Gagosian Quarterly, Spring 2020

100 116 The Iconoclasts Death in the The first installment of a Afternoon four-part short story by Anne Boyer.

109 Building a Legacy Katy Rogers speaks with the Quarterly’s Alison McDonald about best practices and resources for preparing an artist’s catalogue raisonné.

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In this second installment of a two-part essay, John Elderfield resumes his investigation of Édouard Manet’s Execution of Maximilian, focusing this time on the political and historical implications of the artist’s formal treatment of real, violent events.

By the Bay Elizabeth Mangini writes on Giuseppe Penone’s installation of two sculptures at San Francisco’s Fort Mason.

28 42 Cindy Sherman The Films The acclaimed Cindy of Man Ray Sherman exhibition that opened at London’s National Portrait Gallery last summer arrives at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, in April, making Sherman the first female artist to have a retrospective at the museum. She sat down with Derek Blasberg to discuss the show, her solitary process, and selfies.

36 The Right Time Natasha Stagg considers the figure of the influencer, the loss of the it-girl, and the “promotional life.”

Featuring a new work by Richard Prince.

Timothy Baum muses on Man Ray’s foray into filmmaking in the 1920s, the subject of the exhibition Man Ray: The Mysteries of Château du Dé at Gagosian, San Francisco.

57 Fashion and Art, Part 1: Proenza Schouler The first installment in a series exploring the collaborative potentials of meetings between artists and fashion designers. In this installment, Derek Blasberg speaks with Lazaro Hernandez and Jack McCollough, the designers behind the New York fashion brand Proenza Schouler.

64 Young Gerd: The Family Pictures of Gerhard Richter Richard Calvocoressi reflects on the monochrome world of Richter’s early photo paintings.

72 Roe Ethridge A portfolio of photographs by the artist from his early years in New York. Ethridge reflects on these works, made in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

92 John Mason Rani Singh speaks with Irving Blum about his time working with the artist John Mason at Ferus Gallery, Los Angeles. The two discuss Mason’s revolutionary approach to ceramics and his friendships with the wider LA art community.

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David Reed David Reed and Katharina Grosse met at Reed’s New York studio in the fall of 2019 to discuss his newest paintings.

Front cover: Cindy Sherman, Untitled #412, 2003, chromogenic color print, 51 ¼ × 41 ¼ inches (130.2 × 104.8 cm) © Cindy Sherman. Photo: courtesy the artist and Metro Pictures, New York Top row, left to right:

124 Vera Lutter Vera Lutter: Museum in the Camera, opening in March at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, marks the culmination of the artist’s nearly two-year residency at the museum. From February 2017 to January 2019, Lutter applied her distinctive photographic technique to documenting LACMA’s changing campus, as well as works she chose from its permanent collection.

Here she speaks with the museum’s director, Michael Govan, about the experience.

128 Stanley Whitney Ahead of an upcoming exhibition in Rome of paintings by Stanley Whitney, Matthew Jeffrey Abrams writes on the painter’s fateful trip to Rome and Egypt and the profound effects of the architec tures of those locations on his later work.

136 Jay DeFeo

Giuseppe Penone, Idee di pietra (Ideas of Stone), 2004 (detail), installation view, Fort Mason, San Francisco, 2019 © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York ⁄ ADAGP, Paris.

Photo: Matthew Millman Jennifer Guidi in her Los Angeles studio. Photo: Brica Wilcox Bottom row, left to right: David Reed, Working Drawing for #709 (For Jeremy Blake and Theresa Duncan), 2005–09/ 2018–19, mixed media on graph paper, 1 page of 14 pages, 17 × 11 inches (43.2 × 27.9 cm) © 2020 David Reed/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Photo: Rob McKeever Film still from Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff (2010).

Photo: courtesy Oscilloscope Laboratories

Suzanne Hudson speaks with Leah Levy, executive director of the Jay DeFeo Foundation, about the artist’s life and work.

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Jennifer Guidi In her Los Angeles studio, Jennifer Guidi discusses her most recent paintings with Laura Fried.

142 Isabelle Waldberg Jacquelynn Baas profiles Isabelle Waldberg, writing on the sculptor’s many friendships and the influence of her singular creations.

148 Book Corner: On Collecting with Norman Diekman Rare-book expert Douglas Flamm speaks with designer Norman Diekman about his unique collection of books on art and architecture.

170 Game Changer: Peggy Cooper Cafritz Cullen Swinson pays homage to Peggy Cooper Cafritz, cofounder of the Duke Ellington School of the Arts, Washington, DC.

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The World According to Kelly Reichardt Carlos Valladares writes on the films of Kelly Reichardt, exploring her interest in subtle details and care for complex characters.

TABLE OF CONTENTS SPRING 2020

Photo credits:

C

indy Sherman’s explorations of women’s identities and their transmission through social representations have long made her an artistic pioneer. While her photographs are technically self-portraits, they actually propose multiple “characters” to whom her viewers bring their own interpretations. In this issue she reflects on her work in light of an upcoming solo exhibition at Paris’s Fondation Louis Vuitton.

In its handling of identity and representation, Sherman’s art foreshadowed the broad undermining of our understanding of those issues that has developed in recent decades with the growth of the Internet and the global dominance of social media. Natasha Stagg’s essay in this issue focuses on matters of personal authenticity in the marketing sphere of “influencers,” those social-media users —some not even real people but computer-generated “personalities”— who advertise products by announcing their own tastes. Stagg has a fascinating take on what is at stake in this online universe. And of course artists are constantly making works in response to social power. One of the issues so brilliantly addressed in Richard Prince’s Instagram series, paired with Stagg’s essay in this issue, is social media’s blurring of the line between public and private life.

Also in this issue, John Elderfield resumes his investigation of Édouard Manet’s Execution of Maximilian, a 150-year-old group of works focusing on politically motivated violence.

On a more uplifting note, we are pleased to present Peggy Cooper Cafritz as this issue’s Game Changer. Cullen Swinson tells us how Cafritz was able to empower budding African American artists by improving their access to education and the institutions of the art world.

We feel privileged to salute friendships among artists. This issue includes a candid and enlightening conversation between David Reed and Katharina Grosse on painting tricks and techniques that they have discovered through time spent both looking at art and developing their own painting practices. We also spotlight the little-known but long-standing friendship and artistic exchange between Marcel Duchamp and the sculptor Isabelle Waldberg.

Finally, we find a nice synergy between Giuseppe Penone’s installation at Fort Mason, San Francisco, where the celebrated Italian artist responds to the landscape and history of an American site, and the work of Stanley Whitney, an American painter who, we learn here, honed his mature painting style in the ruined architectures of Rome and Egypt.

We are honored to bring you these stories, and many more surprises, as we embark on this new decade and our fourth year publishing the Gagosian Quarterly!

