Gagosian Quarterly, Summer 2017

s we embark on one of our most exciting seasons yet, we are thrilled to share what we affectionately call our “summer blockbuster.” This issue is graced by artists whose work challenges our expectations, pushes our perceptions, and continually surprises us, even decades after its initial inception. In short: masters.

Pivotal artists are often infamous, so much so that, as viewers, we tend to make assumptions about the work. Yet with a great artist, the moment we are in a comfort zone their work will catch us off guard and promptly shake things up again.

In this, our second issue, our stories reveal the unexpected worlds of the artists we know and love. We revel in Pablo Picasso through his alter ego the Minotaur, that complex mythical creature—strong and sexual yet vulnerable and conflicted. We explore the sculptures of Alberto Giacometti through the lens of Peter Lindbergh.

We study Henri Matisse’s deep influence on Tom Wesselmann. A single painting by Mark Tansey shows us the intricacy of the content he pours into each canvas. Ellen Gallagher tells us about her long-held fascination with the sea.

We visit Giuseppe Penone in his studio as he prepares for a major forthcoming monograph that will present the core ideas of his practice since the start of his career.

In March the world lost Howard Hodgkin, a radiant visionary and a spirit of both passion and compassion. We share Howard’s voice in this issue as a dedication to his memory and legacy but also as a testament to the vibrancy of his life.

With so much on the horizon for the art world this summer, we hope this issue accompanies you on your journey, wherever that may be—Venice, Basel, or those more unique destinations that bring their own rewards.

Alison McDonald, Editor-in-chief

30 Spotlight: Mark Tansey

34 Substance and Shadow

Alexander Wolf guides us through a multilayered new painting by the celebrated artist.

Alberto Giacometti’s iconic sculptures become the subjects of Peter Lindbergh’s photographic gaze.

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Reinventing the Nude Modern master Henri Matisse was a touchstone for American Pop artist Tom Wesselmann throughout his career.

54 Jonas Wood Mural Meredith Mendelsohn reports on a new mural currently installed at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

60 Howard Hodgkin: Layla and Majnun Behind the scenes of the celebrated dance collaboration between Sir Howard Hodgkin and choreographer Mark Morris.

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Giuseppe Penone: The Inner Life of Forms A studio visit with the artist to discuss his upcoming monograph.

104 Below the Surface Ellen Gallagher discusses the origins of her artistic practice with Adrienne Edwards.

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Andy Warhol’s Sixty Last Suppers Jessica Beck discusses Warhol’s Last Supper series and an exhibition at Milan’s Museo del Novecento.

Photo credits: Picasso wearing a bull’s head intended for bullfighter’s training, La Californie, Cannes, 1959. © 2017 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo by edwardquinn.com

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Giuseppe Penone in his Turin studio, 2016.

Photo by Angela Moore

Picasso and the Minotaur

Andy Warhol at the opening of Andy Warhol – Il Cenacolo at Palazzo delle Stelline, Milan, January 22, 1987. Photo by Maria Mulas

Gertje Utley immerses us in one of the legendary artist’s favorite alter egos.

112 Joe Bradley Lauren Mahony anticipates the artist’s mid-career survey at Albright-Knox Art Gallery.

122 Carsten Höller The artist speaks with Daniel Birnbaum.

142 St. Kit of New York, Part 2

By Christopher Bollen

148 Art Above Politics Dr. Mikhail Piotrovsky and Torkom Demirjian discuss the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.

Tom Wesselmann, Great American Nude #8, 1961, mixed media and collage on board, 48 inches (121.9 cm) in diameter. Artwork © Estate of Tom Wesselmann/ Licensed by VAGA, New York. Photo courtesy Estate of Tom Wesselmann Anselm Kiefer, Les extases féminines ([The] Feminine Ecstasies), 2013, watercolor on paper, 65 ¾ × 60 ⅝ inches (167 × 154 cm). © Anselm Kiefer. Photo by Georges Poncet

156 Radiant Revision Le Corbusier’s Cité radieuse has an exciting art space on its roof, Marseille Modulor, founded by designer Ora ïto.

166 Book Corner: Black Book A special focus on Christopher Wool’s large format publication from 1989. Text by Anna Heyward.

170 In Conversation Jeffrey Deitch speaks with Derek Blasberg.

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Anselm Kiefer: Transition from Cool to Warm Art historian James Lawrence explores a new body of work that forms the core of an exhibition in New York.

TABLE OF CONTENTS SUMMER 2017

Cover by Urs Fischer

Gagosian Quarterly, Summer 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 Urs Fischer

Contributors Carlos Basualdo Jessica Beck Daniel Birnbaum Derek Blasberg Christopher Bollen Serena Cattaneo Adorno Nancy Dalva Torkom Demirjian Adrienne Edwards Ellen Gallagher Andrew Goldstein Catherine Grenier Anna Heyward Carsten Höller James Lawrence Peter Lindbergh Lauren Mahony Pepi Marchetti Franchi Meredith Mendelsohn Giuseppe Penone Dr. Mikhail Piotrovsky Dr. Gail Stavitsky Jeffrey Sturges Gertje Utley Alexander Wolf

Publisher Jorge Garcia

Founder Larry Gagosian

Advertising Manager Mandi Garcia

Business Director Melissa Lazarov

Advertising Representative Michael Bullock

Thanks Anna Antoine Chloe Barter Priya Bhatnagar Saranna Biel-Cohen Angela Brown Greg Burchard Michael Cary Jeffrey Deitch Douglas Flamm Waltraud Forelli Mark Francis Brett Garde Amanda Hajjar Stefanie Hessler Ora ïto Claire Kremer Helen Molesworth Angela Moore Elizabeth Mouzannar Bill Murray Louise Neri Antony Peattie Ben Lee Ritchie Handler Eva Seta Mark Tansey Kara Vander Weg Philippe Vergne Robin Vousden Eva Wildes Ealan Wingate Jonas Wood Christopher Wool

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 Serena Cattaneo Adorno

Jessica Beck

Founding Director at Gagosian Paris, she has worked with Fondation Giacometti, Douglas Gordon, Carsten Höller, Jean Nouvel, Sterling Ruby, James Turrell, and many others.

Beck is the Associate Curator of Art at the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh. She has curated many projects, most notably Andy Warhol: My Perfect Body, the first exhibition to explore the complexities of the body, through beauty, pain and perfection, in Warhol’s practice.

Carlos Basualdo

Daniel Birnbaum

Nancy Dalva

As the Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, he has organized Bruce Nauman: Topological Gardens; a survey exhibition of Michelangelo Pistoletto in 2010; and Dancing Around the Bride: Cage, Cunningham, Johns, Rauschenberg and Duchamp (with Erica F. Battle). Here Basualdo leads a conversation with Giuseppe Penone and Pepi Marchetti Franchi. Basualdo is the editor of an upcoming monograph on the art of Giuseppe Penone.

Photo by Angela Moore

Daniel Birnbaum has been the director of Moderna Museet, Stockholm, since 2010. He was previously the director of the Städelschule Fine Arts Academy, Frankfurt, as well as its Kunsthalle Portikus. He was Artistic Director of the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009.

Here he interviews Carsten Höller.

Photo by Moderna Museet/Åsa Lundén

Nancy Dalva is a writer and documentary filmmaker who lives in New York City. Here she travels to Berkeley to interview Howard Hodgkin for the premiere of his newest collaboration with the choreographer Mark Morris, Layla and Majnun.

Adrienne Edwards Adrienne Edwards is a Curator at Performa, New York, Curator at Large at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and also a PhD candidate in performance studies at New York University. Her scholarly and curatorial work focuses on artists of the African Diaspora and the Global South. She is a contributor to numerous exhibition catalogues and art publications, including Aperture, Art in America, Artforum.com, Parkett, and Spike Art Quarterly.

Photo by Lorna Simpson

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Torkom Demirjian Torkom Demirjian is the founder and chairman of the family-run Ariadne Galleries, with locations in New York and London and specializing in the art of the ancient civilizations of Egypt, the Near East, Greece, Rome, Asia, and early medieval Europe. In 2015 he assumed the role of Chairman of the Board of the Hermitage Museum Foundation.

Photo courtesy Hermitage Museum Foundation

Andrew Goldstein

Catherine Grenier

The editor-in-chief of artnet News, Andrew Goldstein is a career cultural journalist who has spent the past decade at the vanguard of online art publishing. Previously the chief digital content officer at Artspace | Phaidon, he has written for the New York Times, New York Magazine, Rolling Stone, and other publications.

Photo by Scott Rudd

Catherine Grenier is a curator and art historian. She has been director of the Fondation Giacometti since 2014. Ex-deputy director of the Musée National d’Art Moderne at the Centre Pompidou, she has curated over thirty exhibitions on modern and contemporary artists.

Photo by Jean Picon

Anna Heyward

James Lawrence

Anna Heyward is a writer and editor in New York. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, Vogue, and The Paris Review Daily, among others. For this issue Heyward highlights Christopher Wool’s Black Book.

James Lawrence is a critic and historian of postwar and contemporary art. He is a frequent contributor to The Burlington Magazine and his writings appear in many gallery and museum publications around the world.

Photo by Robin Vousden

Carsten Höller

Peter Lindbergh

Lauren Mahony

Carsten Höller was born in Brussels in 1961, and lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden, and Biriwa, Ghana. For this issue he talks to Daniel Birnbaum about themes that appear in his work.

Photo by Brigitte Lacombe

Peter Lindbergh is a German photographer whose now iconic images of women derive inspiration from early narrative cinema and street photography in their fleeting observations and compositional elegance.

Photo by Stefan Rappo

Lauren Mahony organizes special exhibitions for Gagosian. She recently worked on Painting Paintings (David Reed) 1975. She joined Gagosian in 2012 after seven years in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Photo by Sarah Kisner

Ellen Gallagher Ellen Gallagher was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1965.

She lives and works in New York and Rotterdam. Gallagher has recently been the subject of survey shows at the New Museum, New York, Tate, London, and Haus der Kunst, Munich. Here she discusses the origins of her work with Adrienne Edwards.

Photo by Philippe Vogelenzang/Trunk Archive

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DIOR.COM

Pepi Marchetti Franchi Meredith Mendelsohn Founding director of Gagosian Rome, she has overseen more than forty exhibitions at the gallery since it was established, in 2007. Raised in Rome, she spent many years living in New York, including the eight years she was working at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

Photo by Andy Massaccesi, courtesy Mutina

Meredith Mendelsohn covers art and design for a variety of publications, including the Wall Street Journal, Architectural Digest, and Artsy. She recently contributed to a forthcoming monograph titled City of Lights: The Undiscovered New York Photographer Marvin E. Newman.

Dr. Gail Stavitsky

Jeffrey Sturges

Curator at the Montclair Art Museum since 1994, where she organized Conversion to Modernism: The Early Work of Man Ray (with Francis Naumann), Roy Lichtenstein: American Indian Encounters, and much more. Her current project, Matisse and American Art, is on view through June 18.

Photo courtesy Montclair Art Museum

Currently the director of exhibitions for the estate of Tom Wesselmann. He was hired by Wesselmann in 1989 as a studio assistant. He has worked for the Wesselmann family since the artist’s death, in 2004. He was instrumental in overseeing the artist’s first major North American retrospective exhibition tour.

Dr. Mikhail B. Piotrovsky

Gertje Utley

Alexander Wolf

Dr. Piotrovsky is a professor at St. Petersburg State University and has served as the Director of the State Hermitage Museum since 1992. He is the son of Boris B. Piotrovsky, the director of the Museum from 1964 to 1990. Dr. Piotrovsky graduated with honors from the Oriental Faculty of Leningrad State University in 1967, specializing in Arabic Studies, as well as attending Cairo University from 1965 to 1966. He studied and worked at the Leningrad branch of the Institute for Oriental Studies from 1967 until 1991, before joining the Hermitage.

Photo courtesy State Hermitage Museum

Gertje Utley is an independent scholar in art history. She is the author of a variety of publications and articles that include Picasso: the Communist Years, Picasso and the Spanish Tradition; Picasso and the War: 1937– 1945, and Picasso: War and Peace.

Alexander Wolf has written for Modern Painters, Art in America, The Last Magazine, and The New Republic. He joined Gagosian New York in 2013.

For this issue, Wolf ruminates on Mark Tansey’s Reverb painting.

Giuseppe Penone In an oeuvre spanning almost fifty years, Giuseppe Penone has explored the subtle levels of interplay between man, nature, and art. His work represents a poetic expansion of arte povera’s radical break with conventional media, emphasizing the involuntary processes of respiration, growth, and aging that are common to both human beings and trees with which he is so deeply involved. His works can be found in many major museum collections around the world.

Photo by Angela Moore

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SPOTLIGHT

MARK TANSEY

A guide through the multilayered and complex new Reverb. Text by Alexander Wolf

Opposite and image at center on following page: Mark Tansey, Reverb, 2017, oil on canvas, 84 × 60 inches (213.4 × 152.4 cm). © Mark Tansey. Photo by Rob McKeever Photography credits for following page: Photo of Woody Allen and Debra Messing by Bill Davila Photo of Woody Allen and Diana Vreeland by Helaine Messer Photo of Feynman diagrams reproduced in Genius: The Life Science of Richard Feynman

by James Gleick (New York: Vintage Books, 1993).

Photo of supersymmetry diagram reproduced in Why Beauty is Truth: A History of Symmetry by Ian Stewart (New York: Basic Books, 2007).

Photos of Wheel (1990) by Rob McKeever. © Mark Tansey Photo of Emmett Kelly by George Leavens. Reprinted in Holiday Magazine, 1954.

Curtis Publishing Company.

Picture a deck of cards based on eye-mind-hand interactions and contradictions. To play the game, select some cards, shuffle them, and continue by finding analogies. You make the cards as you go. Sometimes new features or behaviors emerge. Sometimes it might seem as though the deck is infinite.

—Mark Tansey

Asked recently whether he paints multiple works at once, Mark Tansey grinned. Reverb, his undivided focus for the last two years, shows a glamorous salon dominated by a long wall of paintings, hung frame to frame, that extends beyond the borders of the 84-by-60-inch canvas. Each square in the grid of floor tiles is inscribed with pictures or diagrams, and mirrors and a vase generate more images still. One work at a time, or many? It remains an open question.

A man and a woman in cocktail attire talk near the wall of paintings. There is tension: he gestures with both hands, making a point, as she looks away into a mirror. Tansey’s paintings are monochromatic, his way of separating borrowed images from their sources and integrating them into a new unity;1 Reverb is in shades of Prussian blue, the color of blueprints.

If Tansey’s paintings always reward close inspection, Reverb eagerly invites it. It doesn’t take long to see that several of the framed images show Woody Allen, doing what Woody Allen does: talking and gesturing—making a point, with his words and with his hands. The images of Allen—walking down a street with Debra Messing, with Helen Hunt on the set of The Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001), at a party with his collar in the grip of Diana Vreeland—echo the physical and spoken communications between the painting’s central figures. On the wall’s upper right are tiny Feynman diagrams, physicist Richard Feynman’s pictorial representations of the interactions of subatomic particles. Thus the wall holds a survey of pictures of interactions, from infinitesimal ones to encounters between celebrities.

Among other things, Reverb explores the slippage of representation: the fluctuations that inevitably occur when thoughts are illustrated through words and gestures, a face is reflected in a mirror, or life is represented through art. Tansey came of age in New York at the same time as a generation of artists investigating the nature of picture-making, especially with regards to recycled imagery, and he is no exception. But whereas many of his contemporaries—Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo, Richard Prince, and others—delight in the shifts of meaning that take place when images are displaced or recontextualized, Tansey also pursues the more immediate shifts intrinsic to common interactions, the changes that happen in the space between the mind and verbal or physical communication. What nuances are lost and gained in translation? Eyeing Reverb’s salon of appropriated images, viewers might wonder what was left uncommunicated in David Cameron’s wave as he left 10 Downing Street for the last time; or by the pantomimes of a vaudeville-era clown.

The nature of Tansey’s inquiry can be traced in part to his variegated studies at New York’s Hunter College in 1974–78, where he made some of his first forays into image-morphing in courses taught

by Ron Gorchov and Robert Morris while also sitting in on Rosalind Krauss’s classes on the French semiologists. Merging these interests, he created notebooks of book and magazine clippings picturing people in every conceivable position—an

encyclopedia of human gestures.2 Intense acts of cataloguing have played a role in his process ever since. Nor are images his only sources: it’s possible that more of his preparatory materials derive from literature and language. A note in his current workbook suggests we consider the title Reverb not only in terms of its many visual echoes, but also verbally: rereading reseeing resignifying reenacting rerealizing At Tansey’s recent one-painting exhibition at Gagosian, Reverb was accompanied only by Wheel (1990), a wooden tablelike apparatus whose top comprises three concentric circles inscribed with words. The circles divide loosely into subjects, verbs, and objects, though some entries may be fairly lengthy phrases. These circles can be turned, and as they spin, the words align in countless combinations—“something I used against artist’s block to provide narrative,” Tansey has said.3 A spin of Wheel might tell us “modern traditionalist stalled by sea change,” or “cubists on the threshold of delay tactics.” Tansey’s inclusion of Wheel in the exhibition is telling; he once wrote of this functional sculpture, “I’ve found it useful in making it possible to mix distinctly different levels of content: the conceptual, the figural, and the formal, much as one mixes red, yellow, and blue on a color wheel.”⁴ (Indeed, the sculpture was predated by several paper versions that he actually called “color wheels.”) Language is to Tansey what color is to most painters— he has referred to his work as “pictorial rhetoric.”⁵ If Wheel has become something of a symbol of Tansey’s atypical process, Reverb may be the painting that epitomizes his ability to hold viewers through gradual revelation. He describes the work as “the space where thinking, seeing, and making interact simultaneously and sequentially.”⁶ The image fuses impressions of the studio, of an archive, of a blueprint (hence the Prussian blue), of a cocktail lounge, even of a church, complete with icons that constitute a layered narrative. A side table bearing a resemblance to Wheel alludes to Tansey’s creative past, while the sketches, diagrams, and tracings on the floor may evolve into future paintings—monochromatic, surely, but colored by the wide spectrum of his purview.

1 See Arthur C. Danto and Mark Tansey, Mark Tansey: Visions and Revisions (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1992), p. 128.

2 See Patterson Sims, Mark Tansey: Art and Source (Seattle: Seattle Art Museum, 1990), p. 8.

3 Tansey, quoted in Phoebe Hoban, “The Wheel Turns: Painting Paintings about Painting,” New York Times, April 27, 1997, available online at www.nytimes.com/1997/04/27/ arts/the-wheel-turns-painting-paintings-about-painting.html (accessed March 13, 2017).

4 Judi Freeman, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Tansey, Mark Tansey (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1993), pp. 69–70.

5 Tansey, quoted in Hoban, “The Wheel Turns: Painting Paintings about Painting.”

6 Tansey, telephone conversation and e-mail exchange with Amanda Hajjar of the Gagosian Gallery, March 8 and 9, 2017.

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The forward part of the wall includes some paintings that depict Woody Allen.

They involve at least two and sometimes three individuals, typically speaking— an expression of the mind—while also expressing their thoughts through physical gestures. Allen’s own gestures are so strong as to recall vaudeville routines.

The wall on the right side of the canvas contains thirty-seven diagrams made by physicist Richard Feynman in 1948.

They are mathematical expressions of the relationships of subatomic particles, making visual the interactions of atoms.

The mirror includes an image of a clown, its source a photograph of the famous clown Emmett Kelly that was reproduced in the psychoanalyst Martin Grotjahn’s book Beyond Laughter (1957). Grotjahn writes of the clown, “In contrast to the wild action of life all around him, he embraces the sadness of it all and becomes a symbol of death.”

Two women’s portraits reflected in the mirror come from the artist’s family archives. The upper drawing, from c. 1947, is by the artist’s uncle, Adrian Tansey, and presents an inward gaze. The lower drawing, from c. 1953, is by the artist’s father, Richard Tansey, and presents an outward gaze.

On the table is a reversed map of the U.S. congressional districts. The table relates in its shape to Tansey’s earlier sculpture Wheel (1990).

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The image in one of the floor tiles constitutes a playful experiment by Mark Tansey in perception, setting miniature three-dimensional figures against a printed image in a newspaper.

The floor tiles include a diagram that illustrates the principle of supersymmetry.

SUBSTANCE AND SHADOW Alberto Giacometti’s iconic sculptures have become the focus of Peter Lindbergh’s photographic gaze.

An upcoming exhibition at Gagosian London brings together the sculptures and the photographs.

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P 35: Peter Lindbergh, Alberto Giacometti, Buste de Diego (1964–1965), Zurich, 2016 Pp. 36–37: Peter Lindbergh, Alberto Giacometti, Group Of Nine, Zurich 2016 P. 38: Peter Lindbergh, Alberto Giacometti, Femme debout (1961), Zurich, 2016 P. 39: Peter Lindbergh, Alberto Giacometti, Group of six with La Main, Zurich, 2016 P. 40: Peter Lindbergh, Alberto Giacometti, Femme debout (Poseuse I) (1954), Zurich, 2016 P. 41: Peter Lindbergh, Alberto Giacometti, Buste (Tête tranchante) (vers 1953), Zurich, 2016 Pp. 42–43: Peter Lindbergh, Alberto Giacometti, Group of Four, Zurich, 2016 P. 44: Peter Lindbergh, Alberto Giacometti, Tête sur socle (dite Tête sans crâne) (vers 1958), Zurich, 2016 Photographs © Peter Lindbergh Artwork © 2017 Alberto Giacometti Estate/Licensed

by VAGA and ARS, NY

Giacometti is constantly reinventing himself, each new sculpture is at once very close to and very different from the one before. And I strongly feel how everything he creates is completely connected to him. For me that’s the greatest quality an artist can have.

Peter Lindbergh 44

marni.com

Picasso

In moments of high emotional turmoil, Picasso tended to hide behind an alter ego. His series of representations of the Minotaur touchingly and intensely reflect the agonies and passions of the artist’s life.

Text by Gertje Utley

and

the Minotaur

icasso’s work was always intensely subjective and infused with the facts, personalities, and emotions of his life. He himself likened it to a diary,1 and we can indeed follow the phases of his existence through his many portraits of his friends and of the women with whom he was involved, or through his self-portraits, either by themselves or as a shadowy profile in some painting’s background.

Yet in moments of high emotional turmoil, he tended to hide behind an alter ego, such as the fragile figure of the Harlequin in his early works and, most poignantly, the figure of the Minotaur in the 1930s.

Rarely did Picasso deliver himself as completely as in the works in which he wears the mask of the Minotaur. This series of representations touchingly and intensely reflects the agonies, passions, and turmoil of a particularly difficult period, a time that he described as the worst of his life.2 These works allowed him to express his anxiety and pain as he was torn between his mistress, Marie-Thérèse Walter, who was pregnant with his child, and his wife, Olga Khokhlova, who refused to grant him a divorce. Meanwhile his native Spain was descending into political turmoil.

Picasso himself affirmed his strong personal connection with the mythological beast when he told Romuald Dor de la Souchère that “if one were to mark all the itineraries of the various places I have visited on a map and would draw a line connecting them, the result would perhaps represent a Minotaur.”3 What he did not state directly, but perhaps implied, was that the connection was in fact far more intimate than that.

The myth of the Minotaur originates in prehistoric times. As it appears in literature and art around 570 b.c., and is brought to us in the later transcriptions of Plutarch and Apollodorus, as well as in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the myth relates the story of King Minos of Crete, son of the union between Europa and Theseus.

Minos had insulted Poseidon, god of the seas, by disobeying his orders and keeping his present of a most beautiful white bull instead of offering it in sacrifice as intended. This so enraged Poseidon that he caused Minos’s queen, Pasiphaë, to fall so desperately in love with the white bull that she had the architect Daedalus build a wooden cow with a convenient contraption allowing her to submit to her passion. The Minotaur—half man, half beast— was born from this misalliance.

Desiring to hide the unfortunate result of the queen’s trespass, Minos had Daedalus build the labyrinth as a refuge for the creature.

Moreover, he ordered Athens, a city then vassal to Crete, to each year send seven young men and seven young women as fodder for the beast’s monstrous appetites. This continued until young Theseus, the Athenian king’s son, decided to defeat the monster. He did so with the help of Minos’s daughter, Ariadne, who gave him a thread that allowed him to find his way 48

back out of the labyrinth after his victory.4 The myth of the Minotaur and his battle against Theseus is represented in early Greek art in Attic black- and red-figure vessels, as well as in a good deal of later art and poetry, including Dante’s Inferno.5 It was rediscovered in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century by Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud and in the 1930s became an extremely popular topic for artists, writers, and composers. The 1930s revival of the Minotaur myth corresponds chronologically with—and likely owes a debt to—Sir Arthur Evans’s publication of his six volumes on the discovery and excavations of the Cretan palace of Knossos (1921–35).6 The Minotaur myth carried multiple layers of meaning, which is why so many artists and intellectuals of the 1930s were drawn to it.

On the one hand, in tune with a new wave of classicism, artists and writers saw the Minotaur as representing Mediterranean values in response to the rise of Fascist and Communist dictatorships. Theseus’s fight against the beast

was seen as symbolizing the struggle of the rational mind against irrational impulses.

It also represented Nietzsche’s division between Apollonian and Dionysian forces (articulated by the philosopher in his 1872 book The Birth of Tragedy), as well as the Freudian duality between the conscious mind, represented by Theseus, and the unconscious mind, represented by the Minotaur. In the rule of the Minotaur in his labyrinth, the Surrealists celebrated a force against reason that they believed allowed them to give free reign to their innermost urges, especially their desire for transgression and sexual liberation.7 The Minotaur’s association with political violence inspired two members of the Surrealist group, Georges Bataille and André Masson, to suggest the name Minotaure for a magazine published by Albert Skira and Tériade from 1933 to 1939.8 Although Picasso never really belonged to the Surrealists, he was always willing to absorb influences, and he shared their fascination with the figure of the Minotaur. Born in Malaga, on the southern coast of Spain, he was particularly attracted to myths rooted in Mediterranean culture. Although he never visited Greece, his interest in Greek myth and the tale of the

Previous spread: Pablo Picasso, Minotaure dans une barque sauvant une femme, March 1937 (Paris), India ink and gouache on paperboard, 8 5⁄8 × 10 5⁄8 inches (22 × 27 cm), Zervos IX: 97, Baigneuses, sirènes, femme nue et minotaure, Private collection. Photo by Eric Baudouin Above: Pablo Picasso, Minotaure courant, January 1, 1928, crayon and pasted paper on canvas, 55 7⁄8 × 91 3⁄8 inches (142 × 232 cm), Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Photo © CNAC/ MNAM/Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY (Photo: Philippe Migeat)

Opposite, top: Cover of the first issue of Minotaure (1933). Photo © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY Opposite, bottom: Pablo Picasso, Minotaure violant une femme, June 28, 1933, India ink, pen, and wash on paper, 18 ½ × 24 3⁄8 inches (47 × 62 cm), Musée Picasso, Paris.

Photo © RMN-Grand Palais/ Art Resource, NY (Photo: Mathieu Rabeau)

Minotaur was nourished through his friendship with the Greek publisher Christian Zervos.

By 1926, images of the frescoes from the palace at Knossos had already been reproduced in Zervos’s journal Cahiers d’Art, as well as in his book L’Art en Grèce des temps préhistoriques au début du XVIIIe siècle.9 The first appearance of the Minotaur in Picasso’s work dates from around this time: in 1927, commissioned by Marie Cuttoli, a pioneer in early-twentiethcentury textile and tapestry design, to produce a tapestry cartoon, he realized a collage of two striding legs surmounted by a bull’s head.

Cuttoli also ordered cartoons from Georges Braque, Joan Miró, and Fernand Léger for tapestry designs.

Picasso’s serious absorption in the Minotaur story, however, began some years later, in 1933.

