstracted triangular pediment of light, underscoring the reference to a classical temple facade.3 Buddha’s Fingers extends key ideas of the street lamp series while also departing from it in important

ways. Unlike many of his earlier installations, this work was conceived as an indoor sculpture and is not site-specific. While the “Small New King” street lamps included in Buddha’s Fingers were sourced from various residential communities in Los Angeles, other works, such as his 2012 project Holmby Hills Light Folly, contain antique lampposts taken from a certain neighborhood, in this case the affluent Holmby Hills. Historically these lampposts signaled the aspirations attached to prestige real estate sites in the 1930s, following the Great Depression, yet in Burden’s contemporary context they provide a dark and knowing commentary on real estate speculation, social stratification, and technological obsolescence. The title also recalls phenomena of the American entertainment industry such as the Ziegfeld Follies, while the glow of the lampposts accentuates the local movie-industry nickname “Tinseltown,” where movie stars’ names appear in glittering lights. Of course, the interest in light in this particular regional context has art-historical references as well. In the early twentieth century, the California Impressionists used the techniques of French Impressionism to capture the fleeting effects of light in their immediate setting. In the 1960s and ’70s, West Coast artists such as Robert Irwin, Larry Bell, and Doug Wheeler began using light as the primary medium to create immersive environments or

objects that challenged the viewer’s perceptual experience. 4 Burden studied with Irwin as an MFA student at UC Irvine, and throughout his career he sustained an attraction to manipulating limits and testing visibility. Buddha’s Fingers is uniquely compact in its composition; most of Burden’s street lamp projects included architectural elements and explored issues of public space, civic life, and social representation. Light of Reason (2014) and Meet in the Middle (2016), for example, are site-specific works created to help universities develop spaces for congregation by incorporating forms of seating alongside the street lamps. For Meet in the Middle, Burden positioned eight street lamps at the perimeter of two concentric circles of benches. The rings are oriented in opposite directions: the inner benches face each other while the outer benches are turned toward the surrounding environment. The divergent model of community suggested here can be seen as a subtle commentary on the top-down ambitions for these institutional spaces as sites of critical discourse, while still embracing the potential of art to generate new social relations. Returning to the photograph of Burden’s studio and the question of the street lamps, it is evident that these objects, found in a state of disuse, interested Burden through their possibilities. To him, these ornamental lampposts were an outmoded

form of public art from a bygone era, objects often unnoticed in their banality yet critical to the effective functioning of a city. Yet he transformed them into something more: whether clustered around the studio high in the Topanga mountains or reimagined in various sculptural iterations across the globe, Burden’s street lamp installations serve as a kind of beacon, blazing long into the future. And what better symbol of Los Angeles than light— whether the California sunshine, the twinkling urban sprawl of the city at night, or the glimpse of headlights in a rearview mirror.

1. The title also connects to California agriculture, which produces the fruit. It is harvested during the winter months in the Los Angeles region. 2. As LACMA director Michael Govan has pointed out, Urban Light quickly came to serve as the signature feature of the museum, marking a departure from many iconic museums around the globe in which the institution’s architecture, rather than a work of art, acts as its visual symbol. 3. In a nod to the local environment, the rows of street lamps both recall the signature palm trees flanking the Southern California roadways and draw attention to the lamps as often overlooked pillars of the urban transit system of Los Angeles. 4. Robert Irwin, Larry Bell, and Doug Wheeler are often described as key figures in the Light and Space movement, characterized as a loose affiliation of Southern Californian artists who developed a regional offshoot of 1960s Minimalism focused on light and perception. In 1971, the UCLA University Art Gallery exhibited works by many of these artists in the group show Transparency, Reflection, Light, Space.

Page 36 (top): Chris Burden in front of his studio in Topanga with lamps that eventually became part of Urban Light (2008). Photo by Jason Schmidt Page 36 (bottom): Preparatory sketches for Buddha’s Fingers. Photos courtesy the Estate of Chris Burden Page 37: Chris Burden, Buddha’s Fingers, 2014–15, cast iron, glass, electrical wiring, 142 × 108 × 108 inches (360.7 × 274.3 × 274.3 cm). Photo by Joel Searles Left (top): Buddha’s Fingers installed at Chris Burden’s studio in Topanga. Photo by Jeff McLane Left (bottom): Buddha’s Fingers installed at Chris Burden’s studio in Topanga, CA. Photo by Joel Searles

Opposite (top): Chris Burden’s Urban Light (2008) installed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Photo © 2017 Museum Associates/LACMA. Licensed by Art Resource, NY Opposite (middle): Chris Burden’s Holmby Hills Light Folly (2012). Photo by Rob McKeever Opposite (bottom): Chris Burden’s Light of Reason (2014) installed at the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA. Photo by Joey Kotting

2008 Urban Light Urban Light is a permanent, large-scale installation at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art consisting of 202 castiron street lamps made in the 1920s and collected from Los Angeles and its many adjacent cities. Street lamps are one of the key elements to a safe and industrialized city, according to the artist, who stated, “The richly detailed fluted lamps are an ornate totem to industrialism and represent a form of public art.” By placing the lamps so close together, Burden took it one step further to say, “The viewer’s experience of traversing through these tightly spaced fluted columns is an exalted one that recalls the marvel of seeing and walking through classic Greek and Roman architecture or a European cathedral.”

2012 Holmby Hills Light Folly “Holmby Hills Light Folly consists of four intricate cast iron benches and four very rare cast iron lamps from the 1920s that have been fully restored. The lamps are originally from Holmby Hills, an exclusive enclave within the city of Beverly Hills. The Holmby Hills lamps are unique in that the lanterns hang from a curly crook, evoking a fairy lantern. The four lamps are placed in the four corners of a 14 × 14 foot square, with the benches placed between them, creating a quiet place to sit and reflect.” Chris Burden

2014 Light of Reason Light of Reason draws directly from the location in which it resides. Inspired by the three torches, three hills, and three Hebrew letters in the Brandeis University seal, the work’s title borrows from a well-known quote by the university’s namesake, Supreme Court Justice Louis Dembitz Brandeis: “If we would guide by the light of reason, we must let our minds be bold.” Twenty-four antique Victorian-era lampposts are lined up in three rows with concrete benches poured around their bases. The three rows form three branches that fan out from the Rose Art Museum’s entrance, thus serving not only as a place to gather, but also as a gateway that leads visitors into the museum.

2014–15 Buddha’s Fingers “Buddha’s Fingers is a sculpture consisting of a dense cluster of thirty-two antique solid cast iron street lamps. The lamps have a hexagonal base, which lends itself to a tight honeycomb formation. The ‘Small New King’ street lamps were formerly used in the residential neighborhoods in Los Angeles, in the 1920s. Their height, with the globe, is just short of 12 feet. Buddha’s Fingers was conceived and realized to be an indoor sculpture. A steel base of approximately 2 inches in height [was] fabricated and all thirty-two lamps [are] attached to this base. The lamps [are] electrified using state-of-the-art LED technology. The LED’s provide an intense cluster of cool, bright light. The sculpture Buddha’s Fingers references both the citrus fruit and the closed hand of Buddha signifying enlightenment.” Chris Burden

Left: Chris Burden’s Buddha’s Fingers installed at Gagosian Gallery, 980 Madison Avenue, New York. Photo by Rob McKeever Below: Chris Burden’s Meet in the Middle (2016) installed at Claremont McKenna College, Claremont, CA. Photo by Josh White Artwork © 2017 Chris Burden/licensed by The Chris Burden Estate and Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

2016 Meet in the Middle Meet in the Middle consists of eight street lamps and twenty-four benches arranged in two circles. In contrast to Holmby Hills Light Folly, Meet in the Middle is made up of lamps and benches that face outward not only toward the college’s campus but also inward toward the center of the work. In this regard, the sculpture lends itself to be a meeting place, a social setting where students and faculty can gather and interact with the sculpture and each other. Burden conceived of the work in 2014 and it was unveiled posthumously in 2016.

IN CONVERSATION

Elton John talks to Derek Blasberg

Derek Blasberg: Let’s start

almost everything I owned at

at the beginning. When was

an auction at Sotheby’s in

your passion for photography

London that lasted four days.

first conceived? DB: What was the reason for Elton John: I got sober in

that sale? You wanted a

1990 and spent the new year

clean slate, or something

basically doing nothing

more introspective?

except concentrating on my

It’s sort of simple: you either collect things or you don’t. I would love to be a minimalist, trust me, I love minimalism, and I think it’s beautiful. It’s just not in my nature.

EJ: Yes! I started collecting photography in 1991 and had an apartment in Atlanta, a 2,200-square-foot duplex. I was collecting photography in such a ravenous and voracious way, that apartment morphed into what is now 18,500 square feet and comprises several apartments

recovery and rehabilitation

EJ: I must have had a

into a normal life. In 1991,

premonition that I would get

in the summer, I went to

sober. My house was full of

visit a friend called Alain-

stuff on every floor: Lalique

Dominique Perrin, who was

lamps and Tiffany lamps

the head of Cartier and a

and nowhere to put them. I

big photography collector.

thought, “The only way to

His wife Marie-Thérèse had

get rid of this is to get rid

a big collection at their

of everything.” I kept four

house in the South of France,

paintings, some cars, and a

and I was staying there

bit of jewelry, and I sold

with [photographer] Herb

everything else. I was very

in the morning and just be

Ritts and a photo dealer

lucky because in 1989, just

inspired by the wonderful

called David Fahey, who had

after I sold it, there was an

things I have.

a gallery in Los Angeles. We

enormous financial crash. So

were at the house and looking

I started collecting again,

DB: Let’s start with

at some photographs by [Horst

but mainly with photography,

the earlier works in your

P.] Horst and [Irving]

contemporary art, and glass,

collection, which are rare

Penn, and I went “Oh my

which I’ve always collected.

nowadays. When did you

god, these are incredible,

Photography became my

get those?

these are so beautiful.”

main passion.

and two duplexes. I just kept buying the apartment next door, and the one next door to that. In the apartment I hang photography salon style, all next to each other. If I’ve got it, I want to live with it! It’s not everything, but I’m very, very lucky to get up

EJ: I got those at a time

Having worked in an industry where you’re always having

DB: You once told me that

when everything was much

your photograph taken, it

you were a tidy child who

more available. Irving Penns

suddenly seemed odd that I

was meticulous about toys. Do

were available at reasonably

wouldn’t have noticed the

you think your penchant for

cheap prices compared

genre before.

collecting fermented there?

to what they’re at now.

DB: Why do you think you had

EJ: I was born in 1947

available. Nowadays, if I

never thought of photography

and I grew up just after

wanted to start collecting

as an art form?

the war. It was a time when

I couldn’t afford to.

Vintage prints were readily

if you had something you DB: Give me an example.

EJ: Perhaps because I don’t

looked after it because you

like having my photograph

couldn’t afford to replace

taken I didn’t pay it much

it. Gramophone records were

EJ: When I started

attention. But, on the spot,

extremely popular in our

collecting, I could get an

I bought some Herb Rittses,

house. Everything I bought

Irving Penn vintage print

some Irving Penns, and

I kept in pristine condition.

for $5,000.

some Horsts, about twelve

Books I loved and cherished.

photographs in total. That

I’ve always kept things neat

DB: Wow, now they’re half

started the ball rolling.

and tidy. I always thought

a million!

It coincided with me buying

I’d be a very good secretary! EJ: At least.

an apartment in Atlanta, because that’s where my

DB: Was the art of collecting

ex-boyfriend lived and I

fulfilling in a more

DB: That’s an impressive

had friends there. There

spiritual way?

return on an investment.

Jackson Fine Art, and I

EJ: In the early days my

EJ: Perhaps, but I’ve never

visited the owner, Jane,

parents argued a lot, so I

collected anything for

who introduced me to a lot

felt the need to disappear

investment’s sake. I’ve

of other photographers.

and surround myself with

never thought, “I’ve gotta

I bought a lot of stuff

things that couldn’t hurt me.

have that because it will

from her but she also gave

Objects couldn’t hurt me. I

make money one day.” Never

me a lot of stuff to read.

was safe with them. So maybe

been my thing. I get as much

I couldn’t believe I’d been

that’s the reason. It’s sort

joy going to a gallery and

so ignorant about this form

of simple: you either collect

buying something by a new

of art, so I just devoured

things or you don’t. I would

artist for $1,500 dollars and

it! I always collected art;

love to be a minimalist,

seeing them emerge as a great

as a kid I collected posters,

trust me, I love minimalism,

artist.

and then when I became

and I think it’s beautiful.

Elton John I collected Art

It’s just not in my nature.

was a gallery there called

Nouveau and Art Deco, and

DB: That’s great to hear, Previous:

because in my opinion the

paintings by Francis Bacon

DB: I say that the difference

Elton John, London 2008

nature of a true collector

and René Magritte and things

between a hoarder and a

is following your gut.

like that. In 1988, I sold

collector is good taste.

EJ: My rationale is, collect what you like. It doesn’t matter if it’s valuable. If it gives you pleasure and you wake up every day enjoying it, that’s the value. It can be comics, it can be books, it can be records, it can be artifacts. I understand why people collect anything. I used to save all my comics and all my music magazines in piles, and eventually I had no place to put them so they had to go. It was a very sad day when I had to get rid of them. DB: How do you discover new photographers now? Do you go to art fairs and photo shows?

I look at anything. Everything. I have a very quick eye. I can walk into a gallery and go straight to the thing I like. It’s the same when I go shopping, because I don’t like hanging around.

almost immediately. It’s a distressing photograph, yes. But on the other hand, there is a thing about art, in general, that the more tragic the subject matter the more beautiful the picture is. In that photograph, he’s falling in a straight parallel line, half the building is in sunlight and half the building is in darkness. I have a sculpture on the main floor [of my house gallery] by Damien Hirst with a dove and at the bottom a skull, and it’s all about the fine line between life and death. This photograph with the man falling in a straight line from the Twin Towers

EJ: I don’t really like art

symbolizes that to the nth

fairs. It’s not what art is

degree.

about for me. It’s become

I collected 2,000

a social thing. I like going

photographs from 9/11.

to photography fairs more

There was an organization

because you’re just looking

that took over two empty

at photo booths and there’s

stores downtown, and Ingrid

no razzmatazz, but having

Sischy, who was my dear

said that I haven’t been to

friend and a big advisor,

one of those for a long time

took me down there to see

either. I’ve been collecting

them. People donated printed

photojournalism for a while,

photographs that were $25

so I’m always scouring

each. They hung them on

newspapers and always trying

washing lines with clothes-

to collect what I think are

pegs. Ingrid and I were in

the important photographs

there and I’m going, “Oh my

of the time. Photojournalism

god, this is the best still

was so important in the days

life I’ve ever seen, oh my

when I grew up. When I first

god, look at this it’s so

saw Elvis Presley in “Life”

beautiful.” To be so excited

magazine, I thought he was

about something so tragic was

an alien! But things like

perverse. But if you look at

“Life” magazine and “Look”

some of the great paintings

magazine paved the way for

that are truly tragic—think

great photographers to show

of Goya!—the beauty in them

their work.

is fantastic. The Mona Lisa is kind of a semitragic

My rationale is, collect what you like. It doesn’t matter if it’s valuable. If it gives you pleasure and you wake up every day enjoying it, that’s the value.

DB: The role of

photograph, and think of the

photojournalism as a genre

beauty that she’s given us

of art is something that’s

for generations. Or Dorothea

relatively new. One piece

Lange’s “Migrant Mother”

in your collection that I

[1936], which was part of

think is especially moving

the Tate exhibition: the

is “Falling Man,” which

beauty in that photograph

was taken on the morning

is stunning but what’s

of September 11th, 2001,

happening is not beautiful.

of an unidentified person

It’s savage. It’s a perverse

leaping out of a tower of the

thing with art: the most

World Trade Center engulfed

gruesome and tragic thing

in flames.

can provide you with the most beautiful subject matter.

EJ: Took me a long time to get that.

DB: Currently you have about 8,000 photographs

DB: Did you want that

in your collection.

specific image? EJ: Yes, but it’s growing EJ: I wanted that specific

by the day. As I was sitting

image. It was originally

waiting for this interview,

printed in a Pennsylvania

I saw a picture by Martin

newspaper and was taken

Schoeller of Barack Obama,

down from its website

and I e-mailed my curator and

said that I wanted to acquire

for the front cover of my

it. Maybe I’ll see something

album “Sleeping with the

on the front page of a

Past,” where I have a white

newspaper, or someone will

sliver of hair poking out.

say they found a beautiful

That wasn’t a good era for me

Richard Avedon that I don’t

as far as personal happiness

have. It’s an ongoing quest

and drug abuse—it was just

to find something special.

before I got sober. You can see that in the picture too.

DB: Not just anything,

I still don’t like having my photograph taken. I’m not comfortable with it, and that probably won’t change.

going to an opening because you don’t see the works in their proper light. DB: Museums? EJ: I love going to exhibitions, but I don’t like going to museums because I can’t buy anything. Ha!

though. I know that you’re

DB: What do you think about

meticulous about the

the notion that we all have

condition and provenance

cameras on the ends of our

of your favorite pictures

of your collection.

cell phones and you can post

from the Tate exhibition,

them on the Internet in real

which would they be?

EJ: I want vintage prints

time? Does that enter your

by the artists themselves.

world of photography?

DB: If you had to pick three

EJ: I would have to say “Underwater Swimmer”

For example, I’ve been looking for the Diane Arbus

EJ: In general, I find camera

[1917], by André Kertész,

photograph of the boy with a

phones very irritating!

because that’s a hundred

hand grenade in Central Park.

But having said that,

years old this year and

It’s a great photograph and

the film “Tangerine” was

it has influenced so

a wonderful image, but I’m

all shot on an iPhone and

many photographs and

waiting for one in perfect

it was fabulous. If it gets

paintings. Even though

condition. It’s like buying

people into photography

it’s a small size,

a bad used car: if you’re

I’m not averse to it. In that

it’s quite astonishing,

going to buy a classic car

regard I embrace it! But I’m

with the sunlight on the

you’re not going to buy a

terrible when it comes to

swimming trunks and the

classic car with a great

technology because I don’t

ripples in the water.

big dent in it, are you? I

know much about it. I don’t

“Migrant Mother” by Dorothea

want the quality. I think

have a mobile phone, for

Lange would be another.

the great thing about this

example. I’ve never had one.

Oh god, this is so difficult! And, third, I would have

show is that the quality of the prints has been so

DB: You’ve never had a

to say Man Ray’s “Noire et

recognized. The head of the

cell phone?

blanche positive” [1926].

my collection, “Not only

EJ: No. I have an iPad

DB: You sleep under that one

does he have some of the best

because when I’m traveling I

in Atlanta, don’t you?

prints, he has the prints.”

want to FaceTime my children,

And that, for me, is what

and it’s also very useful for

EJ: Yes, I do. And I

I did from the word go.

looking at photographs. But

sometimes think if it falls

the phone? I don’t need one,

off the wall and kills me

thank you very much.

I’d be happy to die by Man

National Gallery said about

DB: In 1990 you knew nothing

Ray. At least I’d have gone

about photography and

out in style!

hated having your picture

DB: Is there anything

taken. Now, as a collector

specific that you’re

and some would say expert

looking for when collecting

DB: I know that when you

in the genre, has your

photographs? Do you prefer

were a kid, you had a poster

perspective changed?

portraits, or do you dislike

of Man Ray’s on the wall of

landscapes?

your bedroom. Tell me: did you ever think in a million

EJ: I still don’t like having my photograph taken. I’m not

EJ: I look at anything.

years that you would own

comfortable with it, and that

Everything. I have a very

the original?

probably won’t change. But

quick eye. I can walk into

now I can look at some of the

a gallery and go straight

EJ: I never thought in a

portraits in a different way.

to the thing I like. It’s

million years I would become

I’ve had my picture taken by

the same when I go shopping,

Elton John! And that all this

the legends we’ve already

because I don’t like

would happen to me, let alone

mentioned: Avedon, Penn,

hanging around.

collect photography and have an amazingly blessed life!

Ritts. DB: And now you have an

DB: You like going to

I can say now, from where I

galleries, though, right?

am in my life, I am so lucky to have been able to acquire

appreciation for them you EJ: I tell people it’s like

these things and also to

listening to music. I don’t

live and work in an industry

EJ: Juergen Teller took some

download one track off an

that is surrounded by such

photos of me when I first

album because I want to hear

amazing things all the time.

came out of treatment that

the whole thing. I like going

There was a time when I was

are very interesting because

to a show because I don’t

not conscious of all of this,

I look so different. I look

want to see a single work,

when I didn’t notice it.

untroubled and I look happy

I want to look at the whole

But that’s the difference

to be back in the world of

thing. I like to visit a

between being drunk and being

the living. Conversely, Herb

gallery when there’s no one

sober. Clarity. It’s as clear

Ritts took a picture of me

there. It’s not really worth

as night and day.

didn’t have before.

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John Currin speaks about drawing with Brett Littman, Director of The Drawing Center.

Previous: John Currin, Untitled, 1995, gouache on paper, 13 3⁄4 × 11 inches (34.9 × 27.9 cm) Left: John Currin, Untitled, 1984, Sumi ink on paper, 7 × 10 inches (17.8 × 25.4 cm) Below: John Currin, Untitled, 2003, ink on paper, 9 × 11 1⁄4 inches (22.9 × 28.6 cm)

RETT LITTMAN: John, is draw-

ing an important aspect of your work? JOHN CURRIN: Well, I’ve always drawn. In the past, drawing was a tool for me to procrastinate. It was a way to put off the difficulties I was having in painting. I used to buy bound sketchbooks and spend hours filling them up—mostly bullshit drawings and then occasionally something lovely. BL Do you feel you have a lot of facility with drawing? JC I always drew as a kid but I never really thought I had a particularly elegant or even distinctive style. Early in my career, drawing was a noncommittal way to try out different personas and styles. Paper 50

is cheap and you can work through things without stressing out the way you do when you’re painting. BL What were some of the personas or styles you tried out? JC I was making funny drawings in an illustrational style—observational drawings, idea drawings, scenario drawings, drawings from stock photography. I felt very free, I could be any kind of artist I wanted to be. But as time has gone on and I’ve focused more on painting, my drawings have become a place where I work out problems in paintings. BL So now a drawing might look like a page of studies of arms, or folds in a fabric, or eyes? JC Here’s a book of drawings for the unfinished painting over there. In these drawings I’m thinking, Where is this thing going to go? What’s

the mood? How do I use these faces from a Sears catalogue? Some of them are explorations of stylistic things, like making a shadow, or drawing someone smiling. This one shows a ring that I wanted to put in the painting, so I needed to draw it to see what it looked like. BL You seem to have been drawing a lot recently? There are a lot of sketches here. JC It’s embarrassing, but one of the reasons I’m drawing a lot more is because I got a new fountain pen. It’s amazingly convenient. It’s like when you get a new phone and you can’t believe it was so annoying that it took a millisecond longer to do something before on your old phone. I find not having to dip a quill into an inkpot just changed my life. BL Beyond the convenience of the fountain pen, do you like the quality of the line you can draw with it?

Left: John Currin, Untitled, 1997, ink on paper, 14 1⁄4 × 11 1⁄4 inches (36.2 × 28.6 cm) Below: John Currin, The Bra Shop, 1997, oil on canvas, 48 × 38 inches (121.9 × 96.5 cm)

his is the one that I made the painting from. I had done some goofier versions of it, but it wasn’t until I did a much more subdued, almost trite drawing like this that I saw how a drawing of a nutty idea could turn into a painting. It is actually a very good example of how an idea totally changes going from drawing to painting. One of the things I was thinking about was genre painting—about [François] Boucher and how everybody looks the same, like a separate race of people. And so I just thought, “Ok, in this one their attributes are these big breasts.” Another thing about genre painting is how it plays around with what the subject of the painting is. It’s like the [JeanBaptiste-Siméon] Chardin painting of the boy staring at the spinning top. It’s not a painting of a boy and it’s not a painting of a spinning top. You are seeing someone who is also kind of obsessing visually, so there’s a kind of hall-of-mirrors effect. That, paired up with the idea that big breasts are something that you stare at. 51

Left: John Currin, Untitled, 2003, charcoal and chalk on paper, 17 7⁄8 × 13 7⁄8 inches (45.4 × 35.2 cm) Below: John Currin, Thanksgiving, 2003, oil on canvas, 68 × 52 inches (172.7 × 132.1 cm)

his was a study of Rachel’s face for the painting called Thanksgiving, where she’s being fed some soup; I think I originally got the idea from The Scream. I did several studies of this, and I vacillated between having her look scared or looking like a baby being fed, but ultimately I picked this one where she looks more like a bird being fed—which in the painting is then echoed by a turkey in the foreground waiting to be stuffed. The whole thing ended up being an allegory about Rachel being pregnant with our first child—but it wasn’t even something I tried to do. She got pregnant right when I started the painting and gave birth just a couple days after I finished it.