Alison McDonald, Editor-in-chief

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Gagosian Quarterly, Spring 2020

Editor-in-chief Alison McDonald

Founder Larry Gagosian

Managing Editor Wyatt Allgeier

Business Director Melissa Lazarov

Text Editor David Frankel

Published by Gagosian Media

Online Editor Jennifer Knox White

Publisher Jorge Garcia

Executive Editor Derek Blasberg Assistant Editor Gillian Jakab Design Director Paul Neale Design Alexander Ecob Graphic Thought Facility Website Wolfram Wiedner Studio

Advertising Manager Mandi Garcia Advertising Representative Michael Bullock For Advertising and Sponsorship Inquiries Advertising@gagosian.com Distribution David Renard Distributed by Pineapple Media Ltd Distribution Manager Kelly McDaniel Prepress DL Imaging

Cover Cindy Sherman

Printed by Pureprint Group

Contributors Jacquelynn Baas Timothy Baum Derek Blasberg Irving Blum Anne Boyer Richard Calvocoressi Norman Diekman John Elderfield Roe Ethridge Douglas Flamm Laura Fried Michael Govan Katharina Grosse Jennifer Guidi Lazaro Hernandez Suzanne Hudson Matthew Jeffrey Abrams Leah Levy Vera Lutter Elizabeth Mangini Jack McCollough Alison McDonald David Reed Katy Rogers Cindy Sherman Rani Singh Natasha Stagg Cullen Swinson Carlos Valladares

Thanks Richard Alwyn Fisher Leslie Antell Jennifer Belt Victoria Benjamin Chris Berkery Priya Bhatnagar Madison Brill Michael Cary Sofia Castoldi Serena Cattaneo Adorno Lucy Clark Virginia Coleman Susan Cooke Emily Cooper John Currin Jack Davison Sarah Duzyk Chrissie Erpf Andrew Fabricant Kate Fernandez-Lupino Lauren Fisher Samantha Floody Emily Florido Mark Francis Hannah Freedberg Brett Garde Matt Gaughan Darlina Goldak Megan Goldman Freja Harrell Sarah Hoover Delphine Huisinga Tenaya Izu Sarah Jones Jenny Kim Harmony Korine Jona Lueddeckens

Carey MacArthur Lauren Mahony Pepi Marchetti Franchi Susannah Maybank Rob McKeever Jeff McLane John Michael Morein Lily Mortimer Olivia Mull Louise Neri Sam Orlofsky Kathy Paciello Charlie Pardoe Jaimie Park Anne Patsch Giuseppe Penone Miriam Perez Tia Powell-Harris Richard Prince Nathaniel Mary Quinn Stefan Ratibor Gerhard Richter Nicholas Shoebridge Sarah Sickles Charlie Spalding Rebecca Sternthal Ashley Stewart Max Teicher Andie Trainer Erin Troseth Corinne Waldberg Dawson Weber GiGi Welsh Kisgen Stanley Whitney Kelso Wyeth

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LO S A N G E L ES

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CONTRIBUTORS Rani Singh

Irving Blum

Rani Singh is Director of Special Projects at Gagosian, Beverly Hills.

Her work focuses on strategic planning and legacy management for artists, exhibitions development, museum outreach, and programming. Singh initiated the Building a Legacy project for Gagosian, which has been active since 2018.

In 1957, Irving Blum joined Ferus Gallery, the LA hub for avant-garde artistic activity, as co-director with Walter Hopps. His visionary direction at Ferus brought together East and West Coast luminaries for the first time. When Ferus closed in 1966, he operated the Irving Blum Gallery until his return to New York City in 1972, when he started Blum Helman Gallery.

Cindy Sherman Cindy Sherman was born in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, and lives and works in New York. Considered one of the most influential artists of her generation, she came to prominence in the late 1970s with a group of artists known as the Pictures Generation. Sherman has participated in four Venice Biennales, cocurating a section at the 55th exhibition in 2013. Additionally, her work has been included in five iterations of the Whitney Biennial, two Biennales of Sydney, and the 1983 Documenta. She has been the recipient of the Praemium Imperiale, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship.

Photo: Richard Phibbs

Carlos Valladares Carlos Valladares is a writer, critic, programmer, journalist, and video essayist from South Central Los Angeles, California. He studied film at Stanford and began his PhD in History of Art and Film & Media Studies at Yale University last fall. He has written for the San Francisco Chronicle, Film Comment, and the Criterion Collection.

Photo: Jerry Schatzberg

Natasha Stagg Natasha Stagg’s two books, Surveys and Sleeveless: Fashion, Media, Image, New York 2011–2019, were published

by Semiotext(e). Her writing can also be found in the books You Had to Be There: Rape Jokes by Vanessa Place, Intersubjectivity, Volume 2 by Lou Cantor and Katherine Rochester, Excellences & Perfections by Amalia Ulman, and The Present in Drag by DIS, among others.

Photo: Roeg Cohen

Jacquelynn Baas Jacquelynn Baas is a cultural historian, writer, curator, and Director Emeritus of the University of California Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.

Her books include Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art (2004), Smile of the Buddha: Eastern Philosophy and Western Art from Monet to Today (2005), and most recently Marcel Duchamp and the Art of Life (2019).

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David Reed David Reed is a contemporary artist whose career spans decades and mediums. Known for his large-scale abstract paintings, Reed plays with the dynamics of brushstroke, light, and color. The artist hails from San Diego and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and Reed College before moving to New York, where he studied at the New York Studio School under the tutelage of Philip Guston and Milton Resnick.

Reed lives and works in New York.

His exhibition David Reed: New Paintings opened at Gagosian in early 2020.

Derek Blasberg Derek Blasberg is a writer, editor, and New York Times best-selling author. In addition to being the Executive Editor of Gagosian Quarterly, he is the Head of Fashion and Beauty for YouTube. He has been with Gagosian since 2014.

Katharina Grosse Widely known for her in situ paintings, in which explosive color is sprayed directly onto architecture, interiors, and landscapes, Katharina Grosse embraces the events and incidents that arise as she works, opening up surfaces and spaces to the countless perceptual possibilities of the medium. Approaching painting as an experience in immersive subjectivity, she uses a spray gun, distancing the artistic act from the hand, and stylizing gesture as a propulsive mark.

Photo: Max Vadukul

Elizabeth Mangini Elizabeth Mangini is an art historian and associate professor at California College of the Arts in San Francisco.

Her monograph Seeing Through Closed Eyelids: Giuseppe Penone and the Nature of Sculpture is forthcoming from University of Toronto Press.

Proenza Schouler Proenza Schouler is a New York– based womenswear and accessories brand founded in 2002 by designers Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez. The duo met while studying at Parsons School of Design, New York, eventually collaborating on their senior thesis, which became their first collection as Proenza Schouler. Named after the designers’ mothers’ maiden names, Proenza Schouler is defined by its fusion of craftsmanship and attention to detail with a sense of refined ease. Inspiration drawn from contemporary art and youth culture is combined with an emphasis on tailoring and the use of customdeveloped fabrics.