The publishers Tériade and Skira, having already worked with Picasso on a book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, now commissioned him to draw the cover and several further illustrations for the first issue of their literary and artistic magazine Minotaure.10 Appearing on June 1, 1933, it placed Picasso within the Surrealist circle.11 Indeed, his five plates show the Minotaur with an extremely phallic dagger, an aggressive mode reflecting the Surrealists’ combativeness, yet the adornments of artificial leaves from an old hat belonging to his wife, Olga, in the collage on the cover illustrate the difference between his and their take on the Minotaur: while the beast appears political in Surrealist artists’ work, Picasso emphasizes its private and sexual context, as well as its “human, all too human” nature, as Josep Palau I Fabre called it.12 And this is exactly what we see in Picasso’s subsequent work, the Vollard Suite, a set of etchings commissioned by the art dealer and publisher Ambroise Vollard and realized between September 1930 and June 1936 (with three additional prints—portraits of Vollard—produced in 1937). Of the suite’s 100 engravings, 16 represent the Minotaur. Picasso started the series with forty etchings under the heading “The Sculptor’s Studio,” and it coincided with a new focus on sculpture in his work. Working in an increasingly autobiographical mode, he depicted himself

in the prints alternately as the bearded sculptor and the Minotaur.13 The Minotaur first appears in the Vollard engravings in a series of highly erotic scenes from May 17, 1933. From then on it became the single most often represented mythological figure in Picasso’s oeuvre. But Picasso had no interest in illustrating the ancient myth; instead, he gave the story personal interpretations, as an intimate diary of his life, his passions, and his tribulations.14 In the Vollard Suite Picasso discovered his affinity with the Minotaur as a new alter ego at a time of extreme emotional turmoil. Always incredibly self-aware, Picasso now focused on his human as well as his beastly side, illustrating the duality of his own nature.

His creative and tender Apollonian side is represented by the calmness of the bearded sculptor, and his animalistic Dionysian side is shown in the vitality and even aggressiveness of the highly eroticized figure of the Minotaur.15 As Picasso explained later to Françoise Gilot, his companion of the early postwar years and the mother of two of his children, the Minotaur knows that he is a monster.

He loves the company of beautiful girls and has local fishermen abduct them for him from nearby islands, and, Picasso continued, “they enjoy music and champagne and clams.

Euphoria beats melancholia and it all evolves into an orgy.”16 This is indeed what we see in some of Picasso’s works of the time, such as the Scène bacchique au minotaure or the scenes of violent passion that show the Minotaur aggressively ravishing Marie-Thérèse. But there are also many scenes of great tenderness between the Minotaur and Marie-Thérèse, as well as images that recall Picasso’s traditional sleepwatcher scenes from his days with one of his first great loves, Fernande Olivier.

Not only is Picasso’s interpretation of the Cretan myth self-referential, it also alludes to Spanish bullfight imagery in scenes where the action—combining the myth of the Minotaur with the corrida, as well as with fantasies of erotic adventures—takes place in the bullfight

Rarely did Picasso deliver himself as completely as in the works in which he wears the mask of the Minotaur.

49

Not only is Picasso’s interpretation of the Cretan myth selfreferential, it also alludes to Spanish bullfight imagery in scenes where the action—combining the myth of the Minotaur with the corrida, as well as with fantasies of erotic adventures—takes place in the bullfight arena. arena.17 Inspired by his father, Picasso, according to the famous bullfighter Luis Miguel Dominguín, was “a real bullfight addict.”18 He was eight years old when he visited his first corrida and painted his first bullfight scene, Little Picador (1890), and he continued with the subject in La Coruña and later in Barcelona, around 1900.19 Now, inspired by two lengthy vacations in Spain in 1933 and 1934, the theme of the bullfight reappeared in his art, often in combination with the myth of the Minotaur, taking on increasingly personal connotations.

In some of Picasso’s works of the time, the Minotaur is shown dying in the arena at the hands of a youth of classical beauty, while Marie-Thérèse looks on compassionately from among the spectators. Those tableaux are followed in June and July 1934 by extremely violent bullfight scenes, in which a horse desperately fights either the bull or the Minotaur, in struggles that are clearly not just life-anddeath but are filled with sexual innuendo.

Marie-Thérèse appears at the center of many of these compositions, half nude, half dressed as a female bullfighter, peacefully sleeping or appearing unconscious or dead (or more likely enjoying la petite mort, the so-called “little death” of blissful exhaustion after sex), and in some works holding onto a phallic spear for further emphasis. At times, lying on the back of the bull or the horse, she recalls innumerable interpretations of the Rape of Europa, such as, most prominently, Titian’s magnificent painting and Ruben’s copy of it. At others, she appears like an angel holding a candle that illuminates the vicious attack by the bull on the eversuffering horse in the arena, alluding to some mystical and religious dimension of the scene.

Picasso shares the emphasis of writers such as Jean Clair, Michel Leiris, and Federico García Lorca on the religious and sacrificial dimension of the shedding of blood in the arena, 50

an event that for them reflects Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross and may meld religion with sexuality and death.20 Picasso developed the idea of sacrifice in Minotaure aveugle guidé par une petite fille aux fleurs (Blind minotaur guided by a little girl with flowers), a drypoint engraving of September 22, 1934—the first in a series of drawings and prints laden with symbolic references and showing the Minotaur blind.

In most, the Minotaur is advancing tentatively, led or met by an innocent-looking young girl, with the features of Marie-Thérèse, who holds in her arms a dove (an image of the Holy Spirit?), a bouquet of flowers, or a spray of wheat. In this particular work the blind Minotaur strides

toward a young man leaning against a wall, while in the background fishermen are pulling in their nets and rolling up the sails of their boat.

In a separate image on the same sheet, framed and hung like a picture on a wall immediately to the left of this scene, we recognize a side-reversed and upside-down reproduction of Picasso’s very personal version of Jacques-Louis David’s Death of Marat (1934). The Minotaur’s blindness may point to visionary rather than physical sight; Picasso’s remark to Tériade, that one should blind painters just as some did goldfinches to make them sing better, seems to confirm this interpretation.21 But blindness here may also refer to the myth of Oedipus, who blinded himself to assuage his guilt about having killed his father and wed his mother.22 Either way, this myth was widely popular at the time with authors and composers such as André Gide, Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, and Igor Stravinsky, to name but a few.23 More than six months later, many of these images and associations reappear in one of Picasso’s outstanding etchings of the period, if not of his entire oeuvre: La Minotauromachie (Minotauromachy, March–April 1935), a work filled with intimate as well as religious symbolism.24 The largest etching in his entire production, it is a rich iconographic amalgam of the artist’s feelings, anxieties, and astonishing self-awareness at a particularly difficult period of his life: above and beyond his futile efforts to divorce his wife, Olga, and marry his pregnant mistress, Marie-Thérèse, there was the stress of political unrest in France and Spain.

In La Minotauromachie, which Picasso worked through seven states to complete, we see the Minotaur, no longer blind, advancing along a seashore, his right arm outstretched to shield himself from the light of the candle held aloft by a young girl with a bouquet of flowers in her other hand. Between the Minotaur and the girl is a rearing horse carrying a dead or sleeping bare-chested rejoneadora—a female bullfighter—with the beautiful features of Marie-Thérèse, her right arm holding a spear.

From a balcony, two girls holding doves watch over the scene, while the left side of the composition shows a bearded Christ-like figure in a loincloth climbing a ladder, an image clearly relating to scenes of Christ’s descent from the Cross.

In April 1936, Picasso took Marie-Thérèse and their seven-month-old daughter, Maya, to Juan-les-Pins, on the Côte d’Azur. In a painting made there he depicted himself in the role of the Minotaur pulling a cart carrying Marie-Thérèse, identified, as so often in his work, with the ever-suffering horse, which in this scene is giving birth to a little foal. While a few of Picasso’s works from the time show a blissful existence, others are dark in tenor and may foreshadow the end of an affair—and indeed Picasso had recently met a new romantic interest, the Surrealist photographer Dora Maar.

In a gouache produced on May 6, 1936, he depicts the Minotaur carrying a near-dead horse out of the entrance to a cave—probably the Minotaur’s labyrinth—while two hands reach out from the dark opening behind them.

On what seems to be an island, Marie-Thérèse, half hidden by a veil, looks on intently, though held back by an enormous hand. The Minotaur, too, holds out his own hand in her direction,

as if trying to shield himself from her view and to keep her away.

An increasing number of works from May 1936 show the Minotaur in perturbing situations, dragging himself exhausted, wounded, and finally dying. In one scene we see Marie-Thérèse on horseback, ready to kill the Minotaur with a long lance, while a young sailor appears ready to take him across the Styx in his boat. One of Picasso’s more stunning scenes featuring the dying Minotaur is a watercolor, Composition au minotaure (May 28, 1936), created as a stage curtain for Romain Rolland’s play Le Quatorze Juillet, which was to be shown during the first Bastille Day celebrations of France’s new Front Populaire government. It shows a monstrous birdman carrying the seemingly lifeless body of the Minotaur, who, in a blend of Picasso’s alter egos,

Opposite, top: Pablo Picasso, Dans l’arène.

Jeune homme achevant le minotaure (plate 89 of the Suite Vollard), May 29, 1933, etching on Montval laid paper, 7 5⁄8 × 10 ½ inches (19.4 × 26.8 cm), Musée Picasso, Paris. Photo © RMNGrand Palais/Art Resource, NY (Photo: Thierry Le Mage)

Below: Pablo Picasso, Femme à la bougie, combat entre le taureau et le cheval, 1933–34, pencil on paper, 10 ¼ × 13 5⁄8 inches (26 × 34.5 cm), Musée Picasso, Paris. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY

Opposite, bottom: Pablo Picasso, Minotaure aveugle guidé par une petite fille aux fleurs (plate 94 of the Suite Vollard), September 22, 1934, 12th state, engraving, 8 3⁄8 × 13 ¾ inches (25.1 × 35 cm), Musée Picasso, Paris. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais/ Art Resource, NY (Photo: Mathieu Rabeau)

is dressed in a Harlequin costume. On the left of the scene a bearded man, carrying on his shoulders a youth with outstretched arms, seems to want to halt their progress. He raises his right fist in the Communist salute, which had also become the greeting of the Spanish Republicans in opposition to the raised open palm of the Hitler salute adopted by the supporters of Francisco Franco. The imagery, while clearly derived from Goya, is also directly inspired by two of Rolland’s plays. Yet it also includes what was for Picasso a more personal identification with both the Minotaur and the Harlequin, the latter in his role as a psychopomp, in myth the figure who accompanies the souls of the dead into the afterlife.25 In early 1937, works that speak of Picasso’s increasing anxiety about the situation in his homeland multiplied. The Spanish Republic was losing ground in its fight against fascism; on February 13, 1937, Malaga fell to Franco.

Another source of anxiety was rooted in Picasso’s increasingly complicated private life.

As already noted, he had by this time met Maar.

Whereas on July 29, 1936, he could still paint 51

While much of the literature on this period of Picasso’s life and work concentrates on his aggressiveness in the guise of the Minotaur, he was also touchingly willing and able to expose his vulnerability and his shortcomings.

Marie-Thérèse lying blissfully in his arms while Dora walks behind a window, briefly thereafter, on September 5, during a stay in Mougins in the South of France, he drew the Minotaur making love to a rather laid-back Dora.

Starting at about this time, Picasso was sharing less and less of his time with Marie-Thérèse, the mother of his infant daughter, and more with Dora, who was intellectually more in tune with him and his friends.

Picasso’s many works featuring the dying Minotaur during the years 1936 and 1937, as his relationship with Dora developed, seem to express a sense of guilt toward the loving Marie-Thérèse. In March 1937, for example, we see this shift reflected in a series of works in which the Minotaur saves Marie-Thérèse from drowning. He carries his almost lifeless mistress onto a boat while multiple swimming Doras witness the scene from the surrounding sea. In the distance, on the horizon, a threatening head appears.

One of the last works in this series is a drawing from December 6, 1937, in which the Minotaur, transpierced by a spear, faces his demise in a mirror held up to him by MarieThérèse, who emerges nude from the sea, crowned with a wreath of flowers and holding a spear. She is resplendent in her beauty while he is ugly and decrepit, seemingly in reflection of his dark soul. This view is apparently what Picasso had in mind when he told Françoise Gilot many years later that the Minotaur cannot be loved for himself.26 Feeling human and bestial, victim and perpetrator all at once,27 Picasso found in the mythological figure of the Minotaur a convenient stand-in for his divided self, one that offers a proof of his self-awareness, a recognition that he could be both friend and foe to his devoted lover Marie-Thérèse. While he was capable of great tenderness in his depictions of her, he also did not refrain from showing his physical passion for her in scenes that may represent rape or just intense, passionate 52

acts of lovemaking. As time passed and his attachment to Maar grew, he could also show his annoyance at Marie-Thérèse’s presence in his life, in addition to anger with himself for putting her in such pain. While much of the literature on this period of Picasso’s life and work concentrates on his aggressiveness in the guise of the Minotaur, he was also touchingly willing and able—more so than in any other period of his life—to expose his vulnerability and his shortcomings.

With the escalation of the Civil War in Spain, this period of intense self-involvement approached its end. There was no doubt which

side Picasso would support, and as Franco’s victory became inevitable, his state of mind was anguished. He shared his fears and anxieties in conversations with Zervos and Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, but these feelings were less intimately self-directed than before. Worried about the fate of his family in Barcelona and his native country in general, Picasso increasingly moved from the introspective world of the Minotaur works to images dealing with the political situation and issues of more general interest, although always—as in Guernica, his magnum opus of 1937—through the lens of his personal life.

1 See E. Tériade, “En causant avec Picasso,” L’Intransigeant, June 15, 1932, pp. 27–28, and Jean Leymarie’s introduction to Picasso e il Mediterraneo, exh. cat. (Rome: Edizioni dell’elefante, 1982), pp. 19, 20.

2 See David Douglas Duncan, Picasso’s Picassos: The Treasures of La Californie (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961), p. 111.

The literature on Picasso and his fascination with the Minotaur is voluminous. I have consulted the following works in my research for this paper: Marie-Laure Bernadac, “Il Minotauro,” in Picasso e il Mediterraneo, p. 153; Bernadac, “1933–1940, du Minotaure a Guernica,” in Bernadac, Brigitte Léal, María Teresa Ocaña, eds., Picasso: Toros y Toreros, exh. cat. (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1993), p. 147; Marc Le Bot, “Minotauromachie,” in Arc no. 62 (1981):30–34; Elinor W. Gadon, “Picasso and the Minotaur,” India International Centre Quarterly 30, no. 1 (Summer 2003):20–29; Hélène Lassalle, “Picasso et le mythe antique,” in Philippe Hoffmann, Paul-Louis Rinuy, and Alexandre Farnoux, eds., Antiquités Imaginaires.

La Référence antique dans l’art modern, de la Renaissance à nos jours, in Etudes de Littérature Ancienne 7 (Paris: Presses de l’École normale supérieure, 1996), pp. 221–42; Steingrim Laursen, “Picasso und die Mythen,” in Ortrud Westheider, Picasso und die Mythen (Bremen: H. M. Hauschild, 2002), pp. 24–26; Paloma Esteban Leal, “Picasso Minotauro,” in Picasso Minotauro, exh. cat. (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2000), pp. 223–30; Juan Malpartida, “Mitos, evolucón y la imaginación de Picasso,” in Fundación Picasso, Picasso. El Minotauro en su laberinto, exh. cat. (Malaga: Ayuntamiento de Malaga, 2014), p. 39; Takanori Nagai, “Picasso and the Minotaur,” in Picasso: The Love and the Anguish—the Road to Guernica, exh. cat. (Kyoto: National Museum of Modern Art, 1995), pp. 347–52; Josep Palau I Fabre, From the Minotaur to Guernica, 1927–1939, ed. Julià Guillamon (Barcelona: Ediciones Poligrafa, 2011), pp. 11, 15, 145; Juan Carrete Parrondo, “La Minotauromaquia. Picasso entre lo Apolineo y lo Dionisiaco,” in Fundación Picasso, Picasso. El Minotauro en su laberinto, pp. 15–21; Curt von Seckel, “Picassos Wege zur Symbolik der Minotauromachie,” and Valérie-Anne SircoulombMüller, “The Minotaur and Minotauromachy or In Search of an Alter Ego in Picasso’s Imaginary Labyrinth,” in Markus Müller, ed., Pablo Picasso and Marie-Thérèse Walter: Between Classicism and Surrealism (Bielefeld: Kerber Verlag, 2004), pp.

45–57; Sylvie Vautier, “Picasso’s Minotaur: A Myth Too Human,” in Picasso Minotauro, exh. cat. (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2000), p. 240; and Ortrud Westheider, “Im Bann des Minotaurus,” in Picasso und die Mythen, pp. 148, 149.

3 “Si on marquait sur une carte tous les itinéraires par ou j’ai passé, et si on les reliait par un trait, cela figurerait peut-être un Minotaure.” Quoted in Dor de la Souchère, Picasso in Antibes (New York: Pantheon Books, 1960), p. 54. Also quoted by Leymarie in his introduction to Picasso e il Mediterraneo, pp. 19, 20.

4 See Ellen Young, The Slaying of the Minotaur: Development of the Myth, 700–400 b.c., PhD thesis, Bryn Mawr College, 1972, pp. 128, 169, 172, 174. Other publications addressing this Mediterranean myth include Laursen, “Picasso und die Mythen”; André Siganos, Le Minotaure et son mythe (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1993); and Theodore Ziolkowski, Minos and the Moderns: Cretan Myth in Twentieth-Century Literature and Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

5 Malpartida, “Mitos, evolucón y la imaginación de Picasso,” p. 39. See, for example, the Attic red-figure terra-cotta columnkrater from c. 460 b.c. in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

6 Sir Arthur Evans, The Palace of Minos: A Comparative Account of the Successive Stages of the Early Cretan Civilization as Illustrated by the Discoveries at Knossos (London: Macmillan, 1921, 1928A, 1928B, 1930, 1935A, 1935B, 1936). See also Marguerite Yourcenar, “Aspects d’une légend et histoire d’une pièce,” Théâtre II (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), pp. 165–79.

7 See Esteban Leal, “Picasso Minotauro,” p. 229, and Vautier, “Picasso’s Minotaur,” p. 248.

8 Lassalle, “Picasso et le mythe antique,” p. 223, Ziolkowski, Minos and the Moderns, pp. 70, 72, 82, and Yourcenar, “Aspects d’une légend,” p. 166. André Masson and Man Ray were among the artists who produced works featuring the Minotaur.

9 See Gérard Regnier, Picasso and Greece, exh. cat. (Andros: Museum of Contemporary Art, Basil and Elise Goulandris Foundation, 2004), p. 198. On the influence of Cahiers d’Art see Romy Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France between the Wars (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), p. xi, and Ziolkowski, Minos and the Moderns, p. 75.

10 See Colette Giraudon, “The Thirties, or the Culture of Unease,” in Müller, ed., Pablo Picasso and Marie-Thérèse Walter, p. 25.

11 The covers of the ensuing issues figured bulls or the Minotaur by, among others, André Derain, Henri Matisse, René Magritte, André Masson, Marcel Duchamp, Joan Miró, Salvador Dali, André Masson, and Diego Rivera.

12 Palau I Fabre, From the Minotaur to Guernica, pp. 144, 145.

13 Picasso was commissioned to produce the etchings in 1930.

He worked extensively on the set in the spring of 1933 and completed it in 1937. The death of Ambroise Vollard in 1939, and the advent of World War II, meant that the prints started coming onto the art market only in the 1950s. Picasso’s sculptures saw a sudden surge of interest and were published in Minotaure magazine in June 1933, in photographs by Brassaï. See Elizabeth Cowling, Picasso: Style and Meaning (London: Phaidon Press, 2002), p. 544, and Cowling, “The Image of Picasso—Sculptor in the 1930s,” in John Richardson and Diana Widmaier, Picasso: L’Amour Fou (New York: Gagosian Gallery, 2011), pp. 257–91.

14 See Christian Zervos, Cahiers d’Art nos. 7–8 (1931):369.

15 Laursen, “Picasso und die Mythen” p. 24; Ziolkowski, Minos and the Moderns, p. 165; and Leymarie’s introduction to Picasso e il Mediterraneo, p. 22.

16 Picasso, quoted in Françoise Gilot and Carlton Lake, Life with Picasso (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), pp. 43–44.

17 See Jean Clair, “Motifs mithraiques et allegories chrétiennes dans l’oeuvre de Picasso,” in Picasso: Sous le soleil de Mithra, exh. cat. (Martigny: Fondation Pierre Gianadda, 2001), pp.

15–28; Dominique Dupuis-Labbé, “L’Arène, lieu de l’amour et du sang,” in ibid., pp. 29–32; Pierre Daix, La Vie de peintre de Pablo Picasso (Paris: Seuil, 1977), p. 248; and Sircoulomb-Müller, “The Minotaur and Minotauromachy,” p. 45.

18 Georges Bodaille and Luis Miguel Dominguín, Picasso: Toros y Toreros (Paris: Éditions cercle d’art, 1993), p. 14, and Keizo Kanki, “The Road to Guernica,” in Picasso: The Love and the Anguish, p. 323.

19 See Ocaña, “Picasso and the Bulls,” in Picasso: The Love and the Anguish, pp. 340–42.

20 See Michel Leiris, L’Âge d’homme (1939), Miroir de la Tauromachie (1937), and, earlier still, La Grande Fuite de neige (1926); and Georges Bataille, L’Érotisme, 1957, in Oeuvres Completes (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), 10:24. See also SircoulombMüller, “The Minotaur and Minotauromachy,” p. 52.

21 E. Tériade, “En causant avec Picasso,” L’Intransigeant, June 15, 1932, pp. 27–28.

22 Vautier, “Picasso’s Minotaur,” p. 241, Parrondo, “La Minotauromaquia,” p. 21, and Palau I Fabre, From the Minotaur to Guernica, p. 261.

23 See Bernadac, “Il Minotauro,” p. 164.

24 In La Minotauromachie de Pablo Picasso (Geneva: Patrick Cramer, 1987), p. 5, Sebastian and Herma C. Goeppert call La Minotauromachie one of the chef d’oeuvres of all graphic art.

See also François Lachenal, ed., Pablo Picasso. Maler, Grafiker, Bildhauer, Keramiker, Dichter, exh. cat. (Ingelheim am Rhein: Stadt Ingelheim, 1981).

25 Romain Rolland’s two plays, “Le Quatorze Juillet” and “Danton,” are published together in one volume in both French and English: in French, Théatre de la Revolution: Le 14 Juillet—Danton—Les Loups (Paris: Albin Michel, 1926), and in English, Two Plays of the French Revolution, trans. Barret H. Clark (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1918). See Gertje R. Utley, Picasso: The Communist Years (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 15, 16.

26 Gilot and Lake, Life with Picasso, p. 50.

27 See Dupuis-Labbé, “L’Arène, lieu de l’amour et du sang,” in Picasso: Sous le soleil de Mithra, pp. 29–32.

Opposite, top: Pablo Picasso, Minotaure et jument morte devant une grotte face à une fille au voile, May 6, 1936, India ink and gouache on paper, 195⁄8 × 25 5⁄8 inches (50 × 65 cm), Musée Picasso, Paris. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY Opposite, bottom: Pablo Picasso, Étude pour La dépouille du Minotaure en costume d’arlequin (Rideau de scène pour Le quatorze juillet), May 28, 1936, India ink and gouache on paper, 17 ½ × 21 3⁄8 inches (44.5 × 54.5 cm), Musée Picasso, Paris. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY

Above: Pablo Picasso, La fin d’un monstre, December 6, 1937, pencil on paper, 15¼ × 22 1 ⁄8 inches (38.6 × 56.3 cm), Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh.

Photo Courtesy Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, purchased with the support of the Heritage Lottery Fund and the Art Fund 1995 Artwork © 2017 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

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JONAS WOOD MURAL In Los Angeles, the Museum of Contemporary Art’s 5,400-square-foot facade now hosts a vibrant mural by one of the city’s own artists. Meredith Mendelsohn reports on the impact the mural has on revitalizing the museum’s exterior and downtown.

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In an era when dazzling architecture is the artworld norm, and in a city where there’s no shortage of flash, the unassuming home of The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in downtown Los Angeles can feel hidden in plain sight. Los Angeles artist Jonas Wood has changed that. Ever since December, when he covered MOCA’s 5,400-squarefoot facade with a mural of verdant plants in decorative ceramic vessels, the building’s stretch of Grand Avenue has been decidedly sunnier. “It has completely changed the temperature outside the museum,” says the institution’s director, Philippe Vergne.

The mural grabs the attention of passersby but also humanizes Grand Avenue, a busy north-

south corridor that is now one of the epicenters of L.A.’s cultural activity. While skyscrapers and office towers vie for attention with some of the city’s more muscular architectural attractions—the neighboring metal-clad Walt Disney Concert Hall and The Broad museum, with its dramatic concrete-and-fiberglass honeycomb facade—Wood’s mural immediately attracts the eye by transforming the building’s exterior. Rendered in Wood’s trademark style of flat intersecting planes bursting with pattern and color, the image is also a reminder of what’s inside the building. “This was really about bringing the museum outside,” says Vergne. “I always liked the idea that when you looked at ancient architecture in Greece or in Rome, it used

to be polychrome and with time it became monochromatic. So for me it’s also a little bit about that.

Let’s bring back some visual lust in the streets.”

Designed in the mid-1980s by Japanese architect Arata Isozaki, the somewhat traditional, redsandstone-clad MOCA flagship, with its arched entryway and pared-down geometric facade, was funded as a redevelopment project to draw visitors and boost commercial activity along Grand Avenue. Adhering to height restrictions in place at the time, Isozaki situated most of the floors underground, including the galleries, which are illuminated by skylights. It hasn’t always been advantageous to be the unassuming introvert of the neighborhood, but it turns out that Isozaki inadvertently 55

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created a blank canvas. “We’d been having these conversations at MOCA about how curiously invisible our building is since much of it is actually below grade, and I was looking at it one day and I realized there’s more of it above grade then we think there is, but it just kind of disappears on that streetscape,” says Helen Molesworth, the museum’s chief curator. “So I wondered what if we drew attention to it in a different way, and I thought, you know what would look good there? A Jonas Wood. It was extremely intuitive.”

Fortunately for MOCA and the public, Wood agreed to the task. “The idea to do this was really smart because MOCA has an amazing permanent collection—there are like twenty-five Rothkos and thirty Rauschenbergs—and the building is 56

very nondescript, and it’s almost like a subway station, where you have to go down the stairs,” says the forty-year-old Wood, who grew up on the East Coast and moved to L.A. in 2003. “They have a million people taking pictures in front of the mural now,” says Jonas, who modestly insists that any number of artists could have transformed the facade this successfully.

For MOCA’s facade, Wood proposed a version of his Still Life with Two Owls (2014), a complex canvas first exhibited in 2015 at Gagosian Hong Kong in a joint show with the Japanese-born ceramic artist Shio Kusaka, whom Wood is married to and whose pots appear in the painting. (The two have another joint show at the Voorlinden Museum in the Netherlands this fall.) While Wood usually works at a

smaller scale, making paintings, prints, and drawings in the studio he shares with Kusaka, he’s no stranger to the large-scale format: in 2014 he created a billboard of potted plants for the High Line in New York, and another for the nonprofit organization la><art, whose brick facade he also painted.

“One reason we chose him is that he can handle very different scales,” says Molesworth. “He can make a small print and then that can operate at the scale of a very large painting.” His flat, colorful figuration, which borrows a bit from the illustration aesthetic and saturated colors of ’60s Pop art, also lends itself to such an endeavor. “Even when he makes three-dimensional space you’re very aware of the flatness of the plane, which is particularly good for this kind of mural,” says Molesworth.

Previous spread: Jonas Wood, Still Life with Two Owls, 2016, courtesy of The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Photo

by Elon Schoenholz Detail of the mural. Photo by Ben Lee Ritchie Handler

“And then of course there is his palette, which is so bright, so sunny, so optimistic. And all of those things are really good for public space.”

Wood changed the painting’s scale and swapped different parts of the canvas to present a continuous image of shelves and pots along the irregularly shaped wall, but the facade’s rocky face presented another set of challenges for the artist. The solution was a vinyl stickerlike material, which is heated up and then adhered to the surface. “We tested out a lot of different materials,” says Wood, referring to his collaboration with the fabricator and artist Eder Cetina, of the digital graphics firm Olson Visual, who has worked with countless artists, including for example Barbara Kruger, to transform artworks into murals. After Wood re-

made the painting, Cetina printed a digital image of it on vinyl strips, which were then painstakingly fitted together.

Wood, who lives in the city’s Westside with his wife and two kids (ages five and seven), grew up in Boston, attended college in upstate New York (where he got his BA in psychology with a minor in studio art), and then moved to Seattle to get his MFA in painting and drawing. There he met Kusaka, who was studying ceramics, and the two headed together to Los Angeles in 2003. “It was either New York or L.A., and a friend of mine told us we could get jobs working for artists if we moved to L.A.” Kusaka got a job working for the sculptor Charles Ray while Wood soon landed at the studio of Laura Owens, who was already recognized 57

as one of the city’s most influential young artists. “I got to learn from someone who has a tremendous studio practice, but also who is open to painting lots of different things,” says Wood. “That was a big deal for me.”