Left: John Currin, Untitled, 2012, ink on paper, 8 × 10 inches (20.3 × 25.4 cm) Below: John Currin, Untitled, 2015, ink on paper,7 5⁄8 × 6 inches (19.4 × 15.2 cm)

I like fountain pens because they feel like a massive shortcut. In the past I had to use graduated ink washes to achieve what I can now do with this one tool. Since the ink is water soluble I can get it to bleed and do things quickly without having to prepare a new pot of ink or pick up another quill. Interestingly these new drawings are all ink—there’s no pencil at all, I just start and finish in ink. BL Your drawings seem to modulate easily between clumsy and finely rendered work. What is interesting to you about those two polarities? JC I can render well if I really try, but I’m not nearly as good as Cecily Brown, Elizabeth Peyton, Karen Kilimnik, or Neo Rauch. They all have this amazing fractal personality in every line they draw. In any case, though, I’m interested in the idea of “bad drawing.” For instance, at one time ScandiJC

navian porn magazines that got sent to England couldn’t have photographic porn on the front covers, due to import laws, so they’d make these cheap oaktag covers to go over them, and there’s a group on pink paper with black on it and with these illustrations that to me seem to be made by someone who has never actually seen a woman naked. I’ve only found about six by this guy, who my assistant and I have nicknamed “Ramirez.” To me they look cool, and I’m fascinated by how naive this illustrator was about his subject and how that affected his drawings. BL Well, in the late 1980s you did draw cliché things like unicorns. JC Yes, I did. I guess I was just trying to figure out how “bad drawing” works. I can draw a terrible drawing well or a good drawing badly. This has

fascinated for me for many years now and really determines how good I am or how clumsy I am in the medium. BL How did you react to the survey of your drawings at the Gagosian booth at Frieze New York last April? JC

In the end, it was a strangely moving experience.

I think for a lot of people it was a revelation—a whole aspect of your work that really hasn’t been seen since the show that Jeff Fleming did of your drawings at the Des Moines Art Center in 2001. JC That may be true. One thing that looking at all my drawings made me feel was that they’d been fun to make. A lot of them I made just to amuse myself, and that really allowed me to come up with my best ideas. I remember when I first went to art school I did four drawings of my girlfriend asleep. BL

Below: John Currin, Untitled, 2000, ink on paper, 7 3⁄4 × 6 inches (19.7 × 15.2 cm) Right: John Currin, Untitled, 2001–2, ink on paper, 10 × 6 1⁄2 inches (25.4 × 16.5 cm)

I remember one of them well: it had some nice delicate cross hatching and I thought it was really well done. But later I realized that I just couldn’t handle that kind of texture across the whole drawing and at some point the whole thing just collapsed. It didn’t have that Cézanne thing, his ability to recapitulate the whole image in the smallest part. His drawings are like an interconnected solid unbreakable thing. I guess another realization I’ve had looking at these drawings is that they always have some laggard part that doesn’t work. As soon as I start overrefining my drawings they wheedle down to nothing—kind of like a Giacometti stick figure. BL How many drawings do you think you’ve made in your career? JC We catalogued the drawings to prepare for the 54

Frieze booth and ended up inventorying about 6,000. BL The group at Frieze included a couple of collaborations that you did with your wife, the artist Rachel Feinstein. Can you talk about those? JC We sometimes do a collaborative drawing where she makes an outline and I shade it. The rule is that I’m not allowed to change her drawing. Rachel is a pretty free spirit and she’ll just make the craziest shit you’ve ever seen, like hands that are all messed up. And then I just try to make the hands look like an Ingres drawing, all perfectly toned and shaded. I love doing those drawings—it’s great to see this thing come alive with Rachel’s wit and energy and my sort of luxurious touch. BL The drawings at Frieze included one of a black man with a baseball cap. What can you tell me about that?

I wanted to draw an old Southern black guy from the 1950s. I was interested in this image stylistically—it was like an old WPA photo, and I wanted to see how I could draw his features and skin tone with the minimal amount of visual information. BL What about the drawings of young boys that you did in the early 1990s? JC In 1992 I was doing images of boys based on some images I had seen of young nude boys with black socks on by Filippo De Pisis. I wanted to make these drawings look like German drawings from the ’30s of blonde boys running free. This drawing here of a precocious boy was a kind of experiment in this series. He has Caucasian features but I drew him with brown skin. The idea of playing with skin tone in drawing stuck with me. In 2003, I found a lot of stock adverJC

Left: John Currin, Untitled, 1997, ink on paper, 11 5⁄8 × 8 1⁄8 inches (29.5 × 20.6 cm) Above: John Currin, Untitled, 2005, gouache and watercolor on paper, 14 × 9 inches (35.6 × 22.9 cm)

tising images of staged interactions between white and black people. These scenarios always make a big deal of black and white people being friends with each other—they might be laughing together, or playing pranks on each other. When I drew these images in a caricatural style, they got more abrasive and uncomfortable. It was interesting to me to see how by playing with pictorial style one could change the meaning of the original image. BL This drawing of a nude woman with an abstract head seems like a real anomaly for you. Can you tell me a more about its origin? JC It was from a New York Times op-ed illustration. The topic of the editorial was women’s health or birth control. I used to look at those types of drawing quite a bit, I really liked their faux-naive style. In the original, the woman is clothed, so I de-

cided to make her nude and gave her square pubic hair and square nipples. I wanted to make this drawing half Otto Müller and half Cubist, to project some sort of socialist dream. BL There are also a lot of drawings of couples—a bearded effeminate man with a woman, for example. What were you trying to do with those drawings? JC In 1994, I started to think about androgyny. First I made androgynous middle-aged women with closely cropped haircuts. Then I decided to split them into men and women. When I started to draw the men, I would start with a female face and then put a beard on it. So the busty women and the bearded guys become parodies of their sex. BL The ’90s seem to have been a really prolific time for you in terms of drawing. What drove you to draw so much during that decade?

I was young and I had a billion ideas that I wanted to paint. I would draw them and then try and paint them. For instance, the bearded guy and the babe was a great image for me. I made several paintings of this image that I was very happy with. But my drawings of unhappy busty girls, or girls with one boob, or this one of a nude in a perspectival setting, never really worked out as paintings. I think today I have fewer new ideas since I’m not drawing as much. In the ’90s I used to draw way more than I’d paint. I was young, scared, and not committed to anything—I wanted to try things out quickly and move on. Drawing was the way I could do that. BL A drawing of a pregnant woman with garbage in her hair from 2005 seems to bring together several ideas that you were working on at the time. Was JC

Below: John Currin, Untitled, 1992, graphite on paper, 10 3⁄4 × 8 1⁄4 inches (27.3 × 21 cm) Right: John Currin, Untitled, 2005, ink on paper, 9 × 6 inches (22.9 × 15.2 cm)

drawing an easy way for you to combine ideas? JC Yes. In drawing I could do things like combine unnaturally pregnant women and draw them with garbage on their heads. This image later became a print, and from that print I made a painting. If I had more time, I’d love to make more prints. They seem right now to be my preferred source material to paint from. There’s something in the process of making a plate and a print that refines and edits visual information for me in a good way before I paint. One other thing I want to say about drawing is, it’s always been a great way for me to fix mistakes. You know my trump card is to add a beard and sunglasses when I screw up a face. BL Have you ever worked in pastel? JC Yes, though I think I’ve now lost the ability to

work in that medium. I used to make cool pastels in art school but today I just can’t control the color and material anymore. That said, I admire Degas’s and Manet’s pastels. Degas’s are a little easier to understand because he does it in vine charcoal and then does a hatch to build up the color. Manet’s pastels are more mysterious—how did he do that by just using the side of the pastel and blending? BL Do you think you’ll come back to making drawings on paper outside of a sketchbook again? JC I’ve been thinking about that. It would solve some of my problems in some of these recent paintings I’m working on. Maybe I should break out the black and white chalk and the blue paper again? BL Can you describe for me the connection between your source material, your drawings, and

your paintings? JC If I’m working from a photograph it’s always better to make a drawing from the photograph and then paint from the drawing. BL Why is that translation important? You can’t just put the photo on the wall and start sketching that out? JC If I took a photograph of your shirt right now, it would have too much information—things I don’t need to see to paint it. If I were to draw from this photograph I’d say to myself, “There’s just too much going on there, I can’t keep track of it, I’m not smart enough.” But if I made a drawing from the photograph, I wouldn’t draw all of the folds and I’d end up with an image infinitely more relevant to the way I paint.

here is a famous Botticelli painting in the Uffizi that I love of the Virgin and Child with a bunch of singing angels. It’s a big tondo, and it has a slight convexity, a bit of stretching around the image that’s very subtle, and it has this feeling that has always just blown my mind. I also loved M.C .Escher when I was a teenager—I made my first self-portrait when I was sixteen with me reaching toward one of those mirror balls—so I’ve thought for a while about doing a nude in a convex mirror. I also thought of it as a kind of reversal or parody of that famous Laura Mulvey essay about the gaze—a disarming of my worries about the creepy invasive male eye. I made three versions of this drawing. This is the one I used for the painting—which ended up on the book cover.

Above: John Currin, Nude in a Convex Mirror, 2015, oil on canvas, diameter: 42 inches (106.7 cm) Left: John Currin, Untitled, c. 2015, graphite on paper, 10 × 8 inches (25.4 × 20.3 cm) Following: Image of a Mylar arrangement taped on top of a painting in John Currin’s studio, New York, 2017. Photo courtesy the artist. © John Currin. Photos by Rob McKeever

So drawing a photograph is a way of editing out unnecessary information? JC Well, maybe it’s a way for me to neglect things that I don’t want to deal with. Drawing a figure from a photograph is much easier than using a live model. When I draw live models, a kind of a dumb realism starts to surface and like some stupid academic artist I start to draw every muscle and toe perfectly. This kind of drawing loses all its excitement for me, and the translation of a photo to a drawing is a good way to avoid this academic tendency I have. BL These painted Mylars of f lower arrangements, vases, or colors over here on the wall—what are you doing with those? JC I’ve been into accessorizing my paintings BL

recently. These transparent Mylars are a kind of shortcut, maybe even a form of drawing for me: I’m putting them over the paintings to see if ideas work before actually painting them in. When I first got a computer and realized I could take a photograph of a painting and then draw on it, Photoshop it, and add stuff without fucking it up—that was a big revelation for me. But when you sit in front of a computer for hours, your eyes get screwed up, and then of course there’s the Internet, there’s porn, and all kinds of other distractions. So now, instead of going on the computer, if I want to figure out how to paint something exactly right—like the little orange tie on the neck of the woman in that painting over there—I just do it on the Mylar and put it over

the painting. This way I can see exactly what’s going to happen, not the idea of what might happen. It’s a stupidly simple concept but it totally works for me. BL John, my final question is, how do you define drawing? JC I guess I would say I’ve always had a slightly contentious relationship to drawing. Ingres called drawing the probity of art. To me that idea is so depressing, it brings me down—I’m battling the idea that drawing is the probity of art, I think of it more as a flirtation with the real. Painting to me is like, we’re both naked in front of each other. Drawing is like, we went on a first date and if we don’t like each other one of us can just get up and leave.

WORK IN PROGRESS

BRICE MARDEN With preparations underway for a London exhibition, we visit the artistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s studio. Text by Kate Nesin

ate-August heat on an early June day had already seemed to push spring’s raw greenery toward the dry gold of summer’s end. Or so I sensed after several hours at Brice Marden’s studio in Tivoli, New York, newly attuned to verdure during my visit—the varieties of hue and texture in a grassy slope studded with anthills, expanses of puckered moss, a clutch of young fruit trees, a looming fir, even the painted green of exterior window sills and of a cross fading from the north side of the artist’s house at Rose Hill, which was operated as a farm by the Catholic Worker Movement in the 1960s and ’70s. The new paintings underway in Marden’s studio are green, and all the same green. This is factually accurate, yet the opposite is true as well: the new paintings are not green and they are not all the same. Some are dun, some are almost pitch, some seem cast with that dry late-August gold. The canvases are identical in size and format, and united by conceptual and procedural program. They happen, however, in person, and with astonishing variability. Each is a monochrome painted exclusively in a hue called terre verte, and each exclusively in the terre verte of a different brand. Marden has used Williamsburg paints for years, but here now as well are Blockx, Holbein (Verona), Holbein (Terre Verte), Sennelier, Winsor & Newton, Old Holland, Rublev (Verona), Rublev (Antica), and Vasari (Ancienne). One side of the studio’s front room is lined with shallow baking trays, which house the distinct terre verte paints thinned with fragrant terpineol. These pans are protected by pieces of cardboard that bear the relevant brand name in charcoal along with a brush, leaking color where it rests. Behind them, small cans and tubes wait in orderly piles, every one of which for me registers as a question mark: how luscious or uneasy will this one feel on the brush? How rich with pigment, how matte of finish? On the day of my visit, this room’s generous bank of windowed doors is open to the air, and the equally generous array of ceiling lights is switched off. Marden does his painting on the north wall of this space, where one canvas currently leans, dark and gleaming from a fresh layer of color the day before. A hand-drawn chart on a long side table helps him track the number of layers already laid down, aiming for parity across the canvases. All of them received a full single coating to start with, while their remaining layers are applied one by one within a 6-by-6-foot square. The freshest coat, still inky today, will take at least a week to dry, and so to reveal itself. It will then be covered over by another. Or, more to the point, it will be augmented by another, which it will likewise enrich. In medieval and Renaissance painting, terre verte was commonly used as underpainting—for flesh tones, in fact, “green earth” supporting bodies in more ways than one. The intensive layering of thin veils of color, to sensuous and unexpected effect, is not new in Marden’s practice. Indeed, the layering of colors in his work is more often revelatory than strictly obscuring. Only since turning to terre verte for this new body of work, however, has he layered paint of a single color, at once reducing and heightening his terms. This color gained historical primacy as underpainting because of its translucency, and Marden works each layer of it less than usual—letting the color’s available density accumulate instead of wiping or scraping it away. We might thus count these terre verte paintings as the artist’s most definitively “monochrome” works, yet Marden seems to hesitate over the accuracy of the word 62

even here. When we spoke—two of the paintings finished, the other eight nearly so— he expressed mild surprise that the surfaces did not all simply read as more or less black. Marden first emerged, in the 1960s, as a painter of monochromes, and his panels of distinctive color looked singular precisely because they contained multitudes, so to speak. In notes for his five Grove Group paintings of the 1970s, among his last monochromes before he turned to an ultimately calligraphic lineation, Marden underscored plurality: the sky in Hydra, Greece, was “blue, gray, yellow, sulphur, turquoise, yellow, blue”; an olive grove was “evasive silver gray green, blue gray green light, black gray browns.” (It is worth noting here that terre verte was among the colors used in the Grove Group paintings.) Meanwhile, the current terre verte paintings suggest that even a single color isn’t a single color. A decade ago, Marden marked his return to monochrome after nearly thirty years with Ru Ware Project, a nine-panel painting in a range of pale blues across which he tried to re-create from memory the unique coloration of the ancient Chinese Ru-ware pottery he’d seen in Taipei in 2007. If color in Marden’s work is typically either memorial or associative, color in these new paintings appears to function otherwise. It is the earthiness of terre verte’s “terre” that he is after, to be sure, but this isn’t the memory of something we’ve seen before. Rather, this is seeing as if for the first time; put another way, this is painting in order to see, study, glean—layer by layer, canvas by canvas. That said, these paintings do not need to operate together. Each does its own work. The same work differently? Different work in the same way? This subtlety was tantalizing to puzzle out, as I moved among them. Divided between two rooms in the studio, much as they will soon be divided between two rooms for exhibition, each painting seemed changed, whether faintly or wildly, each time I approached it. In this way, memory does come into meaningful play: one terre verte surface in the front room might prove exceedingly similar to one in the back room, but to surmise such, I can only rely on the presumed mutuality of my own observations and recollections, shifting between them just as I shift between spaces, just as I shift between paintings; and just as qualities of light or atmosphere shift between spaces, between paintings, too. Marden began these works as a group of eight, adding two more canvases in part because he had room to do so. They now feel uniquely suited in both scale and number to this studio, and he anticipates a peculiar emptiness upon their pending departure. Yet these do not encapsulate terre verte, either—terre verte’s potential may well linger for Marden once the paintings have moved on. After all, the fundamental implication that each of them harbors, individually as well as together, is that terre verte might only manifest differently—might only define itself with a difference, however minute and mercurial, every time. I felt some wistfulness, myself, leaving the unfinished works that afternoon, knowing that another two or three coatings of paint would render them effectively unrecognizable. Marden acknowledged that to remake these paintings a decade from now would surely demonstrate inevitable variations in the manufacturing of each brand’s terre verte over time. But the current suite of works already demonstrates the unfixedness even of earthen, grounded terre verte; and so my wistfulness was cut by curiosity, my keenness to meet the finished paintings some day soon, and to seek in their surfaces some sense of how or whether they are finished at all. 63

THE INTENSIVE LAYERING OF THIN VEILS OF COLOR, TO SENSUOUS AND UNEXPECTED EFFECT, IS NOT NEW IN MARDENâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S PRACTICE. Kate Nesin

THIS IS SEEING AS IF FOR THE FIRST TIME; PUT ANOTHER WAY, THIS IS PAINTING IN ORDER TO SEE, STUDY, GLEANâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; LAYER BY LAYER, CANVAS BY CANVAS. Kate Nesin

I FELT SOME WISTFULNESS, MYSELF, LEAVING THE UNFINISHED WORKS THAT AFTERNOON, KNOWING THAT ANOTHER TWO OR THREE COATINGS OF PAINT WOULD RENDER THEM EFFECTIVELY UNRECOGNIZABLE. Kate Nesin

Photos by Eric Piasecki

JEFF KOONS

THE BIGGER PICTURE In 1994, Jeff Koons’s son Ludwig, then one year old, was taken from his Manhattan home to Italy by his mother, Ilona Staller, despite a US court order requiring that he remain in New York State and granting joint custody to both parents. An international legal battle would slowly make its way through the courts for many years to come. Even the simplest legal questions lacked clarity and resolution—such basic issues as who had jurisdiction over the case, for example, were in dispute. Ultimately US lawmakers sided with Koons while Italian lawmakers sided with Staller. Meanwhile, amid this long swirl of legalities and irresolution, a young child was growing up. At the time, there were limited resources to which Koons could turn for guidance or assistance. Yet around that same moment in the mid-1990s, the urgent need for such resources was becoming obvious on a wide scale. The International Centre for Missing & Exploited Children (ICMEC) was born out of the deepest of tragedies. It traces its roots directly to a crisis in Belgium: in 1996, police captured a vicious serial killer named Marc Dutroux, now infamous for his crimes against six girls, aged eight to nineteen. The case was devastating not only because of the unbelievably heinous nature of the crimes but also because it revealed, in an unprecedentedly high-profile way, a series of grave missteps and oversights on the part of the law enforcement and justice systems during the investigation. Ultimately, over 300,000 people joined a Brussels protest march, known as the White March, demanding reforms for the protection of children. In response, the Belgian government looked to the international community for assistance and guidance. Their prime minister visited the United States and invited the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) to establish a base in Brussels. The president of NCMEC at the time, Ernie Allen, was eager to help, but he understood the complexities involved in the effort. His response was, “You do not need an American solution to this problem—you need a Belgian solution.” NCMEC did work with the Belgian community to provide immediate assistance, though, and helped to establish the Brussels-based group Child Focus. Even then, the depth of the problem on an international level was just beginning to be understood, as more and more countries began reaching out to NCMEC for assistance. In 1999, the NCMEC Board 70

of Directors created ICMEC to engage these issues more deeply and on a global scale. Koons was involved right from the beginning. ICMEC has expanded and evolved over the last eighteen years. It has established relationships with citizens in more than 122 countries as it works to enhance communication, share successful methods of outreach, educate first responders, support law enforcement, and advocate for legal systems capable of swift response. It also works to establish globally recognized definitions for various offenses and to provide benchmarks that can act as guidelines in future cases. Currently, for instance, it is mounting an initiative to raise awareness about differences among nations in how and when children are considered “missing.” By way of example, more than 460,000 reports of missing children were filed in the United States alone in 2015, while the numbers are 45,000 and 20,000 in Canada and Spain respectively. It’s not that children are more likely to go missing in the United States, or that they are in greater danger, it’s simply that the definition of what constitutes a missing child is not universal. Koons’s personal history led him directly to this great organization. He knows firsthand the impact ICMEC has had in raising awareness and pressing

for the greater effectiveness of international legal instruments. He became a board member at ICMEC in 2002, and in 2007 he cofounded The Koons Family Institute on International Law & Policy as the organization’s research arm. The mission of the Institute is to provide authoritative, impactful research on the most current trends in the child protection field. This information is critical to policy makers and first responders, and informs the curriculum that ICMEC provides through its Global Training Academy. In the interview that follows, Koons shares his family’s story and explains how this philanthropic pursuit has affected his life. And Ambassador Maura Harty, the President and Chief Executive Officer of ICMEC, gives us insight into the agency and its hugely ambitious goals, and helps us see how its work is changing the world. ALISON MCDONALD Jeff, what was your first encoun-

ter with the International Centre for Missing & Exploited Children? JEFF KOONS Back in 1994 I was a left-behind parent— my son was abducted and taken to Italy by my exwife. I really didn’t know where to turn and a friend recommended the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children in Washington. I connected with the Center. Ernie Allen was the director at the time, and it was through speaking with him that I started to get involved. A few years later he asked me if I wanted to be on the Board of the International Centre for Missing & Exploited Children, a new organization they were just creating at the time. The purpose of ICMEC was to gather all the information that we had already developed in the United States on how to try to protect children from abduction and sexual abuse and to share that information internationally to create a network. ICMEC was an

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COUNTRIES HAVE WORKING RELATIONSHIPS WITH ICMEC TO ENHANCE COMMUNICATION, OUTREACH, EDUCATION, AND SUPPORT FOR LAW ENFORCEMENT AND LEGAL SYSTEMS.

definition of what it means to be “missing.” Numbers of missing children vary widely between countries. Maura, this is currently an initiative for ICMEC. Why is creating a global definition such a challenge? MAURA HARTY Yes, there is no common global definition for what constitutes a “missing child,” and no uniform global response to the issue. In addition, few countries collect reliable statistics on a national level and thus they don’t keep track of the dispensation of cases. So we don’t know who comes home and who doesn’t. Why is this important? Because there is no way to compare any given country’s response to this issue with any other country’s response, simply because of a lack of a common protocol. In many countries, statistics on missing children are not even available; and even available statistics may be inaccurate due to underreporting, underrecognition, inflation, incorrect database entry of case information, or deletion of records once a case is closed. For all of these reasons, ICMEC developed the Model Missing Children Framework in an effort to harmonize a global approach and assist countries in building strong, well-rounded national responses. At ICMEC we firmly believe that one missing child is one too many, and we are committed to improving the global understanding of and response to missing and abducted children. AMCD Jeff, if you might speak directly about your personal history, how has your commitment built up over the years? How has your engagement changed? JK So what happened to me, Alison, was that I tried for almost two decades to get my son back, but at a certain point I realized I just never would. And I decided to take that energy and to try to help other people. You have to find something to hold on to so you don’t lose faith in humanity. Working with ICMEC and trying to help other families—to help other children avoid the situation that my son ended up in—that’s how I directed my energy.