Douglas Flamm Douglas Flamm has over twenty years of experience in the field of rare books and began working as Gagosian’s Rare Book Specialist in 2016. He works closely with collectors, helping them to enhance their book collections by sourcing scarce and important material.

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John Elderfield John Elderfield, Chief Curator Emeritus of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, and formerly the inaugural Allen R. Adler, Class of 1967, Distinguished Curator and Lecturer at the Princeton University Art Museum, joined Gagosian in 2012 as a senior curator for special exhibitions.

Timothy Baum Timothy Baum is a private art dealer and writer, specializing in Dada and Surrealism. He is also the publisher and editor of Nadada Editions, and is separately working on a catalogue raisonné of the paintings of Man Ray, in association with a Paris colleague, Andrew Strauss. He lives and works in New York.

Anne Boyer Anne Boyer is a poet and essayist, the inaugural winner of the Cy Twombly Award for Poetry from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and a 2018 Whiting Award winner. Her latest book is The Undying (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019).

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

Cullen Swinson Cullen Swinson was recruited by Peggy Cooper Cafritz to the Duke Ellington School of the Arts in 1998.

He currently serves as the school’s Chair of English Studies, previously having served as Ellington’s first Dean of Humanities and Director of Academics and having taught creative writing and dance history at the school. Swinson holds a Master of Arts in Humanities from Georgetown University. He is also a visual artist and an amateur cellist.

A painting by Swinson that was owned by Cafritz was lost in the fire that tragically destroyed much of her collection in 2009.

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Matthew Jeffrey Abrams Matthew Jeffrey Abrams is an essayist, critic, and art historian. In 2017, he received a PhD from Yale in the History of Art, where he was the A. Bartlett Giamatti Fellow at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, BOMB Magazine, Conjunctions, and elsewhere. He also publishes no/ta/be/ ne: a newsletter-essay project.

D I O R .CO M

Norman Diekman

Katy Rogers

Norman Diekman studied at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, and worked in architecture with Philip Johnson, Lee Pomeroy, and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. He also worked with Ward Bennett in furniture and product design. In this issue, he speaks with Douglas Flamm about his passion for book collecting.

Katy Rogers is the vice president and secretary of the Dedalus Foundation, director of the Robert Motherwell Catalogue Raisonné Project, and president of the Catalogue Raisonné Scholars Association. She is the co-author of the catalogue raisonné of Motherwell’s paintings and collages (Yale University Press, 2012) and of Robert Motherwell: 100 Years (Skira, 2015).

Richard Calvocoressi

Laura Fried

Richard Calvocoressi is a scholar and art historian. Previously a curator at the Tate, London, director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, and director of the Henry Moore Foundation, Calvocoressi joined Gagosian in 2015.

Laura Fried is a Los Angeles– based curator and is a co-founder and Director of Active Cultures, a nonprofit organization that explores the confluence of food and art in contemporary life.

Jennifer Guidi

Suzanne Hudson

Leah Levy

Jennifer Guidi creates paintings notable for their luminosity, texture, and sculptural presence. Her swirling, mandala-like compositions oscillate in color and texture, inspiring shifts in perceptual awareness to forge new sensory horizons. Each painting is methodically executed through a unique process—at once systematic and organic—which reflects the connection of her painting practice to strains of Minimalism that privilege attention to detail and repetition. Her sculptural markings evoke an intensely meditative sense of narrative and spiritual votive.

Suzanne Hudson is an art historian and critic based in Los Angeles, where she teaches at the University of Southern California. Her most recent book is Mary Weatherford (Lund Humphries, 2019); Contemporary Painting is forthcoming from Thames and Hudson in 2020.

Photo: Filip Wolak

Leah Levy has been the executive director and a trustee of the Jay DeFeo Foundation in Berkeley, California, since its formation in 1991.

She worked directly with Jay DeFeo as a curatorial consultant from 1985 until the artist’s death in 1989. Levy is the author of numerous articles and several books on art.

Vera Lutter Born in Germany, Vera Lutter is a New York–based photographer known for her technique of the camera obscura, or pinhole camera. Through this singular style, Lutter renders cityscapes, light, and architecture around the world.

Lutter’s images have been exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions.

Most recently, Vera Lutter: Museum in the Camera at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art marks the culmination of Lutter’s two-year residency at the museum.

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The acclaimed Cindy Sherman exhibition that opened at London’s National Portrait Gallery last summer arrives at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, in April, making Sherman the first female artist to have a retrospective at the museum.

She sat down with Derek Blasberg to discuss the show, her solitary process, and selfies.

CINDY SHERMAN

Previous spread: Cindy Sherman, Untitled #425, 2004, chromogenic color print, 70 ¾ × 89 ¾ inches (179.7 × 228 cm).

Courtesy the artist and Metro Pictures, New York Below, top: Image posted to Cindy Sherman’s Instagram.

Caption: “Hello Fall” Below, bottom: Image posted to Cindy Sherman’s Instagram.

Caption: “Hi” Opposite: Cindy Sherman, Untitled #216, 1989, chromogenic color print, 87 1⁄8 × 56 1⁄8 inches (221.3 × 142.6 cm).

Courtesy the artist and Metro Pictures, New York

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My favorite part of the exhibition when I saw it in London was the re-creation of your studio.

CINDY SHERMAN For the catalogue, they hired someone to photograph each wall in my studio and someone thought, “What if we make wall­paper out of it?” I had actually already been making wall­ paper for a couple of projects, so we knew how to do it. I was scared I was going to hate it—what if it seemed super Disney-ish?—but they did a great job.

There was talk of sending over some of my wigs or props or ephemera or stuff to put in that room too, but I’m glad it was all just fake rather than having some real precious little things there.

DB One would assume artists are apprehensive about showing the tricks of the trade, but in a lot of ways your work is more about observing people than tricking them, right?

CS I like things to be clear. In my early stuff, you can see the cord that’s attached to the shutter when I’m taking the picture, or you can tell they’re fake tits or a fake nose. It doesn’t bother me.

DB It was fun to see so many people taking selfies in this selfie studio too.

CS After we figured out that was what we were going to do, I realized this was going to be a great selfie place.

DB What do you think of people who compare your work to selfies or self-portraiture?

CS I don’t actually see any of the work I’ve done as self-portraiture. I always refer to those characters in the third person, not as though they’re me.

DB You once said you hate the word “selfies.” Is that true?

CS The thing I hate most about selfies is the way most people are just trying to look a certain way.

They often look almost exactly the same in every pose, and it’s a pose that’s aiming to be the most flattering, which isn’t at all the way self-portraiture has traditionally been used—it was never about selfpromotion or making one look one’s best, it was more about studying a face, using one’s own face to learn about portraiture in general when, I suppose, no other face was available. Also, I’ve always thought that phone cameras distort the face. The lens is slightly wide angle, which isn’t inherently very attractive anyway. I have friends I follow and I can tell when they’re feeling vulnerable or insecure because they’re suddenly posting all these pretty photos of themselves. They’re just wanting people to like them.