That open-minded approach to subject matter has yielded a body of work that runs the gamut from still lifes, interiors, and landscapes to portraits, which include family members as well as sports figures (based on trading cards, one of Wood’s pictorial inspirations early on). What links his varied imagery is a continuity of style, a cheery graphic modernism softened by a slight quirkiness—an imperfect line, a skewed perspective—that feels highly personal, as though the way an object makes him feel is as important as the way it looks.

“I paint what turns me on,” he says. And while traces of Owens’s style can sometimes be detected, the British-born Los Angelino David Hockney comes more to mind, with his abstracting take on sun-drenched suburban mid-century L.A., as does Henri Matisse, whose flattened, decorative, allover approach prioritizes no part of the canvas over another. In Still Life with Two Owls, Wood’s use of pattern—the stripes of Kusaka’s ceramic pots, or the zigzagging lines of plant leaves—inevitably invokes Matisse’s groundbreaking use of pattern to add structure to an image and to harmoniously merge figuration and abstraction.

“Hockney was a big, big influence on me. He has that Renaissance ability to paint from life but also he’s also an inventor,” says Wood. “But I love Picasso and Braque and Matisse and Vuillard. . . .

And the thing about Hockney or Alex Katz or Lucian Freud or any of those people that I’m super into, they were into those modern painters, too.

So I get to look at Matisse or Picasso through their work.” Given Wood’s deep involvement in the history of contemporary and modern art, his work

seems like an especially fitting invitation to enter a museum. But the mural also reveals a viscerally Californian sensibility that makes it feel right for this spot. Wood’s sunny visions of houseplants, architectural pottery, and blue sky invoke a mid-century postwar moment when the new availability of steel meant bigger windows and more light, and when greater affluence meant more leisure time and the popularization of the indoor/outdoor lifestyle made fashionable in L.A. by such designers as Charles and Ray Eames. The reference feels culturally appropriate. The mural, perhaps coincidentally, also hints at a Japanese aesthetic: the generous use of black, the woodblock-print-like linearity, the wave pattern of Kusaka’s ceramics. It’s a fitting reference for a building designed by a Japanese architect in a neighborhood not far from the city’s historic Little Tokyo.

Still Life with Two Owls was actually sourced in part from an image of a shelf with plants and pottery from a 1970s House & Garden–type magazine, says Wood. “I usually use those and then replace about 70 percent of the plants and objects in them with things I’m interested in.” Kusaka’s patterned pots fill the shelves in the mural, while the two owls are renditions of figures in the couple’s collection by the late ceramicist Akio Takamori. The plants are a mix of Wood’s own (he has a lot of them, he says) and found images.

At the end of its run, in late 2017, the vinyl will be peeled off and disposed of, immortalized by its many appearances across social media, but Vergne and Molesworth hope to adorn the facade with a new mural by a different artist each year. “This thing that was invisible is now totally present. And it’s present in a very, very lively way,” says Molesworth. “I see people walking by and pointing at it and talking about it. For a lot of people it’s an Instagrammable moment.”

Jonas Wood, Still Life with Two Owls, 2014, oil and acrylic on canvas, 90 × 118 inches (228.6 × 299.7 cm) Artwork © Jonas Wood

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Binx photographed

by Craig McDean w w w. s a c a i . j p

LAYLA AND MAJNUN A celebrated collaboration between Sir Howard Hodgkin and choreographer Mark Morris. Nancy Dalva takes us behind the scenes.

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s this issue of Gagosian Quarterly was in production, Sir Howard Hodgkin died, at the age of eighty-four, in London. I had interviewed him a few months earlier in Berkeley, California, at the premiere of the Mark Morris Dance Group’s Layla and Majnun, on which he had been a crucial collaborator. Howard was an interviewer’s dream—he wouldn’t unpack the meanings of his paintings for you, but he talked freely about artmaking, process, the way and the why of his work, and the more general notions and feelings beneath the form. I feel profoundly bereft— such was his power, in person and in paint.

—ND

Prelude Zellerbach Hall, a home-away-from-home in Berkeley for the Mark Morris Dance Group, is at capacity, the audience rustling and settling. In their midst sits an endearing and gallant figure in an emerald-green silk shirt that brings out his brilliant blue eyes: the artist responsible for the evening’s decor and costumes, Sir Howard Hodgkin. This is his fourth collaboration with Morris; the first was Rhymes with Silver (1997), next Kolam (2002), then the three-act Mozart Dances (2006), and now, in the fall of 2016, Layla and Majnun. The previous week, Hodgkin had been at the Mark Morris Dance Center in Brooklyn, seeing and hearing the work outside the framing stagecraft that amplifies it. He is nothing if not all in—immersed, dedicated, given to the kind of sardonic and sagacious and understated merriment of a person who exists in a resolute equilibrium.

At the dress rehearsal in Berkeley, Hodgkin had sat as close as he could get to the stage. But on opening night he moved all the way to the back— assured of the detail, he took in the larger scene.

There were traditional Azerbaijani singers, weaving a melodic spell. There were English surtitles telegraphing a story known throughout the Middle East, in Muslim, Sufi, and Hindu cultures, and most recently retold in Indian movies. (Morris and Hodgkin had worked from a translation of the Persian version of the story by the twelfth-century poet Nizami Ganjavi, whose epic is considered one of the classic works of Sufi literature.) There were the raucous and fabulous musicians of the Silk Road Ensemble, center stage. To the sides there were staircases with wide landings, and at the back a raised walkway, or danceway. And there were of course dancers, surging and coursing about in Hodgkin-designed costumes—all in all, an elaborate show-and-tell, with shifting layers and levels, like some kind of magical and colorful storybook come to life.

Behind everything hung an outsize version of the painting Hodgkin calls Love and Death. On a grained background, a swirling sea of red is overlapped by a smaller series of jagged, urgent currents of green. Which, a viewer might ask, was love, and which was death? Are those green pastures the Elysian Fields, and is that the heart itself beating? Or is that springtime, and over there, a sea of blood? Et in Arcadia ego?

Just that morning, the artist sat with me for tea and an interview. His affable and erudite partner, the musicologist Antony Peattie, occasionally joined in from a nearby sofa. The first thing Hodgkin said was that he didn’t remember how he had met Morris. Some weeks later, in a different yet curiously similar interview, Morris said the same 62

thing about him. The choreographer, the painter— are they so unalike, but for dancing’s evanescence?

Surely a painting is frozen choreography—the artist’s dance before the canvas suspended in time.

Would you say that your art and Mark’s have things in common?

HOWARD HODGKIN Yes. ND What are they?

HH That—that I can’t answer.

ND Oh please. Make it up.

HH [laughs] I can’t.

ND Well, I’ll make some suggestions and you could say yes or no?

HH You’re an outside observer [laughs].

ND Oh, come on! Would you say that both of you are more interested in shape than line?

HH Yes. ND The response to your work is so immediate and visceral and it’s filled with delight. In that way I think it’s like the choreography—it’s immediate.

You don’t have to thrash through a thicket of ideas to get at it.

HH I accept that absolutely.

ANTONY PEATTIE And both Mark and Howard allude NANCY DALVA

to narrative—and to object and representation—and then kind of skitter away from it. So some of the dances are telling a story and some simply— HH Aren’t.

ND I feel as if the narrative arc is there and you dip in and out of it.

AP Exactly.

HH Yes, I think that’s absolutely what happens.

ND Morris has always been called a postmodernist—to me that’s because he’s the ultimate ecumenicist, he sees everything as equal. It’s like when Dido says to Aeneas, “Trojans and Tyrians are alike to me.” Everything’s alike to Morris: folk dancing, ballet, it doesn’t matter. Everything— HH Can be— ND Used.

HH Used. Exactly. I feel like that very much when I’m working, because painting as I do now, which with age has become much more straightforward, anything can be used.

ND What kinds of things are you using?

HH Oh, the same old things as always. But with age, color and shape and so forth become more accessible.

ND Why? Or how?

HH Help, Antony.

Well, you were saying that you can use anything. So you mean, for example, accident, different gestures, hands or— HH Always.

AP —brushes, or— HH Yes. AP You feel freer.

HH Age has freed everything up in the most extraordinary way.

ND Tell me, has your way of working with Mark Morris changed over time?

HH It hasn’t fundamentally changed, but I think we both trust each other far more than you do when you’re strangers in the beginning.

ND How do you work together?

HH Usually he begins by telling me about some music.

ND Do you then listen to it?

HH Yes. ND How much of your painting is a response to the music?

HH I can’t really say.

ND Are you aware of it as you’re creating the decor?

HH No. ND What about the story?

AP

Previous spread: Photo by Mat Hayward Opposite, top: Photo by Susana Millman Opposite, bottom: Photo by Mat Hayward Above: Howard Hodgkin, Love and Death, 2015, oil on wood, 31 × 35 inches (78.7 × 88.9 cm). © Howard Hodgkin.

Photo by Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd. Following spread: Photo by Frank Wing

Ah. Well, that was different.

Different from your other collaborations?

HH Yes. I couldn’t think quite how I could do something as narrative as Layla and Majnun, and then one day, having sort of tried to work it out through a not very good translation, I suddenly realized, it’s all about love and death.

ND Well, that’s simple.

HH Yes [laughs]. Exactly. And that meant suddenly I could do it.

ND So you need a large topic.

HH Oh yes. Definitely. Always. And then—all art is really a communication of some kind or other. I wanted to encapsulate it somehow.

ND How did you make the painting that was the model for the backdrop? One sees this background material—a graininess that seems to be the ground?

HH Yeah, you’re quite right.

ND What do you paint on?

HH Wood.

ND Always?

HH Virtually always now.

ND When did that start?

AP ’75 or ’6, and the first picture was inspired by India.

HH

ND

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HODGKIN REBELLED AGAINST THE AUSTERITY OF ABSTRACT ART AND INSTEAD PUT THE HUMAN SELF, IN ALL ITS DESIRE AND SUFFERING, AT THE CENTER OF HIS UNIVERSE. Jonathan Jones, The Guardian

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HOWARD HODGKIN WAS ONE OF THE GREAT ARTISTS AND COLORISTS OF HIS GENERATION. Nicholas Serota

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How is it—this is not a yes or no question— how is it that on a flat surface, without going into any of the vanishing-point perspectives that were the devices of those who preceded you, you create such a sensation of volume? Craft, right?

HH Yes, I think that is exactly what I do. But I can’t say how.

ND I suppose it’s like asking a tree how it does photosynthesis [laughter].

HH I think that’s exactly right.

ND In the theater, it doesn’t look like a smaller painting that you enlarged, it looks as if it was always meant to be that scale.

HH That’s a compliment I entirely accept.

ND How did you do it? Did you know the size it would be made to? How did you achieve that scale?

HH I had done it in England several times before, but not as successfully. To me, it was very attractive artistically that by designing backdrops and elements of stage scenery I could work on a very large scale. But that was the first time I understood that of course I could make a painting the size of the backdrop of a play, or a dance, or whatever. I was in control.

ND I was very struck by how self-contained Layla and Majnun is as an experience. The lighting designer Jim Ingalls told me there are hundreds of lighting cues, and he’s carefully chosen different colors for the floor, for the dancers, and then what he calls the washes— HH He’s done it beautifully.

ND There are all kinds of light sources, but one of them is the light shining through your canvas from the back, so the dancers are dancing by the light of the painting. And that is how we see them.

HH Marvelous.

ND What do you think about the colors that he’s added?

HH I think he has extended what I’ve done with total success.

ND In a way, then, what you’ve created is a world in which this dance happens. It takes place inside your painting.

HH Yes. ND Do you respond to weather?

HH Oh, yes.

ND How? HH Oh, in a perfectly straightforward way. Bad weather makes me feel sad. And, of course, the opposite.

ND

Well, I think I respond to your paintings like weather. They have that effect on me. They are their own climate.

AP So many of his pictures are weather. A Storm.

Late Afternoon. Times of Day. Clouds.

ND Monday and the Sea. HH Yes, yes.

AP There’s a lot of sea too.

ND But I feel when I look at your paintings that I’m participating in some kind of art-historical tradition. They’re unique to you, but they’re not outside the canon.

HH No, they’re not.

ND And that is also exactly true of Mark Morris as well, his works participate in the canon.

HH Yes. ND Maybe they even comment on it.

HH Maybe. I can’t comment on that [laughs].

ND How do you look at dance?

HH As a series of patterns.

ND Perhaps you also feel as if you have things in common with Mark temperamentally?

HH Yes. ND What would they be?

HH We’re both quite hard to satisfy and we have similar attitudes to other artists.

ND Which is?

HH Deep concern.

ND What’s that code for?

AP Critical?

HH Yes. ND Whose art do you like besides your own?

HH Matisse was always a tremendous influence on me, but a moral one rather than an artistic one.

ND Matisse owned a small Bathers by Cézanne that he eventually gave to the City of Paris. He said that painting, which he kept in his studio, had been his moral compass, and that he could not imagine his life and art without Cézanne. It sounds to me as though that’s what you’re saying about Matisse, essentially?

HH Yes, it’s exactly the same. There’s no reason you should have seen it, but I painted a picture called For Matisse—it’s a tribute, but it’s not about Matisse’s art, it’s about Matisse’s influence on my life.

ND Does the thought of him keep you going?

HH Yes. ND I think his persistence was heroic.

ND

So do I. How do you not give up?

HH I don’t know.

ND Like Samuel Beckett: “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”

HH Yes, just like that.

ND If you had to choose perfection of the life or of the art, I get the sense you’d go with the art.

HH Definitely [laughter].

ND What haven’t I asked you that I should have?

HH Why I go on.

ND Why do you go on?

HH The obvious answer is a sort of perfectionism. But that is such a vain thing, and I think art is much more important than the vanity of the artist.

ND So you think the paintings are larger than you?

HH Yes. ND In the theater you’ve left room for other artists.

HH Yes, I know.

ND Why? HH Why not?

ND And you’ve left room for the viewer in the same way.

HH Yes. HH

ND

Coda In the theater, the tragedy that is Layla and Majnun builds to a pair of lovers’ joint demise. In the most formal pictorial way, they meet their doom upstage, subsiding to the ground in a final embrace just in the center of Love and Death. Just at that moment, the backdrop is flooded with crimson light so rich that the entire universe seems saturated.

And the painting changes: the small, zigzagging green brushstrokes turn black. The larger swathes of bright tomato deepen to ruby and become a valentine. Here, then, in a moment of theatrical alchemy, the viewer’s first question—which color is love and which color is death?—finds an answer.

Black is the color of death. It is small. Red is the color of love. It is vast. It has dominion. Love, says Hodgkin’s painting, is greater than death.

Performance images of Mark Morris Dance Group performing Layla and Majnun (2016) with costumes and set designed by Howard Hodgkin, Cal Performances, Berkeley, 2016.

Previous spread and left: Photo by Susana Millman

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1000 KARAT BLAU DESIGNED BY AXEL SCHMID

TRANSITION FROM COOL TO WARM James Lawrence offers an intimate view of Anselm Kiefer’s latest exhibition, exploring the erotic tactility and romantic allusions of the artist’s recent paintings, vivid watercolors and handmade books.

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e are in Anselm Kiefer’s studio outside Paris on a hot day in September 2016, looking at some of the works to appear in his forthcoming exhibition at Gagosian, Transition from Cool to Warm. A few books rest on tables in the library, a long and airy section of the upper floor. The pages in the largest of the books are bigger than A1 paper, which is a little under two by three feet; even the smaller books are the size of a large atlas. Each page carries a female nude, sometimes formally graceful, sometimes erotically contorted, always eloquently limned and modeled. Some appear in yoga poses next to bodies of water; others evoke the watercolors of Auguste Rodin, to whom Kiefer pays tribute in the book The Cathedrals of France (2013) by combining sexually charged figures and renderings of ecclesiastical architecture, two abiding interests of the earlier artist.

The pages of the books seem lighter than their rigidity and thickness would suggest. Hands accustomed to the flexibility of even the heaviest paper somehow anticipate greater heft as they turn the stiff bound sheets. Each cardboard leaf has a coating of plaster so mineral dry that it promises an insatiable thirst. Instead, painted figures and fluid stains almost float on sized surfaces that are much less absorbent than paper. The results deliver the sensation of a gessoed fresco painting, along with the visual impression of a watercolor and the aura of a codex.

Kiefer’s studio is a huge industrial cuboid across the road from an aerodrome in the town of CroissyBeaubourg, a dozen miles east of Paris. At 375,000 square feet, it has slightly more floor space than Tate Modern. In this former department-store warehouse, even the largest works can seem almost 72

casually deposited in place, as though by a distracted giant. We pass corrugated towers from the set of An Amfang (At the beginning), the opera that Kiefer and Jörg Widmann created in 2009. We pass large canvases on dollies; tubs of well-categorized materials, both raw and reclaimed; and vitrines that seem familiar from this or that exhibition. One might turn a corner and find pieces of surplus Cold War military hardware—perhaps from the decommissioned MiG-21 that arrived at Kiefer’s studio a few years ago—just as easily as one might find a pool with a field of inverted dried sunflowers suspended just over the water’s surface. It soon becomes apparent how easy becoming completely lost would be, not only because the improbably capacious space is disorienting but also because its internal arrangement—like Kiefer’s art in general— discourages any sense of closure or segregation.

The notion of completion rapidly recedes behind the pervasive atmosphere of concurrence. It is as though factory, warehouse, archive, and scrapyard were all located in the same time and place, each nourishing the others.

Most of Kiefer’s creative effort—more than 60 percent, by his own estimate—revolves around his books, which he has made by hand since the beginning of his career in the late 1960s. This lineage can be traced back to a splendidly prognostic piece of juvenilia: in 1954, the young Kiefer handwrote and illustrated his own retelling of “Marouf the Cobbler,” the closing tale from One Thousand and One Nights. The formal components of a well-presented book are evident in this work from childhood: an abstract frontispiece, a title page with handstamped decoration, and—in a fit of youthful confidence—the number “42” written on the back of the book, as though many other such volumes had already appeared and more were to follow. In the late 1960s Kiefer started to use the book form less for its

Previous spread: Anselm Kiefer, aller Tage Abend, aller Abende Tag (The Evening of All Days, The Day of All Evenings), 2014, watercolor on paper, 33 × 24 ½ inches (83.6 × 62.3 cm) Top: Anselm Kiefer, Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen (The Waves of Sea and Love), 2017, oil, emulsion, acrylic, and lead on canvas, 74 7⁄8 × 149 5⁄8 × 17 inches (190 × 380 × 43 cm) Opposite: Anselm Kiefer, malen (Painting), 2015, oil, emulsion, and acrylic on canvas, 74 7⁄8 × 110 ¼ × 3 5⁄8 inches (190 × 280 × 9 cm)

narrative continuity and more for its singular ability to weaken the constraints of time. The pages of a book are physically sequential, but the reader may disrupt or interrupt their linear flow at will. On the other hand, each page, when the book is opened to it, obscures all the others, denying the simultaneity of a painting. For Kiefer, the resulting freedom serves a double purpose: it allows connotations to flourish, and it also provides rich soil for his own ideas as they take shape.

Kiefer’s bibliophilia and love of the written word are pervasive throughout his work. Handwritten inscriptions guide us gently through the fluid iconography of his paintings and sculpture, adding a distinctive visual mood as they do so. His lead-leaved emulations of books are renowned. It is nonetheless difficult to grasp the aesthetic magnitude of his works, or their polymathic frames of reference, without sacrificing some perspectives for others. Perhaps we dwell on scale: the size of his compositions, the scope of his ambitions, the breadth of his allusions, and the temporal reach to which he aspires. Some commentary thrives on the proliferation of his work, its sheer mass and volume of expressive material.

Some thrives in the byways that lead from its more straightforward connotations into the forbiddingly esoteric. Whether or not we are familiar with Kiefer’s lexicon and syntax, their gravity dominates leavening phrases of wit, humor, sweetness, and levity that speak in more intimately human terms.

It is easy, then, to miss the tactile promise of Kiefer’s works—or, rather, to accept looking as a surrogate for touching, to let the eye wander where the hand cannot. This feels intimate, because everything he makes has a characteristic hand-hewn quality. Even

when he reassigns a found object, he subjects it to physical processes that assimilate it into the tones and textures of his idiom. Nothing he uses is immaculate; all has been touched. That is particularly noticeable with his books, with their deckle-edge irregularities, handwritten passages, and the chewy heft of their gummed layers or plaster coatings.

Above all, they are books as private containers of meaning rather than public ones. They encapsulate and elucidate Kiefer’s creative repertory in microcosm, much as his studio is a microcosm of what exists outside it but flows through it nonetheless.

Transition from Cool to Warm takes its title from Kiefer’s book Erotik im Fernen Osten oder: Transition from Cool to Warm (1976), in which atmospheric renderings of an arctic seascape lead to the emergence of a female figure and then to a series of loose, abstracted, and exquisitely stained nudes. Kiefer’s engagement with erotic figuration is thematically complex, as a mock-up of the forthcoming show makes clear. Temporary walls have turned a section of the studio into a full-scale model of Gagosian’s 21st Street gallery. Over the course of several months, Kiefer has experimented with various configurations of large watercolors and vitrines that contain books in order to tilt the conversation among them in different directions.

The provisional installation on display in early September included Extases féminines (Feminine ecstasies, 2013) a magisterial composite watercolor with numerous panels joined together in a fragmented but legible composition of flora, seascape, and two deeply erotic female nudes. This arrangement, like the joined woodcuts that Kiefer made in the 1980s, presents a lateral analogue of the sequential book

In other paintings Kiefer invokes love as something unsatisfied, sinister, fatal, or tragic—the ruins of love, one might say.

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Top: Anselm Kiefer, artist’s book, 20 pages (9 double page spreads, front, and back cover), closed: 31 7⁄8 × 24 7⁄8 × 4 ½ inches (81 × 63 × 11.5 cm) Bottom: Anselm Kiefer, artist’s book, 16 pages (7 double page spreads, front, and back cover), closed: 31 ½ × 24 × 4 inches (80 × 61 × 10 cm)

form: a flat, simultaneous burst of bright color and arresting images rather than a gradual apprehension of information and recollections. The result is appropriately epiphanic. Kiefer has written the name “Jean-Noël Vuarnet” in the upper-left corner, a reference to the author whose study of erotic religious ecstasy, Extases féminines (1980), helped to provide the inspiration and framework for Kiefer’s own explorations of the theme. Watercolor is an apt medium for this subject, with its undercurrent of circumvented authority and unsanctioned expression.

Kiefer handles watercolor lightly, with acute sensitivity to its inherent unruliness. Its fluid unpredictability defies the kind of calculated control that more viscous materials permit. Nothing in watercolor remains inert, least of all the paper support, which swells and ripples as it absorbs liquid and participates actively in its own process of transition from one state to another. Sometimes Kiefer amplifies that transitional quality with encrustations of charcoal that convey some of the weight and density of his works in other media. Even without that additional texture, the behavior of soaked paper creates enough topographic undulation to give the impression of heft. The paintings gain body.

Allusions in the works often lead back to the medieval or early-modern eras, though with a refreshing joie de vivre. In addition to Vuarnet, Kiefer also cites Walther von der Vogelweide, a renowned lyric poet and minnesinger of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. Walther’s prototypical German patriotism, so resonant in the wake of Romanticism, has receded behind the more universal appeal of his poems on the subject of love. On a watercolor that shows a supine female nude and nebulous foli74

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Kiefer’s books and works on paper remind us that his sense of magnitude and longevity is anchored in the quiet assembly of intimate thoughts in material form.

Previous spread: Anselm Kiefer, artist’s book, 24 pages (11 double page spreads, front, and back cover), closed: 28 × 20 1⁄8 × 3 5⁄8 inches (71 × 51 × 9 cm) Opposite: Anselm Kiefer, Extases féminines, 2014–15, watercolor on paper, 29 1⁄8 × 20 1⁄8 inches (74 × 51 cm) Top: Anselm Kiefer, dat rosa miel apibus, 2014, watercolor on paper, 23 5⁄8 × 30 3⁄8 inches (60 × 77 cm) Artwork © Anselm Kiefer Photos by Georges Poncet

age, Kiefer has inscribed the first lines of Unter den Linden, Walther’s tantalizing description of a tryst between a knight and a maid, told from the maid’s point of view. Elsewhere Kiefer invokes alchemy, Rosicrucianism, and the esoteric Jacobean scientist Robert Fludd. dat rosa miel apibus (2015) is a watercolor whose two joined sheets establish Kiefer’s characteristic dichotomy of heaven and earth. The lower sheet is filled with verdant and florid blooms of soaked pigment; the upper carries a soft-focus but perfectly legible airliner. The title, an aphorism that translates as “The rose gives honey to the bees,” comes from an allegorical concept of wisdom as a process. Its best-known representation is an engraving, attributed to Johann Theodor de Bry, that appears on the title page of two of Fludd’s works, published in the early seventeenth century.

Kiefer’s revision of the motif detaches iconography from symbolism, leaving a sweetly mysterious and witty paraphrase that requires no arcane system of beliefs for support. These disparate influences convey an overall impression of activities that lie apart from the dominant currents of history, whether those activities are episodes of female expression in an era of imposed voicelessness, or the quest for knowledge in the face of profound epistemological uncertainty.

In other paintings Kiefer invokes love as something unsatisfied, sinister, fatal, or tragic—the ruins of love, one might say. A couple of watercolors quote from Goethe’s poem of unrequited desire Heidenröslein (Rose of the field, 1779), their imagery and handwritten text hinting at violation rather than mere disappointment. A landscape at sundown refers to Hans Leip’s 1915 poem “Lili Marleen,” written during World War I and turned into a popular song during its successor. The spectrum of emotional and sexual states that illuminates these

paintings suggests that Kiefer regards the flux of human relations as a natural manifestation of the flux of existential relations. His treatments of erotic subjects are based in reciprocity: in the mischievous Rodinesque courtship of sacred and profane in The Cathedrals of France, in the aqueous grace of nudes in landscapes, or in the rhetoric of sexualized inspiration that permeates the theme of ecstasy. He presents loosened allegories of transition, not far removed from the cyclical symbiosis of rose and bee that Fludd admired.

Kiefer’s approach to the physical aspects of art has an expansionist side, not least in his acquisition of studios that gradually become large-scale works of art in their own right. His books and works on paper remind us that his sense of magnitude and longevity is anchored in the quiet assembly of intimate thoughts in material form. For all their sometimes breathtaking presence, even the grandest of Kiefer’s works have an undercurrent of modesty.

They do not set out to change the world but to illuminate those aspects of it that we either cannot or prefer not to see. At the reduced, private scale of books and paper, his vast studio condenses into what the hand can touch and turn. Perhaps the studio comes to resemble a medieval scriptorium, where rarefied knowledge took gloriously drawn and tinted shape. It is easy to imagine Kiefer in such a setting, working as a conduit for the realization of spiritual precepts even as his drolleries turn the world upside-down in the margins. In the contemporary, high-technological, digitized world, our ruins are industrial, and habitual pleasures of touch are slipping away. As long as there is something to desire and a connection between eye and hand, however, there is invariably hope. For Kiefer at least, there is always something to assemble from the pieces.

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ANDY WARHOL

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SIXTY LAST SUPPERS

Previous spread: Andy Warhol, Sixty Last Suppers, 1986, acrylic and silkscreen ink on linen, 116 × 393 inches (294.6 × 998.2 cm). Photo by Rob McKeever Collage of source material for The Last Supper, 1986, advertisements and headlines cut from New York Post and collaged together with tape. Photo by The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.

hirty years ago, Andy Warhol’s La st Su p pe r made it s debut in Milan. To mark the anniversar y of t his projec t, M ilan’s Museo del Novecento is hosting a special presentation from March 24 to May 18, 2017. Text by Jessica Beck, curator at the Andy Warhol Museum.

I’ve got these desperate feelings that nothing means anything. And then I decide that I should try to fall in love, and that’s what I’m doing now with Jon Gould, but then it’s just too hard.

—Andy Warhol, diary entry, 1981 He became more and more like a medieval alchemist searching—not so much for the philosopher’s stone as for the elixir of youth.