NGO, a nongovernmental organization, but at the same time it was making a lot of resources available to other countries around the world. AMCD So you were involved right from the beginning, when ICMEC was formed. JK Yes, at the beginning of ICMEC, but not of NCMEC, which had started earlier with John Walsh, the famous television presenter from America’s Most Wanted. His son was abducted and murdered in the 1980s and he didn’t know where to turn. He went to Washington and realized there was no organization there to help him, so he helped to create NCMEC, which began to make great progress finding abducted children. Back then, when it was getting started, the percentage of abducted children who would get returned was very low, I think around sixty-two percent. Today that has been raised up to more than ninety-five percent. AMCD In the United States. JK In the United States, correct. AMCD As I understand it, there is currently no global 72

AMCD Maura,

I know you work hard on awareness and training. Who are your most effective change agents on the front lines? Teachers? Nurses? Police officers? MH Our most effective change agents can be found in every field. Professionals who leave our courses and apply what they have learned can change a situation and help make the world a safer place for children under their care. AMCD To pioneer radical changes on a global scale is an ambitious mission. What’s your most important long-term goal? What would that success mean for children around the world? MH We see a world without child sexual abuse or exploitation and a world where no child even runs the risk of going missing. While this is ambitious, we do not think it is radical in any way. It is simply the way the world should be. Every child deserves a safe childhood. Every child deserves to be a child. AMCD So how do you take steps towards that? What is achievable in the short term when trying to tackle child exploitation on a worldwide level? MH We need to raise awareness. We need to give adults in child-serving professions the information they need to respond properly to a vulnerable child. And we need to make sure that children are empowered to reach out to a trusted adult when faced with abuse or exploitation. AMCD And what about missing children? MH We have twenty-five countries in our Global Missing Children’s Network [GMCN], a community of child-protection workers, both NGO and law enforcement, who share data and best practices in an

Below: Jeff Koons. Photo by Peter Ash Lee/Art+Commerce

effort to make the world a safer place for children. We’d like it to be five times as many. We’d like to increase global cooperation and information-sharing. Together with partners such as Facebook we are introducing “rapid emergency child alert systems” worldwide, and we’re further expanding the use of technology in the recovery of missing children, especially through continuous upgrades of the GMCN. AMCD Jeff, do you remember the first issue tackled by The Koons Family Institute on International Law & Policy? JK The Institute has been involved with trying to introduce laws internationally that affect children, as far as abductions, and also with helping to outline research activities. For instance, it’s tried to come up with numbers so that ICMEC can show a government how many children went missing last year. Without the numbers, without the statistics, a lot of people don’t realize how many children are missing, but once we bring that awareness they understand that it’s a problem. And the Institute is involved in a lot of other activities. Over 100 laws have been initiated or enacted internationally because of the Institute. AMCD Maura, could you describe the role of The Koons Family Institute within ICMEC? How does the research done there lay the groundwork for your strategies? MH The Institute is ICMEC’s research arm. Research underpins everything we do. We research laws in existence around the world so that we can better understand how different countries deal with child-protection issues. Our groundbreaking report Child Pornography: Model Legislation & Global Review, for example, first released in April 2006 and now in its eighth edition, offers a “menu of concepts” that countries can consider when drafting anti-child-pornography legislation. Key topics covered include definitions, offenses, reporting, preserving data, sanctions, and sentencing. Ten years ago, the first edition of the report revealed a dismaying prospect: only twenty-seven countries had enacted legislation sufficient to combat child pornography offenses. Since then the situation has improved. Our most recent edition, published in early 2016, finds that eighty-two countries have in place legislation deemed sufficient to combat child-pornography. But a great deal of work remains to be done: thirty-five countries still have no legislation at all dealing specifically with child pornography. AMCD Jeff, how do you determine or feel the success of the project? Can you see the impact? You’ve been committed to this cause for so long, yet the work must be a bit abstract in terms of seeing results? JK Satisfaction is in the numbers, Alison. Seeing the numbers change. Those numbers connect to real children, real lives. Over time I have contin-

$700,000

HAS BEEN RAISED FOR ICMEC THROUGH KOONS’S INITIATIVES WITH KIEHL’S IN AN EFFORT TO CREATE SAFE, SUSTAINABLE, AND POSITIVE ENVIRONMENTS FOR CHILDREN.

Previous: Jeff Koons, Seated Ballerina (2017) installed at Rockefeller Plaza, New York. On view May 5–July 17, 2017. © Jeff Koons, Photo by Tom Powel Imaging

ued to see these numbers grow higher as progress is made, as children are returned. And children end up being returned in a lot of different ways—police departments today are very well informed about how to respond, the amber Alerts are in place. It’s been gratifying to see all of these things enacted over the last eighteen years. AMCD Maura, how does ICMEC measure success? MH Since we’re not a direct service provider, measuring success can be a challenge. Since we opened our doors to the world, we have trained over 12,000 law enforcement officers, investigators, prosecutors, and other specialists from over 120 countries. We have contributed substantially to both new and refined laws against child pornography in 127 countries. We have expanded the GMCN. We have advocated for the commemoration of International Missing Children’s Day, which is presently recognized on May 25th in seventeen countries across four continents. And we continue to expand our global partnerships. But we also should not dismiss the impact we have through our training programs, and on the children who are beneficiaries of the new knowledge and skill sets acquired by the adults who participate in those programs. There’s a multiplier effect: as we raise awareness and provide skills, everyone who is impacted by our programs changes their behavior. And so an ICMEC training class is a pebble in a pond, but the ripple is worldwide. AMCD Yes, Jeff just installed his Seated Ballerina in Rockefeller Center earlier this year to raise awareness about International Missing Children’s Day. Jeff, how do you feel that installation is helping ICMEC accomplish some of its goals? JK On a basic level, it raised $100,000 from Kiehl’s that went directly to ICMEC. On a broader level, it brings awareness. Everyone who views Seated Ballerina might then become informed about ICMEC, and that May, when the piece was installed, was National Missing Children’s Month. That makes people interested to know more, and 73

10,877

LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICERS FROM 118 COUNTRIES HAVE BEEN TRAINED SINCE 2003. then they can get in contact with people to see how they can help with protecting the rights of children. AMCD Can I ask why you chose Seated Ballerina in particular for communicating to such a large audience about this topic? Were there other artworks you considered during the selection process? JK I first installed Seated Ballerina in a stainless steel version outside malba, the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires. When I saw how the public interacted with it, I realized that it really communicated hope. So when the opportunity came to create something for the Art Production Fund with the support of Kiehl’s, I immediately thought that the Ballerina would be able to connect to children and to all the hope and potential that they have, that we all have, and that we have for our children. That hope and potential are taken away from some children is unacceptable. We have to be able to bring those children back so that they can fulfill their dreams. AMCD Maura, the amber Alert system seems to be raising awareness in the United States—what are some of the other ways that you use technology in your advocacy? MH One of the courses we’ve been teaching for over a decade is called “Computer-Facilitated Crimes against Children.” Regularly updated, this course aims to provide state-of-the-art techniques and technology tools to police officers, prosecutors, and judges. And the GMCN provides a platform for members to share information about missing-children cases in their respective countries and to disseminate photos quickly. Members also have access to age-progression technology, which can assist in long-term missing-children cases. And we play an active role in fostering the adoption of rapidemergency-child-alert systems (such as the amber

Alert) around the world. We’re proud of a strong partnership with Facebook, which helps to advance that goal. AMCD Can you discuss other important global technology partners? How are they helping? MH Collaboration is in ICMEC’s DNA. We are fortunate to have a network of friends and colleagues around the world with whom we collaborate on research, roundtables, social media campaigns, and training opportunities. We are very grateful for the support we receive from Facebook and unicef and we note with pride that Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, and C5 Capital are members of our board. We often work with the Motorola Solutions Foundation and with the World Bank, Google, Terre des Hommes, and several pharmaceutical companies who support our work on global health issues related to child sexual abuse and exploitation. These relationships are important because they provide both financial support for our efforts and broad platforms to help disseminate information about the issues we address. AMCD How do you know what works? How do you test? MH We seek feedback from participants in every course we teach. We peer-review our research projects to ensure that our research is on the mark and accurate. AMCD Jeff, your wife, Justine, is also very committed to the cause. How has her involvement grown over the years? JK Justine is very active and her commitment has grown alongside mine. We try to help in fundraising and just trying to make people aware throughout our community. AMCD What do you feel philanthropy brings to your daily life? JK I was brought up to be very self-reliant. At a certain point you’re able to take care of yourself and your family, and you want to extend that out to giving support to your community. As an artist, you make your work and you do it for the sensations that you feel and the development of the intellect, but then you want to share that, you want other people to have those feelings and that sense of possibility and transcendence. It’s the same with trying to give support to a community. At the end of the day, everything’s a metaphor for self-acceptance and the acceptance of other people. All the objects and images that we work with every day, they’re wonderful, they’re transponders—they help us inform ourselves and inform others—but really it’s giving support to each other that has the most relevance.

AMCD What

is the best and most effective way for people to get involved? JK By contacting ICMEC. There are all different ways to help—ways to be supportive financially and ways people can just bring their energy. One of the things I’ve done over the years is to try to generate attention. It’s been a privilege to be able to help with their platform. AMCD How does ICMEC use donations? MH A gift to The Global Impact Fund supports strategic initiatives that allow us to continue advocating for changes to laws, training professionals who interface with children, improving prevention, facilitating treatment, and building international networks of people across disciplines who all support the cause. AMCD What will the future hold for The Koons Family Institute? JK We plan to remain committed, and we hope that our children will become involved with it as well. We hope that it will continue to grow and help others.

marni.com

AN EVOLVING LEGACY

Henry Moore moved to Perry Green in 1940. It was his home and studio for more than forty years. The artist’s grandson, Gus Danowski, and the Foundation’s director, Godfrey Worsdale, speak with Zoë Santa-Olalla about keeping vital research available, unveiling their latest initiatives, and welcoming more visitors than ever before to the grounds.

This past April, to coincide with the fortieth anniversary of its founding, the Henry Moore Foundation unveiled a new library, visitor center, and archives. When did the discussions for this undertaking start, and why was it initiated? GODFREY WORSDALE It has its roots in the two directors who preceded me. Tim Llewellyn began a conversation with the trustees in 2005, and three years later, when he was succeeded by Richard Calvocoressi, the board was ready. There were two main goals. First, we wanted to create suitable storage for the bulk of the sculpture collection. Second, we wanted to create a master plan where all the possible needs of a modern artist’s foundation based in a place like Perry Green could be considered. Managing Perry Green requires a balance: it was originally an artist’s studio, a place where art was created, where people came to visit an artist and where that artist and his family lived, and we have to maintain a respect for the integrity of that; and then on the other hand, we want to make a visitor attraction fit for the twenty-first century. And that’s a delicate challenge. ZSO What are the new buildings on the Foundation grounds at Perry Green, and what are the new features in each of the buildings? GW There are two parts. One is a new archive, where we can store all the material relating to Moore’s work and life and trajectory as an artist. The other is a series of spaces in which we can properly welcome and look after our guests. We have approaching a million items to care for in the archive. Because Moore was successful very early on in his career, his archive began to grow right away. GUS DANOWSKI He was very good at record-keeping. GW Absolutely, he kept all sorts of things. So we had his commitment to that in the first instance, and then lots of subsequent press and media. That generated an enormous amount of material that continues to grow today, so we needed somewhere to keep it. And of course it’s not all sheets of paper— it includes negatives, photographic prints, newsOË SANTA-OLALLA

Previous spread (left): Henry Moore Archive, building completed by Hugh Broughton Architects in 2017. Photo © Hufton+Crow Previous spread (right): Henry Moore on the grounds of Perry Green. Photo The Henry Moore Foundation Archive Above: Henry Moore, Upright Motive No. 9, 1979, bronze, 140 1⁄4 × 35 7⁄8 × 39 3⁄4 inches (356 × 91 × 101 cm). Photo The Henry Moore Foundation Archive Below: Henry Moore’s Upright Motive No. 9 (1979) and Torso (1967) in his enlargement studio, Perry Green, c. 1979. Photo The Henry Moore Foundation Archive

Opposite (left): Henry Moore, Upright Motive No. 5, 1955–56, bronze, 84 1 ⁄8 × 23 1⁄4 × 18 1⁄2 inches (213.5 × 59 × 47 cm). Photo The Henry Moore Foundation Archive Opposite (right): Henry Moore with some of his Upright Motive Sculptures including Upright Motive No. 5 (1955–56), Perry Green, 1964. Photo by J.S. Lewinski Following spread: Henry Moore’s Sheep Piece (1971–72) installed at Perry Green. Photo by Jonty Wilde, 1977

paper copy—and modern-day archives demand a range of different temperatures and conditions that can accommodate those different things. So our archive divides into various stores under various conditions, and then a reading room where people can sit and consult that material. The other half of the project saw the visitor’s center develop. This gives us the opportunity to welcome people properly, to bring them into our retail space, our café. We now have a very flexible event space where we can host corporate events, weddings, et cetera, and bring school groups in. ZSO How was the London-based Hugh Broughton Architects firm selected for the redevelopment? GW Hugh Broughton and his practice had designed the sculpture-storage building, so they had a track record of working in Perry Green, which is not a straightforward place to undertake a major project. Hugh had also had some experience of working with Richard Calvocoressi before he joined us. So it was a nice fit in lots of different ways. Hugh really understood the challenge that any small English hamlet is going to present, of practicing as a signature architect in a very constrained and particular site. But the sculpture store was such a success that I suspect everyone felt that this practice needed to continue to work at Perry Green. ZSO Gus, as one of Moore’s grandchildren, what do you think this redevelopment means for Moore’s legacy? GD It brings the buildings together. As Godfrey said, the project has to strike a balance between former working studios and grounds, on the one hand, and on the other, a building that looks world class and impressive enough that a student studying art on the other side of the world would want to go visit it. It also has to maintain and preserve and future-proof my grandfather’s archives and works. We hope to welcome visitors both local and far afield, allowing them to access this. GW Your earliest recollections of this place must be some of your most special childhood memories. So this is personal for you, and I wonder, when you see these buildings, how much of your heart is immediately taken back to your childhood recollections? You must have warm memories of these spaces—it must have been exciting as a child to run around the studios. GD It’s always felt odd to have what was essentially my first family home preserved for posterity. There were always people coming and going, it was never quiet—he always welcomed visitors— but it’s always felt strange to go into the house, to see the studios now as opposed to how they were. Funnily enough, the thing that has evolved most in my memory was Dane Tree House. I remember the original glass extension—before that I simply thought of it as offices and then as the Foundation grew around the house, there was a sense of, “How do we incorporate all of this into what is clearly a serious thing for the future?” And I feel like these new buildings to me almost unlock that inner conflict, if that makes sense. Before, they were buildings that meshed with childhood memories of the house, or riding around on my bicycle, whereas now they feel like things that belong to everybody, even while they’re very carefully integrated in with things I feel personally connected to. ZSO How do you feel the new buildings relate to the new state-of-the-art art-storage facility completed by Hugh Broughton Architects in 2011? GW I also grew up in a hamlet, and of course you know everybody and you count your neighbors in tens and twelves. Your neighbors know about

every change. Here, despite that, the truth is we’re running a major international operation, caring for thousands of works of art, tens of thousands of visitors, a whole range of activities, art-transport vehicles coming and going all the time. And yet we do our very best to be respectful neighbors. And that ethos, of being neighborly, travels through Hugh’s way of dealing with the site. The sculpture store you’re asking about is typical: it’s clad in very dark timber, in keeping with a lot of the local agricultural buildings. In this part of Hertfordshire the barns are almost black. So if you were walking across the field and saw our sculpture store in the distance, you wouldn’t immediately think it was art storage, you’d accept it as an agricultural building. GD And it’s set away from the place, in an enclave. GW Yes, driving through the village within ten meters of it, you probably wouldn’t know it was there. So Hugh worked really hard to get that balance just right. GD When I first met him it struck me that it must be a challenge when you’re an architect and you want to make a statement with a building, but you also have to harmonize with the surroundings. At Perry Green, too, the sculpture should be the main object that you see. It was a real accomplishment to make something so impressive and at the same time not make it too loud. GW Your grandfather was enormously sensitive about the interrelationships between his work and architecture. I’ve read so much about the time and care he gave to making that dialogue succeed. The figure at the unesco headquarters in Paris—a very geometric building—brings forward a relationship between the natural form and the clearly manmade. We’re quite regularly contacted by architects or owners of Henry Moore sculptures who want to resite them, and we always take that very seriously, because I know full well how much Moore would have wrestled with such a challenge. Interestingly, Hugh had the reverse angle, in a way: the works were already here and he had to redesign the architecture next to them. ZSO Was there a specific strategy in the new designs that enhanced the experience of the grounds and gardens, which were designed by Moore’s wife, Irina? GW Hugh absolutely understood the importance of that. In fact the building frames the view of the grounds in a very careful way. I’m still learning about the grounds and [Moore’s daughter] Mary Moore has helped me to understand them. It’s fascinating, you can almost experience the grounds as a series of different rooms. The family garden, for instance, which is immediately adjacent to [Henry and Irina Moore’s former home] Hoglands, is one thing. Then other parts around are still functioning as farmers’ fields, and there are different areas that are more meadowlike. There’s even a part of the grounds that, though it’s very beautifully laid out, feels more suited for presenting sculpture, it functions almost as a presentation space. So dealing with the grounds is quite complex in its own way. ZSO Gus, I know that Mary Moore, your mother, has helped with some of the landscaping of the grounds and with re-creating the gardens as she remembered them as a child. What are your own memories of Perry Green? GD I actually pretty much grew up here, it really felt like home. You know, the Foundation and I are essentially siblings, we were born at the same time. There was a strict routine that allowed my grandfather to maximize his work and at the same time still manage to be a family man: we would all have

breakfast and lunch in the sunroom at Hoglands and then we’d often walk to a small studio down at the side of the house where he’d put out art supplies for me. At first it was just to play around but he often couldn’t help but want to get involved. He’d pick something up and say, “Now, look at it like this.” He would move it around because he wanted me, even from an early age, to understand that you can get into an object simply through looking at it. It’s funny how easily people look at a piece of paper or something and think it’s two-dimensional when it’s not. And of course there are funny memories. In the early 1980s the Superman movies came out, the Christopher Reeves Superman, and I was obsessed—I found myself trying to make capes and muscles with Plasticine and my grandfather couldn’t resist improving on my sense of form. There’s got to be a Henry Moore Superman buried in a drawer somewhere. ZSO Superman maquettes [laughs]. GD But my most vivid memory would be Hoglands and the yellow sitting room, at least we called it the yellow sitting room. That room was where you accessed the grounds, and even still, there are all these little objects on the table that were wonderful attractions to a child but that also allowed my grandfather to talk and engage people in the history of art, sculpture, his experiences with discovering things in museums, African art. It’s wonderful that the place has managed both to remain very much how it was with these outdoor studios and at the same time grow to allow more people to come and see it. ZSO What’s so wonderful about the Foundation is you can visit all the different studios Moore used. The one that I absolutely adore is the Bourne Maquette Studio, where you see all these found objects and Plasticine objects and the whole process of scaling up. It’s interesting that one of your most vivid memories is about these same objects. It really was so important, the process. GD For me as an adult, what you just said is probably one of the most important things I love about the Foundation. He gifted all of it so that people could see the working process as well as the work, and I think that’s such a vital resource, whether for a young artist or someone who is simply curious about him. And yes, I have fond memories of running around studios while someone was scaling

up and working with large plasters, or things were framed that felt almost like alien structures. GW I couldn’t agree more about that notion of letting people into an essentially private world. Artists are almost always quite private in their creative moments, and the Bourne Maquette Studio especially is such a brilliant example of a plausible working space. I like the delicate touches: the radio is there, and somehow it humanizes it. You can really imagine this man working away to the radio, listening to tennis or cricket or whatever. And that’s something we need to preserve, because audiences understand art better if they remember it was made by someone with a personality and a character. This place reminds them of that so well. ZSO Absolutely, people connect with art more when they can visualize how it was made. That clicks with them—particularly younger children, it sticks with them, and they can understand sculpture better. GD Yes, and Moore always had these little objects around him in both his living room and his studios so he could walk back into the studio and not have any sort of writer’s block, not be stuck, whether he was picking up something he’d already been working with or picking up an object to look at it anew. My grandfather had a strict routine to maximize his time. He’d have breakfast at 8.30 a.m., after which he would carve, then tea at 11 a.m., then my grandmother would send him straight back to work, a habitual nap after lunch, then work. She gave him structure so that he was free to think and create. And in the archives here there’s so much photographic evidence that documented how he worked, what he did, how the grounds were, and how his studios were. It’s so vital. ZSO Why do you think he was so meticulous in documenting his process? GD It’s completely my own opinion, but on a certain level I think he must have known very early on that he was going to pass it on. ZSO He did set up the Foundation during his lifetime and that relates to the idea of a legacy, and of how he wanted to be remembered. When an artist passes away, it must be incredibly difficult and complex to set up a foundation, it’s a very complicated process. So for him to do it in his lifetime meant that there were parameters already in place, and it was able to function very quickly and efficiently.

through our grants program, we are able to support artists, institutions, and researchers. Actually, when you add in our curatorial expertise in the field, we can help in a third way, by steering research, providing original source material, and even possibly funding. When I joined the Foundation, one of the first things I did was look specifically at the charitable objective of the operation. It’s very clear that the Foundation was established to encourage public appreciation of the visual arts but at the same time, I’m very comfortable supporting postdoctoral research, as that does benefit public appreciation, since those people will go on to publish books and create exhibitions for the public. Part of that thinking goes all the way back to Moore’s early life in Castleford, where he felt quite starved of visual culture. So by investing literally tens of millions in supporting public exhibitions of sculpture, we’re truly giving many people opportunities that he lacked. GD Throughout my life it has been a privilege to see my grandfather’s success and his works in big, prominent public places. I honestly don’t think anything has given me more pride than to see the support that the Foundation gives to working, living artists and sculptors, and specifically to sculpture. Nothing speaks more loudly to me than when I see “Supported by the Henry Moore Foundation” at an exhibition. GW Moore realized quite quickly that he was part of history. He was thinking about artists before him, around him, and even after his own lifetime. He understood that continuum. GD And one thing he was very clear about: no posthumous casting. I think he’d seen that happen with artists he admired, and the tremendous confusion that can arise with that practice, whether it’s done by a foundation or a family estate. He absolutely knew, from both a market point of view and an academic point of view, that there had to be clarity. ZSO Your current exhibition, Becoming Henry Moore, focuses on the artist’s formative years, from 1914 to 1930. Why was that time period chosen as a focus for the fortieth anniversary? GW When I was a new director, one of the first things I did was appoint Sebastiano Barassi the Head of Collections and Exhibitions. Very early on we agreed that what we wanted to do was generate new knowledge, tread ground that hadn’t been trodden before. Sebastiano brought up the idea of the very early work, of focusing on the period of Moore’s Above: The new Henry Moore Studio and Garden offices and visitor center, completed by Hugh Broughton Architects in 2017. Photo © Hufton+Crow Right, from left to right: Godfrey Worsdale, Zoë Santa-Olalla, and Gus Danowski in front of Knife Edge Two Piece (1962–65). Photo by Sarah Mercer Opposite: Henry Moore working in his revolving summer house, Perry Green, 1956. Photo by The Henry Moore Foundation Archive Following spread: Henry Moore, Family Group (1948–49), installed at Perry Green. Photo by Sarah Mercer

Page 86 (top): Gus Danowksi with his grandfather Henry Moore. Photo courtesy Gus Danowski Page 86 (bottom): Zoë Santa-Olalla, Gus Danowski, and Godfrey Worsdale walking toward Hoglands, Henry Moore’s home at Perry Green. Photo by Sarah Mercer All artwork © The Henry Moore Foundation. All images that include artworks by Henry Moore reproduced by permission of The Henry Moore Foundation For more information, please visit www.henry-moore.org

Since I came into this role, I have met many people who work in similar positions in artist’s foundations around the world and I feel hugely fortunate because of exactly that point, the fact that this foundation was carefully conceived. It was thought through by Henry Moore and his wife and daughter, they created it together. And it’s a very generous and complete foundation in the breadth of things we do. All of our initiatives have a strategic purpose that was carefully conceived. ZSO The Foundation is very active in awarding grants to artists, with more than 2,000 recipients to date. Since it was established, in 1977, it has awarded approximately £31 million in grants, which is amazing. How will the new facilities help future artists and curators, as well as students and scholars? GW I feel very sure that the scholarship on Henry Moore is going to be supported by the new archives. We’ve always helped academics and scholars, but now, with the improved facilities and therefore better access, we’re able to help even more. Separately, GW

slightly unlikely start in life, living in a small terrace house, one of eight children, in a mining community in West Yorkshire. He was still residing there up until 1916, and then by 1930 he’s an active participant in the European avant-garde. And during that same timeframe he went off to fight in the First World War. While this is generally known among Moore scholars, no one has ever really tried to dig out the details of how that happened. GD There’s one work that immediately comes to mind, the snake, that small marble piece [Snake, 1924]. Back then, he wasn’t this huge, successful artist who could walk into a marble quarry and say “I’ll have that fabulous big cut over there.” He was going and he was getting what he could, but part of his genius was his ability to see the potential of an object. He was passionate about direct carving, and it’s fantastic to see so many direct works in stone, but I really like that there’s this snake that he found inside the stone and that had tension. I’d love to see what the actual block, which was probably a very awkward offcut, had been before.