DB How did you get on Instagram?

CS I’d been hearing about Instagram all the time but I didn’t really know what it was until I went on a trip to Japan with a friend and she insisted on doing it. I thought, “Well, I’ll just share photos of my vacation.” And then, slowly—it’s kind of fascinating how it creeps in—I got interested in discovering all these different sorts of subcultures, like people who do makeup but aren’t really makeup artists as I know them. It’s a whole separate art form that I wouldn’t have known about if it wasn’t for Instagram.

DB How often do you post?

CS I was just thinking that I’m due for one. It’s been over a month or something. It’s more challen­ ging now because I feel like I’ve done everything I can with these apps. I’m waiting for new things to explore or new things to discover.

DB How do you find your apps?

CS Well, a lot of it is just people recommending things. And sometimes I rethink how to use an old app. The one I use a lot is Facetune. They have this feature where you can basically erase background and insert anything you want. If I want to make a DEREK BLASBERG

shirt a field of grass, I can. Or a firepit. Or whatever.

I get bored when I feel like I’m just repeating a lot of what I’ve already done.

DB You’re the only person I know who uses Facetune to make themselves look . . . can I say “ugly”?

CS [Laughing] That’s okay to say “ugly.” Funny looking? Or odd?

DB Let’s talk about your history. You were born in New Jersey and you moved as a young girl to Long Island. You were the youngest of five children.

Apparently, as a little kid you liked to dress up.

CS I think a lot of kids like to dress up. But while most of my friends wanted to be brides or ballerinas or princesses for Halloween, I’d want to be a witch or a monster or an old lady. I don’t know why—to me that just seemed more fun, especially for Halloween, where it’s about being more scary than pretty.

However, I’ve been in therapy for a few years and now I wonder if dressing up was also a way for me to forget about who I was and try to be somebody else. There was the idea of my family feeling like I didn’t fit in, so maybe if I was a different person they would accept me. Or something?

I think I was always interested in clothes and the idea of outfits and personas. When I was a teenager, I made little drawings of all my school outfits. I was inspired by this one teacher who seemed to wear a different outfit or configuration of outfits every single day. So I made a little pegboard with the five days of the school week on it and I made little paper dolls and I’d figure out all my outfits for the whole week with these little drawings. In college, I did a film based on the idea of those little outfits. It’s part of the show and called Doll Clothes.

DB I saw that but didn’t realize you’d done it in college.

CS College was when I went back to dressing up.

Actually, now that I think of it, even before I documented it I was already playing with makeup in my room to look like different people for fun. Maybe it was also therapeutic.

DB Do you think dressing up as an adult unlocks childhood joy?

CS Well, it’s definitely still fun.

DB When did you start photographing yourself?

CS I failed my first photography course. I had to retake it and I had a teacher who was sort of, “Don’t worry about the technological part of it,” because that’s why I failed the first time [laughter]. Growing up, I was sheltered in terms of art experience.

We rarely went to museums and I didn’t know a lot about contemporary art. Learning about Conceptual art and thinking about using a camera made it seem like, “Well, yeah, I could just worry more about what the concept is of the image I’m going to be shooting and then reproduce it in a second.”

Whereas in the past the way I painted was very laborious.

DB To pursue art as a career takes gusto.

CS Honestly, I didn’t know what it even meant to be an artist. When I went to college, I thought may­ be I’d wind up teaching. I thought an artist was somebody who did the drawings in court, or on a boardwalk, you know, the people that did the caricatures?

DB When did you realize it could be a career?

CS I remember seeing a spread in Life magazine with Lynda Benglis pouring latex on her studio floor. I guess that was the first time I thought, “Well, hmm. This is really something a woman could do.”

DB Do you identify with any of the feminist move­ments shaping pop culture, like #TimesUp or #MeToo? CS Yes, definitely. It’s implied in my work. I don’t

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This page: Cindy Sherman, Untitled #540, 2010/2012, chromogenic color print, 71 × 87 1⁄8 inches (180.3 × 221.3 cm).

Courtesy the artist and Metro Pictures, New York Opposite: Cindy Sherman, Untitled #468, 2008, chromogenic color print, 70 ¼ × 54 inches (178.4 × 137.2 cm).

Courtesy the artist and Metro Pictures, New York

go around using the label or the hashtags, I’m quieter and I’d rather my work speak for me, but it’s definitely in the work.

DB After you graduated from college, were you excited to come to New York?

CS Honestly, I was kind of scared. Whereas most people would have gravitated to New York, I thought, “No, I’m not going to go to New York. You don’t have to go to New York to be an artist. You can be an artist anywhere!” I stayed in Buffalo one year longer after I graduated. New York intimidated me.

Actually, it wasn’t until I was visiting the city and I saw Vito Acconci walking down the street in SoHo that I thought, “It’s such a small world here, it’s not a really big, intimidating place.” I realized the art world is such a small world, an insular world. Then I got this [National Endowment for the Arts] grant of $3,000 so we [me and the artist Robert Longo] thought, “Well, let’s move to New York!”

DB How were the early days in New York?

CS It was great back in the ’70s. I guess the city was definitely grittier and dirtier and more dangerous, but way downtown was deserted. I lived in the Wall Street area and there was nobody at night. You were lucky if you could find a cab. The whole art world was different in a positive way because there weren’t a lot of galleries, which there are now, and nobody really expected to sell their work. There was this freedom because you weren’t worried about anybody buying it, so you didn’t have that much pressure about what you were making. There was more of a crossover between types of creativity, too: a filmmaker could also be an artist, or a visual artist could also be a musician, or a stand-up comic could be a painter.

DB When you moved to New York, you made the now famous Film Stills. Was that on a lark or was that your stake in the ground?

CS I didn’t know what I was doing! At first, the way it started, I did one roll of film and on that roll of film I had six or seven different characters in different poses. There was the one on the bed in the black bra, there was the one leaning by the door as if she’s crying. I couldn’t afford film so I would only 32

take six shots of each one of those and then decide, “Okay, that’s it, I have it,” and then do another one.

For a long time, I worked in my apartment, just re­ setting up different areas—this place looks like a library or that place looks like a hotel room. When I realized I should do some exterior shots, I would make lists of what types of shots to do around the city and then ask a friend, at the time my boyfriend [Longo], we’d get in his van, I’d have a few wigs and some outfits, and we’d go, “Okay, let’s stop here!”

And I’d put the wig on and some makeup on and jump out and tell him where to stand to take the picture and then we’d jump in and I’d do a different character and we’d find a different place. It was fun!

DB That seems so youthful and authentic.