—John Richardson, “Eulogy for Andy Warhol,” 1987 In the final decade of his life, Andy Warhol returned with gusto to painting, working freehand on a dramatic scale. Sealing his place within the canon, he spent this period engaging contemporary issues of technology and politics while also making copies after the masters Botticelli, de Chirico, and Raphael. But none of these subjects could compare in number to the more than 100 paintings in Warhol’s Last Supper series, produced between 1984 and 1986. The dilemma with the current literature on these paintings is that it often makes little reference, and in some cases no reference at all, to the major crisis affecting Warhol’s community at the time of their completion: the aids epidemic.

The ambiguity in the literature on Warhol’s subject matter in the last decade of his career stems in part from the conflict between his Catholic faith and his homosexuality. This tension is often ignored in discussions of the work, with the result that the paintings appear one-dimensional. Once these issues are brought to the forefront, a broad discussion of 86

mortality and salvation can emerge as the crux of the Last Supper paintings.

In 1984, the art dealer Alexander Iolas, an Egyptian-born former ballet dancer and an eccentric collector of Surrealist and other early modernist art, commissioned Warhol to create a series of paintings and prints based on Leonardo da Vinci’s iconic Last Supper. Warhol’s final exhibition during his lifetime, Warhol—Il Cenacolo, featured twenty-two of these works and was staged in 1987 in the refectory of Milan’s Palazzo delle Stelline, which then housed the bank Credito Valtellinese. The venue was selected for its proximity to Leonardo’s masterwork, which was painted in 1495–98 just across the street, in the refectory of the Dominican cloister Santa Maria delle Grazie.1 While only two dozen works were exhibited at the opening, Warhol had spent two years, most of 1985 and 1986, producing over 100 additional renditions of The Last Supper.

The commission, the last of the artist’s career, became a near obsession for him. In prophetic fashion, these images of the eve of Christ’s crucifixion marked the end of Warhol’s own career and, indeed, his life. Just a month after returning to New York from the opening in Milan, he was admitted to the hospital for gallbladder surgery and died.

The materials Warhol produced in relation to The Last Supper are remarkable for their quantity and their diversity, including works on paper, large-scale paintings, and even sculpture. Within the series two distinct styles emerge, one that stayed true to Leonardo’s original by screen-printing the source image on canvas, the other departing from it by combining hand-painted images of Christ with commercial-brand-logos and text pulled from newspaper headlines and advertisements.

Ultimately both versions present commentaries on suffering, one through repetition, the other through signs and symbols.

Few works of art are as celebrated and studied as The Last Supper, yet the original as Leonardo executed it on the refectory wall has not existed for 500 years.2 Painted with an experimental technique on dry plaster, the image began to deterio-

rate within a few years after its completion. Shifting trends in conservation and decades of painstaking repair have only succeeded in salvaging select details. Yet time has not muted the emotional vibrancy of the disciples, or the complexity of the perspectival lines and dueling gestures among the figures’ hands and feet, which symbolically point within and beyond the pictorial field. No matter how faded by age, these elements continue to perplex and inspire art enthusiasts and scholars worldwide. Art historian Leo Steinberg contended that the strength of Leonardo’s masterwork lies in its inherent duplicity: since the nineteenth century, writers have argued over which event—the reveal of Christ’s betrayer or the celebration of the Eucharist—is more clearly indexed by the dramatic gestures among the disciples.3 Adding to the sustained interest in the work is the way it’s studied, often from copies—engravings and other reproductions— that have varied over time as the original has deteriorated. Leonardo’s Last Supper is a kind of meaning machine. Although Warhol’s Sixty Last Suppers (1986) was not exhibited at the Palazzo, it is one of his strongest assessments of this multiplicity of meanings at work in Leonardo’s original.

Sixty Last Suppers is a modern image that oscillates between flatness and illusionistic depth, ideas that lie at the heart of Renaissance painting.

This monumental work is dramatically rendered in stark black and white. Taking as his source the Cyclopedia of Painters and Paintings, first published in 1885, Warhol screen-printed that book’s facsimile of an earlier engraving of The Last Supper in a tightly structured grid sixty times across the canvas.4 In the way he looked to the source, his process here wouldn’t have been dissimilar from that of the scholars and enthusiasts before him: many celebrated writers of the Enlightenment, for example, such as Goethe, based their study on an engraving created in 1800 by Raphael Morghen, a copy that left out the symbolic wine glass under Christ’s right hand.5 Warhol, who worked throughout his entire career with reproductions as source material, understood the inevitable loss or change of meaning

Left: Source Material for Andy Warhol’s Last Supper, 1980s, printed ink on paper and masking tape on cardboard, 11 ¾ × 15 ½ inches (29.8 × 39.4 cm). Photo by The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Contribution The Andy Warahol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. Below: Andy Warhol in front of The Last Supper (Yellow) (1986) at the opening of Andy Warhol – Il Cenacolo at Palazzo delle Stelline, Milan, January 22, 1987. Photo by Mondadori Portfolio/Archivio Giorgio Lotti via Getty Images

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in the facsimile. He also understood how a reproduction can exist in suspended time. By the 1980s, he had fully embraced contemporary media—television, photography, and even the Amiga computer—and had launched his own television show, Warhol TV, which aired from 1980 to 1982. Culture as mediated experience is the appropriate lens through which to view Sixty Last Suppers, with its abutting black-and-white rectangles that look like stacks of miniature television screens, the details of Leonardo’s image faded by their shadows. These were only the latest episodes in Warhol’s sustained engagement with modern media, which started in the 1960s with his Death and Disaster series: before he was referencing television, he was creating paintings that mirrored the 16mm film strip.

In late 1962 through ’63, Warhol created some of his most celebrated works, the Death and Disaster paintings of suicides and car accidents copied from periodicals such as Newsweek and Life. For a suicide painting completed in 1962, 1947 White, Warhol sourced a Life photo by Robert Wiles of a young woman—Evelyn McHale, a twenty-three-year-old model—who had leapt to her death from the eightysixth floor of the Empire State Building.6 The young beauty landed on the roof of a limousine, where the vehicle’s twisted metal perfectly cradled her, leaving her body miraculously unmarked and her posture frozen like a sleeping beauty. Warhol printed this image in an overlapping sequence that mirrors

the shape and structure of the film strip. The repetition and movement in works like this one heighten and confuse the trauma of the original event—these victims take on saintlike qualities as their suffering becomes beautiful.

By contrast, in Sixty Last Suppers the image is less distorted and the squares seem more aligned with the cube of a television screen than with a strip of 16mm film. In 1947 White, Warhol overlapped the frames of the silkscreen and created movement by printing the image from light to dark, a visual effect that mirrored the flicker and motion of a film strip.

The grid in Sixty Last Suppers is clean, without blur or overlap, and the dark shadows give the image a soft glow echoing that of a television screen. The repetition here is static, locking the image in time.

The moment, however, at which these images were frozen was indeed one of public suffering for the homosexual body. Branded in the media as the primary bearer of aids, the gay male became a symbol of moral and physical decay. aids in these years was presented both to show the authority of clinical medicine, with its doctors working to find a cure, and to warn of the perils of sexual deviance, the lesions of the sarcoma that often accompanied the syndrome operating as visible stigmata of guilt.

The principal target of this sadistically punitive gaze was the body of the homosexual.7 Jane Dillenberger is the author of the most thorough writing on Warhol’s religious works, her ex-

tensive research tracing a trajectory from his Byzantine Catholic upbringing in Pittsburgh to the Last Supper commission. Dillenberger, a theologian as well as an art historian, must have found aids too taboo a topic, though, since she makes no reference to the epidemic in her book.8 Warhol’s commingling of commercial branding and images of Christ in these works commented on the cultural climate of the time in ways even the most thoughtful commentators have overlooked.

By the early 1980s, the aids epidemic was beginning to sweep through major cities in the United States and abroad. The syndrome first came to wide public notice with an article in the New York Times in 1981 under the headline “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals,” which shared reports from doctors in New York and San Francisco who were diagnosing homosexual men with a rapidly fatal form of cancer.9 Out of the forty-one patients tested, eight died less than twenty-four months after the diagnosis. Panic and anxiety spread quickly within the homosexual community and the term “gay cancer” was adopted to describe the disease. By May 1982 the Times had firmly connected the disease with homosexual communities through the headline “New Homosexual Disorder Worries Health Officials.”10 Headlines from 1981 onward became more alarming as public figures and celebrities, most famously Rock Hudson, began to die of aids.

Warhol’s first reference to “gay cancer” in his Andy Warhol, Last Supper, 1985, Polaroid Polacolor ER. Photo by The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. Opposite: Andy Warhol’s studio in New York City with one of his Last Supper paintings in the background, 1987. Photo by Evelyn Hofer/Getty Images

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THE LAST SUPPER PAINTINGS ARE A CONFESSION FOR WARHOL OF THE CONFLICT HE FELT BETWEEN HIS FAITH AND HIS SEXUALITY.

diaries came on February 6, 1982, not even a year after the New York Times article, in reference to Joe MacDonald, a male model whom he had photographed in the 1970s and who would die of aids in 1983. Warhol recounts, I went to Jan Cowles’s place at 810 Fifth Avenue where she was having a birthday party for her son Charlie. . . . Joe MacDonald was there, but I didn’t want to be near him and talk to him because he just had gay cancer. I talked to his brother’s wife.11 Just a few months later he referenced the New York Times directly in an entry from Tuesday, May 11, 1982: The New York Times had a big article about gay cancer, and how they don’t know what to do with it. That it’s epidemic proportions and they say that these kids who have sex all the time have it in their semen and they’ve already had every kind of disease there is—hepatitis one, two and three, and mononucleosis, and I’m worried that I could get it by drinking out of the same glass or just being around these kids who go to the Baths.12 In each of the eight references to “gay cancer” in The Andy Warhol Diaries, Warhol expresses fear

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Opposite: Andy Warhol signing posters and issues of Interview magazine at the opening of Andy Warhol – Il Cenacolo at Palazzo delle Stelline, Milan, January 22, 1987. Photo by Leonardo Cendamo

Andy Warhol in front of The Last Supper (Yellow) (1986) at the opening of Andy Warhol – Il Cenacolo at Palazzo delle Stelline, Milan, January 22, 1987. Photo by Archivio Garghetti Artwork © 2017 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

of contracting the disease from the most casual of encounters and the underlying tone of his remarks is loaded with judgment.

Warhol’s anxiety about health and illness had started during his youth, with an early onset of Saint Vitus’s Dance, but it peaked in the 1980s with the growth of public paranoia over aids and the targeting of homosexual men. The work starts to reflect these worries as bodybuilding imagery is juxtaposed with benevolent images of Christ, the same Christ from the Last Supper works. Given Warhol’s phobias over disease and illness, it is easy to imagine the shock that he would have felt in 1984 when he found out that his boyfriend Jon Gould, his last long-term relationship, had been admitted to the hospital with pneumonia. By 1986, Gould had died from aids, at the age of thirty-three.

Despite an age difference of twenty-five years, Gould and Warhol were involved for five years, traveling together, working together, and for a short period living together. Warhol was infatuated with Gould at times, writing desperately about his feelings in his diaries and photographing him obsessively. Gould is one of the most photographed subjects of Warhol’s late career, appearing in over 300 of the 1,500 contact sheets Warhol produced between February 1981 and September 1985.13 No matter how much the artist tried to put it out of his mind, he had to realize that the deadly aids virus had been incubating in the body of the young man whose bed he had shared. Crucial to this narrative, it was within days of Gould’s death that Warhol started painting what would turn out to be his final series of paintings: The Last Supper.14 Given the sociopolitical climate in which Warhol was producing these paintings, and taking into account his private relationships, it is confounding that the link between the aids epidemic and the Last Supper series remains tangential in the current literature. In paintings like The Last Supper (The Big C) (1986) Warhol both flaunts and conceals a connection to aids. Hand-painted via a projection process, like his Campbell’s Soups of 1961–62, this Last Supper leaves parts of the canvas unfin-

ished. The figure of Christ recurs four times, while hands appear repeatedly. Thomas’s finger pointing to the sky, intimating that heaven knows he is free of guilt, appears prominently next to the “eye” in the Wise potato-chip logo.15 Pulled from a New York Post headline, the phrase “The Big C” is centered under Christ’s face on the lower-left portion of the canvas. Dillenberger asserts that “The Big C” references Warhol’s fear of cancer, a conservative account that presents only half the story. The source material for this painting, in the archives of The Andy Warhol Museum, is a collage made up of headlines from the New York Post, motorcycle ads, and clippings reading “the Big C” and “aids” cut from a front-page article in the Post. Warhol ultimately left out the aids headline while keeping the more covert “The Big C,” but given the direct references to “gay cancer” in his diaries, it becomes clear that this image of Christ was connected for him to the rapid rate at which people were dying around him. “The Big C” was synonymous with aids. The image of Christ, offering his flesh in the Eucharist, was a symbol of salvation during a time of heightened suffering, an unusually personal and emotional image for Warhol. By 1987, the year he debuted his Last Supper paintings, aids had become an uncomfortably common occurrence in his circle of friends and colleagues. Iolas, the gallerist who gave him both his first exhibition, in New York in 1952, and his last one, Warhol—Il Cenacolo, in Milan in 1987, died of aids just five months after the opening of the later show; in January of that year, when the show opened, Iolas was in the advanced stages of the disease and was relegated to a sanitarium. Warhol surely felt that the disease was surrounding him.

More than a demonstration of reverence for Leonardo’s masterwork, or even an unveiling of his Catholic faith, Warhol’s Last Supper paintings are a confession of the conflict he felt between his faith and his sexuality, and ultimately a plea for salvation during the mass suffering of the homosexual community during the aids crisis. aids had generated a new way to brand the bodies of homo-

sexual men as symbols of moral decay, targets for both fear and punishment. In this perspective these paintings can be understood as some of the most personal and revealing works of Warhol’s career.

1 See Corinna Thierolf, “All the Catholic Things,” in Carla SchulzHoffmann, ed., Andy Warhol: The Last Supper (Ostfildern-Ruit: Cantz, 1998), p. 23.

2 See Sarah Boxer, “The Many Veils of Meaning Left by Leonardo,” New York Times, July 14, 2001, available online at www.nytimes. com/2001/07/14/books/the-many-veils-of-meaning-left-byleonardo.html (accessed March 18, 2017).

3 See Leo Steinberg, Leonardo’s Incessant “Last Supper” (New York: Zone Books), 2001.

4 See Thierolf, All the Catholic Things, pp. 23–24.

5 See Steinberg, “The Subject,” Leonardo’s Incessant “Last Supper”, p. 36.

6 See Ben Cosgrove, “‘The Most Beautiful Suicide’: A Violent Death, an Immortal Photo,” Time, March 19, 2014, available online at http://time.com/3456028/the-most-beautiful-suicide-a-violentdeath-an-immortal-photo/ (accessed March 18, 2017).

7 See Simon Watney, “The Spectacle of aids,” in aids: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism, ed. Douglas Crimp (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1998), p. 78.

8 In The Religious Art of Andy Warhol Jane Daggett Dillenberger makes just one reference to aids, and this in relation to Warhol’s Skulls of the early 1970s. She states, “The resurgence of skull imagery accompanied punk culture and is related to anxiety over the spread of aids as well as the escalating threats of nuclear war and ecological disasters.” The connection is odd, since aids did not surface in public consciousness until the early 1980s.

Dillenberger, The Religious Art of Andy Warhol (New York: Continuum, 1998), p. 71.

9 Lawrence K. Altman, “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals,” New York Times, July 3, 1981, available online at www.nytimes. com/1981/07/03/us/rare-cancer-seen-in-41-homosexuals.html (accessed March 18, 2017).

10 Altman, “New Homosexual Disorder Worries Health Officials,” New York Times, May 11, 1982, available online at www.nytimes. com/1982/05/11/science/new-homosexual-disorder-worrieshealth-officials.html?pagewanted=all (accessed March 18, 2017).

11 Andy Warhol, “Saturday, February 6, 1982,” The Andy Warhol Diaries, ed. Pat Hackett (New York: Warner Books, 1989), p. 429.

12 Warhol, “Tuesday, May 11, 1982,” in ibid., p. 442.

13 “Andy Warhol @ Christies: Jon Gould,” Christies digital sales “Eyes on the Guise,” available online at https://onlineonly.christies. com/s/andy-warhol-christies-members-only-eyes-guise/jongould-6/589 (accessed March 18, 2017).

14 Bob Colacello, Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up (New York: Random House, 1990), pp. 480–81.

15 See Steinberg, “The Hands and Feet,” Leonardo’s Incessant “Last Supper”, p. 69.

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THE INNER LIFE OF FORMS

Giuseppe Penone speaks with Carlos Basualdo and Pepi Marchetti Franchi about his upcoming monograph.

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As the editor of this book, how did you first approach the project?

CARLOS BASUALDO I started by identifying the needs of those who might want to learn more about Giuseppe’s work—scholars, collectors, the general public. When we began discussing the project in earnest, I was struck by the fact that there was very little in English that took into account the full complexity of the work, none that grasped the work comprehensively.

PMF Your approach structures the book into two parts. The first volume contains many different perspectives on the work, including authors who have different professions, backgrounds, and bases of knowledge. The second component, a series of eleven booklets, explores the core themes and interests that Giuseppe has carried through his career. That overall view reveals, among other things, how the work often develops in series or families through which, Giuseppe, you explore an idea, or the potential of a material. Your interest in the branches of trees, say—in a way all those branches grow out of the same trunk, but they develop quite independently. Showing trees stripped of their bark, for example: you began that practice very early on and you’re still moving forward with it.

GIUSEPPE PENONE It’s often a question of rediscovering the form that is already present within the material. In the case of those works, it’s about discovering the tree as it was at a certain point in its growth.

CB This book will be very different from any earlier publication on the work, mostly because of how we articulated this possibility of a more global perspective. For the first part of the book, we worked with writers who I thought represented the different worlds that have come in contact with Giuseppe’s work—the French context, for example, which is extremely important in relation to an understanding of Giuseppe’s work.

Giuseppe has had a number of very important shows in France, from the retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in 2004 to the major exhibition at the palace of Versailles in 2013. There is a large body of writing on Giuseppe in French, not only by art historians but by philosophers and others.

So the book includes a wonderful essay by Rémi Labrusse, who knows the literature thoroughly and will thoughtfully address it as well as the work itself of course. Then there’s Emily Braun, one of the most important American scholars of Italian art and the curator of the excellent Alberto Burri retrospective at the Guggenheim in New York last year—I could not leave her out of a book of this kind. We also very much wanted more varied perspectives, so we invited, for example, the British scientist Timothy Ingold, whose field is social anthropology—a field of knowledge that has allowed him to tap into Giuseppe’s work in a way that enriches the debate enormously.

We realized that it was crucial to accompany t he se d i f ferent perspec t ive s w it h a c omprehensive overview of the work, which we t hought needn’t be chronolog ical but had to be systematic. We then proposed making a booklet dedicated to each major theme in Giuseppe’s work introduced by a text by Daniela Lancioni. Daniela is an Italian scholar who has worked with Giuseppe for many years. For the second part of the publication, Daniela has EPI MARCHETTI FRANCHI

Previous spread: Giuseppe Penone with Spazio di luce (Space of Light), 2008 Opposite: Giuseppe Penone, Essere fiume (To Be River), 2010, one river stone, one quarry stone Following spread: Giuseppe Penone’s Nel legno (Into the Wood) and Indistinti confini (Indistinct Boundaries)

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developed a series of chapters that let the reader follow the various directions the work has taken over time. These, then, are the two parts of the book—on the one hand different perspectives on the work, coming out of different cultural worlds and different contexts of reference, and on the other an overall analysis of the work, structured in separate chapters and punctuated by texts by Giuseppe that I have selected from his own writings.

We wanted the structure of the book to correspond as much as possible to the structure of the work. Since the form of Giuseppe’s work has much to do with its intellectual structure, we wanted to try to get closer to that in the book as well.

GP Yes. At the same time, I think the way to address the work is by talking about sculpture.

Knowledge of materials, and the pragmatic aspects of making the work, are fundamental for me. They’re how I understand why one work has one form and another has a very different one, even though the basic concept that generated them is the same.

PMF They’re different aspects and moments of an experimentation that stems from the same intentions.

GP That stems from intentions and also from doing—from the direct relationship with the material. This, I believe, is what gives the work its character. I don’t take a literary approach to form, I try to understand a language that talks about doing, and about the form that can be developed from the material itself.

CB Understanding through doing, and it’s the process of doing that develops form.

GP Yes, and that form is almost always already present in the material.

PMF So it’s a question of revealing something already there in the material, something you establish a dialogue with.

GP The interesting thing about this book is the way it looks at the work. This collaboration with Carlos is completely different from other experiences I’ve had: it approaches the work by analyzing it as a totality not only through the vision of an art historian but through an examination of its context, an attempt to explain why it has the specific identity it does, being tied to a region, a particular culture, that of Italy and the Mediterranean. That doesn’t always happen—there’s a tendency to isolate the work, to insert it into the context of a single aspect of art history, whereas it’s obviously in dialogue with reality and with everything that goes into making up that reality.

This approach is also developed through the book’s form, its concept, its design—the design marries perfectly with that idea.

CB Yes, the form of the publication as an object was key to us, we discussed it at length, both among ourselves and with Paul Neale, our wonderful graphic designer.

PMF Giuseppe, your work is recognized internationally and has been very influential for many younger artists. Is there anything you think has been overlooked at all? Anything this book could focus on or correct?

GP Every book is necessarily partial, it can’t cover everything. But the strength of this one is that it addresses the problem of dealing with the work from different viewpoints, analyzing it in a way tied not just to art history, or to any one specific context. That enriches the work a great deal. The book basically synthesizes the concerns 97

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I myself have had in making the work, which haven’t always come from the world of art history but also, perhaps, from philosophy, or from literature. In that way the book mirrors a reality in the work and enriches its interpretation, opens up other possibilities of analysis. It is always the moment that is lived that suggests the reality that is seen.

CB I absolutely agree. One important element that emerges clearly from the book is the importance and richness of your drawings, which are used for the covers of the publication’s several different booklets. The drawings have multiple meanings: you use drawing both to plan works and as works in themselves, and all the degrees between.

GP For me, drawing is a way to organize ideas, to try to understand them. Maybe you start with an idea, a suggestion, and you clarify it through drawing, or through writing.

PMF Yes, when you and I have worked together I’ve often seen you want to sit down and write about how to tackle a certain project. You’ve really needed to do that.

GP Yes, it’s a way of schematizing and clarifying the points between thoughts. Thoughts accumulate and overlap, there can be so many aspects, but through drawing, through writing, you can collect them in a synthesis.

CB Written language has always been important to you.

GP Yes, but I don’t write for the writing itself, I write to clarify ideas.

CB The pencil itself, as wood and graphite, plant and mineral, is tied to the materiality of your work; the pencil’s materiality is tied to the work’s materiality. For you, I think, writing is a material.

GP Yes, somewhat. Writing has a particular identity at a particular moment. The drawing, meanwhile, is an expressive form that can be understood independently of the specificity of language—a drawing can be understood by a Japanese person, an African, a European, more or less in the same way, it has this universality.

I think its permanence in time is its most interesting characteristic. We have drawings from 30,000 years ago and we still more or less understand their meaning; but we can’t understand writing from 30,000 years ago. That immediacy, that capacity, sometimes, to recognize even the feelings in a drawing is an extraordinary quality, a sort of universality—perhaps only music comes close to it. So drawing is very important to me, and opening each booklet with a drawing seems to me to be a wonderful way to show the medium’s importance in the development of the work.

PMF How is it possible to condense an entire career or a body of work within a single book?

CB I believe that the book’s importance lies in our intention to do precisely that, even if we know it is not entirely possible. What we can say or do at this particular moment is try to bring that moment fully to bear on the work. That I think is the greatest ambition—that and the hope that some of the things found in the book will prove useful in the future.

GP Above all, it has to be an object that we want to make, that doesn’t bore us. That’s the only way to avoid boring the reader as well.

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Previous spread: Drawings that will be included in each booklet in the upcoming monograph Opposite: Giuseppe Penone in his Turin studio with some elements of the work Lo spazio della scultura - pelle di cedro (The Space of Sculpture - Skin of Cedar) Artwork © Giuseppe Penone Photos by Angela Moore Photos of the booklet drawings © Archivio Penone, except for drawing in the lower left corner of page 98 © Ellen Page Wilson

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BELOW THE SURFACE Ellen Gallagher in conversation with Adrienne Edwards.

DRIENNE EDWARDS

a sailboat.

So we begin with

Yes, I thought this might be a good place to begin. It was a long time ago. In 1986, I wanted some adventure, so I thought I would do something called sea Semester out of Woods Hole, Massachusetts. A group of students study celestial navigation and oceanography in Woods Hole at the sea Education Association, which is adjacent to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. Then for the second part of the semester you work on your own independent research project.

Of course I waited until the last minute to choose mine. I went to the Oceanographic Institute and a scientist showed an incredible slide show of pterapods, these wing-footed snails. I thought they were the most beautiful things and so, not really paying attention, I jumped into that—that would be my project. Turns out they were practically microscopic [laughter] and it meant I was on board a sailboat doing four-to-five-hour Neuston-net tows, collecting these things, then looking at them under a microscope and trying to make drawings.

These were actually the drawings I used to apply to art school.

But the other thing about this was the voyage itself. We began our journey in the Caribbean and we moved by Saba and Bonaire up to Martinique.

And Martinique was for me, I guess, a life-changing experience. When we arrived it was just before Christmas. We’d been sailing for I think a good month at least, about twenty-six of us on board that sailboat. We arrived in the port of Fort-de-France and you could walk through the port, through this neighborhood, and end up right in the center of Fort-de-France, and there was the Schœlcher library, the library of Victor Schœlcher, an abolitionist from France. Schœlcher was incredible—he combined activism and letters and it’s his archive that began this library. He was a radical voice against slavery, and against the French government’s violent taxation of Haiti as reparations following the country’s independence. The building was built in Paris, it was part of the World Expo of 1889, and ELLEN GALLAGHER

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then it was cut up and reconstructed brick by brick in Fort-de-France.

So the idea of this library had a kind of radical potential for me. I was just back there for the first time since 1986. Aimé Césaire’s office is around the corner from the library and you can visit it—it’s a bit like the Freud Museum in London, Freud’s former house, which is open to the public as well.

Anyway, when I visited Martinique in 1986 there were student protests going on, and I wanted to join in because it sort of seemed like a party to me, but they explained that they were fighting for the right to take the baccalauréat, to have access to France.

They wanted to attend university, to not be trapped in this drop-off point in the Caribbean. So as a New England person through and through, this felt to me like my first time as an adult in Europe and also my first time in Africa. I’m speaking subjectively— that’s what it felt like to me.

AE Because Martinique represented a coalescence of these two cultures in a way? Which is what makes it so interesting, right? We’ll get to something about this kind of liminality that you’re really interested in, but formally, when you think about the dismantling and reconstruction of this building, brick by brick, something starts there that enters your work. Literature has a recurring presence in your work as well.

EG Yes. AE And this was also the moment, I think, when you began to think about the imagery and mythology around water. So all of these things begin to create a cypher.

EG Another thing in my mind when I went sailing, I remember, was that Langston Hughes had joined the Merchant Marine. I actually looked into the Merchant Marine before I went to sea Semester and my mom was like, I think that’s a bit too rough for you [laughter]. So, yes, Langston Hughes. And I remember being at sea and just being struck by its geographies; and the collecting of the pterapods, which was such a detailed ritual for me and almost a gridded ritual, like every day at a certain point, collecting again. We were also collecting temperature readings, and the temperature readings alongside the collecting of the pterapods—my idea for the

pterapods was, they’re semimobile, they get stuck in the currents and eddies, and I was going to come up with a map of the Caribbean somehow by mapping where the pterapods were. And that didn’t really work [laughter]. But what I did discover was that there were other bodies of water within the Caribbean that made it up, it’s not just one singular body of water. I started finding these temperature spikes during my Neuston-net tows and I discovered that there was another body of warmer water just below us that was salinity-maximum water.

That was really shocking when we were on board, that the ocean actually isn’t this whole being, or it’s a whole being made up of multiple diverse bodies.

AE Would you tell us a bit about eXelento?

EG Yes, eXelento is made up of 396 pages. I started by unbinding magazines from the 1940s or so and kept going until 1978.

AE What kinds of magazines?

EG Ebony, Our World, Sepia—mid-century race magazines. So I unbound and then scanned them.

This intervention of the scanner created a sense of infinite space for me. I scanned each page and then I chose what I was going to reformat—fragment, collage, tweak. It’s not a stable archive in that sense.