Yes, that’s a great piece in the exhibition. My favorite in the show is probably the most modest piece. It’s a tiny drawing of an old man that he made in 1921, at the Royal College, in preparation for the sculpture Head of an Old Man, which he described as his first sculpture. It’s very carefully studied but very wistfully sketched, and it’s only the size of a postcard. So much in that drawing makes you think, this is the work of a great artist. He’s an art student at the time, and this is probably one out of half a dozen that he prepared. Sadly, the sculpture doesn’t exist anymore. There’s a photograph of it in the catalogue. But there’s so much in that drawing and it feels very special. ZSO Gus, your family is involved with maintaining the display at Hoglands, the house that first brought Henry and Irina Moore to Perry Green, in 1940. Why is it important to the family to maintain the display at the house? GD When my grandparents died, the house was left to the estate. After much consideration we decided that none of us would ever want to live in it— ZSO GW

it’s literally in the middle of the grounds that are now the Foundation and we felt very strongly that the whole thing had to become one. Not just in ownership, either, but in restoring the house to how it was in my grandfather’s time—it’s so interesting to share the space where he brought together all these objects and artworks, where he could think and talk about the whole history of sculpture and surround himself with things that he loved, like African and Cycladic art. So we felt it was important to restore Hoglands—with the vision of the Foundation—to being an artist’s home in a museum sense, and to include original, real works and objects within it. It’ll always be strange for me, though, when I walk around it—it sounds the same, smells the same, it’s a time trap. There’s always going to be a balance between having to preserve, lowering the blinds and such, but at the same time wanting people to experience it as it was. For me, the reason it works is that people can understand that this was not just where he lived but where he worked, and can see how that discipline extended through his day-to-day life. ZSO It def initely completes the picture—the house offers particular insights into Henry Moore. Though he was a very successful artist, it’s a modest house, and I think that’s surprising for many visitors, and endearing as well, to experience how he lived and how he operated. And even though the house is modest, there really is a treasure trove of art inside. Do you have a particular favorite from that personal collection? GD When I was a child it was always the narwhal’s tusk, simply because I thought it was a unicorn’s [laughs]. But as I grew older it was the drawings, specifically a Seurat drawing. Perhaps I love the drawings because even though I’m not a great draftsman I did learn to draw from him. And he taught me the way drawing can be three-dimensional, and also the way I now see and sense art. All of that was influenced by him. ZSO Is there a special significance in the exhibition’s focus on Moore’s formative years? For instance, do you see it as a resource for younger generations in their formative years? GW One of things that Henry Moore did for people was, he taught them how to look properly at things. How to look and how to see. ZSO What’s next for the Foundation? GW Lots of things are coming up. Becoming Henry Moore, which was originally conceived just for Perry Green, will go on to the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds. That’s not something that happens very often; in fact, Henry Moore isn’t usually shown at the Henry Moore Institute. That was his own intention: he wanted that center to be dedicated to the study of sculpture in its broadest sense, not of his work. But he is a part of that story and so we’re really pleased to take this exhibition to Leeds, not least because the city of Leeds is an important part of the story. We are also working on the Collectors’ Circle— we want to build a community of people who have Henry Moores in their private collections, to inform scholarship but also to help owners know their own collections better. There’s so much in the archive— almost every sculpture Moore made we have a photographic record of, often a photograph of him making it. So as an owner of a Henry Moore, you could find out more about the history of the sculpture that you own. I think that’s really exciting, for both the collection and the Foundation.

John Elderfield and Lauren Mahony discuss Helen Frankenthaler in the years 1959â&#x20AC;&#x201C;1962, a period of daring experimentation and innovation.

FRANKENTHALER

Helen Frankenthaler began making a name for herself in the New York art world in the early 1950s and is typically considered a second-generation Abstract Expressionist. Following her invention of the breakthrough soak-stain technique in 1952, why do you think she revisited Abstract Expressionism in the late 1950s, having moved in a different direction? JOHN ELDERFIELD Well, there are really several periods in Helen’s work within the 1950s. There’s the first soak-stain period, from Mountains and Sea, in 1952, to late ’54. Then, while the soak-stain technique isn’t abandoned, it becomes more material, more Ab-Ex in feeling. In 1956, Helen moves back to something closer to the earlier soak-stain technique—only to again move closer to Abstract Expressionism in 1959–61. In the early 1960s there’s yet another change, where she moves into a thinner kind of painting and more emphasis on color. So about every three years she’s doing something different. That makes the change in the late 1950s less surprising than it may seem at first. LM Interestingly, the period that this show covers, from ’59 to ’62, falls precisely between the first two Frankenthaler shows that you’ve organized for Gagosian. The first show—the Painted on 21st Street show—ran from 1950 to ’59 and examined all of those changes that you just described in the 1950s. LAUREN MAHONY

Previous spread: Frankenthaler in her studio at Third Avenue and East 94th Street, New York, with Mediterranean Thoughts (1960, in progress, left) and Figure with Thoughts (1960, in progress, center), March 1960. Photo by Tony Vaccaro Below and opposite (detail): Helen Frankenthaler, The Red Sea, 1959, oil and charcoal on sized, primed canvas with painted wood frame, 69 5⁄8 × 68 1⁄2 inches (176.8 × 174 cm)

Then the next show, Composing with Color, covered 1962 and ’63 and dealt with her transition to acrylic paint, and to flooding the canvas with color, using much more intense hues. The short time period of the present show, of 1959 to ’62, feels different, fresh, and new to Frankenthaler studies in general. These paintings are not well known and they haven’t been exhibited in a long time, if at all—the show in Paris marks the very first exhibition for several works, including First Creatures [1959] and Untitled [1959–60]. How did this show come about? And how did you react to seeing the paintings again after such a long time? JE Well, after doing the 1950s show, we wanted to provide a better sense of the Frankenthaler people knew, with bright color and so on—the ’60s painting. This Paris exhibition offered us the opportunity to see her development between 1959 and ’62 fleshed out more. The closer we looked at this group of works, the more I realized that there was something very different happening in this period. LM What was happening in her life at that moment that might have influenced this change? JE Well, there was her 1960 retrospective [at New York’s Jewish Museum]. It’s not surprising to think that an artist’s work might respond to a big survey exhibition. This one covered her work from the early 1950s, before Mountains and Sea, right through to the ’59 pictures. That must have been poignant for her as a very young artist, to have that all laid out. She must have looked back at what she had done and then considered what she would do next. Another motivation for artistic change was probably the change in her personal circumstances: in 1958 she had married Robert Motherwell. Before that, until the mid-1950s, she had been in a romantic relationship with Clement Greenberg, and the experience of looking at art with him in those early years has long been recognized as being very important to her. LM Which countries did she and Motherwell visit? JE France, Spain, and Italy. LM Yes, she made many paintings in Italy in 1960, when they were on vacation in Alassio. Also, Hendaye, from ’58, shares its name with a port town very close to Saint-Jean-de-Luz, where they spent most of their honeymoon in ’58. So there are interesting connections to their time in Europe in some of the works you selected for the show. What about the context of New York, though? The show is called After Abstract Expressionism. JE In 1959, Helen was doing very Ab-Ex pictures, and that was the year of the famous Willem de Kooning exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery that sold out on the first day—the high point of 1950s Abstract Expressionism’s reception up until then. Helen’s work of 1959–62 belongs to that moment. But our exhibition ends in ’62, when something else begins in New York with the New Realists exhibition. LM The groundbreaking Pop art show, also at the Sidney Janis Gallery. JE Yes. That show marked an absolute change in the New York art world. And there was also a change in Helen’s work at the beginning of the 1960s, moving it toward the Color Field painting with which she would become most associated. It’s very interesting to me how the 1959–61 works in our show—coming between her celebrated soak-stain work of the 1950s and her Color Field paintings of the 1960s—have somehow slipped out of her history. Most people must have jumped over them. And to some extent, Helen did herself, in subsequently telling her own history.

Previous spread: Helen Frankenthaler, First Creatures, 1959, oil, enamel, charcoal, and pencil on sized, primed linen, 64 3⁄4 × 111 inches (164.5 × 281.9 cm) Opposite: Helen Frankenthaler, Untitled, 1959–60 (detail), oil and charcoal on sized, primed linen, 89 3⁄4 × 69 3⁄4 inches (228 × 177.2 cm) Left: Helen Frankenthaler, Untitled, 1959–60, oil and charcoal on sized, primed linen, 89 3⁄4 × 69 3⁄4 inches (228 × 177.2 cm) Below: Helen Frankenthaler, Mediterranean Thoughts, 1960, oil on sized, primed canvas, 101 × 93 1⁄2 inches (256.5 × 237.5 cm)

to the color of her paintings. Of course there’s a long tradition of color being gendered in this way, described in Jacqueline Lichtenstein’s wonderful book The Eloquence of Color. And what people had trouble with in the soak-stain paintings of the 1950s was not only color, but color along with softness. That separates her from, say, Joan Mitchell, who was always perceived to be making tougher paintings because her surfaces were more impastoed. LM Mitchell was more a follower of de Kooning than Helen was, at least at this point. JE Yes—and that certainly contributed to Mitchell being thought a tough painter, toughness being linked to “masculine” paintings. LM Do you think, then, that some of these tougher paintings of Helen’s were maybe a response to her work being interpreted as too “feminine” or “lyrical”? JE Well, you know, maybe she wondered if she could paint tough. LM And wanted to prove that she could? JE Yes. LM There’s a quote from her from the late 1950s about a painting called L’Amour Toujours L’Amour, from ’57, where she says, “If you think this is too lyrical or too whimsical, you’re not seeing it.” JE That’s perfectly to the point. She’s insisting, “Just because you think it looks sweet doesn’t make it a lesser painting.” With artists who become wellknown, people inherently desire to have more admiration for the works they feel are more typical of that artist—the works in a recognizable signature style. Once at The Museum of Modern Art I

LM These late-’50s-to-early-’60s paintings are more aggressive than what came before or after. Can you talk a little bit about where the title of your essay comes from, that phrase “Think Tough, Paint Tough”? And I feel like the addition of “Move On” to the end of your title attributes to Helen a confidence about her approach to painting—the idea that she would try something and move on to the next thing, rather than dwell on it. JE The title comes from the critic James Schuyler, who wrote in a review of her 1960 retrospective that “part of Miss Frankenthaler’s special courage was in going against the think-tough and painttough grain of New York School abstract painting.” That’s true of the 1950s work, by and large; she didn’t really fit into Abstract Expressionism, being celebrated for painting soft-looking pictures. The implication of that response, though, was that she wasn’t a tough painter, yet as Helen knew very well, the analogy between being a tough artist and making works that look tough is obviously a misleading one, although it’s easy to fall into. Clearly Helen wouldn’t have become the artist she was if she hadn’t had a personal toughness and drive—she was someone who very much wanted her own way, was strong about what she did and believed in what she did. But in the 1959–60 period she not only thought tough but also painted visibly tough-looking paintings in a way that, as Schuyler said, she hadn’t done earlier. And she would do so later again, for example in the late 1970s. LM And early 1980s. JE Yes. It’s worth remembering here that the early criticism that Helen wasn’t a tough-enough artist was associated with the idea that her work looked “feminine.” Words like “cosmetic” were applied

Helen Frankenthaler, Mediterranean Thoughts, 1960 (detail), oil on sized, primed canvas, 101 × 93 1⁄2 inches (256.5 × 237.5 cm)

was proposing the acquisition of a very geometric drawing by Matisse, and someone on the Drawings Committee, which had to approve the acquisition, said, “This isn’t what a Matisse drawing should look like.” So I can imagine people saying of First Creatures, for example, which comes across as a very aggressive work, “This isn’t what a Helen Frankenthaler painting should look like.” But if you take that approach, you’re not really seeing the artist’s full identity. It’s actually been terrific to work on this brief, focused period. It’s allowed us to think about the change that was happening in her work. LM And to look at these works in depth, and in the context of everything that came before and after. JE And the works are pretty extraordinary, some of them very unexpected. Many people don’t have a strong sense of the course of her development, or haven’t studied her transitions at this level of detail. I think even scholars who know her work will find these lesser-known periods revelatory and exciting. Of course, once the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation has published its catalogue raisonné, it will be great to have a real sense of what was happening work after work for her entire career. One interesting thing that starts to happen in the second half of the 1950s, for example, is that the canvases become more depictive than they were in the first stain period. That depictive quality is obviously there in the light, thin lines of Mountains and Sea, but it soon disappears from subsequent paintings, then comes back with a vengeance in ’56 and ’57: the paint is very much poured on and manipulated but there’s a clear figurative emphasis. At times you’re not quite sure what the figure represents, but when you think of Europa [1957]— LM or Venus and the Mirror [1956]— JE Yes, in both of those works the figuration is produced through an expanded version of linear drawing, which is poured on as well as drawn with the brush. And the figuration can be as much in negative spaces as in positive ones. It’s fascinating to see this evolve in the period of this exhibition. Just look at First Creatures and ask to what extent you can see creatures. LM I see them, and I’m kind of fascinated by that, because it reminds me of Helen’s description of seeing Jackson Pollock’s black painting Number 14 (now in the collection of the Tate) at Betty Parsons: she saw a fox in it, and it reminded her of children’s-magazine illustrations where you have to find the hidden figure. JE Then of course there’s the fox in— LM Winter Hunt [1958]. JE Yes, a little menagerie of animals appears at this point. LM First Creatures is early in showing what may be a swan. That’s a figure she developed later on, in the early 1960s, when she created one of her few paintings series, the Swan Lake series. JE When you talk to artists about their work, you will later always wish you had asked them about certain things that you never did. Like, where did those swans come from? LM She talked about this a little to E. A. Carmean [in Carmean’s exhibition catalogue Frankenthaler: A Paintings Retrospective, 1989]. He asked her about individual paintings, including Swan Lake I, and she basically said that in working on the painting she wasn’t intending to come up with these swans or creatures or any kind of figuration, but that it appeared, and she was ready for it, so she developed it from there. JE Not much has been written about this, and 97

it’s interesting. There are a lot of animals in early modernism, particularly in Surrealism. There are birds in Matisse, and early on, in 1916, there’s a dog. And there are of course animals in Picasso, and in Braque’s studio pictures of course. LM And as you’ve said in your essay, Helen saw every show, whether it was with Greenberg or later with Motherwell. Even as a student she was very savvy about what was going on in New York. Miró was a big influence on her early on. JE I hope that as the catalogue raisonné develops, the Foundation can include a compendium of shows she could have seen, based on when she was traveling or in New York. It would be a great resource for scholars. LM Yes, and she would often refer to paintings she had seen in her letters and postcards. JE She often responds to things and you think, “Why does she like these?” Then you look at the work she was doing at the same time: sometimes she’s liking a quality similar to something in work she’s already done; at other times what she’s seeing relates to a way she wants to move forward. Once that reading has happened, it opens up that source for her. She may be using these sources consciously or they may have just lodged in her memory and then unconsciously come out when she was painting. At some point it would be great to have a study of the iconography of her work. LM What was it like looking at the paintings with Helen when you were working on your Frankenthaler monograph [1989]? Did she seem nostalgic about the 1950s, or any other particular period, or was she able to look at the works objectively? JE A bit of both. In some cases she was looking at paintings that she hadn’t seen for a long time, because they’d been in storage. There were some that had once been stretched but had been taken off the stretchers and rolled, to make storage easier. She was very interested to see those again, because she hadn’t looked at them for a long time. There were others that had never been stretched, and that she saw differently after so many years: at the time, 98

Above: Helen Frankenthaler, May Scene, 1961, oil on sized, primed linen, 35 7⁄8 × 59 7⁄8 inches (91.1 × 152.1 cm) Artwork © 2017 Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Photos by Rob McKeever unless otherwise noted

maybe she’d thought the painting hadn’t worked, but looking back she realized there was something there. So she might decide to stretch it, and one of the studio assistants would get out tape and mark out what it should be. She’d kept quite a lot of 1950s paintings, she must have recognized that there was something special about what had happened then. Some had been sold early on, but there were still a lot that hadn’t been, and her market was sufficient that she didn’t need to sell them. She often felt strongly about certain things, so she wasn’t going to part with them unless she knew that somebody cared enormously about them. Anyway, it was a really great process. LM How did you decide which works to include in that book? JE We would meet for hours. We never seemed to have enough time. We eventually got to the point of putting photographs of works on the walls, and all the studio walls were full of them. When we had to decide what would go into the book, we went through them together and she would say, “Oh, I have to have that.” And I would say, “You know, we’re actually including too many from this period.” And she would say, “Well, we’ll figure it out when we get to that point later on.” I went through the same thing with Richard Diebenkorn—it was really hard to get him to eliminate works from a book or exhibition because the implication was that he thought less of them. It was the same with Helen, she got so attached to certain works they just had to be there. Others she would gracefully surrender as the process continued. It’s worth saying here that publications and exhibitions done in artists’ lifetimes are bound to be different from posthumous ones. Some curators and authors chafe against the will of their subjects, but I actually think it’s good for the historical record to understand which works the artist esteems and wants in these exhibitions, because opinions will often change later on. LM Helen was sensitive to Mountains and Sea being so much a focus of attention—she wouldn’t allow it to be in certain exhibitions. Even now, most people focus on Mountains and Sea as her iconic influential work. JE Yes, and of course that has to do with the way in which the history of art is told: through moments of innovation, or a sequence of innovations, one after the next. That implies that artists are most interesting at those moments, rather than later on. And then apparently we’re not supposed to be interested in them anymore because we’re interested in somebody else. LM Yes, and with someone like Helen or de Kooning, who also had a very long career, there’s so much value in exploring those other periods. I agree on how nice it’s been to explore in depth not just what she’s most famous for but these other bodies of work, lesser known even to us. JE The notion of a tightly controlled history has fewer supporters than it used to have. There’s suddenly far more interest in how modern painting has developed in different versions and different forms. And it’s great that we’re able to show different versions of Helen Frankenthaler, an artist who was working in different ways but always remained the same person. LM I agree. JE Cézanne’s 1895 show at the Vollard gallery in Paris was really the first time anybody had seen his work in depth, because most of it hadn’t been exhibited before. The response was, “All these different things?” And Cézanne replied, “Yes, everything is different, but everything is a Cézanne.”

w w w. s a c a i . j p

A Photography Portfolio by Roe Ethridge

The Story of L Saul Anton

I first met L. on a catalogue shoot in my studio in Sunset Park. She was assisting Ebba Stahlström, a bleached-blonde Swedish stylist I used to hire when my regulars were unavailable. It was my usual 6 a.m. call time—I liked to fuss with the lighting before we started cranking out pictures—and Ebba was muttering under her breath as she unzipped her work valise with one hand and clutched a Starbucks Grande in the other. “Why do you always make me get up so fucking early?” A short while later, just as I snapped my first tests, Ebba pulled her American Spirits out of her purse and disappeared into the stairwell. I first noticed L. when she didn’t follow Ebba out. She gave me an embarrassed smile as she set down a waxen rendering of a large bowl of ramen noodles, then went on to carefully unwrap three more of the wax objects we would be photographing that day for a high-end auction house. I still remember the blueand-white striped men’s shirt she was wearing buttoned all the way to the top, along with a pair of cutoff jeans and running shoes. I even remember her blowing a face-sized bubble. When it popped, she let herself laugh like an innocent schoolgirl playing in the yard. “They get up early where you’re from?” I asked casually. “I don’t know, but I never did,” she said ruefully, as I tried to not look too smug. I asked her name, which she told me, adding awkwardly, “I know your name, so you don’t have to tell me.” As it turned out, Ebba never worked with me again, which isn’t surprising since I paid more attention to her assistant that day than to her, and people can be touchy about that kind of thing. But I didn’t care that much. At the end of the day, I asked L. if she was hungry. We went around the corner from my studio to eat hamburgers and ended up drinking vodka tonics. She spent the night. In the morning we stayed in bed for a little while, hazily puzzling together what had just happened. “This is so cliché,” she said, her head on my shoulder, “you’re a photographer sleeping with an assistant.” It wasn’t something I generally did, but I was on the rebound from Clarisse, who’d returned to France the month before. I thought for a moment, looking for something compelling to say. “Didn’t anyone ever tell you that photographers like pictures more than real life?” She laughed, then disappeared into the shower. A few minutes later she was in her cutoffs. “Call me if you need anything. I know a lot of stylists you can work for.” I gave her my card. She took it but wrinkled her nose. “I didn’t come to New York to be a stylist,” she said, “I’m a photographer.” She stretched out the syllables of the word with a mischievous grin on her face. Then, before I could respond, she gave me a peck on the cheek and headed for the door.

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I didn’t see L. again for a long time, figuring she’d call if she wanted to hang out. Some months later, though, a burly detective who looked like he’d walked out of central casting came into my studio while I was doing another shoot, pictures of fruit I was trying to make interesting. He was a big guy in a dark suit with an Italian last name and a surprisingly soft voice. I invited him to sit down and he quickly came to his point. He wanted to know when I’d last seen Ebba. I thought back to that day with L., then led him to my computer to show him the ramen-noodle pictures we’d shot that day. “Was anyone working with her?” he asked. I can’t tell you why but I didn’t tell him about L. I lied and said Ebba was working alone that day. “I called her on short notice, so she probably didn’t have time to hire anyone,” I offered. The detective studied me pensively, then stood up, shook my hand, and left with a soft word of thanks. I watched him go like he was out of a cheap detective movie.

Soon we were climbing the stairs of a walk-up and unlocking a brushed-steel door. There was little inside except a large roll of background paper at one end. A brick wall with flaking paint ran the length of the place; I didn’t see much photo equipment but there was a hot light in the corner, which she turned on as I looked for a chair. “Can you believe he’s just letting me use it?” Someone named Carson was lending her the space out of the goodness of his heart. I didn’t probe the arrangement. “We have to christen your new studio,” I told her, and took out my digital SLR. I flipped on a second hot light that she’d clamped to a pipe in the corner and snapped a few pictures of her. Afterward, we sat on the floor for a while and looked at what I’d shot on the screen. “I like the one with my hair over my face. That’s the one you should use.” “For what?” She looked at me blankly without saying, then took my hand: “What’s really strange is that I always feel like someone is following me.” I gave her a you’re-not-serious look, but she was dead earnest. “It feels like there’s someone always following me.” I didn’t know what to say and didn’t really make much of it. We went back to my place in a cab, but I was tired and told her I needed to wake up early to catch a flight. I was visiting my parents in Florida. She didn’t mind waking up early, she said—“That’s how we met, remember?” In the morning I found a note on the table. “Fly safe and see you soon, L.”

At least another year passed before I saw L. again. She walked into my studio one evening just as I was packing up my lenses. To tell the truth, I wasn’t really surprised when I heard her voice behind me. Somehow I’d always known that we’d see each other again. “I was in the neighborhood,” she said coolly, and handed me a bouquet of dandelions she’d found, it seemed, growing on some patch of grass somewhere. “Thanks,” I said. I wasn’t surprised either by how different she looked. She’d grown her hair out and found someone who could style it, and she was wearing a black cocktail dress that showed off her body. Her arms and shoulders were chiseled like she’d been doing yoga five times a week. “You want to come to a party with me? My date canceled.” Girls like L. were invited everywhere by everyone and knew more people than I could ever hope to. She had been on private yachts, private planes, and private islands—with rich men named Jim my, Bobby, Arty—whatever. “You look great,” I offered. “Fuck that,” she shot back, before tossing her handbag on my bed. “Can I get it later?”

I caught my flight the next morning and before noon was stepping out of a cab in front of the ranch house I grew up in. It’s never a bad thing to spend time somewhere that doesn’t change much; Woodland Hills is such a place. After lunch, I spent time going through the garage, where my mother still had most of my childhood stuff: bikes, balls, toys, books, and several boxes of magazines from the ’90s—everything from Harper’s Bazaar to The Face. That evening I ate dinner at home with my parents. My father was excited to have me there and went on and on about the fishing he’d been doing. He’d already reserved a boat to take us out in the morning. I never much liked fishing, but I always went because it made him happy. Around 10 p.m., just after my parents had gone upstairs to go to bed, there was a knock on the door. I really didn’t know what to say when I saw L. standing in the doorway. She was wearing a white-striped boating sweater and jeans. “I never told you I was from Tampa,” she started, “so when you told me you were from Woodland Hills, I couldn’t help myself.” It hadn’t been hard to find out where my parents lived, but I didn’t remember ever telling her where I was from. For whatever reason, though, her com ment seemed to make some kind of weird sense.

We Uber-ed over to a SoHo loft, where we found a corner to stand in and sip vodka tonics. She remembered that was what we’d drunk the last time we saw each other and brought them over from the bar. “For old times’ sake?” I asked. She liked that, and clinked my plastic cup. “How’s the photography coming along?” Her gaze turned steely for a moment, then melted into a large smile. “Great. I have a studio now.” When we left the party an hour or so later, she asked me if I wanted to go see it. It was nearby in TriBeCa.

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“There’s a lunar eclipse tonight,” she said. “Do you want to go down to the marina and check it out?” I realized at that moment that L. reminded me of a girlfriend I had had in high school, Lisa, who always liked to “check things out.” “Tonight?” “Supposed to happen around 1. I was going to take pictures.” She swung around a camera bag she’d slung over her shoulders. I didn’t ask her what she was doing there. It all seemed more normal than not. “You know,” I said, “I’ve got a telescope in the garage—and it’s got a camera mount.” L.’s eyes opened wide. “Oh, we could take pictures! I love looking at the sky at night—you know, the stars, the constellations, the planets. . . .” Her voice trailed off. She was smiling now, and I could see her teeth, which were still, it seemed, those of a child, each one a little small and different from the next. It’s the kind of thing you start to notice, whether you like it or not, when you’re a photographer.