CS It was. I didn’t know if any of it was going to work out, but it didn’t matter! It was just, like, let’s have some fun.

DB I wonder if young people still have that sense of easy risk anymore. Today, we’ve got twenty-oneyear-old self-made billionaires.

CS Nowadays, kids go to grad school and leave expecting to find a gallery right away and have their first show. There are probably courses that teach them what it is to become a successful artist, rather than just concentrating on making the art.

DB Were there moments when you thought about not being an artist? If so, how did you keep on keeping on? Sorry if this sounds like a motivational speech.

CS That would probably be the $64,000 question, because I think that just the fact that you don’t give up means that you’re probably set on being an artist. I met people who came to New York and wanted to be artists and after a year, they didn’t like struggling. They wanted a real job where they could have a decent apartment and not be in some funky shithole. I think when you’re really trying and committed, you kind of don’t care where you live. You allow yourself to live in shitholes.

DB Is your process now the same as it was then?

CS The biggest difference is shooting with digital now. I can see instantly what I’m getting and what’s wrong—if it’s out of focus, or if I just don’t

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like the shot. And if I don’t like the character I can change the makeup. In the past, I’d develop everything after having done all the makeup and taken all the photos, and then I’d wait for the film to develop. I’d have to take my makeup off because I’d have to take the film to the store, so if I didn’t get the shot I’d have to start over again.

DB You set up all the pictures yourself?

CS Yeah. I have a mirror set up next to the camera.

DB You do all of the hair and makeup yourself?

CS Mm-hmm. I also have a little hand-held mirror for when I’m doing the makeup.

DB Do you have music on?

CS Yeah, I love music.

DB And you use a camera alone?

CS Yes. I feel less inhibited with no one around, which means I can take chances and do something foolish and maybe that turns out great. It would be a lot more convenient if I had somebody there to stand in for me and I could see, “Oh no, it will be better if you tilt your head this way. Or stand up in­s tead of sitting down.” But I just know it would inhibit me, that’s all.

DB Have you ever tried a photo assistant?

CS Yes. I found I was kind of just keeping busy for them [laughs]. I felt like I had to look like I was really working all the time. I realized that part of my work process is about spacing out sometimes, and that’s sometimes good. It clears your brain for a little bit and then you go back to focusing and then your head’s a little clearer.

DB How do you research for your series, like the clowns and the socialites?

CS For the clowns, I started trying to imagine what the personality was underneath the makeup.

What would bring somebody to want to be a clown?

Is it just purely to make kids laugh? Or is it something else—is it a darker, seedier thing? Some of the snapshots of clowns I found online were these kind of seedy, sweaty-looking men. When I started doing this series I starting thinking of clowns as a whole race of people, but people just like anyone else. I thought I should do a housewife clown, a clown at the gym . . . I was trying to think of everyday shots of clowns just going about life.

DB Is that a typical trajectory? You start with an article of clothing and that ignites a thought pro­cess?

CS Sometimes, yeah. The socialites series was inspired when I was going through thrift shops on the Upper East Side. I was inspired by the outfits because they looked like something a glamorous woman would have worn thirty years ago at some function up there.

DB Do you have multiple series going on at the same time?

CS Usually it’s really sequential. Sometimes, though, I might be fooling around in between series.

DB Has there ever been a picture where you’re like, “That’s just way too ugly”? You said I could say “ugly”!

CS No, but I’ve done pictures where I think it’s just a little too goofy. I like ugly and bizarre, but not goofy.

DB Do you look at pop-culture references for starting points in your work? What’s the filter of your information?

CS Well, it’s a lot of cultural, cross-multicultural influences, like bad TV or bad movies or advertising or fashion photography. A lot of it is just im­ag­ ery that’s in the media.

DB There’s a certain sense of folly to your work so you have to be aware of the Real Housewives . . . , right?

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Right. Although I haven’t really watched that show. I’m vaguely aware of some of the characters.

The recent stuff I did, which was loosely inspired by 1920s flappers, came from seeing portraits of women from that period in a German book. The makeup was so intense! I remembered that’s what I loved about that time period—the eyebrows being so extremely penciled in and the lips being little bow shapes and a dark hole around the eyes. I loved the whole extremeness. I began playing with it and the characters just came out.

DB Oftentimes I think people are trying to show a more real version of themselves in this selfie culture. Are you showing real versions of yourself or unreal versions of yourself?

CS I would say they’re unreal versions of myself, but I don’t even see them as myself at all. I feel like I’m disappearing in the work, rather than trying to reveal anything. I’ve never thought of it as revealing fantasies or getting to feel this or that character.

I’m hiding beneath the makeup, so it’s about obliterating, erasing myself and becoming something else.

DB So it’s not even self-portraiture?

CS I’m trying to find other faces and other personalities. I don’t know what it is I’m looking for un­t il I put the makeup on and then I sort of find it or it’s somehow revealed.

DB How does it feel when you get to that place?

CS Kind of magical. When I was doing some of the history pictures, I looked in the mirror and I didn’t see myself at all. That was really kind of freaky but also euphoric. I really did not see myself anywhere in her.

CS

Cindy Sherman, Untitled #424, 2004, chromogenic color print, 53 ¾ × 54 ¾ inches (136.5 × 139.1 cm).

Courtesy the artist and Metro Pictures, New York Artwork © Cindy Sherman

Richard Prince, Untitled (Portrait), 2019, inkjet on canvas, 79 Ă— 49 inches (200.7 Ă— 124.5 cm)

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THE RIGHT TIME Natasha Stagg on influencers, the loss of the it-girl, and the “promotional life.”

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About a year ago, I was working at a branding consultancy with fashion clients interested in YouTube stars while promoting the German trans­ lation of a novel I wrote that had made predictions about new methods of fame and cultural leveraging, and so was inundated with takes on “influencer culture.” I watched the first episode of a new Vice show, hosted by obsolete prototype Paris Hilton, that tracked a social media star’s path of fakery in search of making it and likened becoming a top-tier personal brand to getting a dream role in Holly­wood. I saw mass­-market celebrities trail niche personalities when starting beauty lines. I read about the proliferation of branded selfie ops, “relative diminishing marginal aesthetic value,” the first animated-bot news anchor, and the limitlessness of media manipulation through digital developments in the near future.

All this while participating in and per­forming for multiple media formats myself, often with the goal of self-promotion.

I’d noticed that a lot of people are somehow still under the impression that the influencer strategy of advertising doesn’t affect them—or they were under that impression until their daughter or friend or mother started the process of social media monetization. I imagine that realization like finding out that someone you know is selling products as part of a pyramid scheme, but a scheme as all-encom­ pass­i ng as television and radio and print advertising combined. It’s deba­ table whether influencer marketing is sustainable as a model, but for now, agencies will attach value to any level of influence and will attempt to make gains from any or all of it.