AE I saw eXelento for the first time at The Broad recently and for me it was, I mean, [sings note] amazing to see this in person. If you haven’t seen it yet, you must see it, and you must see it during the day, with natural light. It is jaw dropping. And I understood this kind of intervention in a different way, because eXelento is what year?

EG 2004.

AE 2004. So here you have the grid, which becomes so important in your work. Even when you can’t see it, it’s there. And the way you approach the grid has these beautiful references to Conceptualism, in particular through the notion of seriality that you see here, but it also has a direct relationship to abstraction. And your intervention with the printed matter and with the Plasticine gives it a completely different, not just texture but life, it imbues it with something radically different. So I’m interested in how you intervene in these kinds of styles of modernism by inserting things like printed matter, and your choices of certain printed

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P. 104: Ellen Gallagher. Photo

by Philippe Vogelenzang/ Trunk Archive P. 106: Ellen Gallagher, eXelento, 2004, Plasticine, ink, and paper on canvas 96 × 192 inches (243.8 × 487.7 cm) P. 107: Ellen Gallagher, Pomp-Bang, 2003 (detail), paper, ink, Plasticine, and polymer medium on canvas, 96 × 192 inches (243.8 × 487.7 cm) Left: Ellen Gallagher, Bird in Hand, 2006 (detail), oil, pencil, gold, Plasticine, gold leaf, and paper on canvas, 93 ¾ × 120 7⁄8 inches (238 × 307 cm)

matter. And how something like the Plasticine is entirely disruptive—it’s a bit naughty [laughs].

EG Yes, but in some ways I think of the Plasticine as a binder as well. For me, the idea that the pages were already in circulation was important.

I was jumping into something that was preinseminated, that had already been in the world, and I was somehow sufflating it, breathing life into it, no matter how subjective or idiosyncratic, making it live again in my realm. The fact that it was circulating also meant that the process wasn’t just this one-to-one reading of signs, which was starting to feel constricting in earlier works. This living matter that was already in circulation somehow, but had been passed out of circulation and cast off—to bring that back into circulation seemed to me a way to move backward and forward at the same time. It gave me the potential to project my stories forward in time but also backward in time.

And the Plasticine, like the pages themselves, is this other ephemeral matter. I guess you’re not supposed to touch it—I’ve been told not to encourage you to touch it [laughter]—but it is never going to dry completely. And the pages are laid out in a grid, so there’s a kind of weave or story that’s built from these 396 pages and then the Plasticine is worked top to bottom, left to right. And there are reoccurring characters throughout the series—the nurse, the peg leg.

The paper is fragile, so it’s scanned onto archival newsprint and then I begin the Plasticine, top to bottom, left to right, because I have to sit on the clean part of the painting to work on it. As I always do at some point in my work, I work on it on the ground—I’m on top of it, hovering over it, building it, really constructing it. What makes it so fluid for me is that even though these paintings are labor intensive, maybe eight pages a day get added and they’re improvised one by one. The story may relate to puns in the text, for instance, or it may relate to puns in the forms, so the Plasticine is a kind of binder—but also a kind of lens that lets you see the layering, with stories beneath it and another layer on top of it. So it’s not so much the grid of modernity that’s mapping the painting, it’s a register in motion. I hope.

AE Let’s discuss Bird in Hand [2006], which for me is a great example of how you complicate the distinctions around figuration and abstraction. In fact it relates to all of those things, it’s a swirl of those approaches, yet it’s also emblematic of your acute sensibility toward the liminal, toward the in-betweenness of things. Can you talk about how

THE SYMBOLIC FOR ME IS ABOUT CARRYING AND THE POTENTIAL TO CARRY—IT’S LIKE MAGIC. Ellen Gallagher

you approached that, particularly with this work?

EG This was really about accumulating layers of printed matter. There’s a penmanship paper that’s built like a kind of Mercator map, so it’s twisted.

And the central figure really began as an accumulation of matter, so there’s always this falling apart and coming together. It’s quite three-dimensional in person and there’s salt, literally, Nepali salt encrusted in an oil paint in the vines combing through the figure’s neck. So there are all these bits that really fall apart into just matter and then come together from a distance as a figure.

AE How did you come to penmanship paper?

What was that moment of, Wow, I can work with this?

EG While I was in art school in Boston in the late 1980s there was a poetry collective of young African-American poets like Sharan Strange. Ntozake Shange was the first reader, Samuel DeLany came and read—it was an incredible time. So as a young art student I got to go to this Victorian house in Cambridge and see and experience these readings and this idea of audience, and I was so frustrated, I was really jealous of the poets, because there was a way in which what they were doing was both abstract and really lucid. I was envious of that, and thinking about that, and then I was in my father’s neighborhood in Providence, Rhode Island. I was walking through this neighborhood, which had been somewhat decimated by highway construction, and what had once been a playground with a swimming pool, where my cousin had been the lifeguard and I had learned to swim, was now emptied out. This was during Ronald Reagan’s era and he emptied out a lot of city pools, so they became less vibrant than they’d been as I’d remembered them in the 1970s growing up. Anyway, I found a piece of paper that had been perfectly folded up and it said, “We are a drug-free school. Have a nice day” [laughter]. It was penmanship paper, with a smiley face, and that just seemed so poignant to me. I took it back to my studio and kept it. Then I think I bought some sheets, glued them to canvas, and they seemed really fleshlike to me. And I liked that they were ephemeral, that they yellowed. I was always inscribing the paper with my pencil and it would crinkle or react, and you could always see the weave of the canvas beneath it. So there was this vulnerable material quality.

AE Watery Ecstatic, an ongoing series that you started in 2001, is compelling to me because it somehow operates within the visual language of abstraction yet combines it with the aquatic world.

But for me it’s so slippery what you do with these

drawings because they somehow address the unspeakable of the transatlantic slave trade and the Middle Passage, in particular in relation to water and the ocean and all that is bound up in the Atlantic. And perhaps to me that abstraction is uniquely situated to somehow hold these stories, not address but hold them and the myths that come out of them.

I’m interested in how you repeatedly return to this series—it seems almost as though you’re trying to exhaust it somehow, but it’s a sinkhole, it needs a bit of an escape, the stories need to be able to be fugitive. The works are profoundly labor intensive.

There’s so much there, I was literally hovering. It’s incredible how you make these works, where you can see your hand in such an intense way. Would you talk about how you came to these works and how you make them?

EG Well, they’re built. They’re made on thick watercolor stock, and I’m drawing with a pencil first and also a scalpel.

AE You’re drawing with a scalpel, I just want to note that [laughter].

EG Somehow I became more confident drawing with a scalpel. I mean, with pencils you can make a mistake but with a cut you just have to keep going forward, so for some reason it’s more about improvisation. I guess Watery Ecstatic goes back to the sea Semester, or to being at sea, looking into the sea, the idea of the sea—it’s about mapping. It somehow relates to Bird in Hand even though they don’t look alike. For so long the sea was a liminal space, unknown, we didn’t have access to its depths. It was also a literary space, a speculative space, especially in early maps. But now, as we’re able to go farther into the depths, it’s a combination of natural history and myth. And for me they don’t cancel each other out, they fold in on each other and make each other stronger and more mysterious.

Then there are the jellyfish, a key literary image for Césaire and his thinking about the archipelago. Jellyfish are actually made up of several organisms, some of which are eating it as it moves through the water. And some jellyfish can self-replicate, so there’s this idea of being able to reproduce oneself in isolation.

The printed matter is actually cut and embedded into the watercolor paper.

AE If you study it closely, it looks like a face that you’ve extracted from printed matter, but then— EG —painted into and cut into. And then bits of text, e’s and o’s, were embedded like pods or bubbles in the seaweed.

AE E’s and o’s also recur in your work.

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Left: Ellen Gallagher, Watery Ecstatic, 2001, watercolor, ink, oil, Plasticine, pencil and cut paper on paper, 27 ½ × 39 ½ inches (69.8 × 100.3 cm) Detail of the same work reproduced on opposite page Artwork © Ellen Gallagher.

Photos courtesy the artist unless otherwise noted.

This conversation was excerpted from a longer conversation that took place on February 24, 2017 as part of The Broad’s partnership with USC’s Roski School of Art and Design.

When you think about collecting pterapods to map a vast space, the e’s and o’s are coming from that same place in me. It’s about taking the smallest portal, the least important signifier, and trying to make it your opening into a vast expanse. The e’s and o’s are those small signifiers but they’re also vowels, they’re something that can expand.

AE Dew Breaker, which you made for the Venice Biennale in 2015, feels related for me to the Watery Ecstatic series. How did these paintings come to be, and what were you thinking about in terms of going from drawings to very large-scale paintings with these ideas?

EG Like a lot of my work, it started as an accident.

I built something up, erased it, sanded it down, and then was getting this almost quilted, bulbous use of the penmanship paper—instead of twisting it or mapping it, it was more built up like a kind of bandage. And I was thinking about Filip De Boeck and his film on the Congo, about how funerals there were being disrupted and elders attacked out of a strong feeling of disappointment and rage.

And then thinking about Edouard Glissant, and the idea, which I think extends Césaire’s thinking, of these sentient geographies. So I started to think of vertebrae stacked together, made up only of the penmanship paper or the printed matter.

And The Dew Breaker is an Edwidge Danticat story, she’s talking about Papa Doc Duvalier’s violent controlling forces— AE In Haiti— EG And their name for the time of day when they would come and do their work. So I was linking these stories together and I wanted to bring the Ebony pages into these stories as well, and the penmanship paper, and the matter itself would build the figuration and be a kind of bandage, not falling apart and coming together in the same way as Bird in Hand but more like a bulbous bandage. So the painting itself was kind of corpselike.

AE In 1997 you began to make black paintings.

I’d love you to talk about why.

EG Well, my father passed away in 1997 and it wasn’t so much that I was close to him, but suddenly I felt as though I somehow had less protection in the universe. And it surprised me that I would feel that way. Yet the death of a parent, even a parent who wasn’t in my day-to-day life, made me feel that EG

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somehow my stars were permanently going to be less aligned in some way.

AE The first time we spoke about it, you said you felt unmoored, which is kind of equivalent to the visual experience of looking at these paintings.

You get this sense of a void, not a negative thing but more about an incredible tension between this sheer blackness and the metallic resonance of the painting. The way the sienna ground comes through, in the most subtle of ways, is to me so reminiscent of the basic elements of our universe— when we think about black holes and what black holes do and how they seem dense and impenetrable, yet it’s nothing but openness. These paintings are very generous in that way for me.

EG Thank you for saying that. In Bird in Hand and eXelento, which both came after this, I talk about the grid as a kind of register that signs can move across. Maybe these black paintings were the first time, or the most successful example, where I thought, “I get it. I can do this. Wow, it happened.

It’s not just something I want the painting to do, it just did it, it made itself.” And building these works was really labor intensive, it was gluing pieces down bit by bit, which is the opposite of painting, in a sense—there’s no fluidity. But then when the enamel skin is laid down, it covers the penmanship paper and the rubber below, and it also throws them into bas-relief. So there’s this centrifugal aspect to the grid, which later becomes the register that the characters can move across, that can allow the signs to reach out to the world.

AE When you talk about characters, is that different from symbols?

EG Not necessarily. The symbolic for me is about carrying and the potential to carry—it’s like magic.

So a character like a jellyfish can be made up of several different bodies, can exist in different times, can be a character that’s symbolic.

AE Perhaps you can talk about Kapsalon, particularly in the context of working in Rotterdam.

EG Kapsalon means barbershop, hair salon, in Dutch.

AE And you did these for the 2015 Istanbul Biennial.

EG Yes, but I’d thought about them earlier. I thought about them as a way of making Dutch black paintings or Dutch national paintings. They’re

made with thicker-gauged rubber, they build out, but they also fall in like a petri dish. And the printed matter is now really sealed, adhered, to the rubber.

It’s almost like the printed matter has become Plasticine-like, claylike.

Kapsalon is a dish that was created when a black Cape Verdean hairdresser went to a shawarma shop and basically made an African stew out of a shawarma dish, and then really got a taste for it. It’s essentially shawarma, French fries, lettuce, mayonnaise, sambal sauce, spice, and some salad dressing. And it’s become this Dutch national dish.

I like the idea of all these ingredients gone watery again in a tin takeout container. And I was thinking of this time of stricture, where we are so disconnected, but these black men in Rotterdam had a flow and created this thing, and it was also about accepting somebody coming into your stuff and making their thing out of your thing and turning it into something that is now—I think it is the Dutch national dish [laughter]. It’s huge.

Rotterdam was heavily bombed during World War II, it was decimated. So our city center is really black, unlike the city centers of Amsterdam or London or Paris. Rotterdam is a working class port town where the center looks more like Queens than like a European city. There’s always construction, so there’s always this sense of rebuilding and making, and great architecture and design come out of Rotterdam, it’s about starting over. And there’s also this very salty vernacular that comes out of Rotterdam because it’s a sailor town, it’s a port town. So the big grand central station was named Station Kapsalon [laughter] and you can’t stop this, that is really the name of that station [laughter]. I find this incredibly beautiful, this 3D vernacular that is living matter. The mayor of Rotterdam was born in Morocco, and he went back to Morocco for a holiday, and a Dutch reporter asked, What do you miss from the Netherlands? And he said kapsalon [laughter]. I just thought that was the most beautiful thing. Maybe I’m being sappy or poetic but I thought, You know what, he’s missing that flow. To me, that’s black abstraction. He’s missing that flow and I just thought that was incredibly moving.

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JOE BRADLEY Lauren Mahony reflects on the themes and artworks presented in the artistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s mid-career survey at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery.

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his June, American artist Joe Bradley will be the subject of a mid-career survey, his first U.S. museum exhibition, organized by Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, which will travel in the fall to the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University. Bradley was born in 1975 in Georgia, raised in Maine, and has been a fixture on the New York art scene over the past decade, regularly showing new bodies of work, ranging from “modular” works and silkscreens to painterly abstractions and sculpture. These shows were punctuated by a well-received debut at the 2008 Whitney Biennial and by inclusion in The Forever Now, the exhibition of contemporary painting organized by Laura Hoptman at The Museum of Modern Art in 2014–15. In 2014, a large exhibition at Le Consortium in Dijon covered much of Bradley’s mature career, but a survey of that type has not yet been staged in the United States. The upcoming show

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will be the first opportunity for American audiences to observe the full breadth of his diverse oeuvre, making apparent the themes and sources that overlap across seemingly incongruent bodies of work and allowing a clearer understanding of his distinctive approach to abstraction.

Given this sustained interest in Bradley’s art, it is a perfect moment to look at the whole body of work and its arc over the last decade. Cathleen Chaffee, Senior Curator at the Albright-Knox and organizer of this summer’s exhibition, has followed Bradley’s work since the Whitney Biennial, saw the show in Dijon, and was surprised that an exhibition had not been attempted at an American museum.

This realization prompted her to propose one for the Albright-Knox, a project she has been working on since 2014. Chaffee recalls of that experience, I was struck then, as I’ve always been struck, by the diversity of his practice, by the different directions that he takes, and it’s something a lot of

writers and curators have grappled with, trying to place his different approaches into a framework. Joe is so engaged with abstraction’s relationship with figuration, the idea of presenting his work here made a lot of sense within the context of the museum’s collection, given the Albright-Knox’s extraordinary history with Abstract Expressionism. He is very much an inheritor of the legacy of numerous Abstract Expressionist painters—but he approaches them in his own way, his own synthesis, or struggle.1 Indeed, the Albright-Knox’s stellar permanent collection of works by Abstract Expressionist masters, in particular Philip Guston, Willem de Kooning, and Clyfford Still, will serve to enhance viewers’ understanding of Bradley’s various approaches to abstract painting and of his devotion to and understanding of its history. When the show travels to the Rose, which also has a strong collection of postwar American art, Bradley will make a se-

lection of works from that collection to be displayed in an adjacent gallery.

What struck Chaffee when she saw the exhibition in Dijon was the difficulty of showing Bradley’s diverse bodies of work together in one exhibition, how to “thread that needle.” (It has been said that a retrospective of Bradley’s work “would look like a group show,”2 though Chaffee smartly points out the same could be said of many artists.)

It is true that on first glance Bradley’s different modes of working might not seem entirely related and contain contradictions, but that is the challenge and pleasure of organizing an exhibition of complex and interesting work. His modular paintings (first shown in the exhibition Kurgan Waves, at the CANADA gallery, New York, in 2006) are composed of single-color canvases installed to create geometric, often overtly figural forms, such as the long-legged, slicker-and-galoshes-wearing The Fisherman’s Friend from 2005, one of the earliest works in the exhibition. This series was

followed in 2008–9 by the Schmagoo series, in which simple forms are drawn in grease pencil on bare, sometimes slightly dirty canvases, elevating sketches to paintings through their scale and support. Bradley has described the Schmagoo series as “setting the reset button . . . a natural progression in some way,”3 and that attitude seems to apply wholly to his transitions between styles. The silkscreen paintings, which followed, employed dark silhouettes of figures against white grounds and have strong connections to both the Schmagoo paintings and Bradley’s drawings. These are the most literally figural works within an oeuvre dedicated to abstraction of the figure in different modes.

Meanwhile, the large-scale, gestural abstract canvases are painterly and messy in a way the modular paintings and silkscreens refuse to be. Their builtup layers of paint and collage elements make them the most time-consuming works Bradley produces, as does the sculptural, three-dimensional way in which they are painted: on the floor, tacked to

the wall, and on the back of the canvas, picking up studio detritus along the way. Bradley’s sculptures, ranging from tabletop works inspired by found materials to large modular pieces, will also be represented in the Albright-Knox show.

Chaffee will demonstrate connections across these wide-ranging bodies of work by articulating Bradley’s intentions behind them. She finds a remarkable consistency in the place the work comes from—each piece is an essential part of the larger puzzle: “For Joe, abstraction and the comic are the materials he keeps coming back to.” She further explains that his various series are interrelated because the artist needs them all, each one informing the rest: “He enjoys having bodies of work that he can go to almost to clear his head, after the hard work, and the very messy work, of making these abstract paintings.” Further, they all come from similar source material, even if “aesthetically, they are not easy to square.” While Bradley looks intently at the art of the past, his sources also

Opposite and previous spread: Joe Bradley, Mother and Child, 2016, oil on canvas, 83 × 101 inches (210.8 × 256.5 cm). Photo by Rob McKeever Right and following spread: Joe Bradley, East Coker, 2013, oil on canvas, 100 × 102 inches (254 × 259.1 cm).

Photo courtesy the artist

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include pop-culture and mundane references that can be identified across series: comic books, high school yearbooks, an instructional book on break dancing, underground music and slang, as well as QSL cards, which CB radio operators used to share their handles and were especially popular in the 1970s. Bradley’s often humorous titles make the conceptual connections among these works more apparent.

The most recent paintings, shown in the Krasdale exhibition last year at the Gagosian Gallery on Madison Avenue, New York, and earlier this year in Eric’s Hair at Gagosian in Beverly Hills, take Bradley’s abstraction in a different direction, but with a sense of summation. Made on stretched canvases, works like Mother and Child (2016), with its horizon line and eclipsed celestial bodies, have a strong relationship to landscape (a genre that greatly interested the artist in his student years at the Rhode Island School of Design), as well as to the modular

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paintings, with their strong geometric forms painted in primary colors.

The Albright-Knox survey will offer an opportunity to revisit the modular paintings, which introduced Bradley to the larger public, and to think about them differently, especially in terms of the work that followed. The modular paintings have often been described as send-ups of Minimalism, or as references to video-game icons, but these connections were not intended.4 Kim Conaty, curator at the Rose Art Museum and a contributing author to the substantial catalogue that will accompany Bradley’s museum exhibition, found the artist’s reading of these works entirely unexpected and it informed her writing on the paintings as a whole.

Rather than thinking of them in terms of Minimalism, she remembers, he told her they were “about the discomfort he felt in figuring out how two colors can rest next to each other on a canvas, and solving it in the most explicit way possible”: using colored

vinyl as a readymade material, stretching it into rectilinear shapes, and composing based on color and formal relationships.5 The modular works are the only paintings for which Bradley makes color studies, where composition is key, in stark contrast with the way the abstract paintings are made. The lessons from these paintings, removing the artist’s gesture and juxtaposing colors in the most direct way, are then applied to the abstract paintings, which share similar forms ensconced in thick layers of impasto, still vaguely suggesting figures. Conaty, who worked at the Whitney at the time of the Biennial and has therefore been familiar with the modular works for some time, found these motivations revelatory, and they serve as the basis for her catalogue essay, which examines his palette and use of readymade color—vinyls or unmixed tube paints—as a through line for works made using vastly different techniques. His choice of colors—mainly primary

colors, different fleshy tones, browns, and blacks— contribute to the figural readings of the works, regardless of how they are made.

At the Albright-Knox, Bradley’s work will be installed in a Beaux-Arts permanent exhibition space of nine galleries, selected to best showcase each type of work on its own. Chaffee plans to give over an entire gallery to the modular paintings, so they can be experienced in isolation; a gallery each for the Schmagoo paintings, the silkscreens, and the drawings. Sculptures may be scattered throughout and at least three grand galleries will be dedicated to the large-scale, gestural abstract paintings. At the Rose, the show will be installed in the large Foster Gallery, which will be configured into smaller galleries for a similar effect. Chaffee and Conaty emphasize that the openness of the exhibition space, and the sight lines between the galleries, will be important to the final layout of the show at each venue, making these

Opposite, top left: Joe Bradley, Untitled (Schmagoo), 2014, graphite and oil on canvas, 52 × 48 inches (132.1 × 121.9 cm).

Photo by Thomas Müller Opposite, top right: Joe Bradley, Untitled (Mouth), 2009, oil crayon on canvas, 74 × 55 inches (188 × 139.7 cm). Photo by CANADA, LLC Opposite, bottom left: Joe Bradley, On the Cross, 2008, grease pencil on canvas, 100 × 65 inches (254 × 165 cm). Photo by CANADA, LLC

connections between Bradley’s bodies of work even more apparent. The Bradley show also continues the Rose’s tradition of presenting an artist’s first museum exhibition: Bruce Conner, Louise Nevelson, and Dana Schutz all had their first U.S. shows there.

The experience of looking back has prompted Bradley to revisit earlier series, some of which he hasn’t engaged with for some time. He is making a new modular painting, new silkscreens, some small sculptures.

The exhibition catalogue will feature essays by Chaffee, on the dialogues among bodies of work;

by Conaty, on the paintings; and by writer and curator Dan Nagle, who will focus on the drawings.

It will also contain an interview between Bradley and Carroll Dunham. Until recently there has been an unfortunate lack of good scholarship on Bradley, which will be rectified with this important collection of texts, as well as by Gagosian’s

just-published catalogue of the 2016 Krasdale show, which features essays by Sir Norman Rosenthal and Anne Pontégnie. Even for those familiar with Bradley’s work, the forthcoming exhibition promises to be revelatory in its depth and breadth, highlighting the similarities across distinct bodies of work in ways not previously possible.

1 All quotes from Cathleen Chaffee are from an interview with the author on March 3, 2017.

2 Kenny Schachter, “Kenny Schachter on Joe Bradley’s Unlikely Rise to Art World Eminence,” Artnet News, January 11, 2016.

Available online at https://news.artnet.com/opinion/kennyschachter-joe-bradley-404936 (accessed March 23, 2017).

3 Joe Bradley, quoted in Phil Grauer, “Joe Bradley,” The Journal no.

30 (2011), p. 60.

4 See “Dike Blair and Joe Bradley,” Bomb Magazine, Summer 2009, p. 81.

5 All quotes from Kim Conaty are from a telephone conversation with the author on March 7, 2017.

Opposite, bottom right: Joe Bradley, Superman, 2008, grease pencil on canvas, 70 × 60 inches (170 × 152 cm). Photo by CANADA, LLC Right: Joe Bradley, The Fisherman’s Friend, 2005, acrylic on canvas, 105 ½ × 36 inches (268 × 91.4 cm). Photo courtesy the artist Artwork © Joe Bradley

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CARSTEN HÖLLER Daniel Birnbaum speaks with the artist about the “unsaturated” in his work.

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You have a PhD in agricultural science. Might one think of your work as a bridge between science and art?

CARSTEN HÖLLER No, certainly not. I haven’t introduced the scientific experiment into the art context, only the experimental form. The scientific experiment aims at reaching a finding through the testing of a hypothesis. In art the experiment is more of an experiment with oneself, without tangible results—there’s no objective observer collecting data and drawing conclusions. There’s only the artwork and its viewers, who are subjected to a situation and called on to examine themselves. That’s a major difference.

DB Even if you’re not creating a bridge between art and science, I at least have the feeling that certain themes migrate from one to the other.

CH That’s true, but the result is critical of science.

DANIEL BIRNBAUM

Natural science is finished and its importance is completely overrated. Its great discoveries are in the past. Even so, certain realms continue to be the exclusive property of science. That exclusivity bothers me—I’d like the opposite of rationality to take up just as much space as scientific logic.

DB In early works you intoxicated yourself with the psychoactive mushroom fly agaric, and mushrooms turn up again and again in your work. Is it the shifting of perception through chemical reactions that interests you?

CH I find mushrooms incredible. But for truffles and a few others, they grow out of the ground as they ripen—in fact their sole function is to lift their spores out of the ground to be carried away by the wind. So why do they have this immense variety of shapes, colors, and constituents, some of them psychoactive? As far as we know, they don’t communi-

cate with other mushrooms above the ground, and they don’t use these toxins to protect themselves.

There’s something else going on that we don’t understand.

The fly agaric is a remarkable mushroom. It’s important in shamanism, though under Christianity that’s been suppressed. It may still be used in some tribal cultures in northeast Siberia to put shamans into trance states. There’s archaeological evidence to suggest that fly agaric was the basis of the soma described in the Vedas, a juice derived from vegetables or mushrooms that was a pathway to the divine. It’s perfectly legitimate to assume that the importance of fly agaric as a symbol has not entirely disappeared.

DB The mushroom’s toxicity isn’t altogether irrelevant: your work doesn’t glorify drugs but does show an interest in shifts in perception. Those 123

kinds of shifts can also be triggered by optical instruments.

CH Many methods and routes are useful for breaking out of the logic in which we find ourselves, and that we have created, with great effort, to tame the world. Science and technology are major components of that logic. If psychoactive mushrooms or other substances can give us a way of thinking and being outside it, not only in art or in dreams, then they’re alright with me.

DB What is this logic? Is it what we think of as normality?

CH It’s a logic that has imposed itself on everything and instantly absorbs everything different.

In fact difference is a kind of culture for breeding it, making it all the more logical. It has a kind of hegemony, it has spread across the world like a pandemic. It creeps into the most remote regions and suppresses everything else like a parasitic organism. It’s so all-encompassing that we can no longer see, in certain circumstances, the possibility of something else.

DB Are your works attempts to escape this logic?

CH At the least they’re suggestions, though I’m fully aware of the paradox that to reject the logic is only to confirm it. I try to imagine how an expedition would have to be equipped in order to get outside it. Perhaps there aren’t any extralogical realms. Perhaps we’re just like sailors convinced that beyond the horizon is the end of the world, which we’re afraid to find, but in any case as we move toward the horizon it keeps moving away from us. Still, it’s worth trying to get to the horizon, since there seems to be as much ignorance about the extralogical as there once was about the shape of the earth.

DB A quality of many of your works is the fact that they’re not only objects, they’re usable. They’re tools.

CH You had suggested calling them “unsaturated” works. That’s a good term.

DB The logician Gottlob Frege talked about “unsaturated functions.” For the idea “being human,” for example, he said that “X is a human” is true, is a sentence, but “being a human” is a function, and as such is unsaturated because it lacks an object, lacks an X. In this sense your artworks are functions—in your flying machine, say, something has to be filled in for X. The work is an unfinished object, since it only functions when someone flies in it.

One can say that every artwork requires an observer to be complete. But with you it happens especially often that the unsaturated quality goes beyond the mere presence of the viewer.

CH I find the idea problematic that artists create

things they consider “finished,” and that once this object or performance or film is finished it goes on public display. To escape that logic, it seems sensible to me to make works that are unsaturated and have the overall nature of tools.

DB Leo Castelli once said that no artwork is finished in the studio, it first has to have a public. It probably has to be sold before it’s finished. In the work of Marcel Duchamp, who was less interested in the art market than in the idea of the artwork, you find the notion that the viewer is just as important as the artist.

CH Yet Duchamp produced almost only finished works of art.