“You shouldn’t lie to the police,” he said in a bored way. Eventually I was charged with obstruction of justice and accessory after the fact. They charged L., if you can believe it, with the murder of Ebba Stahlström. They said I was hiding the suspect at my parents’ place, and my mom and pop’s confused testimony didn’t do much to give the jury any confidence that I was doing anything else—for they weren’t sure, in the end, how long L. had actually stayed at the house. My lawyer recom mended I take a plea, so I did, and spent eighteen months in a low-security prison in, of all places, Florida. L. took a plea, too, and got fifteen years. The detective told me that she’d been looking for a way to set me up for what she’d done, and had almost succeeded. I saw her once during that time, in a lineup where I was standing behind the two-way glass and the detective asked me to identify L. as the young woman who had shown up that morning with a bright smile and a clear work ethic. She had, he told me with no inflection, drugged Ebba to sleep and then suffocated her. It was strange to hear that at that moment, because she was wearing a very Floridian fruit-print dress and a widebrim med sun hat. I eventually wrote to L. in prison, saying that I couldn’t forgive her for what she’d done, but that I’d try. She responded by sending me a photograph of herself. I’m not sure when it was taken but she looked like a girl on the prairie, wearing a flower-print dress and her hair up. On the bottom, she wrote, “Remember that dress you got me and what I told you about someone following me? That’s her—in the dress.” I didn’t remember getting L. a dress.

We headed down to the beach that ran north of the marina, passing by the local camera shop along the way. It was closed, but the sign was still lit and shining into the night sky like a beacon. “Is that where you got your first camera?” L. asked flatly. I nodded. “My mom gave it to me for my thirteenth birthday.” Later, I spent three sum mers working there, printing the odd picture of a kid or dog they wanted blown up and framed. “A lot of people around here still use oldfashioned film cameras,” I said. It was a warm Florida night. We walked down the beach a little ways, I set up the telescope, and we watched the night sky unfold. It was a bit early for the eclipse so we decided to go for a swim, something I hadn’t done since I was a teenager. She was wearing a bikini under her clothes, as if she’d knew that was what we’d be doing, while I made do with my boxers. Afterward we dried off and waited for the eclipse, which came and went as we snapped pictures through the telescope. She did a lot of oohing and aahing all along the way. “I’ve never taken these kinds of pictures before.” All I could think at that moment was, “This doesn’t feel like it’s real.” We went back to my folks’ place and fell asleep in my old twin bed. But when I was awakened by my dad knocking on the door in the morning, she was gone. I found another note sitting under a glass of water in which she’d arranged a bouquet of dandelions. “I’m going back to New York. See you soon.”

A couple of weeks after I came home from prison, I got a call from a friend of mine, a writer. We’d become friends some years back when we found out that he was from a place called Woodland Hills, too, only it was in California rather than in Florida. Like me, he’d grown up in a ranch house under palm trees riding BMX bikes around the neighborhood. He’d even dated a girl named Lisa, and though I never asked him if he owned a telescope, he’d once mentioned to me that he’d been in an astronomy club. He’d heard what happened and thought he’d check to see if I needed anything. We went out for beers one night and I told him the whole story, at least what I understood about it: about L., Ebba, the way L. showed up in Florida. A couple of days later a book came in the mail, a novella by Balzac called The Unknown Masterpiece. On the inside cover my friend wrote a short note: “There are only so many stories, so it’s a shame if we end up living ones we haven’t ever had a chance to read.” He’d signed it with a smiley face and his initials, RE.

It was a while before I saw L. again. I spent ten days in Florida and when I returned to New York, I found the Italian detective waiting for me in front of my building.

One of these days I’m going to sit down and read it.

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Tradition since 1774. birkenstock.com

Gagosian Beverly Hills presents Adriana Varejão: Interiors, curated by Louise Neri, as a collateral project to The Getty’s triennial initiative Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, which focuses this year on Latin American and Latino art. In a text adapted for the occasion from the longer essay “Paved and Tiled by Adriana Varejão,” Brazilian cultural historian and curator Lilia Moritz Schwarcz explores cultural themes in Varejão’s oeuvre.

ADRIANA VAREJÃO:

INTERIORS

n his book The Savage Mind, French anthropologist and ethnologist Claude LéviStrauss describes the experience of the anthropologist Eleanor Smith Bowen, who juxtaposed “her vain philosophy” to that of the “native” from whom she was learning a new language. During the elementary stage of her apprenticeship, her informants insisted that she memorize the names of botanical specimens that she was unable to recognize. When Bowen questioned this requirement, she was rebuked: “How can you say you speak our language when you cannot even recognize 150 species of plants?” Reacting to such an episode might have given rise to many other reactions. The first would have been to admit the exoticism embedded in the discourse of the “other,” relegating the episode to the aegis of primitivism as expressed in the altercation: “they” do, in fact, exist and think differently from “us.” Another possibility could have been to take note of what this altercation revealed: the idea that cultures function like languages, representing entryways to worlds unknown, and creating misunderstandings along the way. For “us,” speaking a language means knowing how to articulate subjects, verbs, and predicates, and knowing how to employ adjectives selectively and coherently. Using the lexicon means knowing how to inflect and multiply. As for “them,” the measure of articulacy is apparently not utilitarian but based on sensory experience. In order to name one must know, and in order to know one must, in turn, be able to recognize. Yet what might be the common ground between this situation and the world that opens up before us in the canvases of Adriana Varejão? In attempting to answer the question I will hazard the exploration of another language—the azulejo tile and the Portuguese verb azulejar. Native to Arab peoples but also present in India and China, the azulejo conquered the world from the holds of ships, on the backs of camels, in airplane holds, by virtue of its extreme portability. Given its shared heritage in both West and East, the material evidence of the tile itself—described in the September 2016 issue of the Gagosian Journal—recalls dialogue, exchange, and theft. The art of tile-making is said to have been introduced to Portugal, through Spain, by the Moroccans, who, in turn, had learned it from the Persians. The path traveled was a tortuous, even paradoxical one, despite the predictable symmetry of the product. For this reason, whereas the term azulejo (from the Arabic al zulaich, al zulaikha, al zula’ij) lost its initial identity, it maintained its meaning: “small polished stone.” Tiles were used to cover the walls of spaces both sacred and mundane; they were objects of royal admiration from France to China, but they also claimed preferred space in train stations, bars, and butcher shops. The origin of the tile is hard to pinpoint and its uses have been varied, whether geographical, temporal, religious, erotic, quotidian, or merely aesthetic. It is hybrid by birth and definition. We know that all worldly things may be traded: goods, symbols, objects—even women. And as part of the exchange of azulejos came values, projections, utopias, and simulacra. Soon associated with trompe l’oeil, the technique very often revealed its performative features to be used “instead of ”: instead of more noble materials; instead of landscape; instead of wealth. But it also produced wealth, given that it made viable

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a technical virtuosity achieved by the Arabs, the Chinese, the Dutch, and later the Spaniards, the Portuguese, and, in their path, the Brazilians. It is said that when the Portuguese took Ceuta, on the African coast of the Strait of Gibraltar, in 1415, they also stole the technique of azulejo tiling. Yet until the sixteenth century they preferred to import the product rather than re-create it, since the markets of Spain and Holland were steady suppliers. At the end of the sixteenth century, azulejos became a permanent part of Portuguese reality, used to pave castles, churches, and monasteries. Altars, floors, and ceilings were now invaded by tiled compositions bearing flowers, birds, and foliage in a process that cannibalized elements from other cultures, promptly resignifying them in the pious religious terms of Portuguese culture in that age. Not by chance, among the many dichotomies that Sérgio Buarque de Holanda articulated in his book Raízes do Brasil (Roots of Brazil, 1936), he included that of the sower and the tiler. The sower represented the Portuguese colonizer who, upon his arrival in Brazil, expended no great effort on the work of colonization, casting his seeds to the wind, paying little heed to where they might land. The absence of any intention of laying roots, of endowing the land with infrastructure or development, explains the anarchy of Brazil’s unplanned cities. The Spaniard was the tiler who established himself in South America seeking “the exasperated love of uniformity and symmetry.” His cities were planned and known for their straight, rational lines. It would be more profitable to emphasize metaphor than division: to sow is to make way for; to tile is to link, to lay roots, to provide uniformity and symmetry. Let us consider Varejão’s azulejos and her supposedly uniform lines in relation to the geometry of her saunas’ enclosures—supposedly uniform because of the cut that reduces the canvas, contradicting the object’s continuity. Interiority devastates exteriority. Perhaps the azulejo really is a tile that fills a void even as it establishes new forms of colonization, if not civilizing then at least cultural. Consider as a double of the azulejo he who tiles, paves, experiments, fills in, or dialogues. There is nothing like gathering these loose threads in order to ponder Varejão’s work. If there is any one element that runs through her artistic trajectory it is the omnipresence of the azulejos, which articulates relations without fixing them, simulating rather than denouncing, representing in lieu of presenting. To speak is to articulate assumptions and to establish is to signify associations. And we are not far from thinking that, in Varejão’s work, “azulejo” is citation; it is language. To tile with azulejos (azulejar) would then be to activate this dialectic between the local and the universal; between inside and outside; between copy and translation. One may say that azulejos pave, tile, and fill in Varejão’s art. They pave a trajectory, and this paving binds a tissue of histories that unravels with each new phase, with each challenge. Like a bricoleuse, Varejão gathers fragments of histories and translates them into others. Like the watchmakers of old, she begins with what she finds and develops her project as she goes, in accordance with a model that is opposite to that of the engineer who, as Lévi-Strauss clearly shows us, first creates the project and then finds the objects with which to realize it. Varejão starts off with what 119

she has: she distributes, reassembles, and creates based on narratives that she patiently collects, rereads, remakes. We know that every translator is a traitor, and her process resembles that of Chinese boxes. Opening one box within another, her work reveals a sea of histories. In the 1980s, Varejão’s azulejo tiling was most directly in dialogue with the Baroque, with an undefined form strongly supported by gesturality. Chinese pottery had already revealed itself as both appropriate and appropriatable material in its geometry as well as in its fragmentation and figuration. Known for their delicacy and crocodiling, Chinese Song ceramics emerged as part of her game of simulation and reality (Açougue Song, 2000). And what to say of the azulejos that line the walls of butcher’s shops? Clean in their exteriority, avoiding contamination and dirt, they are duly conflicted in their identity, where inside becomes outside and outside in. The living flesh emerges in the center of the canvas, and it is as human as the effect and result of the paint. Paint is compressed, squeezed, thrown by a gesture that frees and imprisons when it reveals its intention. There is butcher’s meat and dried beef, in the very Brazilian tradition of conserving in order to have something to eat, even if it is meat dried by time. Here common flesh is the transit of viscera: on the one hand, flesh that hides beneath the fake effect of perfect canvases that reveal equally perfect situations; on the other, the foregrounded meat that is sold and exhibited. That Ruina de Charques (Jerked Beef Ruins) should appear in Varejão’s work should come as no surprise. The clean contains the dirty and purity contains peril, as demonstrated by the anthropologist Mary Douglas when she dealt with our most deeply rooted cosmologies. Ours is a civilization of cleanliness that aspires to hygiene and homogeneity; we are in denial of defilement. At least apparently, nothing could be cleaner than Varejão’s ascetic Saunas. Clean in accordance with function and use, their purpose should be to help the body

expel impurities and aspire to perfection. In them, we extirpate “evil” that we may become beatified and neutralized in a ritual that foresees separating the hybrid from the pure, the clean from the soiled. Saunas are enclosures, laboratories for avoiding contamination. Yet there is nothing filthier than a sauna, which accumulates imperfections in its folds, debris in its junctions. The spectacle of filth, of imperfection—of the unsaid and, once again, the simulacrum—is outlined alongside the spectacle of emptiness: predictably, geometric tile and ritual cleanliness. Perhaps it is in Paredes com incisões à la Fontana (Wall with Incisions à la Fontana, 2002) that the full breadth of this spectacle is most clearly represented. Instead of the marbled tile of living flesh, here is the azulejo in its most “primary” version, betrayed only by the instrument that once again mutilates and exposes imperfection. Varejão’s cartography moves between truths and simulations, cleanliness and dirt, history and re-reading, blood red and sky blue, tile and tear, canvas and simulacrum. Like a kaleidoscope in which the material is always the same but produces new designs, her works appear to be constantly shuffled. The design of one canvas is always completed in another; each box opens to reveal a new one; each story results in the following one. The stories never end, for there is always a world that invents them and, after all, as Jorge Luis Borges wrote, everything has been written. Certainly there is no way to remake a lifetime of work wrought from such feeling, affection, criticism, reading, re-reading, intention, and chance. The way out was, therefore, to follow a case-oriented methodology inspired by historian Carlo Ginzburg in his influential book The Cheese and the Worms— to pay attention to the vestiges and signs left by the works, all of them reflecting tension, dialogue, and ambivalence. Excerpted from “Paved and Tiled by Adriana Varejão” by Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, in Adriana Varejão—entre carnes e mares (Rio de Janeiro: Cobogó, 2009).

Page 116: Adriana Varejão, O místico (The Mystic), 2005, oil on canvas, 35 1⁄2 × 28 3⁄8 inches (90 × 72 cm). Photo by Eduardo Ortega

Above: Adriana Varejão, Sauna musa (Muse Sauna), 2004, oil on canvas, 19 3⁄4 × 23 5⁄8 inches (50 × 60 cm). Photo by J. Bastos

Previous spread (multiple views): Adriana Varejão, Rome Meat Ruin, 2016, oil on aluminum and polyurethane, 100 7 ⁄8 × 18 1⁄8 × 10 1⁄4 inches (256 × 46 × 26 cm). Photo by Vicente de Mello

Left: Adriana Varejão, Açougue Song (Meaty Song Ceramics), 2000, oil paint on plaster, canvas, and styrofoam with meat hooks, 59 × 76 3⁄4 × 7 1⁄8 inches (150 × 195 × 18 cm). Photo by Vicente de Mello Artwork © Adriana Varejão

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The first two decades of Zeng Fanzhi’s career offer great insights into the artist’s trajectory. Volume one of a catalogue raisonné focused on these years will be released this winter. Gladys Chung, the editor for that project, investigates that moment, during the formative early stages of this artist’s career.

ZENG FANZHI: THE EARLY YEARS

he first volume of Zeng Fanzhi’s catalogue raisonné, to be published in the winter of 2017, will encompass the work of the first two decades of his career, from 1984 to 2004—the first peak of his trajectory and a crucial period in the development of Chinese contemporary art. Illustrating many early works never published before, and the complete Mask Series, which was accomplished within that period, the book will also include rarely seen archival photographs and documents as well as conversations with Zeng. It will certainly provide a new and unprecedently comprehensive perspective on this acclaimed artist and his oeuvre. The introduction to the catalogue, written by its editor, Gladys Chung, is excerpted below. Zeng Fanzhi has rarely exhibited or discussed his early works, and many of them are scattered or even lost. Tracking them down has been a task of more than archival value; it has shed light on the artist’s virtuosity, his pioneering strategies, and the aesthetic quests that he initiated in his youth and that run through his ongoing career. This is especially clear from the following representative works. 1988: A Mind at Odds with His Time Still Life with Kettle (1988) shows Zeng’s obsession with art history. When he was a student, it was a normal part of the curriculum to paint copies of masterpieces, as so many famous artists had done before. Many of Zeng’s contemporaries chose to duplicate masterpieces by the French PostImpressionist Paul Cézanne, but Zeng went beyond mere imitation, aiming both to capture the spirit of Cézanne’s art and to treat it in an innovative way. Copying Cézanne’s Still Life with Kettle (between 1867 and 1869), he worked not only from the original image but from real fruit, and tried hard to find a high-waisted coffeepot with a white

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handle (making do with a saucepot) he even located a table and cloth like Cézanne’s. The reconstructed still life sparked a new feeling in the artist’s mind, and although the overall composition and layout of the painting can be traced back to Cézanne, the hue and ambience belong wholly to Zeng. He referred to and learned from the classics and at the same time resisted and departed from them, inserting his personal feelings and subjectivity. The trait would remain prominent throughout his career: even images inspired by canonical art-historical tropes are permeated with personal sensations and interpretations. The practice extends into later works such as From 1830 till now (2014) and Laocoön (2015). Socialist Realism and German Expressionism Though Zeng was always a subjective artist, in his early period in the 1980s he was inevitably influenced by Socialist Realism and the Soviet ruralthemed art so popular in China at the time. The question of how Socialist Realism inf luenced Zeng demands further research, but certainly the impact is more complex than most critics suggest—nor was it absolutely negative. The technical skills required for Socialist Realism are far from invisible in Zeng’s work; being trained to paint rural themes and portraits, he developed virtuosity in painting the human figure, its volume and silhouette. The mastery of modeling, chiaroscuro, and facial expression apparent in many of his early paintings can be attributed largely to his art-school training in Socialist Realism, a training that surely nurtured his passion for figurative painting and portraiture. At the same time, the skills of Socialist Realism required a sacrifice of subjectivity, since this mainstream style called for formulaically positive depiction and for obscuring accordingly the unique personalities and emotions of both the portrayer

Previous spread: Zeng Fanzhi with Hospital Triptych no.1, (1991). Photo by Guo Shaoming Above: Zeng Fanzhi, Narration, 1989, oil on canvas, 46 1⁄8 × 32 7⁄8 inches (117 × 83 cm) Below: Zeng Fanzhi, Still life with Kettle, 1988, oil on canvas, 19 3⁄8 × 21 1⁄2 inches (49 × 54.5 cm) Opposite (right): The artist and friends in his studio, Wuhan, 1989. Opposite (left): Zeng Fanzhi, Haircut, 1989, oil on canvas, 33 1⁄8 × 21 7⁄8 inches (84 × 55.5 cm)

and the portrayed. The rigidity of Socialist Realism could not prevent Zeng’s emotion from spilling to the canvas, albeit in masterfully subtle portrayals: I painted models as required by the curriculum in class, but after class I adopted a totally different style. I loved drawing people around me, like my friends and people in the street. Sometimes I took photos; sometimes I did sketches but mainly portraits. At that time what I desired to express was my feelings. I also did abstract paintings, but finally I found that figure painting was my favorite. I always get a special feeling when I see the emotions of people in pictures.1 The way Zeng was exposed to, understood, resisted, and transcended the Chinese painting tradition that was dominant in his early years is central to his work of the time. In his four years at art school, he insisted on exploration. Every work represents a break from tradition, a search for his own style and subjectivity. Some of his most important inspirations here were German Expressionism and Abstract Expressionism: he learned a great deal from artists such as Max Beckmann and Willem de Kooning. He has also often said he was inspired by the brushwork of Raoul Dufy. His study of these masters was methodological, examining the form, brushwork, line, and color of their work to find ways to escape from the norms of Socialist Realism. He located himself between these artistic traditions, learning the essence of both and internalizing them to fuel his own style. 1989–1991: A Radical Breakthrough For a period in 1989–91, Zeng abandoned his desire for storytelling and inclined increasingly to formal components such as color, line, and textural brushwork. Relinquishing traditional perspective and the illusion of three-dimensional space, he turned instead to notions of flatness, realizing that abstraction might give him a way to bring subjective emotion and physical sensation into his work. That urgent focus underpinned his interest in de Kooning: “I have been fascinated by de Kooning’s lines since I was at college. His brushwork gave oil paints an

I painted models as required by the curriculum in class, but after class I adopted a totally different style. I loved drawing people around me, like my friends and people in the street. Zeng Fanzhi

irritating and maybe even agitating sense, as if something were being torn off and ripped. It embodies an impact that touches other senses, including that of sight and physicality.”2 Many works of these years demonstrate Zeng’s early attempts to explore the expressive powers and sensibilities of color, to which he had been sensitized by German Expressionism. To convey states of psychological anxiety, he began to use glaring hues such as blood red and stark white, a totally different palette from the browns and somber blacks of mainstream rural-themed painting. In producing his first consciously abstract works— Narration of 1989, for example—he felt that he was creating his own style: I started to produce abstract paintings in the late 1980s. At that time, I was mocked at by many of my schoolmates. “Why?” they asked. “Why do you use lavishly so many materials and paints?” That’s right. I used all kinds of materials. I painted with my hands. In order to explore something new, I painted a lot, employed impasto, and wasted a lot of paint. But exploring new things is very important. When you are trying something new, you are feeling the paints and even communicating with them. What I felt then was totally different from what I feel now. I was like a baby feeling for something that was in my body and could not be taken away by anyone else.3 125

Baptism by Abstract: Exploring Brushwork Having experienced something like a religious rebirth through his experiments with abstraction, Zeng found himself equipped with a new strategy and a reinforced self-assurance with which to return to portraiture. With growing confidence and virtuosity, he adopted German Expressionist techniques, using vigorous, emotionally charged brushstrokes to outline his figures. In Haircut (1989), for example, he used thick gray and coarse white to highlight the intricate folds and creases in the figures’ clothes. The contrast between these colors brings out the coldness and indifference of the subjects’ expressions, foregrounding the meaningless monotony and dullness of daily life. Zeng’s solid training in modeling also allowed him to give his figures a sense of volume and three-dimensionality with only a few brushstrokes. In works such as this one, Zeng found a subtle balance and unity of realism and expressionism. In many portraits of the time, he portrayed his figures in strange perspectives—bottom up, profile, frontal, displaced, even hybrids of different viewing angles. This extraordinary sense of space was doubtless a lesson learned from expressionism. He also drew inspiration from the deformed and elasticized figures of Cézanne: many portraits of 1989–90, especially the Hospital Series and Mask Series, show the oversized, warped hands and eyes that would later become signature motifs. Expressionism certainly widened his artistic path and played a distinctive role in his career. 1991–1992: Hospital Triptych: A Broader Paradigm and Thematic Transpositions In the summer of 1991, Zeng began to prepare for his graduating exhibition. He wanted to create a work that would both summarize what he had learned at art school and establish his personal style. This led him to adopt a larger size and the triptych form, an appropriate platform for portraying the complexity of human experience. For his subject Zeng looked to an important experience in his life. He had lived for a long time near a hospital in the Hankou district of Wuhan. Passing through the facility every day, he had witnessed many life-and-death moments and watched suffering patients preparing to meet their fates. Their helplessness in the face of indifferent doctors and nurses had a huge impact on him and became a grounding theme of Hospital Triptych.

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In some sense, Hospital Triptych necessarily marked an advance in maturity: as a graduate piece, it embodied the stylistic breakthroughs that Zeng had accumulated over the years preceding. But its chosen theme elevated it still further. For the first time, Zeng focused on groups of tragic characters, which he arranged in scenes that echoed Greek tragedies; and he began to explore religious iconography. His construction of symbolic images remains a point of study in his work to this day. Numbing and Indifference Hospital Triptych no. 1 establishes the scenes and characters of the entire oeuvre of hospitalrelated paintings in the following years. The work comprises three scenes that can be viewed both as independent stories and as a left-to-right sequence: patients waiting to see doctors; patients during an operation; and patients after the operation. These works, cold and cruel in atmosphere, mix Zeng’s incisive observations of human situations with his personal interpretation of reality. We see maniacally smiling doctors handling patients who lie on the operating table like raw meat to be butchered or writhe and groan in agony on the ward. Their anxious looks and physical suffering starkly contrast with the indifference of the doctors who treat them like meat, using scornful fingers to examine their secret parts and ridiculing them when they groan. Physical suffering is associated with spiritual abuse, and the doctors’ maltreatment points to the brutality in human nature. Zeng captures every tiniest detail: needles full of blood, scalpels, pallid hospital clothes. In recording patients’ suffering he reveals indifference and cruelty. As art critic Pi Daojian writes, the work dovetails “the indifference of the participators and the anxiety of the audience.”4

Above: Zeng Fanzhi, Hospital Triptych no. 1 (middle panel), 1991, oil on canvas, 70 7⁄8 × 59 1⁄8 inches (180 × 150 cm) Below: Zeng Fanzhi, A Man in Melancholy, 1990, oil on canvas, 39 3⁄8 × 35 1⁄2 inches (100 × 90 cm) Opposite: Zeng Fanzhi, Hospital, 1992, oil on canvas, 70 7⁄8 × 59 1⁄8 inches (180 × 150 cm)

Radical Break from the Norm Only by mapping Zeng’s portraits onto their historical context can we understand the innovative significance of Hospital Triptych. At the time, Socialist Realism dominated art in China. And Socialist Realism advocated that portraiture be “decent, grand, and deprived of any imperfection,” imposing uniform postures, manners, and appearances. Its figures were idealistic symbols—abstract concepts embodied by fictitious stereotypes. They were painted merely as propaganda tools for the revolution. The figures in Hospital Triptych, though, or even in the earlier A Man in Melancholy, break the bonds of mainstream Socialist Realism and display complexity, individuality, and feeling—indeed, dark and negative feeling. A type of portraiture then rare in China was born.