Influencer marketing was already old hat, a strategy that should have given way to something new. Like cringey hashtag campaigns, though, it became ever more integrated into the advertising infrastructure it was sup­posed to subvert or at least circumvent.

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Perhaps this boom, due to ad executives hoping to attract postmillennials, was driven by the teenagers they polled.

For many, it was influence or die. The feeling was tangible.

In the early summer of 2018, I received an email from a publicist about Vancouver’s “influencer marketing and content platform” #paid (hashtagpaid.com), and although I hardly ever get baited by press releases, something compelled me to respond to this one. I was curious about the agency’s processes, I said.

The publicist suggested a phone interview with Adam, the twenty-five-yearold cofounder and CSO. Like any amateur journalist, I made my first question about how the startup started.

The old advertising questions about efficacy and tactics remain, but when they’re applied to the influencers, it’s in everyone’s interests to be portrayed as extremely normal.

“A friend of ours, Ronnie, from Toronto, amassed over 100,000 followers in a year,” began Adam. The year and platform in question are 2012 and lnstagram. Adam drew out certain words in a distinctive style I think of as pitch­speak, which makes the impossible promise of relevancy.

In a clever tactic meant to simplify compl ic ated expla nat ions, each phrase is reduced to an emphasis: “We started analyzing what she was posting, how her followers were reacting. Commenters were asking her what gym she goes too, what sports bra she wears, what protein she puts in her shakes. She’d give them honest

answers. That’s when we stepped in and said, Hey, she’s endorsing brands without getting paid.”

Influencer marketing is a multi­ pronged ter m i nclud i ng mega-, macro-, and micro-, and each level comes with its own package of associative benefits. Influence is applied to everyone who has any type of following, from an average social media user to the most-followed person on a given platform. Everyone is susceptible to advertising, but if we all exhibit differing levels of influence, we also all exhibit differing levels of influence immunity. Relative “authenticity” is a measurable factor here as well, the definition morphing into something like “engagement potential.” The old advertising questions about efficacy and tactics remain, but when they’re applied to the inf luencers, it’s in everyone’s interest to be portrayed as extremely normal.

Which is most effective: an influencer whose stock is high but whose motives are completely transparent, or someone subtler, whose earnest personal branding isn’t easily distinguishable from sponsored content? Every social media user falls somewhere between the two poles.

If anyone can be a potential source of “authentic” advertising, is anyone truly authentic online? These are not the kinds of questions that bothered Adam, who became Ronnie’s manager when they were both nineteen. When I looked at her Instagram account, it was a trove of before-andafter pictures that utilized all the old selfie tricks like better lighting, flattering bikinis, and self-aware posture. The food photos she posted were a mix of calorific desserts and colorful fruit salads. She often updated her followers on the health of her longterm relationship (now engagement!).

In these photos, two grinning, blonde, blue-eyed high school sweethearts were always careful to make eye contact with the camera. To promote her e-commerce shop, she posted still life

shots of the merch: pillows, mugs, totes, and framed posters with inspirational messages like “Less greed more giving.”

Not that I’m judging. We are all of us necessarily familiar with and somewhat accepting of a double self-image: the contrast between a life and the image of that life as projected online. We each create a personal brand. We each author a narrative of depicted moments. We sometimes wonder about the dichotomy between the moments we share and those we don’t, about how it relates to a truth, or a core, if those exist. What was authenticity in another era? And what amount of authenticity is lost when we’re promoting a cause, associating with a brand, selling a product—or selling ourselves?

W hen Adam and Ronnie f irst started working together, they compiled a list of ten brands she either already used or wanted to work with.

Adam reached out and brokered deals on his new client’s behalf, at which point she was legally obligated to add the word “Ad” or “Sponsored” to posts she was paid to make.

But, says Adam, “it wasn’t a stretch because we weren’t forcing the brands at her. Her followers weren’t surprised because she was already giving them product recommendations, since they were asking for it. Now, she’s just earn­i ng revenue from these recommendations, versus the free replies she would write in her comments section.”

Influence should be easy to determine: follower counts tell the story and analytics do the rest. But every good marketer k nows t hat’s not enough. If you’re scrolling past an ad and land on a meme making fun of the flaws in the very same ad, your like might not be worth that much. In a vicious cycle, ads incorporate sarcasm and meme mimicry. This is how you get fast-food Twitter accounts anonymously authored by comedians. Corporations, as they say, are people. And people, it seems, are corporations.

The dream of influencer marketing is to make ads from potential posts created by the kind of people who know how to make their friends and family jealous. The goal is to blend in completely, to deploy a truly personal aesthetic, created by users themselves. The ideal user exudes an air that’s aspirational but attainable. Her life is smoothed out and sunny, not overcomplicated with too many messages. She and her friends are just normal people having fun because of t he products t hey’ve purchased.

I had heard t he ter m “m icroinfluen­c ing” before speaking with Adam, but probably didn’t investigate its meaning. A micro-influencer, it was explained to me, is a social media

If we all exhibit differing levels of influence, we also all exhibit differing levels of influence immunity. account that has a better impact on its followers because it has a smaller, more trusting following than the typical movie star or name-brand account does. Companies target smaller and smaller advertising platforms in order to set in motion word-of-mouth endorsements that people are more likely to believe. According to this logic, micro-influencers (or anyone with a following under 100,000) are normal people who happen to be passionate enough about shopping to want to advise others on the quality of the products for which they shop.

Companies, from what I understand, pay inf luencers to promote their products in a way that each entity has agreed feels natural to their own brands. Companies could also send gifts to influencers, expecting

but not contractually obligating a promotion, whether it be a YouTube review or a tabloid photo. Since the recipients of these gifts are not legally beholden to alert their fans of a paid promotion, the gift tactic ser ves as a loophole in two directions. To the company, unpaid and therefore unannounced advertisements appear more authentic. To the inf luencer, meanwhile, a gift can add value to a personal brand: posting a thank-you note to a brand promotes the brand, but also one’s self, suggesting one is important enough to receive free products.

To hear it from the guys at #paid, brands are doubly served by microinf luencer partnerships: followers are more likely to look kindly on a brand that contributes to the livelihood of a beloved noncelebrity, and a brand that invests in a personality comes to reflect that personality, a real, authentic person. The authenticity, whatever that means, bubbles upward.

Micro-influencers don’t look like Hollywood superstars or fashion models. While elite celebrities are mostly superthin, inf luencers are athletic and rounded. They f launt their extravagant vacations, loving relationships, and stable home lives, even as they remain grounded enough to foster a large group of adoring friends. This is the lifestyle, it seems obvious now, that America has always truly wanted.

Before influence was a traceable statistic, “influential” used to mean “cutting edge.” But an inf luencer isn’t inf luential in that way anymore. A typical influencer today is basic—the opposite of avant­-garde.