DB And the readymades? How saturated would you say a readymade is, 50 percent? 100 percent?

CH At least 200 percent, since it’s doubly saturated.

The readymades are something different. The manufacturer of the bottle-drying rack thought the object was finished and released it for sale. Then Duchamp took it and introduced nonsaturation into it, since he denied the exclusivity of its original function—drying bottles—without giving it a new function in Frege’s sense. The bottle rack was a sentence that Duchamp turned into a function. But then he displayed it as a finished art object. Having lost the saturated exclusivity of its original use, it now worked as a sculptural form, but could still be used, potentially, as a bottle rack. So saturation had become layered, and is therefore 200 percent.

DB I feel that the more saturated a work is, the more effective it is in the art market.

CH Yes, unfortunately.

DB A perfect object, say a Brancusi— CH —which is saturated, highly saturated.

DB Duchamp’s ideas are no longer new—it has become almost normal for art to take the viewer into account.

CH Yes. One could also say of my work Test Site [2006–7] that it was a sculpture in a space that is in itself saturated. It wasn’t absolutely necessary for a person to climb into the work and slide down; the libidinously spiraling tracks were justified in their relation to the rectilinear industrial architecture of Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. But now somebody comes along and climbs in. At that moment a situation appears to which the artist no longer has access, namely the existential and individual experience of the person sliding. Roger Caillois described the experience of vertigo as “a kind of voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind.”

So the work could be used in different ways. To that extent it was both saturated and unsaturated, and as such perhaps more unsaturated: the saturated aspect became a pawn of the nonsaturation.

IN ART THE EXPERIMENT IS MORE OF AN EXPERIMENT WITH ONESELF, WITHOUT TANGIBLE RESULTS. Carsten Höller

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DB That’s a whole new theory of art! Let’s talk about the idea that the viewer of an artwork, or perhaps the reader of a book, brings a great deal to it and actively participates in it. A book is nothing until someone reads it, but the person in a slide has no freedom: the adventure, the experience, may belong to her or him alone, but there is only one way of sliding down.

CH The action is predetermined: you end up where you think you will in the manner you had expected. You slide down a preset course, and yes, in doing so you briefly lose part of your usual condition. You are no longer the person you usually are.

But that’s a kind of liberation. There’s no longer any room for decision-making, you’re freed from yourself. If the artist can manage to offer a specific form of interference that is possible in this form and in this form only, to my mind that’s worth the effort.

My question is, how can one make things that release a person from the certainty of logic? How can one produce a situation that elicits doubt without illustrating that doubt and thereby neutralizing it? My first attempt was Laboratory of Doubt in Antwerp. I bought a car and pasted stickers all over it that read “Laboratory of Doubt” in Belgium’s three languages, Flemish, French, and German.

Loudspeakers attached to a microphone and amplifiers were mounted on the roof. I wanted to drive around in the car and sow doubt, wanted to make doubt proliferate. But I didn’t manage it, because I couldn’t think what to say to sow doubt. There was a degree of nonsaturation here that I found appealing. There was only potential.

DB In what works by other artists do you see nonsaturation?

CH Maybe the Passstücke [Adaptives] that Franz

West began in the early 1970s. Those are beautiful unsaturated works. To some extent they function like my slides, or better, for on the one hand there’s an object in plaster and steel that is weirdly appealing, and on the other there’s a functionality that goes undefined. Here it was truly a matter of producing a unique experience with simple means.

DB Many of Bruce Nauman’s works are unsaturated in that they require an observer who becomes part of the work. Unlike the slides, though, those are unpleasant, almost claustrophobic situations.

Umberto Eco, in his book The Open Work [1962], writes that a work of art is never truly finished but rather is always being read in a new way. New generations arise and time goes by. And Duchamp not only talks about the observer’s involvement in the artwork but also points to posterity, to the fact that it will only be clear in fifty years whether or not a

Previous spread: Carsten Höller, Revolving Doors, 2016, mirrored revolving glass doors, aluminum, alucobond, and steel, 219 ¾ × 219 ¾ × 89 ¾ inches (558 × 558 × 228 cm).

Photo by Attilio Maranzano Carsten Höller, Divisions (Roach and Surface), 2016, acrylic glass, paint, stainless steel, screws, and roach (taxidermy by Matthias Fahrni), 17 ¾ × 29 ½ × 7 ½ inches (45 × 75 × 19 cm).

Photo by Thomas Bruns Following spread: Carsten Höller: Decision, installation view, Hayward Gallery, London, June 10– September 6, 2015. Photo

by Ela Bialkowska

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EVEN IF YOU’RE NOT CREATING A BRIDGE BETWEEN ART AND SCIENCE, I HAVE THE FEELING CERTAIN THEMES MIGRATE FROM ONE TO THE OTHER. Daniel Birnbaum 128

work was important. Duchamp also says that the cards are reshuffled: for a long time no one is interested in El Greco, then El Greco resurfaces. Is that also part of the public’s collaboration?

CH Duchamp also said that posterity makes mistakes. How a work of art is viewed later, after the artist’s death, depends on more than the work of art itself; there are errors that creep in and can become altogether major, then perhaps disappear again.

That too is a form of nonsaturation, since that’s how art lives on.

I don’t think we can make an absolute distinction between the saturated and the unsaturated artwork, though we can make a relative one. The unsaturated work doesn’t present a form of truth, doesn’t pretend to make it possible to get to the truth. But that refusal can’t continue into eternity, into posterity’s posterity—something static adheres

Above: Carsten Höller: Decision, installation view, Hayward Gallery, London, June 10– September 6, 2015. Photo

by Ela Bialkowska Artwork © Carsten Höller

in the process, since the artwork is a mausoleum of its own meaning. The issue lies in producing something that goes beyond that, in the sense that it works as a tool that helps us climb inside ourselves.

It’s that tool-like quality that makes it possible to climb out of the finished state again.

DB I’m wondering what the consequences of that are. I’m afraid that the more saturated a work is, the more it’s seen as a masterwork. That seems to be the exact opposite of what you’re after—you look for maximum unsaturation.

CH Both . . . and. An unsaturated work of art has to have both qualities at once, otherwise it is not unsaturated. The unsaturated aspect may be temporary but the saturated aspect is not. I’m not saying this is the philosopher’s stone, but in this age of the great ordering system of logic what I propose is this doubling, this replication, and the uncertainty

it brings. As I said, I want to try to escape that logic, to achieve a kind of extralogical uncertainty. The unsaturated aspect will not replace the saturated one; it’s a part of it, at the same time that it’s an extralogical continuation of it. “Unsaturation” is such an appropriate concept of yours, because it suggests chemical reactions, such as those with fatty acids.

DB I was waiting for you to mention unsaturated fatty acid.

CH And the reactions taking place are beyond anyone’s control—at least that would be the idea.

Excerpt of a conversation between Daniel Birnbaum and Carsten Höller at the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, January 31, 2013. Edited in German by Stefanie Hessler. Translated from German by Russell Stockman. Further edits were made to this text in English by Louise Neri.

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REINVENTING THE NUDE

Throughout his career, Tom Wesselmann looked to the art of Henri Matisse for inspiration.

From direct quotations to more allusive innovations, the younger artist maintained a continual dialogue with the modern master. Andrew Goldstein discusses the complexities of this relationship with Jeffrey Sturges and Dr. Gail Stavitsky.

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ooking at the clean, sunny compositions and exultant joie de vivre in the work of the American Pop artist Tom Wesselmann, even lay observers might find their minds wandering to the art of another master of the pleasing painting, the French modernist Henri Matisse. From a formal perspective, the two artists share an emphasis on harmony, pictorial economy, and what Matisse called “essential lines”; thematically, both were drawn to the allure of the classical nude—though in importantly different ways. Nor is their relationship across time merely an accident of complementary styles. Wesselmann, from the very beginning of his career to his twilight days, determinedly claimed art-historical descent from Matisse, in the manner of a son demanding rights of succession from a distant father.

How did this unusual relationship across time blossom? Wesselmann originally dreamed of becoming a cartoonist, and studied drawing at the Art Academy of Cincinnati. His ambitions changed, however, after he arrived in New York to attend Cooper Union in 1956 and found himself plunged into the cauldron of that city’s postwar artistic ferment. Impressed by the work of the Abstract Expressionists, in particular Willem de Kooning, Wesselmann felt that “to find his own passion” he needed to “go in as opposite a direction as possible.” Matisse, as an exemplar of the figure-focused generations preceding the New York School, provided a path forward.

To discuss the way Wesselmann contrived to bring Matisse into the very DNA of his work, Andrew Goldstein sat down with Jeffrey Sturges, the director of exhibitions for the Estate of Tom Wesselmann, and Dr. Gail Stavitsky, lead curator of the Matisse and American Art exhibition at the Montclair Art Museum.

ANDREW GOLDSTEIN How did Wesselmann first become drawn to the art of Henri Matisse?

JEFFREY STURGES I want to read something Wesselmann wrote recounting his thoughts, upon completing his studies at Cooper Union in 1959, because I think it gets to the heart of our discussion:

Obviously I must have. I just didn’t remember them. But having a book in my hand, I got a look at them and they were meaningful to me. I was struck by various aspects of them.

I didn’t have too much to say about it, except that I was awed by him as I was by de Kooning.

I can sort of look back at whom I was awed by just by saying “Matisse and de Kooning.”

What got me about Matisse and put me on my guard at the same time was how very stunningly beautiful his paintings were. They were exciting. You couldn’t look at a Matisse without feeling some kind of excitement, you just couldn’t do it.

You can see Matisse pointing the way, especially in terms of clarity and intense color.

AG While Wesselmann considered de Kooning too strong an artistic model to follow, he was less

I think Matisse comes in right around the time of graduation from art school. I’d acquired some little cheap book of his reproductions. I’d seen a few here and there before. shy about letting Matisse guide his development.

Why was he a more sympathetic influence, and what were a few concrete approaches Wesselmann picked up from him?

GAIL STAVITSKY There’s actually a quote of Wesselmann’s where he said, “I had to find a way of making figurative work exciting, and I certainly got an assist, a morale boost, from his presence.”

Pretty early on, I think, Matisse offered a pathway in terms of color and form.

AG We can see this as early as 1959, when Wesselmann made an important collage titled After Matisse. Can you tell me what’s going on in that work?

JS Wesselmann was copying a Matisse painting called The Artist and His Model [1919]. When you see them side by side, you can find all of the corresponding elements. The thing that’s different is that the Matisse is horizontal, but Tom decides, I’m going to make mine vertical. Clearly he’s trying to understand Matisse’s formal decisions by copying him. But the content is also important—he chose to copy a work whose theme defines his own career, 132

Previous spread: Tom Wesselmann, Sunset Nude with Matisse, 2002, oil on canvas, 66 × 80 inches (167.6 × 203.2 cm) Top: Wesselmann’s copy of Clement Greenberg’s 1953 book Henri Matisse with a reproduction of the image of The Artist and His Model (1919) by Matisse Bottom: Tom Wesselmann, After Matisse, 1960, pastel and collage on board, 15 × 11 5⁄8 inches (38.1 × 29.5 cm)

the artist and model.

Another difference is their relationship to the model, and I think that’s significant. Matisse painted his models and then there was Mrs. Matisse. But with Wesselmann, his wife, Claire, was the model for the Great American Nudes, so there’s a personal romantic relationship to the model, which I think is very different from Matisse.

AG The specific source for the After Matisse homage was a reproduction in Clement Greenberg’s 1953 book Henri Matisse, a resource that Wesselmann would pilfer from at other times as well.

Greenberg wrote, “I would say that, for a while now, Matisse has been a more relevant and fertile source for ambitious new painting than any other single

master before or after him.” How did Matisse, who passed away two years before Wesselmann came to the city, become so au courant in postwar New York?

GS A lot of that had to do with Matisse’s son Pierre, who moved to New York in 1925, opened a gallery, and did many exhibitions of Matisse’s work. By the late ’40s Greenberg was writing reviews calling Matisse a really important contemporary artist, arguing that he wasn’t just an old modern master but somebody who was still very relevant. Greenberg essentially said that we should rejoice in the fact that Matisse was alive and well and still doing new and important bodies of work, especially those great paintings from 1947 that were shown at the Pierre Matisse Gallery.

AG What was the reaction to Matisse’s death like in New York in 1954?

GS That’s a really relevant question, because it was obviously a moment when a lot of attention was paid to him. One of the works we have in the show is Grace Hartigan’s Homage to Matisse from 1955, so it’s within a year after Matisse’s death. She literally writes right at the bottom of the painting, very boldly, “Homage to Matisse.” It’s her interpretation of his variation on a still life by Jan Davidsz. de Heem, but it’s abstract—the Abstract Expressionist version of that subject. Mark Rothko too painted an Homage to Matisse in 1954. He was certainly on people’s minds.

AG It reminds me of when the Salon d’Automne held a retrospective of Cézanne in 1907, the year after he died, and all of the modernists in Paris came and were enormously influenced.

Over these early years, Wesselmann’s kinship with Matisse developed to the point where he seemed to be actively working to claim a kind of art-historical descent from the older artist. In another work from 1960, Judy Trimming Toenails, Yellow Wall, he uses a witty device to connect his more contemporary pictorial instincts to Matisse: he puts a framed Matisse painting in the background, while in the foreground he presents a far

Top: Wesselmann’s copy of Clement Greenberg’s 1953 book Henri Matisse, showing its reproduction of a Matisse drawing that Wesselmann tore out to use in the work at right.

Right: Tom Wesselmann, Little Still Life #32, 1964, graphite, collage, and assemblage on board, 5 ½ × 6 ½ × 1 ¼ inches (14 × 16.5 × 3.2 cm)

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more abstracted, featureless nude along with domestic details rendered in shapes of solid color.

What is going on in this artwork?

JS Wesselmann drew from life. He would make sketchbook drawings, select one that he liked, transfer it to panel, and then add collage elements.

In this case we see Judy with a red hat, a blue towel draped over the bathtub, and a yellow wall behind.

The color is organized by the triad of those primaries; red, yellow, and blue. On the wall is a reproduction of a Matisse painting showing a woman in a blue dress, with a red chair, and yellow details.

This painting also has pictures hanging on the wall. Wesselmann repeats this motif, the painting on the wall, frequently. I look at that Matisse and I see two things. I see Wesselmann questioning himself, like, “Am I up to this?” But then I also a see it as a declaration: “I am this good.” I think he’s saying both. He’s testing himself and answering the question at the same time.

GS It may also be a kind of dialogue with Matisse in another way, because Matisse so often included his own work in the background. But it’s so clear even from the start here that he’s much more abstract in his treatment of the nude, and also more contemporary, working in the mode of that time period.

AG Do we know specifically what it was that Wesselmann admired so much, or found so useful, in Matisse during this period? What was it that made Matisse into an appealing aesthetic tool for that moment?

JS As a young artist, Wesselmann felt that the painting he admired, gestural abstraction, was already being done, and seemed to offer no possibilities for him. In the face of a dead end, he decided that the way forward was the opposite: not abstraction but representation. Not brown but colorful. Not messy but sharply defined. I think Matisse offered a model for this new path.

GS Matisse’s flatness, his simplicity of form and palette, and his integration of everything on a two-dimensional surface was so Greenbergian.

AG The next year, in 1961, Wesselmann’s investigation of Matisse yielded his first big break with Great American Nude #1. It’s clear with this painting and its title that he is placing himself in dialogue with the great European nude, in particular the Matissean nude. And the great American nude is very different. First of all, where does this painting come from?

JS Well, he had a dream. While working on 134

small collage works like Judy Trimming Toenails, Yellow Wall [1960] he began to think more about color and how to use it as a way to define the paintings. He had a dream with the words red, white, and blue and immediately decided to continue the nudes with that theme and the title Great American Nude. Of course he was working in the tradition of the European academic nude, but setting himself apart from it, reinventing it.

AG When you think of the search for the great American novel you think of the ideal novel that would tackle the country’s prevailing themes and express its nature. You don’t really think of nude paintings as having the same role in the culture— that there’s a nude out there that will say it all and explain where we are. But the American part of the Great American Nude is what makes it so interesting. How do you see the Americanness of Wesselmann’s nude contrasting with the Europeanness of Matisse’s nudes?

GS It’s funny because I feel like that’s part of the reason why we’ve talked about this work a lot— there’s something about that whole Hugh Hefner, Playboy, sexy theme, combined with elements of pop culture, that gives it such a uniquely American flavor. It’s interesting to contrast that with Matisse, because sometimes I see his work in terms more of world culture than of European culture. He collected textiles from the Orient and Africa and used all these multicultural elements to inform his paintings, although they’re certainly part of the French tradition of the nude.

JS I think it’s the frankness of the sexuality in Wesselmann’s work that is so different from Matisse’s.

There’s an erotic quality—not so overtly at first, but it develops as the series continues. As I said, for Matisse there was Madame Matisse and then there was the model. For Wesselmann there was more of an integration of art and life. He saw eroticism as

Top: Henri Matisse, Woman in Blue, 1937, oil on canvas, 36 ½ × 29 inches (92.7 × 73.7 cm). Photo by The Philadelphia Museum of Art/ Art Resource, NY

Bottom: Tom Wesselmann, Judy Trimming Toenails, Yellow Wall, 1960, mixed media and collage on board, 7 ¼ × 5 ¾ inches (18.4 × 14.6 cm)

Tom Wesselmann, Sunset Nude with Wesselmann, 2003, oil on canvas, 75 × 105 inches (190.5 × 266.7 cm)

a very basic facet of humanity, and an important theme in his work—not something off to the side but a driving force, a core component of life.

AG It’s really fun to look at a Matisse nude and a Wesselmann nude and play a game of compare and contrast. What are the differences? Some are very basic. Matisse’s nudes are brunette, Wesselmann’s are blond. Matisse was a self-avowed romantic, and his nudes are either doing their toilette or posing alluringly, to be admired romantically; Wesselmann’s nudes are far more pornographic, appealing not to romance but to more carnal, libidinal desires—they’re not just for observation. Matisse taps into a classical, almost statuesque ideal of female beauty; Wesselmann was more frank, emphasizing his models’ pubic hair. Then there’s the fact that Matisse uses grand Moroccan villas and country homes as his settings while Wesselmann places his nudes in a tiled bathroom or a kitchen, making them more vernacular and much more direct. Wesselmann even plays up this contrast between the American and the European nude in Great American Nude #44, from 1963, where in the middle of the kitchen there’s a Renoir tondo of a decorous red-cheeked brunette and then on the side you’ve got a featureless blond striking a “rah-rah!” athletic pose. How would you frame this difference between Wesselmann’s and Matisse’s nudes?

GS It’s much more sublimated in Matisse, because whatever he’s painting is subjugated to balance, harmony, and control, making the whole composition work together. It’s also a personal thing, as you said. I doubt Matisse ever talked about sex the way Wesselmann obviously did, as

such an important part of life.

JS That’s an indicator of the times, right? Think about the sexual revolution—you mentioned Playboy, everything changes in that decade. People are talking about sex. I think this work demonstrates that new openness. There’s a moment in the mid’60s when Richard Bellamy, Wesselmann’s dealer at the time, says to him, “The more erotic, the better.” Obviously they realized there was a strong response to this aspect of the work, and that people were interested in it. And looking at those Pop artists, Wesselmann went head-on into the subject in a way that none of the others did.

AG Matisse famously said that he dreamed of, “an art of balance, of purity and serenity, devoid of troubling or disturbing subject matter, an art which could be for every mental worker, for the businessman as well as the man of letters, for example, a soothing, calming influence on the mind, something like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.” What did Wesselmann hope to provide his viewers?

JS I think it changes. In the beginning he wanted to reproduce the strong visceral response he had had to the work of de Kooning and Robert Motherwell when he was a student, but on his own terms.

The Great American Nudes, although unified by the theme of the nude in the interior, are composed of very different materials: painting, photography, real fabric, and objects, each with its own reality. It was shocking to see these realities collide; shocking to see the advertising world and the fine art world collide. Wesselmann was after that kind of shock. But I think this was tempered over time, as 135

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MATISSE PAINTED HIS MODELS AND THEN THERE WAS MRS. MATISSE. BUT WITH WESSELMANN, HIS WIFE, CLAIRE, WAS THE MODEL FOR THE “GREAT AMERICAN NUDES,” SO THERE’S A PERSONAL ROMANTIC RELATIONSHIP TO THE MODEL, WHICH I THINK IS VERY DIFFERENT FROM MATISSE. Jeffrey Sturges

Tom Wesselmann, Great American Nude #1, 1961, mixed media and collage on board, 48 × 48 inches (121.9 × 121.9 cm)

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his work shifted from collage to pure painting then to the cutout metal works. I think we have to look back again to his early statement about Matisse and beauty. I think beauty in painting was important for Wesselmann too.

AG Are those laser cuts you mention in direct lineage with Matisse’s late cutouts?

JS It’s fascinating to imagine them side by side.

One of Wesselmann’s late relief metal works is a remaking of Matisse’s Dance, the blue figures surrounded by cutout colored shapes. Yes, they look like the Matisse paper cutouts, but let me explain how these works began, because it will clarify the intention. With the laser-cut works Wesselmann wanted to duplicate his drawn line at a larger scale.

First he made a drawing with brush on paper, maybe 18 by 24 inches, and then it was scanned. But remember this is 1985, before everyone had a scanner, printer, and computer. Then the scanned image would go to a fabricator and they would laser-cut a flat sheet of steel to remove all of the negative areas, leaving behind only his line. Finally, the work would come to the studio painted with a white primer and he would paint them in color.

AG It’s similar to what Alex Katz was doing around the same period.

JS Yes, but Wesselmann brought together several technologies to duplicate his drawings larger than life. So they’re almost photographic in their faithfulness to his original drawings. At the time, thirty years ago, that was a very advanced use of technology. Today it looks fairly commonplace.

AG And even with these very advanced works, Wesselmann is still paying overt homage to Matisse, just as he was in the beginning of his career.

GS It’s interesting how he always kind of acknowledged the source, as in Still Life with Two Matisses [1991] and Still Life with Johns and Matisse [1992/1993]. It would be absolutely fascinating to see a show just of Wesselmann and Matisse.

AG Absolutely, that would be a great show. What I love about this late period of Wesselmann’s is that it’s evident he’s having fun with these art-historical allusions and entertaining himself, the way Picasso did in the Vollard Suite, where he was burlesquing his artistic heroes and putting them in wickedly irreverent scenarios. Wesselmann’s sense of humor is different, of course, and in Still Life with Matisse and Johns he approaches his mashed-up theme with a kind of childlike near-abstraction, almost like late de Kooning, where everything is stripped

down to its bare minimum. It’s funny to see him start to mix and match his contemporaries with Matisse. What’s going on there? What’s the game he’s playing?

GS I feel like it’s affectionate. There’s also one with Roy Lichtenstein.

JS Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol—a lot of his contemporaries are there in the 1990s, it’s not just Picasso and Matisse. It’s a little bit different to see him paired with his peers.

GS Yes, that’s why I wondered if it was a kind of friendly mutual admiration.

JS Oh yes. It seems like he’s entertaining himself. And they look good, right?

AG They certainly do. But then the Sunset Nude series [2002–4] is where he really takes a majestic turn, taking on a melancholy, autumnal quality.

It’s a poignant series, obviously, because you’ve got the setting sun alluding to his own final years, but it also refers back to the beginning of his career Above: Tom Wesselmann, Still Life with Johns and Matisse (3-D), 1992–93, oil on cut-out aluminum, 72 × 92 × 11 inches (182.9 × 233.7 × 27.9 cm) Left: Henri Matisse, Reclining Nude II, 1927, bronze, 11 1⁄8 × 19 ½ × 5 7⁄8 inches (28.3 × 49.5 × 14.9 cm). Photo © Tate, London 2017

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and, of course, to Matisse. Sunset Nude with Matisse Odalisque, for instance, is a sensational painting.

But it’s in Sunset Nude with Wesselmann [2003] that he achieves a kind of kaleidoscoping of his whole artistic career, positioning his own Judy Trimming Toenails, Yellow Wall in the background. Presenting that breakthrough 1960 painting, with its own Matisse nestled in its own background, creates a mise-en-abîme effect where you go from a Matisse in a Wesselmann to another Matissean lounging nude—albeit with some tropical, Gauguin touches —in a Wesselmann. It’s moving to see that kind of sweep of his career. What was he thinking about in those final years?

JS Wesselmann had a heart attack in the mid1990s, and here you could make a comparison to Matisse’s health problems. But there’s a sense of renewal that happens after this close call with death.

Matisse had that, certainly—the paper cutout series follows that time in his life. Wesselmann, who lived for another decade, went headlong into abstraction and then a new series, the Sunset Nudes.

I think he was looking back at the beginning of his career and recognizing what defined him historically as an artist—his Great American Nude series— and as a response he made the Sunset Nudes. Like you said, I think it really is poignant.

And there’s more. One can divide his career into the collage work from 1960–65, the shaped canvases from 1965–85, and then the cutout metal

Left: Henri Matisse, Odalisque Seated with Arms Raised, Green Striped Chair, 1923, oil on canvas, 25 5⁄8 × 19 ¾ inches (65.1 × 50.2 cm).

Photo by National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC Below: Tom Wesselmann, Sunset Nude with Matisse Odalisque, 2003, oil on canvas, 120 × 100 inches (304.8 × 254 cm)

works; each period developed a three-dimensional aspect. Each phase progressed from flat to relief works. His last series, the Sunset Nudes, would have had their own three-dimensional version too, but the series was cut short. He was preparing a series of works based on his early collages, like Judy Trim-

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Top: Tom Wesselmann, Great American Nude #26, 1962, mixed media and collage on board, 60 × 48 inches (152.4 × 121.9 cm) Bottom: Henri Matisse, The Romanian Blouse, 1940, oil on canvas, 92 × 73 inches (233.7 × 185.4 cm). Photo © CNAC/ MNAM/Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY

ming Toe Nails, Yellow Wall. He wanted to re-create them on a much larger scale. He had already made preparations for one piece that was a reimagining of a bathtub collage; he had fabricated a giant toilet seat to be included in the work, and was working with his printmaker to fabricate some of the collage material. So the steps were there—he was just gathering the parts, and making studies for works that would have been the assemblage version of the Sunset Nudes.

AG It sounds like he was about to burst through to some kind of new development.

JS Well, yes, in these last studies one can imagine the next series. It seems so promising.

AG It’s fa scinat ing t hen t hat h is c areer is bookended so strongly by his filial relationship with Matisse. To be honest, I can’t think of any other artist who worked so deliberately in the shadow of an earlier artistic master. At the same time, of course, he was forging his own stylistic path.

JS Right, it’s both. He’s in that shadow but at the same time, he’s clearly himself as an artist. Maybe having such a strong figure to be working against really motivated him. I mean, Matisse is a lot to live up to.

GS You know, I have to say I think Matisse would have been really happy to have a student like Wes140

selmann. In Paris he ran a short-lived academy, from 1908 to 1911, and one of the things he really didn’t like was that he felt too many people were copying him and doing their own versions of his bold colors and trying to make their own Matisses.

His point was, his teaching wasn’t about copying him, it was about finding your own means of expression. He also used to say, “You have to walk on the ground before you can go on the tightrope,” and he really emphasized the fundamentals, like drawing from plaster casts. It was an almost academic education. I think he’d be very happy to see Wesselmann’s work, because I don’t think he ever wanted anybody to do anything but find his or her own means of expression.

AG Another interesting corollary to Wesselmann’s late work is Picasso’s late work where he invites a dialogue with the great old masters.

JS That’s a really good comparison. In the Sunset Nudes, painted in his last few years, Wesselmann included images of other artist’s paintings, hanging on the wall beside the nude. Like the posters of Matisse and Picasso that he had included in the Great American Nudes from the 1960s, these quotations bring those artists directly into his paintings. We see the comparison in the picture, not just in our mind.

Tom Wesselmann, 1962 Nude, 1991, liquitex on bristol board, 7 × 8 ½ inches (17.8 × 21.6 cm) Artwork © Estate of Tom Wesselmann/Licensed

by VAGA, New York.

Photos courtesy Estate of Tom Wesselmann All works of Henri Matisse are © Succession H. Matisse, Paris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

Of course they have different ways of grappling with their influences. Picasso is looking back at Velázquez and Rembrandt and saying Okay, I’ll do it my way. With Wesselmann it’s more as if he’s saying, the way he had his whole career, I’ll do it the American way.

JS Yes. I think the French-American contrast is significant. One of the most important Pop exhibitions was the New Realists show at the Sidney Janis Gallery in 1962, which included the American Pop artists and the European Nouveaux Réalistes.