Religious Imagery and Universal Pathos Hospital Triptych no. 2 embodies a thematic shift, leading the viewer to ponder individual suffering and death. It meanwhile reinterprets themes and iconography from Western art history and offers a new ideological perspective. The latent compassion and solemnity of the Hospital Series are overt in Hospital Triptych no. 2. The patient’s collapsed body and the doctor’s hold on it evokes the schema of the pietà, of Mary holding the broken body of Christ after his descent from the cross. This was the first time Zeng had applied this sort of Renaissance model in his painting, a cultural leap that raises his Hospital Series to the realm of philosophy: the transition is made from the depiction of an individual Chinese patient to consideration of the universal problems of human suffering.

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There’s no redemption for Zeng’s patients: Jesus was crucified for humanity’s sins and eventually ascended to heaven to sit at God’s right hand, but the body depicted in the painting will never ascend or attain sainthood. A raw pessimism seeps through the work: there is no hope of release, no hope of sublimation. The Hospital Series questions the nature of suffering, its apparent meaninglessness accounting for the tragedy of the human condition. Zeng’s work can be seen as a chemical combination of constantly changing artistic compulsions, bubbling and boiling down to a deep and thorough contemplation of human nature, a distillation that surmounts any specific temporality or geography. 128

The rise of contemporary Chinese art in the late 1980s and early ’90s was a product of each individual artist’s reflections on real-life situations, with which they mostly dealt in sarcastic, absurd, cynical ways. But Zeng chose to contemplate such circumstances in a sympathetic and humanitarian way, giving his themes global appeal. His paintings are vast and complex, capable of moving the viewer on a deeply personal level across classes, borders, and cultures. That is the true essence of art. 1993: Blood-Soaked Meat, Dead Animals, and Human Bodies From the Hospital Series stemmed two further series, Meat and Human and Meat. Although the latter

Opposite: Zeng Fanzhi, Meat no. 2, 1992, oil on canvas, 71 × 59 1 ⁄4 inches (180.4 × 150.5 cm) Right: Preparatory sketch for From the Masses, To the Masses, (1993) Below: Zeng Fanzhi, From the Masses, To the Masses, 1993, oil on canvas, 70 7⁄8 × 78 3⁄4 inches (180 × 200 cm)

two contain fewer works than Hospital Series, the three must be studied together to see their closeness. Through them, Zeng made a significant artistic leap and established an imagery with connotations distinctly his own—namely, meat. Deliberately overlaying the image of meat onto human figures, in these works Zeng presented human bodies alternately with bloody flesh and dead animals hung or scattered around them, concatenating images of people and of beasts prepared for slaughter. This innovative iconography was a creative transformation of something Zeng had seen: shirtless workers sleeping on a frozen meat slab to keep cool, evoking an immediate union of living humans and dead meat. Unique emotions were thus extracted from the dullness of ordinary blue-collar lives. Zeng developed this imagery of unprocessed meat through the observation, distillation, and tranformation of his own environment, for the butchers and meat-packers of his old neighborhood would sometimes display meat on the streets. He took the work beyond that real-life situation, however, through the addition of critical details: in Meat no. 2 (1992), for example, a piece of grayish-white cloth covering the meat arouses associations with the shroud covering the body of Jesus, transforming an actual scene into religious iconography and endowing the image with many layers of meaning. Lacerated meat and bleeding bodies are symbols of sacrifice and salvation in the Bible. In Genesis, God favors Abel’s bloody sacrifice of a lamb over Cain’s offering of the fruit of the field; in Leviticus, priests inspect the sacrificial lambs of Yom Kippur to ensure their physical and by implication moral perfection before their sacrifice. The theme is developed in the New Testament, where Jesus’s sacrifice on the cross substitutes humankind for the lamb and offers salvation with a stark message: 129

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hope comes at a cost. Zeng’s draped cloth—Andrea Mantegna’s Lamentation of Christ is an example he may have drawn on—captures the passion of Calvary and transforms a humble meat-packing district into the locus of universal legend. Blood-soaked meat and suffering human bodies are thus connected, reminding viewers of the patients and the dead in the Hospital Series. Several elements blend here to form a chain of imagery. For Christian saints, the decay of the body entails the noble elevation of the soul. For ordinary people, though, human bodies are unprocessed meat trapped in meaningless suffering; we are obliged to ask ourselves where solace and salvation lie. Human desperation, both compassion for and pessimism about the human condition, and a questioning of the meaning of life have always been Zeng’s concerns. Here they are explicitly conveyed through his system of imagery. The three series of Zeng’s early period, Hospital, Meat, and Human and Meat, reveal him as an observer who presents the brutal conditions of human existence with cold eyes. The sufferings he depicted at this stage were more universal than personal, in sharp contrast to the introspection and autobiographical quality of the better-known Mask Series,

so deeply rooted in the private emotions of the artist’s loneliness and restlessness when he moved to Beijing in 1993. It was a lonely turning point and a new artistic chapter was about to emerge. Please contact info@fanzhifoundation.com for more information and to order the catalogue raisonné. Contributors include, among others, Fumio Nanjo, Philippe Dagen, and Chang Tsong-zung. Edited by Gladys Chung. Zeng Fanzhi | Van Gogh will be on view at the Van Gogh Museum, The Netherlands, from October 19, 2017 to February 25, 2018

1. Zeng Fanzhi,, quoted in Li Xianting, “A Restless Soul—A Dialogue between Li Xianting and Zeng Fanzhi,” in I/We: The Painting of Zeng Fanzhi 1991–2003, exh. cat. (Wuhan: Hubei Fine Arts Publishing House, 2003), p. 167. 2. Zeng, in conversation with the author, London, October 6, 2016. 3. Zeng, quoted in Helen Ho, “A Close Look into Zeng Fanzhi,” Art and Investment no. 9 (2010):49–50. 4. Pi Daojian, “The Indifference of the Participators and the Anxiety of the Audience,” in Behind Masks: Zeng Fanzhi, exh. cat. (Hong Kong: Hanart TZ Gallery, 1995), pp. 19–22.

PYRAMID DESIGNED BY SHRIO KURAMATA

WITNESS A text by Edmund de Waal touches on the inspiration he finds in the work of Giorgio Morandi.

A white bottle is all that remains. —Giorgio Morandi, letter to Lamberto Vitali, 1962 beginnings If you make things and put them down on a table or a shelf in your studio, or if you take a cup from the cupboard and make yourself coffee and then wash it up and stack it on the draining board by the sink, you are on the edges of still life. Still life happens. Notice the strange interstices between the things that crowd our life, our vision. There are felicities in the way these cups meet or the spaces between these wet porcelain vessels that congregate on the board next to my potter’s wheel. These are serendipities, moments of cadence. And these moments illuminate something at the heart of still life. This world of things is full of small epiphanies. That is a start. It is only a start. To catch the fugitive apprehension and make it slow into the fullness of Chardin’s glass of water (three cloves of garlic and a brown jug), Cézanne’s apples, Morandi, will take a lifetime, but as Rilke wrote, “You must change your life.” And he should know. He wrote poems, Ding gedichte, that were still lives too. senza fretta One day in 1960, Morandi paints the large black jug with the high looped handle and the high beaked spout with six canisters in front of it. These are white and black and orange and beige. They stockade the jug. The jug holds the center of the picture. The ground is ochre. The background is gray, a flat gray. It takes time. Another day in 1961, the jug faces to the right. It is bigger. There are four canisters: the orange and black in the center, the flanking ones now cream. The background is scumbled. It is a quicker painting. His signature takes the stage too. The light is different. The foreground is closer in one than in the other. The objects are the same but transformed. It makes me think of Wallace Stevens’s “Anecdote of the Jar,” the way that putting something down in the world changes the energy field of everything around it:

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I placed a jar in Tennessee, And round it was, upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill. The wilderness rose up to it,  And sprawled around, no longer wild. The jar was round upon the ground And tall and of a port in air. It took dominion everywhere. The jar was gray and bare.  It did not give of bird or bush, Like nothing else in Tennessee. When an object takes dominion, it takes over a space in the world, a space in our visual field, and a space in our thinking. This is the paradox about these small paintings of pots and tins, painted in a studio no larger than a box room. The space they create is as big as Tennessee. Once again I’m asked again and again about why I make vessels again and again. Why sit low down at my potter’s wheel—my seat is an old wooden bench that I’ve sat on for thirty years—turn to my left and pick up a small ball of porcelain clay, throw it into the center of a revolving wheel, wet my hands, bring them together over the clay, and start another vessel? Don’t you get bored? I’m asked. They are so simple, just cylinders, a few centimeters high, barely inflected forms, a slight change of energy at the rim. You use the same clay, the same wheel, the same few tools. And my answer is that to spend time is to explore time. That this process is not a means to an end. Make the pots in order to have them finished so that they can be red and glazed and sanded down so that I can arrange them in compositions. Taking this time to make is a way of finding a space to think about music and space and language. It is a kind of renewal, a starting over. Morandi’s response to a question was that “I must always start from the beginning, and ought to burn what I’ve done in the past.” Starting from the beginning meant “marks traced out along the outlines of the objects upon the ground sheet, in order to verify the mapping and to preserve

the structures of the still life in their placement; the circumspect shifting of the objects upon the flat surface, by means of the handles of the longest brushes; the use of the compass and the straightedge as instruments of geometrical and proportional verification; the presence of a mobile frame, ‘a white Leonardo-esque vehicle,’ constructed so as to grade and guide the light from the large window; the lines marked in chalk on the floor, after a pause in working, the precise position and chosen point of view.” Here is rigor, a paring back of the extraneous elements in order to create a set of possibilities that expands the world. Via Fondazza I think of two men I admire who lived at home in their familial apartments with mothers or sisters for their whole lives. One is Primo Levi, who lived in Corso Re Umberto in Turin. The other is Morandi, who lived in Via Fondazza in Bologna. Levi goes to work every day as a chemist in a paint factory, where he studies how to calibrate fine distinctions in the way light works in paint. It is a career forty years long. To get exactly the correct equipment to create his experiments he learns to blow glass and polish it. He makes his own crucibles. He writes in The Monkey’s Wrench of “the advantage of being able to test yourself, not depending on others in the test, reflecting yourself in your work. On the pleasure of seeing your creature grow, beam after beam, bolt after bolt, necessary, symmetrical, suited to its purpose.” Morandi goes to work every day through his sister’s bedroom to the studio with its one window and one bare bulb to calibrate fine distinctions. He pours different colored pigments into transparent glass bottles, whitewashes tins of Ovaltine, colors vases to change their visual density. To get exactly the correct surfaces on which to place his objects he creates three tables of varying heights, two built by himself, one at eye level, one above eye level, and one below. In Primo Levi’s story “The Mnemogogues” an aging Doctor talks to a young Doctor he calls Dr. Morandi about “the definitive prevalence of the past over the present, and the final shipwreck of every

Previous spread: Edmund de Waal, Giorgio Morandi, installation view, April 7–October 1, 2017, Artipelag, Gustavsberg, Sweden. Photo by JeanBaptiste Béranger Previous: Giorgio Morandi, Still Life, 1956, oil on canvas, 9 7⁄8 × 15 3 ⁄4 inches (25 × 40 cm). Photo courtesy Artipelag Opposite: Edmund de Waal, epyllion, 2013, 55 porcelain vessels in 3 aluminium and plexiglass vitrines, 74 × 248 × 4 3⁄4 inches (188 × 630 × 12 cm). Photo by Jean-Baptiste Béranger Right: Giorgio Morandi, Natura Morta, 1962, oil on canvas, 11 7⁄8 × 13 3 ⁄4 inches (30 × 35 cm). Photo courtesy Artipelag

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Perhaps my obsession with Morandi is actually with dust; the idea of dust, how time settles and stirs, how we trace time. John Rewald finds the right word for this. It is “witness.” Edmund de Waal passion, except for his faith in the dignity of thought and the supremacy of the things of the spirit.” “Before I die I should like to bring two paintings to completion,” said the real Morandi. “What matters is to touch the core, the essence of things.” And more cogently still, “Nothing is more abstract than reality.”

Dust I recently finished a book about the color white. It was a kind of autobiography, mapping my obsession with white through my journeys with porcelain. It was a journey to China, Meissen in Germany, Cornwall in England, the Appalachian Mountains and Dachau; a journey into the history of the material. It became a history of dust. How this beautiful clay had affected those who searched for it and used it—the eddying white dust in mines and workshops and factories across a thousand years. I wrote about my own apprenticeship and how I swept up the dust day after day for years, breathing in the dangerous clouds of silica. And when I’d finished this book I realized that I’d ended my previous book on my family writing about the dust of Odessa, the dust of archives in Paris and Vienna. And I read John Rewald on the dust of Morandi: They must have been there for a long time; on the surfaces of the shelves or tables, as well as on the flat tops of boxes, cans, or similar receptacles, there was a thick layer of dust. It was a dense, grey, velvety dust, like a soft coat of felt, its color and texture seemingly providing the unifying element for these tall bottles and deep bowls, old pitchers and coffee pots, quaint vases and Um sum qui num es deliqui autem dis corit, to odis sint prem netus etus vidus. Porepudam eaquam, verunt andi con cullign isquas asit aut litatur sedias ad maxime simin rercius andicip sapissitam illatque nonsequis idundus, comnimo lorerci isquiduntios essuntotat rectur mo et ipsum quunt fugit autem aut labore, occus doloriti voluptamet quo omnihilit a doluptus.

tin boxes. It was a dust that was not the result of negligence and untidiness but of patience, a witness to complete peace. In the stillness of this humble retreat from all the excitement of an agitated world, these everyday objects led their own, still life. . . . The dust that covered them was like a mantle of nobility, endowing them with a special purpose and meaning, and attesting to the faithful company they had been keeping with Morandi for many, many years. Perhaps my obsession with Morandi is actually with dust; the idea of dust, how time settles and stirs, how we trace time. Rewald finds the right word for this. It is “witness.” The end of the shelf This exhibition at Artipelag allows me to put my work near that of Morandi. I struggle to find the right word. Conversation and dialogue and homage and installation and intervention are such harsh Art World terms. I feel great anxiety and tenderness about bringing my own work into such proximity with Morandi. He hated a fuss and I don’t want him to feel fussed over. I want my work to be on nodding terms with him. I don’t need anything more. So what I’ve done is to think of his compositional rigor, the ways that he makes us move closer or further away, the way he alters our sense of gravity, of being grounded, or hovering or floating. The way he thinks about the ends of shelves, the end of the line, edges. The ways he returns and repeats. And then I’ve used this syntax to bring some work of mine into these clean, light-infused spaces for the summer months. There are pieces above you, some suspended, some on high shelves. There are works to move amongst, a vitrine placed far away, cabinets in series on walls. They are elegies, cloudscapes, fragments of song or time-keeping, walks through cities, memories of people, distractions, recalibrations, marginalia, readings, soundings. They are my way of keeping time. They are a kind of witness. They are vessels made from porcelain, stilled. They are still life. Witness by Edmund de Waal was originally published by Artipelag in the 2017 catalogue Edmund de Waal/Giorgio Morandi.

Left: Edmund de Waal. Photo by Ben McKee Opposite: Edmund de Waal, Giorgio Morandi, installation view, April 7–October 1, 2017 Artipelag, Gustavsberg, Sweden. Photo by JeanBaptiste Béranger Artwork © Edmund de Waal Artwork © 2017 Giorgio Morandi/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ SIAE, Rome “Anecdote of the Jar” from THE COLLECTED POEMS OF WALLACE STEVENS by Wallace Stevens, copyright © 1954 by Wallace Stevens and copyright renewed 1982 by Holly Stevens. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

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WILLIAM FORSYTHE In advance of his fall exhibition in Paris atÂ Gagosian Le Bourget, the choreographer discusses his mindful objects with Louise Neri, a longtime friend and collaborator.

Previous spread: William Forsythe, Black Flags, 2014, readymade industrial robots, silk flags, carbon fiber flagpoles, and steel plates, dimensions variable. Photo by David Brandt

Following spread: William Forsythe, Nowhere and Everywhere at the Same Time, No. 3, 2015, plumb bobs, string, compressed air cylinders, Dimensions variable. Photo by Dominik Mentzos

Left: William Forsythe, Towards the Diagnostic Gaze I, 2013 (detail), readymade feather duster and engraved stone shelf from stone locally sourced for exhibition, 2 × 31 1⁄2 × 17 3⁄4 inches (5 × 80 × 45 cm). Photo by Dominik Mentzos

Opposite: William Forsythe, Alignigung, 2016, still from digital video. Video by Simon Wallon for Opéra National de Paris

t a time when the art world is embracing choreography in all its forms, this fall Gagosian will present William Forsythe’s compelling Choreographic Objects at Le Bourget. Forsythe is a radical innovator in choreography and dance, revered the world over. In a career spanning more than four decades, he has produced an extensive repertoire of groundbreaking ballet choreographies and experimental, non-proscenium-based dance-theater works, as well as an open-access digital platform for dance analysis, notation, and improvisation. In the process, he has redefined the very syntax and praxis of his field, and exerted unparalleled influence on subsequent generations of artists. In tandem with the evolution of his choreographic performances, Forsythe has been working for more than twenty years on installations, film works, and discrete, interactive sculptures that he calls “choreographic objects.” Consistent with his expanded conceptual aim of activating ordinary observers to choreograph themselves, the Choreographic Objects prompt the conscious engagement of humans in a given environment. Here, Forsythe discusses them with Gagosian director Louise Neri, a longtime friend and collaborator. What was the impetus for the Choreographic Objects? WILLIAM FORSYTHE It all began in 1990 with an invitation from the architect Daniel Libeskind to participate in his permanent municipal installation project The Books of Groningen [1991] in the Netherlands. His proposal was based on his belief that his métier might not be entirely dependent on practice-related expertise to achieve its goals, that it could be a robust platform for transdisciplinary artistic discourse. My participation enabled me to see how the mechanics of choreographic strategy could be demonstrated effectively in adjacent domains and other media besides the body. LN Can you describe your aims with the Choreographic Objects? WF In the twenty-six years since The Books of Groningen, this unique discursive re-location has supLOUISE NERI

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ported a wide range of choreographic models, from the immense White Bouncy Castle [2007] to a suspended timber shed that responds to the forces that one’s body exerts on it [Underall, 2017] to a feather duster that resists all attempts by the hand to still it [Towards the Diagnostic Gaze, 2013]. No matter how diverse the scale and nature of these projects have been, they all strive to give viewers an unadorned sense of their own physical self-image and to return the analysis of kinetic phenomena that was previously the exclusive purview of professionals to a platform that speaks clearly to the nonspecialist. So the Choreographic Objects are, essentially, modeled abstractions. LN Can you explain how you “model” them? WF The actual modeling frequently uses patterning structures like counterpoint to achieve its goals. The faculty that allows us to unconsciously negotiate with life’s aleatoric distribution of patterns is key to one’s well-being; works that are contrapuntally structured are, in a sense, exercises for that faculty which accounts for a significant part of one’s survival. LN What are you exhibiting in Paris? WF At Gagosian Le Bourget I will present Black Flags [2014], an imposing visual spectacle; Towards the Diagnostic Gaze; and the video sculpture Alignigung [2016], a composition with two dancers. Then, later in the fall, La Villette/Grande Halle will present a version of Nowhere and Everywhere at the Same Time [2013], a vast field of pendulums that viewers may enter. LN In preparation for our discussion, I read a reflection by Karl Popper on Julien Offray de La Mettrie’s L’Homme machine [1748] where Popper concludes that there might be no clear distinction between living matter and dead matter and that man may indeed be a computer.1 Given your engagement with robotic technology, is either philosopher of interest to your own work? WF In contemporary terms, La Mettrie’s eighteenth-century treatise translates to a computational theory of mind. As humans we constantly deploy a faculty that, in all levels of interaction, conscious and unconscious, participates in a predictive, statistically calculated engagement with the environment. You use this faculty to determine how much salt goes in the soup; when pouring milk, you figure out the speed at which milk’s flowing

out and you adjust the tilt of your hand and arm unconsciously to stem or increase the flow; putting your socks on while standing on one leg, trying to park your car—these “calculations” based on accumulated experience are going on all the time. LN In some areas of industrial design, humans are considered to be more perfect machines because we possess greater tactile capacities for nuance and anomaly. For example, the extreme curves of surfboards can’t be preprogrammed in assembly-line manufacture, they must be made by hand. Within the general framework of the Choreographic Objects, Black Flags is really the first of them in which you promote a literal idea of surrogacy, a process of transferral by which mechanical creatures are activated so as to appear to be alive, interacting in complex relation. It’s also the most powerful analogy you have made in this body of work to choreographic interaction. This work poses many ontological and philosophical questions. WF The word “surrogacy” is very apt. To some extent, most of the Choreographic Objects serve as surrogates for real-life interactions with the human environment—stepping off the curb, running to catch a bus, avoiding a swinging door, and so on. All of the objects simply isolate coordinational transactions that abound in one’s normal everyday environment—not tipping a chair, avoiding stubbing one’s toe, and so on. What I frequently attempt to do is isolate phenomena that are so fully integrated into our unconscious physical selves they’re invisible to us. LN Can you give concrete examples? WF Towards the Diagnostic Gaze renders the body’s pulses and tremors visible through the fibers of an ordinary feather duster. In the case of Black Flags, the phenomenon of contrapuntal patterning is, for me, a natural thing. It occurs visually and acoustically all the time. If one subscribes to John Cage’s idea that music is a ubiquitous phenomenon and does not emanate exclusively from controlled sources, then we can imagine it as a pointillist, contrapuntal web or veil of phenomena that is constantly exerting itself on our senses. LN How did you come to imagine using industrial robots for your work? WF I am fascinated by demonstrations where flags are used to express social or political unification

or solidarity—in civic ceremonies, sports, political rallies. For Black Flags I used the same scale of flag that crops up in football games. In that context the flags are powered by humans, which is very difficult to do. It’s obvious that whoever wields them is dedicating his entire body to the task in a very specific way. It’s a challenge that almost can’t be met. I was fascinated by this and sought to employ the idea differently. The initial impulse of Black Flags was calligraphic, inspired in part by my earlier dance work for Ballett Frankfurt As a Garden in This Setting [1992], in which David Kern maneuvered a length of light-blue satin ribbon attached to a fly-fishing pole to perform a 3D calligraphic choreography onstage. I thought that I could simply use a motion-capture of his demo and map it onto a program for the robots. But I discovered that it didn’t translate, it was way too complex. I had to take into account the fact that the flags have to slow down at some point; they could not be sustained in a state of constant propulsion. LN Kern was a lone performer; why did you use

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two robots for Black Flags? The subject of the work is contrapuntal inscription and the robots together produce a very specific kind of relationship that embodies what’s fundamental and compelling about the properties of counterpoint. LN Do you describe Black Flags as a duet? WF I would say more of a two-handed piano composition. LN Do you find that machines can map contrapuntal relationships more perfectly than humans? WF Per fec t ion isn’t my foremost c onc er n here. Going back to the football fans, given the scale of the exercise, the sheer demands of force that the imagination of the choreography requires, with that material on that scale and in that space, is humanly impossible. So with the robots I am providing an augmented human practice. LN Did you at any time consider the early protomodernist performing artist Loie Fuller, who used the air around her and armatures concealed in her voluminous silken robes to extend her physical presence, appearing onstage as an almost abstract, WF

nonhuman entity? She’s said to have inspired flag-dancing in modern club culture. WF Fuller was prescient in offering a proto-digital kind of abstract visual phenomenon using prosthetic armatures. Conversely, the robots are purely digitally driven entities that bring the body back to mind. LN The kuka robots that you employ have become fairly commonplace in industry. Why did you select these particular models? WF They’re possessed of an extraordinary elegance and fit our requirements. The base weighs eight tonnes to counter the kinetic forces. Extending their reach from five meters to thirteen meters with the introduction of flagpoles is a significant accumulation of complex shear forces. These robots possess seven rotating joints, meaning seven degrees of freedom, which offers a planar complexity that for my practical purposes is inexhaustible. LN Is their planar complexity greater than that of the human arm? WF Much greater! Our hands are extraordinary in the way they turn, but imagine if your wrist

could move 360 degrees, as well as your elbow, your shoulder, and your waist; and at the same time you could turn around yourself: the counter-torquing, spiraling products of the robotic faculty are really quite mesmerizing. LN Given that your dance aesthetic is characterized by extremity with regard to the physical capacities of the dancing body—torque, extension, elongation, and so on—it seems somewhat paradoxical that the apotheosis of your theories is a machine! WF [Laughs] Especially given that much of the theory that produced these kinds of movements maintains that if we approached ballet as a program, what would the results be? The dancers collaborated as researchers with regard to the proposals I gave them, and the results were their individual solutions to these particular proposals. So I suppose you could characterize our research exchanges as the “if/then” algorithmic type, which is a common characteristic of programming environments. LN Working with robots would seem to be a natural evolution of your earlier engagement with neuroscientific research, for example the Max Planck