She’s the aff luent, pretty person you’d rather not admit you pay attention to because she is, by default, a sellout. Still, although you may not even know her name, there’s something about her skin that makes you sick with envy. She’s not plagued by celebrity scandal or even a career,

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and yet she’s incredibly, impossibly popular. In the daydreams of her followers, she wakes up every morning to an excess of opportunities, each more fun than the previous one.

Does t he m icro- or macroinfluencer sell happiness? She’s not famous for her talents—at least not yet—but she’s still being paid to document her lifestyle. Her influence is acute; it’s measurably more powerful than the effect a big celebrity might have on her millions of fans. Because she is a no one, she’s someone. It’s this type of person—not her much wealthier or more famous colleagues—that is our era’s real trendsetter.

“Influencer” is what we’re calling them now, but that’s just one in a timeline of those words invented to describe celebrities who are first and foremost talented at utilizing new media. The linguistic evolution has taken zeitgeisty terminology from alluding to the dramatic to pinpointing the vanilla. In other words, we’ve gone from coveting the few to the many, the iconic to the algorithmically induced.

“Inf luencers” were once called “it girls,” a term I never thought I’d miss. After speaking with #paid, though, I reread Jay Mclnerney’s 1994 New Yorker profile “Chloe’s Scene” to try and remember what it used to mean to be inf luential and young.

Mclnerney famously names Chloë Sevigny “the coolest girl in the world,” based on her ability to spot and insert herself into trends. In the 1990s, she was in an early Sonic Youth music video, Larry Clark’s first movie, a Maison Martin Margiela fashion show, and a Bernadette Corporation short film, for example. In the profile, the high schooler is effortless, unreachable (she clearly doesn’t have a pager and is hardly ever at home), and in demand. She chooses modeling for indie magazines over Vogue Italia, since, as Mclnerney describes it, “‘Down low’ is a cherished concept: secret, alternative, not

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commercial—everything one wants to be. Except one also sort of wants to be famous, and here is the contradiction at the heart of Chloe’s world, the dilemma of subcultures that ostensibly define themselves in opposition to the prevailing commercial order, the dilemma of all the boys and girls who want to be in Paper and Details: What do you do if Harper’s Bazaar, or Calvin Klein, comes calling? In Chloe’s case, so far, you sort of blow them off.” Twenty-four years later, though, she surely wouldn’t. Who would?

In his pitch, Adam had spun the refusal to sell out as irrational and may­be inauthentic. “Another way to view this is,” he continued, “[marketers] are giving money to help support

In a vicious cycle, ads incorporate sarcasm and meme mimicry. The ideal user exudes an air that’s aspirational but attainable. that creator to create even more ama­ zing content that their audience loves. So from the audience’s standpoint, it’s not like [creators] are paid for a product placement, it’s more like a valida­t ion. It’s that this amazing brand believes in the creator—person—that I follow, and now they’re helping that creator make a living.

It’s about the creator continuing to make content. That’s the change, in terms of the mindset.” As if in conclusion, he added, “I don’t really think it’s about selling out anymore.” The rationale was cyclical: entertainers must earn money and the entertained must pay up in some way. “Even if you don’t have a significant following, you understand that if you expect

someone to create a weekly YouTube video or post on lnstagram every day and commit their lives to creating content for you, then they need to make money somehow.”

As he compared paid posts to charitable acts, I could hear Adam almost start to believe himself. Many agencies, including #paid, promise a seamless monetization of social media posting: get paid to do the hard work you’re already doing by providing the world with engaging content, their mission statements all say, in so many words. Your brand is already established, they coax. If you’re not making money from it, you’re working for free.

This fair-is-fair explanation is not really how economies work, including the attention economy. Still, countless startups will hinge their success on managing these projections. Meanwhile, talent and creative agencies have scrambled to rebrand themselves as specializing in influencer marketing. On hashtagpaid. com, an interactive slider calculates how much you can make per post based on average engagements. A button below it encourages visitors to “start getting paid” by joining the 15,000-strong “creator marketplace” established across over 100 countries.

For one of the agency’s macro-influencers, who describes herself as a “content creator,” the promotional life is a form of preparation for whatever comes next. She doesn’t see herself doing paid posts forever: “I am already seeing a shift in the social media world, and these platforms will surely give out on all of us eventually.”

Excerpted from “Right Time,” originally published in Sleeveless: Fashion, Image, Media, New York 2011–2019 (Semiotext(e), 2019).

judygeib.com Gorgeous dendritic agate and Australian opal necklace, 18K gold and aluminum.

THE FILMS OF MAN RAY: Timothy Baum muses on Man Ray’s foray into filmmaking in the 1920s.

MYSTERIOUS ENCOUNTERS OF REALITIES AND DREAMS 42

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I sat up late last night munching on tasty squares of 90% cocoa dark chocolate and reading the “Dada Films and Surrealism” chapter of Man Ray’s splendid and informative 1963 autobiography Self Portrait. The squares of chocolate that I consumed are obviously irrelevant to this text, except that they helped keep me awake during the very relevant reading of Man Ray’s intimate account of the circumstances, techniques, and vague reasons as to why he elected in the 1920s, in endlessly inspirational Paris and other parts of France, to try his hand at making films.

After reading his recollections of his film­making days, my own memories of my experiences of the work of this masterful, eloquent (and particularly versatile!) artist and personality—many of which I shared with him personally—reawakened quite lucidly and journeyed instantaneously from the recesses of my mind to the fore, and suddenly I was ready to address this exciting subject—the early silent, very low-budget black-and-white films of Man Ray—and to share it with you. So here’s what I remember (fortified by seeing the films in question for the first time in years only a scant couple of weeks ago).

I am writing this text to accompany, and hopefully elucidate, the exhibition of the same subject (the 1920s films by Man Ray) at Gagosian, San

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Francisco, in early 2020. In this exhibition, three of the four films the artist made during that period (excluding the first one, a hastily improvised 3-minute sequence of rayograph-like images, titled Le retour à la raison, made in 1923) are presented, accompanied by vintage still photographs and an array of objects that correspond to the contents of the films.

Chronologically, the first more complete and comprehensive film is Emak Bakia, which was made in the summer of 1926. The film was sponsored by a wealthy retired (but not uninspired) American expatriate stockbroker named Wheeler, who, excited by the portraits Man Ray had made of his beloved wife, invited the artist to vacation at his villa in the French Basque region, near Biarritz, and perhaps to bring along his movie camera and make some sort of film that the businessman would back. Man Ray found the invitation sufficiently enticing and took him up on the offer. The result of this was Emak Bakia, which, edited, runs 22 minutes (the title derives from the name of the Wheelers’ rented villa).