At the time, Wesselmann noted the strong aesthetic difference between the American and the European artists in the exhibition: he described the European artists as too subtle. And his first and most famous series, the Great American Nude, is certainly not subtle.

AG Do we know what Wesselmann thought of Matisse as a man, as a biographical figure?

GS Wesselmann said of Matisse, He’s the most breathtaking painter there is—to me. I think that summarizes it all. He was so engaged with the way the work looked, and maybe less so with Matisse as a person.

JS What was important to Wesselmann was the art. Being able to meet him? It might have been interesting for him, but I think it was the painting that AG

was engaging, that vibrancy, that vitality.

AG To go on to the next generation, do any artists come to mind who are indebted to Wesselmann in any way that even approaches the way he was indebted to Matisse?

JS I think Mickalene Thomas’s work shares important elements with Wesselmann’s, the collage aesthetic and the odalisque. She contributed to the Wesselmann retrospective catalogue in 2012.

But of course the work is formally and conceptually very different.

AG I also think of Julian Opie as an artist it’s almost hard to imagine without Wesselmann.

JS Yes—formally, in terms of the line and even the idea of production. I mean, there were so many times when Wesselmann used technology to advance his work in a way that precedes what Opie is doing today.

AG But I think it’s undeniable that it’s rare for an artist to have as close a communion with another artist as Wesselmann did with Matisse. The two almost seem fused in Wesselmann’s later work, in a way.

JS Yes, I think it grew over the years. In the beginning, you see him including a Matisse poster, and it’s more about making a contrast. But slowly Matisse becomes more and more integrated.

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A short story in four parts

by Christopher Bollen

Part Two Know this: Kit was not a believer.

Sure, at thirty-four, she had witnessed her share of miracles. The summer after college, she and her German girlfriend Gudrun had spent an entire night climbing Mount Sinai to reach the peak at sunrise—the apocalyptic purples and dusty apricots pouring across the dawn-bleached desert still haunted her. Six years ago Kit had overslept and missed a train in Madrid that was subsequently bombed by radical separatists; she still had the train ticket pinned to her bulletin board. Her Korean mother in Baltimore had been diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer (the five-year survival rate was less than 10 percent), but wondrously, after only two operations, she was in remission and running mini-marathons. Last winter, while visiting a wealthy collector in Hawaii, Kit had gone for a swim alone and had actually touched a wild dolphin.

These, according to Kit, were extraordinary events; they were implausible and suspicious-sounding but genuinely authentic moments of real-life enchantment. Kit often leaned on these experiences to remind herself that the world still held a cache of magic and mystery, and she occasionally brought out one of these anecdotes at snoozy cocktail parties to entertain listeners. But these were terrestrial miracles, requiring no outside tampering by the Divine. Like anyone in New York who made serious money by exploiting their own talents, Kit felt that she was a chosen person—she might even go as far as to call herself blessed. But God? A maker of supernatural miracles? A mystical visitation by a holy being who, amid the extreme turmoil befalling this planet, chose a Kit Carrodine artwork to spiritually vandalize?

Uh uh. No frigging way.

The problem was that one of her paintings—Untitled, #7 of her Killers series, now hanging at Haskell Vex Gallery—was crying, as in leaking water from the eye region. And in the days that followed, no matter how many times Kit swore up, down, and sideways that it was just a case of condensation buildup—a freak accumulation of vapor thanks to the Antarctic temperature at which Haskell set his gallery thermostat—the blogs and newspapers went berserk covering the miracle painting of West 21st Street. There had been articles in the New York Post (surprisingly unbiased), The Cut (a mocking one), Jezebel (even more mocking), and The Daily Beast (a think piece on the mingling of true belief and predatory capitalism). In an attempt to turn a quotidian environmental disturbance into abject sensationalism, the reporters refused to heed Kit’s appeals to sanity—Condensation, it’s only condensation!!! The gullible faithful came in droves to the gallery while the rational skeptics accused both Kit and Haskell of attention-seeking charlatanism. The final irony had not been lost on her: she had prayed for the blizzard of press she was currently receiving—the story had even drowned out news on the search for the New York serial subway pusher—and it was this very exposure that was threatening to destroy every last shred of her credibility in the art world. Last week she had been a serious artist and a rising star; this week she was a local carnival act and a falling meteor.

If Kit ever did meet God, she would punch Her/Him in the stomach (after thanking Him/Her for sparing her mother).

Kit ascended from the tomb that was the Greenpoint Avenue subway stop. One sleeve of her nubby beige cardigan was bunched at her elbow while the other engulfed her blood-speckled fingers: she had chewed three hangnails on the ride to her studio while refusing to look at any of the newspapers folded in the laps of her fellow riders. Before reaching her studio in a former soap factory on the waterfront, she predicted that the steel grate would still be shuttered over her door. That would indicate that the last of her assistants had fled the sinking ship—two had quit by e-mail yesterday and one had concocted a weeklong family emergency in Minnesota that was so deranged it almost sounded credible. To her genuine surprise, though, the grate was lifted. She entered the cavernous concrete rectangle. Its floor was stained in spray-painted outlines of long-removed canvases, not unlike, Kit always thought, police tape around homicide victims.

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St. Kit of New York

Usually Kit’s first sight of her studio manager, Grace, was the emotional equivalent of rubbing alcohol on a cut. But today Kit was touched by Grace’s loyalty in showing up. Kit smiled in gratitude even as the young woman was sweeping up slides she’d obviously toppled onto the floor. From here out, Kit promised herself, she would no longer take her staff for granted. She vetoed the plan to fire Grace; instead she might offer her a raise.

A mug of tea sat steaming on Kit’s drafting-table desk, clearly placed there by Grace (who really was a wonderful, brilliant studio manager). Kit noticed the mug was bleeding a water ring onto page four of the Daily News. “Heaven help us! Prominent New York artist’s miracle painting cries crocodile tears, says gallerist.” Says gallerist? Kit quickly scanned the article, rummaging her eyes over the five paragraphs for Haskell’s name. And there it was, two paragraphs in: “Mr. Vex assured reporters that the painting is a clever hoax, perhaps intended by Ms. Carrodine as a sly reference to medieval church statuary. He refused further explanation as to the source of the strange tears.”

Kit felt as if a bullet the size of a taxi had just plowed through her body: Haskell was supposed to defend her, not throw her under the nearest bus. She dialed the gallery on her cell phone. As she waited for someone to pick up, she stared at the two images accompanying the article. One was a photograph of her from a year ago at an opening at the Whitney Museum—not an unflattering shot, in which Kit posed with an annoyed-but-humored crumple to her lips. The paper had cropped in on her, cutting the face of the man next to her in half. It was her ex-boyfriend, Kai. He was grinning open-mouthed and his one visible eye was roller-coastered wide; he looked like a fool, but a fool she missed. She wondered how he was handling their breakup. She could have used Kai by her side and in her bed the past few days, someone gentle to steady her erratic brainwaves. Kit took a compact mirror from her purse and placed it perpendicular to the cropped photograph, doubling the half-moon face, briefly returning Kai to the illusion of a complete person.

“Haskell Vex Gallery, please hold.”

Kit was thrown into the purgatory of badly dated indie rock. The second image that the Daily News ran was a reproduction of Untitled, #7, pretears. Kit examined her own painting, gazing past the forest of emojis—cash bag, eggplant, beach umbrella—and down to the barely visible face of the young black murderer. She had studied his mug shot for weeks while painting it, duplicating every wrinkle and bend of his mouth and nostrils. Kit probably knew this man’s face better than anyone else on the planet, maybe even better than he did.

Were inmates allowed mirrors on death row? It was a tough face, menacing but resilient, with a wide jaw and forehead and the disbelieving eyes of someone who realized he was caught whether or not he was guilty. She didn’t know his name or the particulars of his crime—when conceiving the Killers series she had found it meaningful not to know his name or background, to treat him as the state did, another statistic to be processed and incarcerated.

“Haskell Vex, thank you for holding,” a voice chirruped through the receiver.

“This is Kit Carrodine. Get me Haskell immediately.”

“Oh,” moaned the assistant. Oh, as in, the problem is calling. “Umm.” Kit was losing her patience. “He’s gonna have to call you back. He’s in a meeting.”

Patience. Breathe. “Listen. What’s your name?”

“Marcella.”

“Hi Marcella.” Kit was preparing her standard pecking-order retort: Just so you know, Marcella, it’s my art on the walls that allows Haskell to pay you to sit up front and look pretty while pretending to read Deleuze and put me on hold. So do me a favor. Tell Haskell he has two minutes to find the door to his meeting room and call me back. But Kit found that for once she didn’t have the nastiness in her. She just said limply, “Could you please ask him to call me as soon as humanly possible.”

She looked out the window at the skyline of Manhattan shining in the spring sun, the slender skyscrapers with steeples and spires, like gilded granite churches. Deep in the cracks of that metropolis, the trees were budding pink and yellow. It had only been a few horrific days, she told herself, don’t let a week be a life sentence. The miraculous tears will stop and 144

Part Two

life will go on. Kit considered buying a plane ticket to some faraway destination until the scandal blew over—Palermo or Baia do Sancho or San Sebastián, or hadn’t she discovered via Facebook that her old girlfriend Gudrun had opened a bed-and-breakfast in Munich? But she rejected the fantasy of escape. Kit, like all successful New Yorkers, was at heart a survivalist and she knew she’d stand her ground.

“Excuse me,” a frail voice whispered behind her. Kit spun around to find Grace standing a foot away, shoulders hunched and purple-white hands held like a frozen clap at her waist. “Could I talk to you for a moment?”

“Of course,” Kit wheezed, in a tone she hoped sounded like affection. “I’m always here for you. What’s on your mind?”

Grace nodded toward page four of the Daily News. “I feel terrible about what’s happening and all the negative attention you’re receiving.” Grace was putting it mildly—four art magazines had canceled features and there had been all of zero reviews of the show. The art world had unanimously shunned any mention of Kit Carrodine for fear of contamination.

To them, Kit had committed the mortal sin of stirring the passions of the masses. “It’s just that”—Grace put her hand on her forehead as if gauging her own temperature—“I’ve been having to handle all of these crazy calls from religious people this past week.”

“I told you to tell them, condensation!”

“I have,” Grace swore. “But people on the phone are praying at me. Asking me to pray with them. And those are the nice ones.” Grace blushed. “There have been angry ones too. Accusations.”

“Like what?”

“Just—” Grace stumbled, afraid to broadcast those insults to their intended target.

“It doesn’t matter. Look, I really admire you, and I know none of this is your fault. But I think I need to tender my resignation.” Kit reached for Grace’s tiny hands but the young woman recoiled. “I never told you this,” Grace continued, “but my family back in Colorado Springs was really Christian.” Grace’s eyes glistened. “It was hard for me to get away from that. Really hard. And now all this talk about miracles is making me feel super uncomforta—” “Please don’t leave me.” Kit was taken aback by the spontaneity of her own pleading. She tried for control as she repeated, “Please don’t.” A call came in on her cell and she instantly picked it up, hoping to hear Haskell on the other end. It was not Haskell.

“You disgusting, evil cunt,” growled the sexless leathery voice. Her death-threat caller was back. “Shame on what you did. You will die for this.” Kit hung up without uttering a word. Announcing that someone wanted to kill you for your wickedness was not the secret to wooing disgruntled employees. It took ten minutes of begging and nodding and sharing horror stories from youth—and also the promise of a raise—for Grace to agree to stay. After they shook hands, Kit lifted the Daily News article and pointed to Untitled, #7.

“This painting,” she said. “Do we still have the original mug shot in our files?”

Grace bit her lip. “I think so. I can look. Toby was in charge of—” “Can you dig up the identity of this convict? Find out his name and where he’s in prison. And any information on the crime.”

Grace nodded. “I forgot to mention,” she whispered sheepishly. Kit worried she’d ask for more vacation days. “Kai keeps phoning too. He says he needs to talk to you. He’s—” “No,” Kit replied definitively. She resigned herself to getting through this crisis on her own.

When Haskell finally called, Kit barked his newspaper quote at him. “A clever hoax?”

“What was I supposed to say?” he snapped. “Should I have admitted that it might be a sign from God for all I know?”

“You were supposed to say condensation! Because that’s what it is.”

“But it isn’t!” he roared. “I’ve had four of the city’s top heating and cooling experts into the gallery to check the equipment. Everything’s normal. Each expert guarantees that isn’t what’s causing the tears! 100 percent no! It has nothing to do with the conditions of the gallery. Don’t you dare try to pin it on me!”

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St. Kit of New York

So this was how her eight-year partnership with Haskell would end: wrestling over who would take the blame.

“What are you saying, Haskell? If it isn’t condensation, then are you trying to tell me it is a miracle?” Haskell laughed. It was the dry, mechanical laugh of an empiricist, a realist, a man who did not for a split second believe that the world was run by much more than chaos and the gravitational tug of the sun. “Whether or not we have proof of the gallery’s humidity levels, you could have just said it was condensation and the whole circus would have vanished.”

“No, Kit, I’m not taking the blame,” Haskell hissed. “I’m not ruining my reputation to save your ass. If I take the rap for this shit storm, every artist I represent will be walking out the door or demanding an entirely new gallery due to my negligence. I can’t afford it! I’ve already taken a loss, and I don’t simply mean in terms of respectability. None of your paintings has sold. No collector in their right mind wants to get ten feet near a series that’s become a laughing stock. My only chance of a profit is selling Untitled, #7 to a southern mega-church!

No, it’s your painting, your fault.” Haskell took a long, well-deserved inhale, having fatigued on a rant that Kit wished had been a few degrees less accurate. The Haskell who spoke next was more considerate, and Kit tried to forget the ugliness of five seconds ago. “Look, it isn’t good. But I am on your side. I’ve found a conservator in Los Angeles who is flying in tonight to examine the painting.”

“Why not a conservator based in New York?”

Now Haskell was frugal about his insults. “No one decent here was willing. This woman is a pro and she’ll do it discreetly. And when we find the cause, we’ll notify the press.

Basta! This lunacy will stop once and for all. Now, do I have your permission for the conservator to run tests tonight on Untitled, #7? Legally I need your permission.”

“Yes,” she relented. Yes, he had her permission. The conservator could chip the whole eye off the canvas as long as she uncovered the source of the water. “How are the crowds?” she asked. “Is it still a Catholic mass at the gallery?”

“I hired guards to keep them out,” Haskell said. “I couldn’t allow it any longer. These people on their hands and knees, singing hymns and weeping, when I’m trying to run an art space. As of this morning, none of them is allowed inside. They weren’t pleased. Your parishioners are congregating at 7 pm in the basement of St. August’s over on Seventh Avenue. Kit, I don’t know if you’re up for it—” He paused.

“Up for what?”

“It might not hurt for you to go there and make an announcement. Tell them it isn’t a miracle. Tell them you used special paint. Hell, tell them one of your assistants was sneaking in and throwing water on the painting. It could really help in terms of disbanding the pilgrims.

And who knows? Maybe it isn’t too late to patch this hole in your career.”

The subway had only gotten as far as Third Avenue before an announcement came over the speaker that “due to a criminal incident,” service was temporarily suspended. As Kit was climbing the steps to the street, a heavyset woman in a macramé coat nodded to her and said, “Someone was pushed in front of the subway at Union Square!” Kit asked if the perpetrator had been apprehended, but the woman just shrugged—“Same ol’ dangerous city of psychos,” she said, and shuffled off. Was it evil that Kit hoped the latest attack by the subway pusher might steal the attention away from her ridiculous crying painting? Maybe her salvation was this serial murderer—maybe killers did provide some essential benefit to humankind?

Kit walked the fifteen blocks to St. August’s. Because of the stalled train, she was half an hour late meeting Bruce, who was leaning against the church’s wrought-iron gate with his hands in his jean pockets and his black-leather jacket zippered to his chin. Bruce had been the only friend Kit could think of who’d be willing to attend the meeting with her. He tapped his watch and she waved her hands in apology.

“I know,” she called. “I’ll pay for the wine after.” She kissed his cheeks.

“The real miracle would be your punctuality,” he complained.

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Part Two

“Ha ha,” she said. “I don’t know why I’m doing this. I don’t want to face a room full of lunatics who should be permanently committed for believing that a gob of oil paint applied to Belgian linen is capable of showing emotion.” She shook her head and looked at Bruce, expecting him to reply with an even more cutting remark. Instead, he squinted at her sadly.

“I think it’s beautiful what you’ve given them,” he said simply, “and what they’ve given back to you in return. Just because it isn’t the people you expected to react to your work—” “Don’t do that,” she warned him. “Don’t play devil’s advocate just to be provocative.

This idiocy over a trickle of water is destroying everything I’ve worked for. It’s not funny.”

“It’s not funny,” he agreed. “But Kit, artists don’t get to choose their audiences, nor do they own the rights on what their work comes to mean. You should respect—” Bruce cut off. He must have caught the anger brewing on Kit’s face and decided she wasn’t up for an evening seminar on art and ethics.

“Let’s get this over with.” Kit stormed toward the doors of the church with Bruce racing behind her. They located the staircase in the vestibule and descended together in the dark. Kit heard the singing first, hymns about the Lord and mountains falling to dust. Bobbing candles painted tiger stripes on the walls. When they reached the bottom and turned a corner, they entered a cafeteria filled with sixty or seventy candle-lit bodies. There were all races, all ages, and, Kit assessed, mostly the lowest fourth of the city’s income spectrum. Some held posters of Untitled, #7 amateurishly photographed or blown up from the Daily News article.

A few had glued blue yarn running down from the convict’s right eye. Kit turned, considering escape over the planned announcement that the tears had been a prank, but she was already spotted. A cute Chinese girl came up to her first, grabbed her hand, and kissed the knuckles.

Kit almost pulled her hand away but didn’t. An ancient woman in a wheelchair was zooming toward her, the tears on the woman’s face rerouted by the deep wrinkles of a smile. Within a minute, Kit was swallowed by her fans, thanked and hugged tenderly and palmed on the back. People were crying all around her, and a lean white man was so overwhelmed he could barely tell her that she had restored his faith in a better life after this one.

“I really didn’t do anything,” she tried to explain. “You see, I’m an atheist. It’s all been—” “God performed the miracle, yes, but you created the stage.”

An attractive, elderly black woman in a lavender suit was marching toward Kit. The woman’s arms opened and, before Kit could protect herself, she was consumed in a tight embrace. Kit felt the heaving breasts and the sticky smell of perfume. The woman touched her cheeks, staring up with love.

“Thank you,” the elderly woman sobbed. “I can never repay you for what you’ve done. Neither can Ronell.” Kit was on the verge of asking who the heck Ronell was, as well as clarifying that this had all been an embarrassing mistake. But Kit didn’t ask or clarify. And because she didn’t, her entire life changed: “How did you know to paint him?” the woman went on amid sobs. “How did you know he is innocent? My boy never murdered anyone, but the police didn’t listen. The police didn’t listen because they needed someone to be guilty.”

Moans of agreement trafficked around them. “Only now, because of your painting, your miracle, the world has started to pay attention to his case. You have given Ronell what no one else ever dared. A chance. Oh, bless you. You have been sent as a savior of truth by the Lord.”

Kit stepped out of the church into the blue-black evening where her phone found reception.

She dialed the number and waited for an answer. Haskell said hello.

“Call off the conservator. You no longer have my permission.”

“Kit.” He sounded startled. “She’s just arrived. Don’t be silly.”

“I will sue the fuck out of you if she touches that painting.”

“Are you on drugs? Have you been drinking? Kit, are you stoned?”

“It’s a miracle, Haskell. It’s a miracle as long as it can’t be explained. Call her off. The painting is crying.”

[To be continued] 147

ART ABOVE POLITICS Dr. Mikhail Piotrovsky and Torkom Demirjian speak about the historical reach of the State Hermitage Museumâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s collections and the value of preserving art in spite of cultural politics.

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You’ve just seen the Richard Serra exhibitions at Gagosian London and New York. Recently you invited Richard to have a show at the Hermitage and you were able to meet him to discuss it. What are your feelings after the meeting?

MIKHAIL PIOTROVSKY I feel that we have a good beginning. Now that I better understand the juxtaposition of paper and steel, we know what to present to our exhibition committees. I also now understand how we can play with our space. We have new spaces that are very big and beautiful and demand special kinds of exhibition. We have a lot to do, but I feel that we can propose interesting solutions for the big spaces that we have. For instance, our hall is covered in four stories of courtyards. We are hoping that this space interested Richard enough that he might do something special for it. It’s wonderful to be working with such an amazing artist who can push us to be innovative from the point of view of museology.

TD For seventy years, the Hermitage was not acquiring much American art. Now you seem deeply interesting in acquiring work by American artists and you have so much space available to you. What are your hopes for the future?

MP It’s not exactly true that we didn’t acquire American art, we were just acquiring it slowly. At this point, though, there’s a lot of American art that we need to acquire. Today one of the main goals of the Hermitage Museum Foundation is to provide the Hermitage with a more comprehensive selection of American art. Twenty years ago the Foundation’s focus was the restoration of the Hermitage buildings; now it’s more focused on expanding the collection. We recently received through the Foundation, for example, a gift of American decorative art from the postwar period. It’s an incredible acquisition and works very well in the new building.

It is a great example of the Foundation’s success, but we need to show American art in all of its varieties.

TD How does it feel that, among the most prestigious museums around the world, you are the longest-serving director?

MP Well, to me there’s a big difference between our museum and any other museum in the world. Most museums are places where people work, and they can do great things, but the Hermitage is a place where you live. When you join the Hermitage you’re not planning ever to leave it. It is a very special museum.

A Hermitage curator is not planning to move on to any other museum later in his or her career. That’s a very important feature of the Hermitage, that it’s a museum for life.

TD That’s wonderful. So how does a gallery like Gagosian fit into that? What are the future collaborations that the Hermitage can do with a gallery of such depth?

MP We’ve worked with Gagosian several times over the years, on exhibitions of Willem de Kooning, Cy Twombly, and others. So this won’t be the first time we’ve worked together, and those earlier experiences are important—especially in Russia, where relations between museums and galleries are not a simple thing. Without getting too specific, it can be difficult to build quality relationships with galleries in Russia, so it’s critical for us to also have wonderful relationships with influential galleries elsewhere. We also need to learn the systems, to know how museums and art markets interrelate, where we can complement each other and work together. American institutions and art galleries do this well, and finding this balance is very important. I see this opportunity with Gagosian as a way we can learn and take the ORKOM DEMIRJIAN

ART BELONGS TO THE WORLD. Dr. Mikhail Piotrovsky

Previous spread: Dr. Mikhail Piotrovsky.

Photo by Olga Maltseva Jordan Staircase, State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. Photo by Dagmar Schwelle/laif/Redux Following spread: Corridor of the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. Photo by LatitudeStock - Stuart Cox

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CULTURAL RELATIONS, IF YOU DESTROY THEM, ARE VERY DIFFICULT TO REBUILD. WE SHOULD USE EVERY OPPORTUNITY TO EMPHASIZE THAT SUPPORTING CULTURAL CONNECTIONS NOW CAN HAVE A POSITIVE EFFECT IN THE LONG TERM. Dr. Mikhail Piotrovsky

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next steps in Russia. Richard’s exhibition will be a wonderful collaboration.

TD One of Gagosian’s most notable accomplishments is that so many of the shows it organizes are on par with museum shows, it does very serious work.

Its catalogues are equally valuable. And something that’s not widely known, but that I have experienced, is that Larry Gagosian is very philanthropic, although he does that work anonymously. How can we make the best of Larry and his philanthropic leanings?

MP Well, that’s your job as chairman of the Hermitage Museum Foundation! [laughs] But you’re absolutely right, the shows are wonderful and the books are at the highest level. As a museum director, though, we still have to maintain the difference between gallery shows and museum shows. Gallery shows need a sense of discovery—they can be a little more risky than museum shows, and most often they present new work. It is only between those shows that they can host blockbuster exhibitions primarily for the general public. Museum shows must all be of high quality as a standard. But quality museum style and quality gallery style, while they’re a little different, both make the world much more interesting.

TD Gagosian has an impressive history, with many important artists, and it represents estates and foundations as well. What do you hope this access might bring to the Hermitage?

MP It’s an amazing list, and there are many artists who will be new and important for our audience.

TD How do you respond when people say that the current political climate between Russia and America is tense? Why is it important for the Hermitage to get the support of the American philanthropic community, art lovers, and artists?

MP This is not the first time the politics between Russia and America have been tense. In recent history alone we saw the Cold War, then a period when we were able to live in shared trust, and now we have a period of mistrust again. So cultural institutions, especially in Russia, know how to deal with this. And actually, seeing the political landscape shift so often just emphasizes how important and enduring culture is—it helps us to understand that strong cultural ties and collaborative cultural relations are above politics. In politics and the economy, problems come up quickly and can often be quickly solved. Cultural relations, if you destroy them, are very difficult to rebuild. We should use every opportunity to emphasize that supporting cultural connections now can have a positive effect in the long term.

TD I have always seen culture as the only sustainable way to overcome all kinds of difficulties.

MP Absolutely.

TD And Americans are probably the most philanthropic people on the face of the earth, maybe in human history. What we do here we hope will somehow begin to have an influence on the new and emerging wealthy class in Russia, so they can see the benefits of emulating this American tradition.

MP That’s exactly what happens. When we first began to have sponsors and donors they were all foreigners, but we were able to use their generosity to convince our own government to give money too.

When our politicians saw that people outside Russia were willing to contribute, and that we could be responsible with those gifts and could have a positive impact, they began to contribute as well.

At the same time, we educated our wealthy class with examples of what we could do, and now we have a lot of private Russian donors. Historically, Russian institutions were mainly supported by foreign and American foundations. In Russia today it’s more often Russian money.

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MOST MUSEUMS ARE PLACES WHERE PEOPLE WORK, AND THEY CAN DO GREAT THINGS, BUT THE HERMITAGE IS A PLACE WHERE YOU LIVE. Dr. Mikhail Piotrovsky

That’s because Russians are now taking pride in sustaining institutions that are important for Russia.

MP Yes, and they’re beginning to understand that cultural institutions are important for future generations, as well as for their other businesses.

TD In today’s world it can be difficult to distinguish between socioeconomic, political, geopolitical, and cultural goals. I’m thinking about the destruction that is occurring on many of the world’s cultural-heritage sites—I know that you at the Hermitage have been outspoken on this topic and have taken many initiatives to address it. What are your feelings on this issue? How do you approach it without politicizing it, as opposed to contributing positively?

MP In the current political climate, when culture faces such immediate dangers, we must be present.

We must explain that culture is incredibly important, that it has its own rights, and that its rights can often be more impactful in the long term than the rights of states. We cannot simply say, “Oh, it’s terrible what happened,” we have to generate ideas about what can be done to prevent it. One crucial need, in my opinion, is that cultural objects must be protected, by force when necessary. And when they are destroyed, or half-destroyed, we must restore them. A while ago there was a unesco committee in St. Petersburg dealing with this—some shrines were destroyed in Timbuktu and the committee made a big announcement about how terrible it was. The very next day after hearing that announcement, the people in Timbuktu came back and destroyed more shrines.

So just saying “It’s wrong” doesn’t work. You have to have a plan, and you have to share that plan with the relevant governments, show them a better way, make sure they understand how important these things are. They won’t listen always but they will sometimes.

TD In the academic world, sovereign rights are seen as more important than culture itself. So individual TD

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initiatives among people of good will are often discounted, and many of the objects you’re talking about have been orphaned. Nobody seems to understand that the cultural well-being of these orphaned objects typically falls more on individual private initiatives than on governments, or even on government controls. Yet government controls aren’t really enforced, and individual initiatives often aren’t welcome because people think someone offering help has other motives, perhaps is secretly a collector of these things.

What is often overlooked is the fact that collectors are often the great protectors of these objects.

MP We’ve had some similar travails. Just think about all the recent destruction in the Middle East and all over the world. But if you try to move objects as a way to protect them, there’s that old story about the “terrible” European nations who “robbed” poorer countries, moved their cultural possessions to European museums, and then had to give those things back. Well, thank God we have Babylon in Berlin, and Nineveh in the British Museum, because Babylon and Nineveh themselves were destroyed. I hope that examples like this can help people see that objects in museums are there to be shared with the world, for the future, and that institutions preserve admired objects and allow scholars to study them.