Institutes’ neurological mapping of the dancers in your choreography, One Flat Thing, reproduced [2000]. Your work has always suggested a highly technical science, but with improbable outcomes. WF What I’m doing in both instances is choreographing your attention. One Flat Thing, reproduced initially shows you how to read its geometries; the flags show you how to read their contrapuntal relation. The timing of the actions is so constructed as to engage your predictive faculties; for example, if you’re observing a choreographic situation, you might realize that there’s a certain amount of controlled information coming out of it, whether dense or sparse, recognizably patterned or stochastic. What I strive to provide are contrasting structural alternations that play with your anticipation of these informational densities. Juxtaposing these different states is what I consider to be the fundamentals of counterpoint, beginning with irregular irregularity. LN Huh? WF Irregular as opposed to regular irregularity which implies an irregularly structured event ad infinitum. For example, if I were to provide an event that’s offering the viewer consistently sustained complex information, at a certain point his or her attention will diminish in order to save cognitive energy, like a screen saver. But then, at some further point, I will intentionally make a structural exception, an interruption of this potentially endless process. The viewer parses this exception as either “anomaly” or “trend.” As the composition’s trends and anomalous tendencies accumulate, the proportion and type of these changes establish an ur-narrative: a product of the curiosity that our interest in predicting pattern produces. LN Can you give a specific example? WF For example, the robots project a sense of threat so one instinctively engages in the outcomes of that affect. It’s like confronting Richard Serra’s Band [2006], or Michael Heizer’s Levitated Mass [2012] at LACMA, where one is prompted to consider the immediate consequences of natural phenomena, including seismic activity. LN Except that with Black Flags it’s rather a confrontation with force and velocity, not mass and weight. WF With Black Flags the precarity emanates from within the perceived possibilities of the machine, but there’s no mind to the machine and it remains completely at our disposal. That’s not to say that to attempt to interact with the robots isn’t actually dangerous. Once programmed by us, the robots will thoughtlessly execute their full program whether or not a human is in their path. LN When I look at the immense beauty and lethal grace of Black Flags, I reflect on the fact that these very same robots replace humans every day on assembly lines all over the world—Popper’s “living matter and dead matter.” Can you discuss the implications? WF I can’t produce a teleology for this particular shift in our civilization, but as humans we have long been fascinated with animation in all its forms, from the earliest automatons of ancient Greece and China to the most recent developments in animatronic illusion, as in Walt Disney’s Pandoraworld-of-Avatar, which represents the acme of dissimulation. My choreography of the robots is not at the service of direct theatrical affect. Rather, I am trying to engage with abstract values, modeling complex surfaces into volumes. The single element that these particular objects share with humans, and that is essential to their respective

functioning, is air. To return to Loie Fuller, what contributed to the abstract sophistication of her art was her proprioceptive ability to anticipate the aerodynamic effects of her accelerations on her material. On the other hand, with the robots, the physical consequences of all the interactions of material and air had to be individually and meticulously programmed. While conceding that the robots emulate certain human attributes, I also tried to deanthropomorphize their interactions so that they would be perceived more as pure compositional entities. I’m striving to make a formal statement in the way that music hangs in the air. LN So could you also call this a formal exercise in recontextualization? WF Indeed. When Duchamp removed the readymade from its daily use, he assigned it another purpose, that of being for aesthetic contemplation. I have removed the robots from their frame of capital and transformed them into compositional instruments, like a piano. A piano is not useful for anything other than making music, but industrial robots can also be employed to “make” choreography. In the gallery they become sublime objects, but when I stop using them, they go back to the factory, lapsing back into industrial obscurity. LN A recent New York Times image of a kuka robot in a cage in a Chinese solar-panel factory really stuck in my mind, but to infer that they’re trapped there would be a little too emotive. You have created a sense, or an illusion, of setting them loose. WF I have assigned them a poetic task. LN Is that challenging in terms of programming? WF Yes, given the safety parameters that are built into the robots to protect humans. When we were programming, the robots often overrode our will if we wanted to move too rashly or with more force, because they’re also programmed to protect us from their force when they approach the observational perimeter. LN Precariousness—disequilibrium, asymmetry, counterpoint—is always a key element in your distinctive choreographic language. It also pervades the Choreographic Objects, as expressed in the precariousness of the image itself, as in Additive Inverse [2007], or in the danger of proximity that Black Flags imparts to the environment it shares with us. WF Many of the Choreographic Objects have to do with acknowledging mortality. Our bodies are precisely not machines; they’re fragile, subject to ebbs and flows. The world does not come at us in evenly measured portions but in a contrapuntal cloud. Our predictive faculty exists for our own self-preservation, and through evolution we became capable of recognizing precariousness and deriving as much information from it as possible so that our relationship with the world developed heuristically. In a certain sense, the Choreographic Objects provide us with cues for our future levels of self-knowledge— what we need to recognize. For example, if you’re trembling way too much with the feather duster of Towards the Diagnostic Gaze, you need to consider whether you specifically might need clinical help or whether your behavior is generally reflective of the human condition. The Choreographic Objects are diagnostic equations that ask: How am I in the world as a body? It’s evident that we’re not robots.

1. Karl Popper, “Of Clouds and Clocks,” in Popper, Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach, 1972 (rev. ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 224.

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Longtime friends, Y.Z. Kami and Peter Marino, sit with Alison McDonald to discuss the power of bronze, the state of architecture, and the infinite.

FIRE AND WATER

I’m curious to start at the beginning. How did you and Peter first meet each other? Y.Z. KAMI We met in the early 1990s through a very close mutual friend, Charles, with whom I used to share a studio. One evening Peter and his wife, Jane, came over and we all went out to dinner to an Italian restaurant in TriBeCa. PETER MARINO Was Isabelle born yet? She was born in 1991—that’s how I judge time, pre-Isabelle and after. That’s the only marker I’ve got other than when I graduated high school [laughter]. YZK It was around the time Isabelle was born. AMCD Peter, what struck you early on about Kami’s work? PM I have two photographic works of towers from the early 1990s. I love those towers. YZK They were photographic images of two minarets in Iran that I mounted on canvas. PM Yes, they’re beautiful. I really have known you a long time. AMCD In general, do you have a preference toward Kami’s portraiture or his abstract paintings? PM Oh, I like them both, but for different reasons. The portraiture I like because of the psychological intensity behind it. He did my portrait, in fact it’s Jane’s favorite portrait of me. She has said it’s the most serious portrait ever done of me. AMCD Kami often depicts sitters with their eyes closed. Was that the case with you? YZK No! He’s looking out at the viewer [laughter]. PM That painting took a very, very long time for Kami to paint, but it’s remarkable. It took a long time to build the Pantheon in Rome, too, I suppose, but both were worth the wait [laughter]. YZK Yes, it took several years. I’m not sure why, some paintings just take longer than others. Peter’s portrait was a long process. Imagine living with his image on and off for several years—it actually made me feel closer to him. PM Kami’s portraits can be really intense. His portraits of Tara, his niece—those are incredible. YZK When I finally finished the portrait, Peter came to see it at my studio. His reaction was very touching, I’ll never forget it: he stared at the painting for a long time and then he said, “I am my mother’s son.” PM Almost everybody thinks of me with black hair and the dark look of my dad. My mom was blonde, Austro-Hungarian from Slavic background, and very, very fair skinned and light. That’s the way Kami painted me, it was very interesting. So that’s absolutely true. AMCD Kami, when you’re painting a portrait, like the one you made of Peter, you seem to be seeking the essence of a person, trying to capture the spirit of that individual. YZK In painting a face, what I really try to achieve is the sensation that I have of a face, the experience of that face. That goes through many layers of paint, and at the end it always feels sort of elusive, almost like I can’t get to it. When you think about anyone’s face, it’s always somehow hazy. It’s never very focused. To get to that initial sensation I have to go through a long process of gradually breaking down and then building back up again. AMCD In terms of your process, Peter, when you start working with new clients in your architectural practice, you often ask them if they have a favorite object as a way to inform the work you do for them. And so I’m going to ask you if you have a favorite object. PM Well, yes, I do, it’s a necklace of a butcher’s meat cleaver. My grandfather was a butcher. He was very hard working and he had shops up and ALISON MCDONALD

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down Second Avenue. A lot of my lessons in life came from him. I was not good at chopping lamb chops [laughter]. I guess I was five when he put a meat cleaver in my hand and told me to chop. All I remember is running out of the shop. YZK Really? I never knew that. PM He tried to show me how to use the knife, but I said “I don’t think I want to”—it was an early childhood trauma [laughter]. It’s still a favorite memory of mine anyway. AMCD Kami, do you have a favorite museum? YZK My favorite museum has always been the same since I visited it as a teenager: the Prado in Madrid. PM I’m going to second that because of the Titians that fill up those Spanish collections. The Titians in the Prado—I still haven’t recovered, and I visit them like once a year. I mean, are you kidding? They’re better than the Titians in Venice [laughter]. YZK The Prado Titians are amazing. But the reason I said the Prado is Velázquez. AMCD Peter, in your collecting life, what was the one painting that got away? PM Just last Monday night there was a beautiful Gauguin up for auction and I thought it was happening on Tuesday night [laughter]. I called in but I was too late. I travel a lot so I get a little mixed up from time zones. It was the prettiest Gauguin. There’s one a week that gets away [laughter]. AMCD You do have a wildly impressive and hugely diverse collection. I know you have a great collection of bronze sculptures and now you’re making bronze boxes. This is not the first time you’ve made these bronzes, correct? PM No, this is group number three. The first collection was shown in Switzerland, in Gstaad, and I’m proud to tell you that it completely sold out. So then I made a second collection for the Paris Biennale. And then I started talking to Larry Gagosian—I was the architect for his wonderful new house in Manhattan and he bought a beautiful pair of black bronze-box cupboards for his living room. They got an amazing placement, alongside artworks by Roy Lichtenstein, Piet Mondrian, and Richard Prince. The room has an amazing energy. YZK Yes, I’ve seen them. They’re beautiful. PM Thank you. Larry and I have been friends since the mid-1970s, when he first came to New York from Los Angeles. He moved into a loft that I did at 419 West Broadway. So that’s going back a few years. I guess we were both ten, maybe eleven [laughter]. AMCD You got an early start. PM Anyway, Larry said that the reaction to my bronze boxes was strong so he wanted to make a show of them at the gallery. What was most interesting for me was that he wanted a complete collection made exclusively for Gagosian Gallery. YZK Great, and an edition of how many? PM Each piece is an edition of eight, which is the legal limit of what you can define as fine art. Did you know that France wrote a law in 1968 that said you’re allowed to make eight of a sculpture? I’m allowed four artist’s proofs, but anything more than that is considered a reproduction and is not a work of art. It was important to me that my boxes be considered fine art. YZK I agree, I think they are. PM I really like the fact that the edition is limited, but then people go, “But I really just want that one. Can’t you just make another?” And I go, “No.” People have the funniest reactions. What, am I supposed to make a ninth number eight? Anyway, the collection took about two and a half years to

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Opening spread (left): Peter Marino. Photo by Manolo Yllera Opening spread (right): Y.Z. Kami in his studio. Photo by Cesar Chavez Lechowick Previous spread (left): Y.Z. Kami, Tower, 1996, photograph mounted on canvas, 120 × 28 inches (304.8 × 71.1 cm). © Y.Z. Kami Previous spread (right): Y.Z. Kami’s studio with Untitled (2010), c. 2014. © Y.Z. Kami, Photo by Louis Heilbronn

Opposite: Peter Marino, Tall Dragon Scale Box, 2017 (detail), blackened bronze, 57 3⁄4 × 37 1⁄2 × 18 3⁄16 inches (146.7 × 95.3 × 46.2 cm), edition of 8 + 4 APs. © Peter Marino Architect. Photo by Manolo Yllera Right: Peter Marino, Tall Dragon Scale Box, 2017, blackened bronze, 57 3⁄4 × 37 1⁄2 × 18 3⁄16 inches (146.7 × 95.3 × 46.2 cm), edition of 8 + 4 APs. © Peter Marino Architect. Photo by Manolo Yllera Below: Peter Marino making the bronze boxes. © Peter Marino Architect

develop. It’s a very long process. We make a lot of samples. It takes a lot of time and patience to get the right color and the right texture and the right everything. What really sparked my interest and motivated me to start creating my own things in bronze was the discovery of a shipwreck in the Straits of Sicily, in 1998. They found the most beautiful bronze of a male dancer and it was completely intact. Five years later it was the centerpiece of a show at the Royal Academy in London called The Age of Bronze [2012]. It made me realize that this bronze from 450 b.c. had been preserved intact, while buildings that I created only twenty or thirty years ago have already been destroyed. In school you’re naive enough to think architecture is a lasting art, but it’s not. A lot of the commercial work I’ve done has a life of exactly seven years. People have bulldozed houses that I built because the land became too valuable. You know, when I did Barneys New York it was my intention that it would last a hundred years. It had marble mosaic floors, marble mosaics on the walls, and it was full of art. The outside of the building is still intact but the interior was changed completely. It’s devastating to have your work torn out in front of you, it’s really painful. I’m a big supporter of landmarks for this reason, because as an architect it just takes your insides out when good buildings are destroyed. YZK That must have been such an awful experience. Nothing like that has ever happened to me. I can’t imagine how it would feel to have one of my paintings destroyed in front of me. Although there have been times when I’ve destroyed my own paintings when I was totally unhappy with them. PM It’s rough. So I realized I loved the permanence of bronze. I went to foundries and saw them melting the ingots, making the mold, pouring the bronze, waiting four days for it to cool, and scraping the mold, the same way they would have made armor in 500 b.c. There aren’t a lot of things in life like that. AMCD Tell me about this process. You start by working in clay, correct? PM Yes, there’s one work where the surface texture is all made with the imprint of my thumb into the clay. That totally suited my somewhat obsessive-compulsive personality [laughter]—I was like, “I’m going to keep going at this.” After a couple of days they stopped me. The pattern starts small at the top and then gets bigger, bigger, bigger toward the bottom. My intention was to imitate running 149

Left: Boontheshop, Seoul, Completed 2014. © Peter Marino Architect Below: Peter Marino’s Aspen home with painting by Y.Z. Kami. Photography by Roger Davies Opposite: Y.Z. Kami, Endless Prayer VIII, 2015, mixed media on paper, 30 × 22 1⁄2 inches (76.2 × 57.2 cm). © Y.Z. Kami. Photo by Rob McKeever

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water. It’s silvered bronze and it never looks the same twice, it has a million different aspects and when the light hits it, it looks like water’s running. That effect got me thinking about the four elements. So I based the fire one on my dragon tattoo— a dragon scale. YZK I love the exhibition title, Fire and Water. AMCD There’s something about the patterning that reminds me of Kami’s Endless Prayers and Domes series. The Prayers incorporate ideas of rituals and the Domes bring in light and space. Kami, is there anything interesting for you in that connection? YZK There’s a repetition of pattern in both Endless Prayers and Domes. In Domes there’s the geometric shape of bricks that repeat themselves in a circular motion; the size of the bricks stays the same. In this way there’s no geometric perspective, and that refers to the concept of infinity. This is the same with Endless Prayers and the idea of repetition and infinity. AMCD Peter, how do you feel about the bronze boxes being shown with the work of other artists? PM I think it’s great, it’s meant to be. In my office there’s a box that has part of my African collection on top of it. I mean, in case you haven’t noticed, I really like combining art [laughter]. AMCD Yes, I did notice! You combine art much more openly than an art historian might, grouping objects only within the context of their own era. PM Boring, so boring. Art reflects thousands of years of human development. Anyone who collects too narrowly is putting blinders on. Are you telling me the one thing you collect is the only thing in life you find beautiful? I find so many things beautiful and I like to explore the continuum of human experience. In my apartment, I combine antiquities with— YZK You combine Renaissance bronzes with contemporary painting, modern art, Chinese art, African art. It’s amazing the way you put things together. AMCD So how do you decide what to exhibit with your bronze boxes? PM I need the complete mixture. And I’m very proud that people who have bought the boxes have mixed them with all sorts of art. One of my French clients has put them in a house that’s full of eighteenth-century French lacquer work. He has a pair of gold boxes and they really look great integrated into an eighteenth-century decor. And there’s an English collector whose house has an eighteenth-century English style, with beautiful pastel colors—he has a silver box and it looks so wonderful there. AMCD It sounds like that surprised you a bit, though. PM Well, when you make something, you can’t really realize how it will look in different contexts. AMCD Kami, do you ever have that feeling about your work? YZK While I’m painting, I can’t think of any particular context or environment where it will be exhibited or installed. But different contexts do influence the perception of the work. AMCD Do you have a favorite building of Peter’s? YZK I particularly connect to Peter’s house in Colorado. It’s something special—for me, one of the most beautiful pieces of modern architecture, as a house. I read somewhere that Peter had said he was inspired by seeing a bird in flight. PM Yes, off a cliff. YZK And the architecture gives you that feeling of flight, almost as if the bird were on the edge of the mountain and flying out toward the valley. The way it comes to you—I don’t know how to describe it, it’s almost an ecstatic experience.

I had to restrain Kami. He kept hanging on the edge [laughter]. AMCD And some of the photos I’ve seen of this house include Kami’s paintings. PM Yes, Kami’s paintings are in every one of my homes. He’s in Southampton, New York, and Aspen [laughter]. AMCD To me, some of Kami’s works, the white Domes in particular, are very much about light and space, which connects to your architecture. PM Yes, I love those works. I’m a light freak. I rarely create any room without windows, in fact that’s what I’m known for in my retail work. I was the first architect to do a department store—Barneys— with windows and natural light. AMCD How did you first get involved in architecture? PM I was a fine-arts student majoring in sculpture at Cornell, and I dropped the fine-arts major and became an architect. At the time, architectural training veered heavily toward engineering, but historically, up to World War II, fine-art education and drawing were much stronger requirements in becoming an architect. I’m very sad about that aspect of architectural education, because that’s why I think buildings look the way they do. In today’s world you have to have very, very rigorous engineering. And what does that mean? You need two years of advanced calculus, two years of mechanical engineering, and two years of civil engineering. But the combination of engineering with fine arts is critically important to successful architecture. You have to be much stronger than just the half of your brain that passes the engineering requirements. Frank Gehry comes from a very strong fine-arts background; Santiago Calatrava had two or three years of medical studies before going into architecture, he’s obsessed with the spine and the skeleton. The architects who don’t come from a strict engineering background are the ones who get touched with the magic wand. And it’s a little sad for society because 99 percent of what’s built is by the engineering half of someone’s brain and not the arts half. I know you need the engineering, my dad was an engineer. I used to draft on Saturdays so my dad would say I started college with a slight advantage, since I already knew how to draft and I wasn’t afraid of engineering. But all I’m going to say is that it’s not very common today to find somebody who’s okay in both advanced calculus and fine arts. AMCD You’re very fortunate to be inclined in both ways. Did you realize that right away or was it more— PM Over time. As I said, I didn’t have a problem with math and engineering, but the really wonderful artist kids whose sketches were revolutionary and crazy—I still remember some from college— they didn’t make it through. YZK Do you use a computer to draft? PM There’s no computer on my desk, I still draw everything by hand. I’m a dying breed. I worry that kids will lose the mind/hand connection, and that really is so important. YZK There’s an old saying that to get to the right brushstroke, the right touch, for a true work of art, there has to be a direct line from the mind to the heart to the hand. AMCD Kami, before we finish, I’d like to ask you what you’ve found most surprising and rewarding over the years in your friendship with Peter? YZK Oh, there are so many things that I love about Peter. The first thing is his heart. He’s kind-hearted. So kind-hearted. And then, his architecture. PM

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I guess the question to start with is, Why did you want to make a movie in the first place? ALEX ISRAEL I wanted to make an artwork for teenagers with a positive message about creativity. It needed to be something that they could access, and a movie can live and circulate online. DB Interesting. So you want this to live in a digital-only platform? Would you call this a work of video art? AI First I’m going to premiere it for teenagers in schools, I’ll go on tour to present it to them. In addition to the screenings, at each stop along the tour I’ll invite students to join me in a conversation about art and creativity. Ultimately I want it to be available to as many teens as possible, so it needs to live online and stream on demand. It’ll be available on DEREK BLASBERG

Alex Israel discusses his upcoming feature-length film with Derek Blasberg.

SPF-18 iTunes and shortly thereafter on Netflix, to whom I’ve licensed it. It’s both a movie and an artwork. DB I know you grew up in California. Was cinema a part of your childhood? AI Movies were always a big part of my life, especially between the ages of eleven and seventeen. I think the movies I watched during that six-year span were exceptionally impactful on my life and worldview. DB Quick: what are the three best movies from that period that first come to mind? Go! AI Risky Business, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and Home Alone. DB And how did growing up near the movie industry affect you? AI Growing up, I felt close to Hollywood—I could recognize filming locations, and I might see movie stars at the park or at a Laker game. Even though my parents didn’t work in the entertainment industry, there were kids at school and friends in the neighborhood whose parents did, and that gave me insight into the way the whole system functioned. I was always fascinated.

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Did you ever want to make a movie when you were young? Is this, even in a little way, fulfilling a childhood dream? AI Yes, absolutely. I constantly made movies with a camcorder as a kid. DB Let’s talk specifically about SPF-18. Great title, by the way. How did the story come about? AI I was researching early surf films and I learned that many, including The Endless Summer, were originally shown in high school gymnasiums. I wondered whether that could be a viable way to distribute something today. I liked the idea of bringing a project directly to teens, to their high schools, so that’s what we’re doing with the tour. Surf movies were an influence, as were teen movies by John Hughes and Amy Heckerling and the TV shows that I grew up with, like Saved by the Bell, Beverly Hills, 90210, and to some extent the after-school special. I didn’t know how to write a screenplay so I began thinking about someone DB

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I might work with. I tracked down Michael Berk, who created the original Baywatch—my friend Molly Logan introduced us—and he agreed to work with me. I wanted the movie to be earnest, and I liked that in addition to being an L.A. beach story there was no irony in Baywatch. I won a grant for the project from the VIA Art Fund and the first thing I did with the money was hire Berk. DB Do you think L.A. is having a cinematic renaissance? Or, with Grease, 10 Things I Hate About You, Clueless—movies just off the top of my head— has California always been its own muse? AI I think L.A. is definitely going through a growth spurt or some kind of renaissance. The city has always loved checking itself out in the mirror, sure, but at this moment the whole world seems to be checking it out too. DB What did you think of La La Land? AI I loved it. I saw it three times. DB Talk to me about your cast. AI I hired a casting director, a duo actually— Nicole Daniels and Courtney Bright. Together they’d cast The Bling Ring, which has an incredible cast of unknown teen actors, and that’s what I was hoping to find. We looked at hundreds of audition tapes and did live auditions and callbacks. For the role of Ash Baker we needed to find a young male actor who could act and sing and play guitar. When we cast the roles of Steve and Johnny we met with young actors and pro surfers and even a few actors

who could surf. The adult roles were lower commitment—we could shoot each in a day or two—so we courted iconic actors like Pamela Anderson, Molly Ringwald, Rosanna Arquette, and Keanu Reeves, and each of them was open to taking part. DB Were those big names important to you? AI It was an opportunity not only to bring highlevel talent into the film but also to reference their bodies of work and their historic, symbolic significance as teen idols of the past. My producer, China Chow, was instrumental in securing name-brand talent for the movie. DB Tell me about Goldie Hawn. Did she live up to your expectations? If she didn’t, just lie to me and tell me she did. AI Goldie Hawn is the movie’s narrator. We recorded her lines one morning at a studio in Venice Beach. She nailed it. I wanted the narrator’s voice to sound wise, comforting, fun, and regional—Californian. Goldie was perfect, and so generous to take part. DB Tell me about filming. Where did you do it and for how long? AI We filmed for nineteen days total, which meant we had to move fast. We shot primarily in Malibu. Half of the shoot took place at Harry Gesner’s architectural masterpiece the Wave House. We shot on the Malibu Pier, the Pacific Coast Highway, in Encinal Canyon for the driving scenes, at a surf shop called Mollusk, and at the Viper Room. Locations were extremely important to creating the

feel of the movie. The whole process was unexpected — I had never done this before, so I jumped into the deep end and learned as we went. The process was extremely collaborative. Everyday I was working with the actors, the writer, the costume designer, the production designer, the cinematographer, and my producers. For many of us it was the first time at the rodeo—or at least our first feature-film project—so we learned together. There was lots of stress, a little kumbaya, and some great magical moments when everything somehow came together in the end. DB How was making a movie similar to and different from making your other artworks? AI It was similar in that most of what I do is collaborative—I work with fabricators to realize most of my works. It was different in ways that are hard to describe. There’s always a challenge to trying something new, moving from one body of work to the next, but making a movie was like stepping into a completely different realm. It’s almost the difference between making an object to put into the world and constructing a world into which you could imagine putting that object.

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I know that you do other things, including sunglasses; now you’re doing a movie, and you collaborated with Bret Easton Ellis on a show at Gagosian last year. Do you think we’re reentering a world in which artists can do more than just one thing? Have you ever thought about your work in these terms? AI Usually making one work or doing one project leads to the next. I try to work in a way that feels organic and connected to my experience. I’ve been surfing the web since middle school, and that’s certainly helped influence my desire to make different kinds of things. It’s allowed me to research sunglass manufacturing in China, to track down guests for my talk show, to take the step from selfies to self-portraiture, and to imagine making an artwork for teens that can live on Netflix. DB I just mentioned Bret, so let’s talk a bit about that series of work. It was one of my favorites. How did that concept come to pass? How did you and Bret work together?

Photos by Rachel Chandler

AI I had been thinking about the text painting as a kind of L.A.-specific art-historical trope, and had wondered how I might explore the tradition. Not being a writer but having loved the process of working with one on the SPF-18 script, I reached out to Bret, a friend and hero, to ask if he’d be open to collaborating. He agreed and started writing brief texts, which we edited together over some funny boozy dinners at the mall, and I ultimately turned them into the stock-photo-based paintings that we showed in Beverly Hills and London. DB Last week I was at a dinner party with a prominent collector who recently told me that she prefers architects to artists because the creation of their work requires communication with others, whereas art doesn’t. She joked that artists are too selfish. AI Architecture is a language that we all speak, at least on some level, whenever we enter a man-made structure. Art is a more rarefied and abstract language, so as a tool for communication it might seem at times limited or indecipherable. With SPF-18 I’m hoping to engage young people, to make them feel enfranchised by art and creativity, and ultimately, I hope, to convince some of them that art is a language worth exploring. DB No spoilers, but who do you want to collaborate with next? And please let it be Goldie Hawn again. AI I think I could probably learn a lot from a primate. DB You mean like Alf? AI You never know.

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marciano art foundation

A contemporary art space in the center of Los Angeles. Free Admission.

4357 WILSHIRE BOULEVARD LOS ANGELES, CA 90010 For tickets visit: www.marcianoartfoundation.org

HOURS: Thursday 11am–5pm Friday 11am–5pm Saturday 10am–6pm

Sunday-Tuesday CLOSED Wednesday (open only to educators and students) 10am–4pm

A short story in four parts by Christopher Bollen

Part Three The pinewood box that contained Untitled, #7 leaned against the wall of Kit’s studio, the only painting in a series of nine that had been returned by her gallerist Haskell Vex after the immediate closing of her show. Haskell’s decision to pull the plug hadn’t been much of a surprise; after all, Kit had refused to allow him to run tests on Untitled, #7 to uncover the source of its mystical tears. Yet even Kit hadn’t predicted his final valedictory punch until she read his full statement on the Artnews website: “Due to the recent controversy and understandable outcry, we also regret that we are no longer able to represent Kit Carrodine and her special needs. We wish her all the best in her future endeavors.” Kit had laughed out loud at that last bit: Haskell had thrown her to the lions to salvage his tarnished reputation. But if Kit had special needs she also had special skills—and one was making friends with lions. Fearing correctly that Haskell would shut her Killers show down, she had decided to get ahead of him on the story by calling a few reporters of her own. Kit’s news had beaten Haskell’s to the papers and blogs by five hours. “I have made a crying painting,” she told the press simply and solemnly. “I deliberately chose to paint the mug shot of an incarcerated black man. I did not choose for this image to sprout water from one eye and appear to weep as it streamed down the canvas. I won’t explain or justify what is, to my knowledge, inexplicable and unjustifiable. But I won’t renounce it either. Art isn’t a toy you send back to the factory if its edges are too sharp or its stuffing catches fire. All I will say is that I have since met the mother of the man I depicted. I have listened to her and others who claim that Ronell Stephens was convicted of a murder he did not commit. I don’t know where I stand on miracles. But I do believe in justice.” Kit had hung up before the reporters could quiz her on the specifics of Ronell’s case. Was Ronell Stephens innocent? Kit had no idea. How could she? She had listened to Ronell’s mother talk passionately of planted evidence and forced confessions, and she had dispatched her studio assistant, Grace, to dig up the few articles on the murder and trial. Ronell had earned an impressive rap sheet of drug-dealing arrests in the Bronx before being accused of shooting an undercover narcotics officer to death in the middle of a hot September night five years back. The jury had found him guilty in less than forty minutes—and that had included a lengthy bathroom break. In her more vulnerable moments Kit worried that she had simply used Ronell as a convenient moral cause to deflect attention from the ludicrous circus that had formed around her after Untitled, #7 had begun to weep. But she recalled the devotion of the believers, the prayerful worshippers with eyes closed so tightly they looked like shotgun holes and hands balled at their chests like second hearts; they had come together because of her painting and had found strength and hope in it. From her own talent and hands she had produced something that made people sob in piles on the floor. That’s when Kit caught herself thinking things she had never anticipated. Things like, Maybe this happened for a reason, or, If I’m truly honest, I’ve always felt chosen to be an instrument of greater good, or even, Who am I to say that this painting isn’t a miracle that could exonerate an innocent man? Ronell’s mother, Alice, had been calling Kit’s studio night and day, begging her to speak at a rally next weekend at City Hall to demand the reopening of his case. Two local morning-TV shows had invited Kit on to discuss Ronell and her “magic artistry” (their words). So far she had declined all invitations, but she was beginning to warm to the idea. Kit had already received one unexpected boon from speaking publicly about the painting: as soon as she openly refused to renounce the work, the art world that had abandoned her came rushing back in her defense. Haskell, now officially her ex-gallerist, fielded endless requests about Untitled, #7 from collectors—basically speculators following the divining rod of scandal and press—who sensed that a Kit Carrodine Killer might be worth quite a bit even after the initial notoriety died down. Poor Haskell had phoned her, mumbling in meekness and apology, as he mentioned numerous six- and even seven-figure bids for her miracle painting. Kit knew he needed to recoup his losses—he was a man dancing on the strangling wire of the market—and, in an attitude of what she saw as utter magnanimity, she had said, “Hey, no hard feelings, okay? I tell you what. Untitled, #7 isn’t for sale. You send that painting back to me. But you can sell the other eight in the show that you’re currently dismantling and take your usual cut.” Haskell had 159

St. Kit of New York

sent Untitled, #7 to the studio the following day, along with an enormous bouquet of peonies. He had always had the safest taste in flowers. An artwork returning to Kit’s studio was usually unboxed, checked for damage, rephotographed, and archived in cloth and Bubble Wrap. But she kept Untitled, #7 nailed shut in its pine crate and told Grace not to let anyone open it. Right now, Kit eyed the box leaning against the wall. Sliding from her chair, she grabbed the hammer on her desk and walked toward the box, brandishing the tool with its claw raised as if threatening to put it out of its misery. But as Kit reached the giant rectangle of raw pine, she couldn’t get herself to yank the nails free. Inside was her canvas of Ronell Stephens, her miracle masterpiece. Was it still crying? If she set it loose in her studio, would she find moisture around the eye? Or would it be as dry as old paint, no miracle at all, just the result of condensation in Haskell’s air-conditioned gallery? It frightened her to learn the answer—and she wasn’t sure which would upset her more, a painting still weeping or an inert accumulation of oil strokes. Suspecting that either case would rip her life apart, she set the hammer down. Her life was safe as long as the box wasn’t opened. Still, she tried to peer between the seams of the wood for any sign of activity. “What are you doing in there?” she whispered into the splintery crack. Kit got on her knees and pressed her fingertips along the cement floor, searching for any trace of water. She laughed—she was confusing the mechanics of a miracle with that of a leaky kitchen pipe—but her fingertips continued to explore the corners of the box for dampness. “What are you?” Kit said quietly to the box. “Are you alive? A message? A mistake? Are you here?” “Kit?” Grace boomed. She had returned from her lunch break to find her boss on her hands and knees muttering madly at thin air. “What the hell are you doing?” “Nothing,” Kit groused as she climbed to her feet, her face turned toward the windows so as to hide the blush scorching her cheeks. “Were you praying to the box?” Grace asked. Kit scowled at her assistant. Nevertheless, in recent weeks their hostile relationship had transformed into something close to friendship. Kit couldn’t afford to lose her. Grace was one of the few constants she had in her life. “No, of course not,” Kit replied. “I told you, I—” She was about to swear yet again to her unyielding faithlessness when Grace waved her hands to ward off the familiar speech. “I booked your rental car for tomorrow,” Grace interrupted. “I got one with GPS so it will take you right to the prison gates. It should be a two-hour drive.” “Was there any trouble clearing my visit with the warden? Tell him Alice Stephens made a special request that I be admitted.” Grace nodded. “They know you’re coming. Even Ronell knows.” Grace snapped her fingers to remember the last part of her instructions. “Oh yeah. Don’t bring him any gifts. He can’t accept them. Apparently they have to throw them in the garbage and it upsets everyone to see things go to waste.” It wasn’t the set of white metal bars shutting behind Kit that disturbed her. Those she expected. It was the twelve-plated steel door that she heard being bolted behind her that brought tremors of panic to her chest as she and her escorting officer entered the innards of the prison. Locked up. Locked in. No way out. Inside for life. Kit had thought she understood what those terms meant, but now, physically sealed inside the deadening walls of this deadening institution, she realized that she had never known. A horrific fact was beating from her chest to her brain: she was trapped in here—even though her allotted stint in prison would only be sixty minutes. Feigning a casual swagger as she walked with the officer down the polished-linoleum hall, Kit was actually fighting the urge to run screaming toward the steel-plated door and beg the guards to unlock it. From there she’d sprint out into the parking lot and hug the air and gravel and budding summer trees, and from thereon she’d live eternally in wide open spaces. “You okay?” the officer asked as they turned a corner. “Yeah, fine,” Kit said with a smile. “Why wouldn’t I be?” She was experiencing claustrophobia so extreme that she felt as if she were being suffocated in a thick wool blanket, or that time itself had hardened and was crushing her ribs. But she wanted this officer to like and respect her because he controlled the keys to the outside world. It occurred to Kit that she couldn’t even call the police if something happened: they had confiscated her purse and phone at the entrance desk. 160

Part Three

On the drive up to this remote maximum-security prison in the bucolic, slightly methy-looking Catskills, Kit had actually been excited for the adventure of prison. Now she felt ashamed for painting mug shots of inmates, as if their daily torture inside these human warehouses had given her a tough street cred that she hadn’t in any way earned. She had behaved like some thirteenyear-old suburban kid who dreamt of being a gangster because she liked listening to rap music. Her art was a con, a lie, and the only genuine element of Untitled, #7 was the strange tear rolling down from the prisoner’s painted eye. Human beings shouldn’t be locked up for life in these inhuman places, she thought. And yet many were—many, many, many. The officer led her into a small white-cinder-block room with a laminated faux-wood table in its center and plastic chairs on either side. There were two windows in the room, with beige blinds covering them. She couldn’t have pulled the blinds up had she wanted to because they were encased in locked grates. “Is this the waiting room before you take me in to see him?” she asked. The officer was tall, plump, and white, with a doughy, dimply face that didn’t seem sufficiently intimidating. “No,” he said. “We bring Stephens in here to meet with you.” Kit quickly glanced at the arrangement of table and chairs as if expecting a sheet of safety glass to materialize and separate the visitor from the inmate. “You mean, we talk over a table?” she asked. “With no barrier between us?” The officer smiled. More dimples emerged on his cheeks. “Yeah. It isn’t like TV, ma’am. You sit across from him like in a normal meeting. I stand outside.” “Outside? So we’re alone together?” Kit had come to visit Ronell because she might very well champion his release. But he was still a man convicted of first-degree murder, and she had thin bones and zero fighting skills and could imagine herself the perfect sacrificial hostage in a botched prison escape. “I’ll be right outside the door,” he assured her. Kit took the chair by the windows. Who was she kidding in undertaking this ridiculous mission? Did she really think she could determine guilt or innocence simply by showing up and talking to a stranger for an hour? She was dangerously out of her depth, and even the dimply officer knew it. The rare murders that intruded on Kit’s New York universe were hopelessly white collar, the motives being passion or money—anything but necessity, which she supposed was the reason most of the inmates had ended up in here. She heard a jingle of keys in the hallway and a young black man in a drab green jumpsuit strode into the room with his wrists cuffed behind his back. An elderly Latino officer reached to unlock the handcuffs. These were careers that involved locking and unlocking all day long. Kit kept her eyes trained on the prison jumpsuit. She identified its precise shade of green from the tubes of oil paint that cluttered her mind: oxide of chromium #459. She could paint every wrinkle of that jumpsuit. It was the rest of Ronell she had gotten wrong. In real life, he was smaller and thinner than his mug shot had suggested; he was also less handsome and pompous looking. As Ronell shook his wrists theatrically at their freedom, smiled at the two officers who stepped outside (leaving the door half open), and sat down across the table, Kit found his expression hard to discern. There was a softness in his eyes and lips that regular doses of mistrust and disappointment were slowly turning brittle. They stared at each other for a solid minute—two random people who were never meant to meet in a secure cinder-block room in upstate New York. Ronell rotated his wrists again. Then he spoke. “I didn’t think you’d be Asian.” Kit didn’t mean to grin, but once a grin spread across her face she let it remain there. It seemed to relax him. He slumped a bit. “What did you think I’d be?” “White.” “I’m half white and half Asian. My mom’s Korean.” “Know what I am?” “What?” 161

St. Kit of New York

“Property.” Ronell pinched his green shirt, where property of was emblazoned across his chest. Below it spread a litter of worn-away letters that must have once spelled out the name of the prison. “I’ve always been property—of the state, or the police, or white people—even before I landed here.” Kit nodded. In some way she agreed with his assessment. “Shit,” he hissed and shoved himself back in his chair, folding his arms over his stomach. He was eyeing her paint-stained fingers on the table. “My mom says you’re a painter. A real artist.” “I am.” “I live in a painting.” At first Kit thought he meant Untitled, #7, and she maneuvered her dry tongue to begin explaining why she had painted his mug shot. But Ronell hadn’t meant that. “I live nineteen hours a day, every day, inside four painted walls and one painted ceiling. No window.” He laughed humorlessly. His hair was shaved so close to his scalp that she could see each fine black hair the shape of a curlicue against his brown-pink flesh. “I hate paint. I didn’t want to meet you.” His eyes fled to a corner of the room. “My mom made me promise I would. She thinks you can help me. You can’t.” Kit wanted to reach her hand out and press it against his fists. But she presumed—even though the officers weren’t in the room—that physical contact was against the rules. “I’d like to help you, or at least try,” she said. “Ronell?” She waited for him to gaze up at her. This awkward next question required eye contact. “Can I ask, are you really innocent?” His eyes constricted, almost closing entirely, as if to shut her out. “What do you think?” he answered coolly. “It doesn’t matter what I think, does it? All that matters is what you think.” It struck Kit that Ronell’s response to the question of his guilt was the same as the one she gave when people asked what her paintings meant. But murder wasn’t the same as art: there was a definite answer as to whether he had killed someone or not. Wasn’t there? “I don’t know enough about your case,” she replied. “I know what your mom says, and what the papers say, and—” “—And what twelve straight folks in a jury box said so they could be done before lunch.” He lifted his eyes to the ceiling. She thought she saw tears in them, although the harsh institutional lighting glistened any shiny surface. “I’ll tell you the truth. I fucked up. I fucked up my life real bad. I was young. And you can’t blame my mom for it. She tried. But I was bent, man. I was bent on it.” He went quiet for a while, watching his thumbs dance on the table. The face that finally emerged was both softer and older than it had been minutes before. Ronell looked directly at her. “I didn’t kill anyone. I did a lot of other stuff. I sold drugs. I was not good. But I didn’t kill that undercover cop. No matter. The police needed to nail someone for the loss of one of their own, and they saw me as a gold opportunity, take down this punk and look like heroes. They got one of my friends to rat me out in exchange for charges dropped on another crime. So he swore in court that I bragged about shooting that cop. But I didn’t. He lied. It’s the usual story. Here I am.” He rotated his head to flex every muscle of his neck. “It’s the same story you’ll hear from every other guy in this pen. I ain’t guilty, I ain’t guilty. So why should you believe me? I wouldn’t.” Kit had made a career of capturing faces. She’d drawn them, sketched them, painted them, studied them like subway maps. You don’t walk away from years of that specialty without learning how to read them. Ronell had irises the color of worn leather. He had a mole in the corner of his left nostril. The bottom of his chin was rounded like a buckeye seed. And according to Kit, he was telling the truth. “I believe you,” she said. “I’m going to do whatever I can to have your case reopened. I can’t promise it will be, but I can promise I’ll try.” The faint tug of an appreciative smile appeared at the side of Ronell’s mouth, which he immediately covered with his hand. He slumped back in the chair. “By the way, since we’re being honest with each other, I don’t buy your bullshit.” “What bullshit?” Kit asked. Perhaps Ronell could read faces too because he was staring intently at hers as if he saw something revealing on it. “About you being some sort of saint who performs miracles like my mom thinks. About you making a painting of me that cries tears. I didn’t cry once during my trial. 162

Part Three

Not once. So no god is going to come out of the clouds and choose a picture of me to strike with any stupid miracle. I don’t buy your whole religion act. It’s bullshit. Just so we’re clear.” A part of Kit had expected Ronell to thank her. Even locked up in this remote corner of New York State, he must know that it was her painting that had spurred all the renewed interest in his case. Strangely, though, Kit preferred his honesty to gratitude. She broke her self-imposed rule against physical contact and reached her hand across the table. She pressed her fingers against his knuckles. “You know what? I’m not sure I buy my bullshit either. We’ll both have to wait and see.” Kit forgot to hug the sunlight as she walked through the prison parking lot. As she clicked the power button on her phone, she was already planning her speeches on the two morning-TV shows and at the rally at City Hall next weekend. Her phone displayed a flurry of missed calls from Grace. Kit called Grace back, cradling the phone between her neck and shoulder as she unlocked the rental car and tossed her purse across the seat. “Kit!” Grace wheezed. “Where are you?” There was a pathological urgency in her assistant’s voice. “I’m just leaving the prison,” she answered flatly. “And you’re safe?” “Of course I’m safe! I’ve been in jail for the past hour.” Kit sensed that something wasn’t right. “What’s going on? Are you okay?” Grace’s breathing turned rickety. “I’m shaken up but otherwise okay. There was an intruder at the studio this morning. An attacker really. I was in the back room when I heard a voice. Oh my god, Kit, it was such a scary voice! It was so scary I thought it was a joke! It yelled in a whisper, ‘You evil cunt!’” Kit’s entire body turned to ice. It was the same message whispered to her by her relentless anonymous prank caller. The voice had finally grown legs and come looking for her at her own studio. “Jesus,” Kit moaned. “Right?” Grace rasped. “When I heard this stranger say ‘evil cunt,’ I knew he was looking for you.” Kit chose to ignore the unintended insult. “I raced out into the main room because I still thought it was someone joking, and a young man in a ski mask was standing there about to swing a baseball bat right at my head! He nearly killed me, Kit! Thank god you and I look nothing alike. When he saw I wasn’t you, he bolted. The police are fanning the neighborhood looking for him. I was worried he might have tracked you down up at the prison.” Kit scanned the backseat of her car just to ensure that a young man in a ski mask wasn’t crouched below the seats. She locked the doors and started the engine. “Look, I think I have an idea who the guy might be,” Kit said. “I know from mutual friends that Kai has been devastated by our breakup. He’s clearly heartbroken to the point that he’s lost his mind. I think it’s best if—” “No,” Grace broke in. “The attacker isn’t Kai. The police know who the kid is, they just can’t find him.” “They know who my prank caller is? How?” “His mother was afraid he might try to hurt you so she called the police to warn them. I guess they’ve decided to take her warning seriously now that I was almost clubbed to death in your place.” “But who would want to try to hurt me?” Kit whined. “Me, who made a painting that cries tears?” “Easy,” Grace replied. “Ronell Stephens killed an undercover cop named Anthony Esposito. Esposito has a teenage son named Mateo. That’s our attacker. Don’t you see? Ronell was safely behind bars forever until you came along and made that painting. He blames you. You might be the reason his father’s killer goes free.” Kit stared straight ahead, gliding her rental car onto the interstate that would lead her back to the scenes of past and future crimes—her lethal, beloved New York. [To be continued] 163

Left and opposite: Images of Henri Matisse’s Poésies de Stéphane Mallarmé, published in 1932 by Albert Skira

BOOK CORNER

MATISSE

Lauren Mahony discusses two rare books by Henri Matisse selected for the Gagosian Shop by rare-book specialist Douglas Flamm. Henri Matisse was sixty years old when he embarked on his first major illustrated book, Poésies de Stéphane Mallarmé, inaugurating a new phase in his career during which books became a sustained part of his work. Begun in 1930, Poésies . . . was published in 1932 by Albert Skira, who had invited Matisse to illustrate the volume, a collection of poems first published in 1887. (Skira’s first project of this type, a selection from Ovid’s Metamorphoses illustrated by Pablo Picasso, had appeared in 1931.) Matisse was fully engaged with the Mallarmé project for nearly two years, concurrent with the large mural on the subject of dance that he was planning for the Barnes Foundation, in Merion, Pennsylvania. Although he had provided illustrations for books earlier on, he had never before been as deeply involved in the overall concept of making a book. Carefully planning the layout and design elements, he made over 200 preparatory drawings, 164

from which he went on to print 60 etchings; 29 were ultimately included in the publication. On the challenge of marrying image with text, Matisse would recall in 1946, “The problem was then to balance the two pages—one white, with the etching, the other comparatively black, with the type.”1 To achieve this balance he scaled his drawings to fill the page—a large one, at about thirteen inches tall by nearly ten inches wide—but used thin, minimal lines without shading, leaving the page mostly white. Seeing the book recently at Gagosian, the noted Matisse scholar John Elderfield spoke of the “absolute fluency” of Matisse’s drawing, remarking on the artist’s ability to create areas of greater and lesser luminosity with simple etched lines. Among the wide-ranging subjects depicted in the etchings are Edgar Allan Poe, botanical elements, and Arcadian imagery that recalls both Matisse’s compositions of twenty years prior and

Left and opposite: Images of Henri Matisse’s Pasiphaé: Chant de Minos (Les Crétois), published in 1944 by Martin Fabiani All works of Henri Matisse are © 2017 Succession H. Matisse/Artist Rights Society (ARS), NY Photos by Rob McKeever

the mural-size painting The Dance, simultaneously in process for the Barnes. Twelve years later, in 1944, Matisse completed another ambitious illustrated book, this one published by Martin Fabiani, his art dealer during the Second World War.2 Pasiphaé: Chant de Minos (Les Crétois), Henry de Montherlant’s modern interpretation of the classical story, is illustrated with 148 linoleum cuts (the cover, 18 full-page plates, 45 decorative elements, and 84 oversized decorative block letters, printed in red, at the beginning of each paragraph). Pasiphaé marks the first time Matisse used linocut, which creates images drawn in white against a black ground—the opposite effect from the Mallarmé etchings. Riva Castleman, writing in 1978, discussed the balance between image and text, as Matisse had in 1946: “The white lines incised into the black ground of each plate provided a considerably different weight to the illustrations as they opposed pages of text, and the embellishment of the text pages with initials and head and tail pieces deftly offset this imbalance. . . . For the first time purely decorative elements, such as groups of undulating lines, serpentines, and stars, are plucked from their customary positions in 166

Matisse’s compositions and, in the bands above and below, act like traps for the loose blocks of typography.”3 In the second half of the book, a band of stars repeats at the top of several pages; these stars become larger as the reader progresses through the text, as though animated in space. Each of these livres d’artistes, or artist’s books, is the result of a total collaboration between artist and publisher and each presents a striking pairing of art and literature. Elderfield, who included both the Mallarmé and Pasiphaé in his landmark 1992 Matisse retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, recently remarked, “His very first paintings, made when he was twenty-one, were of piles of books. He was a great reader, who loved books, so it is not surprising that he made great illustrated books. His illustrated books are so integral to his art as a whole.” 1 Henri Matisse, “How I Made My Books,” 1946, repr. in Jack D. Flam, Matisse on Art (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), p. 167. 2 See Riva Castleman’s catalogue entries in John Elderfield, Matisse in the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1978), pp. 140–42. 3 Ibid., p. 142.

TATE BRITAIN 12 SEP – 21 JAN 2018