And spreading objects around is a safe way of protecting culture—spread things around a little and one bomb won’t be able to destroy a whole heritage. If you collected all the Armenian manuscripts and gathered them in one place, then one bomb and that entire heritage would be gone. That’s a vulnerability. As such, the spreading of knowledge and the dissemination of art are good things.

TD One argument is that allowing museums to collect artworks from distant cultures, diversifying or spreading them around, enhances the value of those objects. Many people think that enhanced values cause more destruction. I’ve always argued the opposite, saying enhanced value actually protects culture.

MP It can be argued both ways. Museums, for instance, actually explained ancient Greek culture to the world, and showed why it was so important and had to be presented and preserved. People need to understand that there are objects around them that have to be protected, and it falls on museums to explain that.

If people focus too much on values or prices, they begin to think of art as property. Art is certainly bought and sold at certain moments, but its ownership is not restricted. Art belongs to the world.

TD Whether Greek art is in Greece, New York, Berlin, at the Hermitage, or in the British Museum, it is still Greek art. Bringing Greek art to the Hermitage doesn’t turn it into Russian art, and at the British Museum it’s not British art; it’s still Greek art—a credit to Greek civilization and to the people who created these incredible things.

MP Partly right and partly not. We present Greek culture but we don’t re-create the experience of seeing it in Greece. The sculptures we show at the museum are not presented against the columns of ancient Greek architecture, they have become part of world civilization. At the Hermitage we have Rembrandts that have been there for two or three hundred years, and we call them Russian Rembrandts. The Matisses in the Hermitage are Matisses of France but also Matisses of the Hermitage, because they live there.

This diversity—not difference but diversity— makes the world interesting: we’ve organized a diversity of cultures.

Anselm Kiefer for Velimir Khlebnikov will go on view at the State Hermitage Museum from May 31 to September 3, 2017.

PETER MARINO Fire and Water

Gagosian London

RADIANT

Serena Cattaneo Adorno visits Le Corbusier’s Cité radieuse to discuss with designer Ora ïto what pushed

REVISION him to purchase its gymnasium on the rooftop terrace, transforming it into a contemporary art space.

T

he French innovator, architect, and urbanist Le Corbusier, born Charles Jeanneret in Switzerland in 1887, is considered one of the fathers of modernist architecture for his rational designs and plans for social improvement. His Cité radieuse, completed in 1952 in Marseille, was created in response to the city’s need for social housing after World War II. It was also an attempt at a more ordered way of living, a resolution of issues generated by the chaotic social organization during the industrial age.

As you approach the building, in a noisy and vibrant suburb of Marseille, it stands rigid yet seemingly floating on sensually rounded cement pilotis. A pure modernist rectangular block, it is unyielding and simple yet at the same time oddly playful, w ith its modular facade divided by partitions in the bright primary colors of yellow, red, and blue. This “vertical village,” formally called the Unité d’habitation, was designed to contain 337 apartments, a 22-room hotel, internal 158

streets, a restaurant, a grocery store, a library, a school, a swimming pool, a gym, and a nursery.

You could move in and never leave. Everything you needed you could find by simply going up or down a few floors.

The architectural innovation of the building won it a certain degree of rejection among the people of Marseille, who gave it the name Maison du fada (The house of the crazy). It has also been criticized as reflecting an elitist, utopian vision of social organization, whose later influence on low-income housing in the banlieues of Western cities has often produced racist divisions and class isolation.

Yet this didn’t stop the structure from being considered a success. Le Corbusier’s goal was to create a perfect consolidation of society within a single space. In his words, “We strive for order, which can be achieved only by appealing to the fundamental basis on which our minds can work: geometry.”

The Cité radieuse is an organic place, living and moving. Some of its residents have been there for over forty years; they have loved their home profoundly even as they have seen Marseille change

Previous spread: Ora ïto on the rooftop of Cité radieuse. Photo by Valéry de Buchet Top left: Le Corbusier. Photo © 2017 F.L.C./ADAGP, Paris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY Top right: Children on the rooftop terrace, 1955. Photo © 2017 F.L.C./ADAGP, Paris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

and develop, get closer to the building and eat up the trees and green space that originally surrounded it. Public transportation has improved and the patterns of daily life have evolved. A strong sense of community is palpable in the Cité but may be slowly fading.

Since 2013, the French designer Ora ïto has been running a venue for contemporary art on the Cité’s rooftop terrace, welcoming artists to breed new perspectives and vitality in this revered architectural chef-d’oeuvre of the 1950s. On the building’s flat roof are a gymnasium and solarium. Offered the chance to buy these spaces in 2010, Ora ïto immediately seized it as the rare opportunity of a lifetime. The space had originally been jointly owned by the building’s residents, but many were no longer using the facility and they voted to privatize it. The conditions of the purchase were complex, the restoration involved difficult restrictions, permissions were arduous to obtain, but Ora ïto never doubted that the project would be rewarding in the end. After long pondering his responsibilities in modifying the mission of the space, he

THERE’S NO LAZINESS IN THE DESIGN. EVERYTHING HAS A PURPOSE AND EVERYTHING HAS BEEN CAREFULLY THOUGHT THROUGH. Ora ïto

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finally decided that Le Corbusier was above all an innovator and would certainly have wanted to see its purpose change with changing times and needs.

Among the elements of Le Corbusier’s thinking that most deeply touches Ora ïto’s creative process is the idea of “Le Modulor,” a series of calculations and charts, based on the proportions of the human body (the architect used his own dimensions and height as a guide), that relate to the golden ratio, a principle dating back to Euclid. These harmonious proportions regulate the scale relationships among every element of the Cité radieuse: doors, ramps, steps, windows, all are based on this golden number. In his work as a designer, Ora ïto similarly is always scrutinizing scale, the equilibrium of volumes, and the human occupation of space.

Most of the Cité’s apartments have exposures on both sides of the building and are duplex, on two levels. Some apartments are entered on their upper floor, some on their lower; this ingenious design reduces the need for corridor space and elevator stops—the elevators actually climb two floors at a time. Le Corbusier designed the interiors of the apartments together with Charlotte Perriand and Jean Prouvé, both now internationally acclaimed in their own right. “There’s no laziness in the design,” Ora ïto tells me enthusiastically, “everything has a purpose and everything has been carefully thought through. The goal is the creation of perfect modular living systems, with a symmetry between the furniture and its function—this is rare, challenging and inspiring.”

We were looking at black and white photographs of the apartments in their original states. Today, sadly, many have been torn apart, with elements of their furniture and fittings individually sold.

Real appreciation of the importance of the Cité radieuse has come just recently; unesco listed it as a World Heritage Site only in July 2016.

“And then there’s the grand terrace in cement,” says Ora ïto, “with its simple mineral qualities— its fluctuating palette as the reflection of light hits its surface, creating a harmonious and constantly changing museum en plein air. Every hour of the day it looks different and you discover a new surface or quality.” In 2013, Ora ïto began to invite internationally known artists to create Bottom left: Cité radieuse, Marseille.

Photo by André Morin Above: Architectones, Xavier Veilhan, installation view, MAMO, Marseille, June 12–September 30, 2013. © 2017 Veilhan ADAGP, Paris/ ARS, NY. Photo by Florian Kleinefeen

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Bottom right: Cool – As a State of Mind, installation view, MAMO, Marseille, February 14–April 26, 2015 Following spread: Felice Varini: Open Air, installation view, MAMO, Marseille, July 2–October 2, 2016. © 2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY/ADAGP, Paris. Photo by André Morin

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THE GOAL IS THE CREATION OF PERFECT MODULAR LIVING SYSTEMS, WITH A SYMMETRY BETWEEN THE FURNITURE AND ITS FUNCTION— THIS IS RARE, CHALLENGING AND INSPIRING. Ora ïto 164

site-specific installations for the terrace, with its magnificent 360-degree view of Marseille. The aim is to celebrate the work of Le Corbusier, offering a new cultural dialogue with the building. The first show at this new institution, called MAMO (an abbreviation of “Marseille Modulor”), belonged to Xavier Veilhan, who will represent France at the 2017 Venice Biennale. He was followed by such artists as Dan Graham, whose walls of mirrored glass, reflecting the sky, questioned the distinction between interior and exterior space; Daniel Buren, who added repetition and color to the rooftop’s gray surfaces by juxtaposing mirrored and striped panels and blocks, challenging notions of direction and perception; and Felice Varini, whose elegantly aligned drawings on the actual surface of the building encouraged attention to perspective and form.

Ora ïto has named no director at MAMO; the program is governed only by his own interests and encounters. The challenge that stimulates him, and drives his choices of artists, lies in pursuing projects that will correspond to, appreciate, and engage in dialogue with the building itself. “In

Top left: Daniel Buren: Definite, Finished, Infinite, In situ works, installation view, MAMO, Marseille, June 30– October 31, 2014. © 2017 DB - ADAGP, Paris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Photo by Sébastien Veronese Top right: Dan Graham: Observatory/ Playground, installation view, MAMO, Marseille, June 14–September 20, 2015. © Dan Graham. Photo by © Stéphane Aboudaram, WE ARE CONTENT(S)

facing the test of installing on the terrace,” he tells me, “all of the artists position themselves differently.

They are forced to reexamine their practice so as to complement the site. They all have their own rules and methods, but they also have to deal with the ideas and prerogatives dictated by Le Corbusier. Each work is both a tribute to and a rebirth of the space.”

In the case of Buren, Ora ïto adds, this condition led to a personal collaboration involving his own design practice. When a proposal involves public architecture, the project becomes not simply the addition of an artwork to the space but the integration of design into that artwork, challenging familiar notions of the creative process. Ora ïto’s ultimate aspiration in his design work is the creation of projects that respond to our time. As a designer in the digital arena, he cannot neglect our contemporary need to look at space through the photos on our phones, our rapid movement through space, the new ways we inhabit space, our different observations and understandings of details and materials.

He wants his design choices to reflect the hyperactivity and virtuality of today.

If Ora ïto has ever questioned the showing of art on the roof of the Cité radieuse, a recent discovery may have changed his mind: “To my surprise and reassurance, I learned that my intentions were healthy: in 1956–60 the terrace had hosted the Festival de l’art d’avant-garde, an exhibition series that had included Jean-Michel Atlan, Hans Hartung, Pierre Soulages, Jean Fautrier, Serge Poliakoff, and Antoni Tàpies, as well as the Nouveaux Réalistes— Yves Klein, Jean Tinguely, Arman, Martial Raysse, Daniel Spoerri, Raymond Hains, Jacques de la Villeglé, and François Dufrêne.” Michel Ragon, a significant critic of the time, wrote extensively on the festival and greatly admired its site: “Also clear is the path forming from individual aesthetic ideas and personal tastes toward a collective awareness of the need to order and harmonize human space.

When modern architecture takes physical functions into consideration, it reveals the psychic, even spiritual functions of three- and four-dimensional urban planning—the fourth dimension of course being time, so important in contemporary life.” It is surely possible to imagine that Ora ïto is right and can feel comfortable with his instincts.

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BOOK CORNER

BLACK BOOK

Christopher Wool’s Black Book (1989) was selected

by Douglas Flamm, a rarebook specialist at Gagosian, for a special focus. Text by Anna Heyward 166

167

Black Book exemplifies Christopher Wool’s use of the typographical word as a pictorial image. It is an oversized object, roughly twentythree inches tall, and contains forty pages bearing seventeen reproductions of enamel drawings. Jet-black paper covers the boards that bind it. Each page of the book contains a single word, inscribed like a large-scale code: ASSASSIN ASSISTANT CELEBRITY HYPNOTIST HYPOCRITE INFORMANT MERCENARY PARANOIAC Published in 1989, Black Book marks a moment when Wool’s work stirred the New York art scene. His bold and rebellious word paintings have since become canonical: white canvases in which stenciled all-capital black letters spell out phrases like “sell the house sell the car sell the kids.” The planar use of the word as a painterly method has come to symbolize Wool’s stark energy. These works typify a brash, generative moment that resonates still.

The drawings reproduced in Black Book have been exhibited in their own right, notably in 2013, as part of the most comprehensive examination of Wool’s career to date, organized by New York’s Guggenheim Museum and traveling through 2014 to The Art Institute of Chicago. Transposed into an artist’s book, they suggest at least as many layers and diverted streams of information as Wool’s word paintings do. They also index, without conforming to, a crowd of artistic cultures: street art, Conceptual art, Pop. The text-based work finds a paradigmatic and tactile expression in this distributive format. Black Book is printed on smooth wove paper in an edition of 350, each copy being signed and numbered

by Wool on the colophon. The book was copublished by Thea Westreich, New York, and Gisela Capitain, Cologne, and produced by Studley Press, in Massachusetts. Westreich and her husband, Ethan Wagner, who have published artist’s books since the late 1980s, are noted collectors of Wool’s work.

In the winter of 2017, Wool and a co-curator, Katy Siegel, mounted the exhibition Painting Paintings (David Reed) 1975 at Gagosian at 980 Madison Avenue. As a young artist, Wool had seen these paintings of Reed’s when they were first exhibited, at New York’s Susan Caldwell Gallery in 1975, and they had marked him deeply. In part he was struck by the similarities between Reed’s marks and Western writing conventions, since Reed had applied his wet-into-wet brushstrokes from left to right, top to bottom, as though applying script to a page. In this way the works share a lineage with Cy Twombly’s blackboard paintings of the mid-1960s. Revisited forty years later, these paintings of Reed’s, which have a lilting, narrative quality even in their abstraction, invite an approach to Wool’s word works through the themes of artistic progeny and cyclical exchange.

Artwork © Christopher Wool. Photos by Rob McKeever

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IN CONVERSATION Jeffrey Deitch talks to Derek Blasberg

Jeffrey Deitch is one of

him what he did was really

that here I was in the center

the people in the art world

impressive and asked

of this arena where I was

who can say they’ve done

what else he could do. He

dealing with beautiful

it all: he’s been a writer,

took some sheet metal and

objects, I was having these

a curator, a dealer, a

that afternoon fashioned

stimulating intellectual

museum director, an advisor,

a beautiful tea kettle,

conversations with artists

a collector, and even,

so they again asked what else

and musicians, and I was

briefly, an amateur artist.

he could do. So he fashioned

exposed to a social world

Derek Blasberg met up with

a planter. It ended up that

that I hardly knew existed

the former MOCA director at

we set him up in a business

in Hartford, Connecticut,

his house in LA’s Los Feliz

called the Copper Artisan,

with these fashionable

neighborhood to talk about

and my father took the whole

New Yorkers who came up,

his nearly five-decade-long

line down to a wholesaler

beautifully dressed. I

career in the art world,

in New York, and a couple

was making money too—what

and about which of those

of weeks later he said—Great

a combination!

roles has been the most

news! We have an order from

fulfilling.

Sears, Roebuck. We ramped up

DB: Why would you ever

production but Sears never

leave?!

Derek Blasberg: We always

reordered so we were stuck

JD: One of these local

start with the same

with this giant inventory

artists who came in was a

question: what’s your

of beautiful copper objects.

sophisticated guy. He had

earliest art memory?

I was young enough to think,

moved up to the country

Jeffrey Deitch: I have this

No big deal, I can sell them,

after decades in New York

vivid memory of making a

so I volunteered to load

and he said, I see you have

painting of the house that my

up my van and drive around

an aptitude for this, you’re

family rented on Long Island

New England to nurseries

a natural, but you don’t

Sound. I’m from Connecticut.

and gift shops and craft

know what you’re doing and

I was younger than ten, but

shops. When I came back,

you need to get yourself an

I remember just a feeling

the van was empty and I

art education. I listened

of ecstasy as I finished

had sold everything. I

to him. On the last day of

this painting. I loved it.

thought, Why do I have to

the summer season I loaded

It sticks out as a childhood

drive all around, why don’t

up my truck and rushed

memory on the same level as

I just open my own place?

down to register for the

the first time I rode on a

I loved the antique shops

next semester at Wesleyan.

two-wheeler bike by myself

and craft shops you have

I changed my course

and didn’t fall over. It

in the countryside in the

direction from economics

was one of these key life

Berkshires so I rented a

to art. I still studied

experiences, so that’s when

beautiful room, a parlor

economics, but Wesleyan

I think it started.

room on the ground floor

had a great art-history

of a grand old hotel in

department and a world-

DB: When you’re ten, of

Lenox, and I filled it up

class music department.

course, you don’t understand

with copper.

I got a great education.

the idea of a profession,

The year after graduation,

I needed something for

so when did you realize

the walls and my mother

I drove down to SoHo—by

that the art world was an

said she knew some artist.

then I was already going to

industry you could work

I had no understanding of

in for a living?

the art world at all, so

JD: I opened an arts-and-

I said great! We put the

crafts gallery in Lenox,

guy’s work up and the first

Massachusetts, in the

weekend we sold everything.

Berkshires, when I was

There’s a sophisticated

nineteen. My family had

group that comes in for the

a sheet-metal shop that

Boston Symphony Orchestra

was attached to our heating

at Tanglewood. Other artists

business and a Portuguese

from the area saw there was

craftsman came to work there

a ton of action and said

and he showed phenomenal

Would you take some of mine?

skill with metalworking.

Sure, why not? I did very,

My uncle and father told

very well, and I was amazed

For me, none of this was approached as a business, it was about the art experience. The engagement with the art always comes first.

galleries and reading art magazines—and parked in front of the Leo Castelli gallery and went up and asked for a job. The Brundage sisters [Castelli Gallery directors Susan and Patricia Brundage] were sitting at the reception desk and they didn’t give me the time of day. We joke about it now, but they made it known that there was no job for me and that there never would be.

171

I try to have an art experience and an art learning experience every single day.

instinct and a love for this

So I went upstairs to John

JD: Maybe an art fair?

Weber’s gallery, which I had

What was also very special

visited a few times, and I

was, until the end of the

loved their program, Minimal

1980s New York City was the

and Conceptual art. At that

capital of the international

time galleries didn’t even

art world, and that was

have a receptionist, no need

the last time there was

for security. I saw there

one art capital. In the

was an inner office with a

’90s it began dispersing,

small vertical window and a

with London, Berlin, and

have an art experience and

woman was sitting in there,

now, in the past decade,

an art learning experience

so I opened the door. I

Shanghai, Beijing, Mexico

every single day. In New

could see an empty chair in

City. There are a lot of

York and Los Angeles,

front of a typewriter and I

scenes now but back then it

looking at an artwork every

asked the director, Naomi

really was New York, where

day is something you can do

Spector, for a job and she

every museum director, every

easily. Every day you can go

said, “Our secretary just

collector, every artist,

to a gallery, a collection,

quit and I need help, but

a lot of the most interesting

a museum, you can read a

John Weber will never hire

people and community, all

chapter in a book about art.

a guy. He’ll insist on a

converged right in front

Something I don’t do: every

pretty girl.” I thought fast

of my counter where I sat

morning my friend Michael

and made her a proposition.

in the outside office

Chow watches an hour about

I said, “How about if I work

of the John Weber Gallery,

art on YouTube.

for free for a week and,

because it represented

with no obligation on your

prestigious artists like

DB: Every day, one hour?

part, if I do well maybe you

Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt,

JD: Apparently there’s a lot

can recommend me to John

and Robert Ryman. What an

on YouTube.

as a permanent hire. If it

amazing education for me.

doesn’t work out that’s

The artists would sit around

DB: I like the concept of

fine with me, no problem.”

and talk about what artists

a daily art education.

She said, “How can I say

talk about, what show was

JD: It’s cumulative. What

no to that?,” told me to sit

good, what show was bad,

I love is, unlike some other

down, and started to give

who was doing great work,

fields where you get to be

dictation.

and I would just listen to

my age and you start losing

these conversations.

it, the younger generation

field, but I didn’t know anything and I determined to educate myself, first about contemporary art, then about modern art, then even now I’m educating myself about old masters and antiquities.

It’s neverending. I try to

understands that in art,

DB: We call that an internship nowadays.

DB: It’s been about forty-

as long as you keep engaged,

JD: At the end of the week,

five years since you opened

you get better. I feel that

John Weber comes in and sees

that makeshift gallery in

I’m better than ever in

me sitting there and he opens

the Berkshires, and you’ve

understanding the whole

the door to the inner office

since participated in more

thing and being able to then

and slams it. I hear five

roles of the art world than

look at the work of a young

minutes of screaming between

just gallerist.

artist and understand how

him and Naomi Spector and

JD: Every single one! I

it fits in, how it innovates,

I get ready to pack up my

think I’m one of the only

and how to make a judgment

things because I know I’m

ones who has been artist,

with confidence. I love

getting kicked out. Naomi

if I can actually make

feeling that every year I get

opens the door, sticks her

that claim because I never

better.

head out, and says, You’re

really pursued it, and also

hired. She gave me my first

art writer, curator, art

DB: What do you think

break and I was so lucky

dealer, museum director, art

about those advances in

to be there: John Weber

advisor, and collector.

technology, online art magazines, and social media?

was at 420 West Broadway, which was the epicenter of

DB: How do those roles inform

JD: I try very hard to

the downtown art world.

each other?

discipline my time and I

On Saturdays people would

JD: It’s the same approach.

don’t like to fall down

come early in the afternoon

It’s all based on developing

the well. I’m not on Facebook

and in two hours you’d seen

a vision. For me, none of

and I never have been.

everything. On a nice day

this was approached as

I’ve seen friends who hardly

people would converge on the

a business, it was about

engage because they’re

sidewalk. There were loading

the art experience. The

always running to Facebook.

docks where you could sit,

engagement with the art

Some people you can’t

everyone was there, and in

always comes first. To

invite to a dinner party

a couple of months I knew

present it in a gallery is

because they can’t resist

virtually everyone in the

one manifestation, to help

taking out their phone. For

art world—the major artists,

people build collections

example, every night I try

the major collectors, the

is another, to help people

to read for a half hour—so

truckers, the framers, the

finance their collecting—

I don’t want to be looking

writers. It was a golden age.

that’s yet another thing I

at Instagram.

did in the ’80s—it all stems DB: Is there a place in

from the total engagement

DB: It can be like falling

the art world now where

with art. What I love is

down the rabbit hole.

there’s one-stop shopping

how it’s cumulative. I

in that way?

started out just having an

172

Previous: Photo by Robbie Fimmano/Trunk Archive

JD: During the day I’ve got a lot to accomplish, I don’t

want to divert my attention.

David Salle, Eric Fischl,

$100,000 worth of art. It was

The direct experience of

Julian Schnabel, foundation

simply a combination of that

art is very important.

artists. The whole thing

and John Weber hopefully

Another thing I do every

made sense and people really

making some scores at an art

morning is run outdoors for

appreciated it and responded

fair, and that was what paid

an hour, no matter what the

to it.

the bills. If John came back

weather is.

from Basel without some big

One visitor that year was Diana Widmaier-Picasso,

sales, that was going to be a

DB: Do you listen to

who was really into the show.

giant problem. It was hardly

headphones?

I was going through it with

a global marketplace.

JD: Never. No headphones,

her and said I had always

By the early ’80s, it

no music. That’s how I focus

wanted to work together.

had definitely become more

my mind.

One of her great areas of

of a market. Collecting

expertise is the erotic

was going strong—a group

DB: Let’s talk about the

work of her grandfather,

of new artists were making

shows you did in Miami at

so I asked if she would

paintings that people could

Art Basel.

like to curate a show for

buy, rather than Conceptual

JD: The first one was called

us next year in this space

pieces. Then, in the past

“Unrealism.” That one was

on eroticism in modern

two decades, it’s beyond a

phenomenally successful,

and contemporary art. She

market, it’s an industry,

beyond our expectations—

loved the idea and I talked

the art industry. So I’ve

tremendous attendance, I

to Larry Gagosian and he

seen this transformation

think we sold sixty works,

loved the idea, so we went

from a community where

and it was very gratifying

ahead and did it. It was

we knew everybody to an

in every way. I think the

a really ambitious show,

industry.

term “Unrealism” entered

we really went for it. For

the language and we’re now

instance, we brought the

working on the “Unrealism”

seminal Jeff Koons sculpture

been any sacrifice of

book, so it was a great

of Cicciolina from Europe.

artistic license, freedom,

experience.

We went all the way, we

or creativity since it’s

didn’t hold back, we got

changed?

all the great works.

JB: Yes, but it’s not the

DB: The idea of doing those

DB: Do you think there’s

first time. Go to an auction

sorts of multitiered, multiartist group shows at

DB: Those shows are a

of nineteenth-century art

an art fair in Miami—would

huge effort.

and you’ll see endless

you consider that a novel

JD: Actually, we had a bit

amounts of merchandise that

or new suggestion?

of a problem because a lot

nineteenth-century artists

JD: Over the years, I have

of people came in and they

knocked out. Even Renoir was

always tried to introduce

just assumed that nothing

knocking them out. This is

new structures. I introduced

was for sale because the

not the first time there’s a

the John Weber Gallery

installation was so perfect

large international market.

newsletter, which was a

and the works were of such

novelty at the time. Then

high quality. This important

DB: Last question: earlier

I was approached by the

collector from Korea was

we mentioned the various

art-advisory department

there and I found out

professional roles you’ve

at Citibank, which wasn’t

later he thought it was a

played in this industry,

traditional.

museum show and nothing was

whether it’s curator or

for sale.

collector or dealer or even,

When I was at MOCA, I

briefly, artist. Is there a

would attend art fairs with some of the museum

DB: I’m going to ask you

part that you’ve found more

trustees, and I’d notice how

a very broad question so I

fulfilling?

people were overwhelmed and

hope you’re not intimidated

JD: Yes, for me it really

said they didn’t know what

because I’m sure it’s a

is being a gallerist. Some

to look at. The art fair

complex answer. In the

people call it an art dealer,

is really an overwhelming

past forty-five years, what

but gallerist is more

experience unless you’re

has been the most noticeable

accurate.

superprofessional and this

or unexpected sweeping

is what you do for a living.

change in either what you

I thought what we needed

do or how you do it in the

was something coherent,

art world?

where you presented a

JD: That’s an easy question

vision of one aspect of

to answer. In the early ’70s

what’s going on in art. For

you could hardly even talk

“Unrealism,” that aspect was

about an art market in terms

the revival of figurative

of contemporary art, it was

painting. I thought that

more a community. The John

was a great topic for a

Weber Gallery had basically

coherent show with some of

one consistent customer,

the best new figurative

Count Panza di Biumo. That

painters, so in addition to

was it. He would come every

Sascha Braunig, Emily Mae

October and we would set

Smith, Ella Kruglyanskaya,

up visits with the artists

and younger people we’re

he wanted to see. He could

very interested in, we had

be counted on to buy about

Behind the greatest artists are the greatest art dealers, who have a very important role in shaping visual culture. It’s a profession where, if you do it right, you can make history.

DB: Why do you think that is?

JD: Because it involves everything. You have to have a vision, there’s an aesthetic intellectual structure. It takes experience. And the greatest reward is that you can make an actual contribution to culture. Behind the greatest artists are the greatest art dealers, who have a very important role in shaping visual culture. It’s a profession where, if you do it right, you can make history.

173

JOE BRADLEY This mid-career survey, the artist’s first large-scale museum exhibition in North America, celebrates Bradley’s unique approach to abstraction and the evolution of style.

Albright-Knox Art Gallery Buffalo, New York June 24–October 1, 2017 Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University Waltham, Massachusetts October 21, 2017–January 15, 2018

Organized by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. This exhibition is made possible through the generosity of Gagosian, Morgan Stanley and the Blue Rider Group at Morgan Stanley. More information at www.albrightknox.org. Image: Bishop, 2016. Oil and acrylic on canvas.

64 x 59 inches (162.6 x 149.9 cm). Wendi Murdoch Collection

Courtesy of Richard serra , still from “Hands tied” (16 mm film, 1968), copyright: Richard serra

RICHARD SERRA Films and Videotapes sponsor: Fonds für künstlerische aktivitäten im museum für Gegenwartskunst der emanuel Hoffmann-stiftung und der Christoph merian stiftung

may 20 ——— october 15, 2017 Gegenwart: st. alban-Rheinweg 60

BECOMING HENRY MOORE 14 APRIL - 22 OCTOBER 2017 FIND OUT MORE www.henry-moore.org

Adam McEwen: I Think Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m in Love

On View Through May 28, 2017

Aspen Art Museum 637 East Hyman Ave. aspenartmuseum.org 970.925.8050 Admission to the AAM is FREE courtesy of Amy and John Phelan

Adam McEwen, Untitled Text Msg. (Private Caller), 2008. Pencil on graph paper, graphite frame, 12 1/2 x 9 3/4 in (31.7 x 24.7 cm).

Courtesy the artist and Petzel, New York

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