Emak Bakia (subtitled “Cinépoème”) is a combination of a succession of cleverly interspersed images (an eye ref lected in the camera’s lens; leaves; a field of flowers; fluttering carpenter nails; lights; spirals and other abstracted shapes; an

opening and closing eye; a lady—Mr. Wheeler’s beloved wife—in her elegant motorcar; a sheepfold in its fullest density; a girl dancing the Charleston; a man playing the banjo; the cross-dressing circus performer Barbette at a dressing table; waves flowing gently onto a beach; fish swimming idly about; the artist’s object titled Fisherman’s Idol, composed of cork fishing-net floats; a cutout of a jumping male figure; the top of a violin; some undotted dice; another succession of sundry floating objects), all of which are followed by a very specific cinematic story sequence of a handsome and well-groomed man (portrayed by the former Dada-period dandy and playboy Jacques Rigaut), who appears in a room with a small leather case that when opened reveals a dozen or so celluloid collars that magically arise and fly about the room and then, one by one, disappear entirely. This scene is followed by another brief sequence of unrelated floating objects, and then by the sudden appearance of Man Ray’s muse and lover of that time, the then greatly celebrated Kiki de Montparnasse, opening and closing her eyes, the lids of which have been painted with a second pair of eyes, creating a most unexpected Surrealist effect. This enchanting little moment ends abruptly with the appearance, in capital letters, of the word FIN, and with that, the film comes to an end.

Previous spread: Man Ray, Film Strips from “Emak Bakia”, 1926, gelatin silver print, 4 7⁄8 × 6 inches (12.4 × 15.1 cm) Opposite: Man Ray, Film Still from “Emak Bakia”, 1926, gelatin silver print, 9 × 11 7⁄8 inches (23 × 30 cm) This page: Man Ray, Film Still from “Les mystères du Château du Dé”, 1929, printed 1980s, gelatin silver print, 11 7⁄8 × 14 5⁄8 inches (30 × 37 cm) Following spread: Installation view, Man Ray: The Mysteries of Château du Dé, Gagosian, San Francisco, January 14–February 29, 2020 Artwork © Man Ray Trust/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris 2020

The next film, made in 1928, is the only one of the period that adheres to a vague story line. Bearing the title L’étoile de mer (The Starfish), it also has a running time of barely 20 minutes. For this film, Man Ray used as his guide a poem he had heard read by its author, the Surrealist poet Robert Desnos, and in which he delighted. With Desnos’s permission, he decided to re-create the poem as a film.

The (happily disjointed) story sequence, as much a dream as a story, is as follows: A man and a woman, obscured in a disquieting fog-like haze, are walking along a road (the woman is portrayed, as in the previous film, by Kiki de Montparnasse; the man by a non-actor acquaintance of Man Ray who lived in the same building as Desnos, and who probably was never seen in another film again). The two enter a building, climb a staircase to the first floor, and enter a small room containing a single narrow bed (or cot?). Immediately, the woman quite sensually but nonchalantly undresses, observed by her fully dressed gentleman companion. She then lies down upon the bed in an uncontestedly seductive way, and the man turns on his heel and departs.

The scene fades out, and the word Adieu appears shakily on the screen.

The next scene is set in a street of factory-like edifices, in which a lone figure, again Kiki de Montparnasse, is standing (perhaps as a vendor?) alongside a tall pile of newspapers. Atop the papers rests a jar containing a single starfish. The man from the previous scene appears, and he greets the lady. They bend over to critically examine the starfish. The man lifts up the jar, and the newspapers, caught up in the wind, blow about all over the street. He runs madly about trying to regather all the newspaper sheets, but in the end only retains a single page, which he commences to read. The scene shifts quite abruptly to a brief tableau of the lady (apparently in an altogether different place) caressing the young man’s head.

Now a complete shift occurs, and we observe a

view of a city silhouetted in a thick, fog-like mist.

This is quickly supplanted by an image of several jars containing starfish, all revolving slowly about.

Next we see a still-life composite of wine bottles, bananas, and other disparate objects, which is immediately followed by a totally separate view of Kiki seated on the cot again, this time with her bare foot resting atop an open book, with a starfish (also on the floor) alongside.

We next encounter Kiki walking along a road once again, where she is soon joined by her original male companion. A close-up reveals that Kiki is wearing a mask. The film cuts to the man standing by himself, studying a tracing in dark ink of the lines on the palms of his hands. Kiki (in a succeeding shot) reappears ascending the inner staircase once again. On one of the steps a starfish has settled. Once upstairs, Kiki is seen with a dagger in her hand, superimposed with the floating starfish.

At this point, the film cuts to a view of a vast array of stars in the dark night sky, then to a nocturnal view of trees by a river. Next we see Kiki seated by a burning fire, then a text reading BELLE comme UNE FLEUR DE VERRE. This is succeeded by a frame showing her attired like a warrior: in a sheet, helmet, and staff.

Then we see a close-up image of flames. After this, we gain a glimpse of the earlier factory-­l ined street; then we see Kiki asleep (was this all but a dream?).

Finally we return to the original road where we first encountered the man and woman walking together. Again Kiki encounters the man, and this time they stop and shake hands. They chat for a moment, and then are joined by another man, played by Desnos. Kiki turns her back on her original suitor and walks away with the new arrival.

The film ends with a cut to the jilted man, all alone, regarding the jar with the starfish inside.

There is a second, very brief transition to Kiki, looking through a piece of glass, which subsequently shatters. This is followed very simply by the projection of two final words: THE END. 45

This now brings us to the final May Ray film of the 1920s, the silent, black-and-white Les mystères du Château du Dé, with which the artist closed out the decade and, additionally, his brief and intentionally abandoned early filmmaking career, in the winter of 1929. This is a film neither intended nor initiated by Man Ray in any way. It reflects entirely the whimsical notion of the Vicomte Charles de Noailles, a blue-blooded aristocrat, who, alongside his wife, Marie-Laure, was an inveterate patron of the arts. The Vicomte enjoyed taking a midwinter break from what Man Ray referred to as “the rigors of the Paris climate,” and elected to descend to his domain (created by one of the most trendy architects of that era, Robert Mallet-Stevens) in the South of France.

Noailles’s idea for the film project was for Man Ray to join him and a group of his friends at his compound (a cluster of cube-shaped and rectangular buildings) and make an informal film of his property (inside and out), with the participation of his guests, as a form of divertissement. He also explained that this was to be a totally noncommercial venture, but that the artist would be compensated for his time and his expenses. Man Ray, respectful of the Vicomte, agreed to join him in the project.

For me personally, the success of this film is less aesthetic than as a valid period piece, chronicling the frivolous lifestyles of privileged families at that time (ironically just a few months before the 46

demise of the world’s economy resulting from the calamitous Wall Street crash that would occur later that year). The only story line is that two men in a Parisian café roll a pair of dice and, when the number comes up affirmatively, go out to their car and drive away. The succeeding drive—which eventually lands them in the South of France—is sparsely recorded, showing a few bare changes of landscape along the way. Finally, the travelers arrive at their presumed destination: a cluster of houses meant to serve as a modern château. The men drive up the hill atop which the edifices stand, and enter the surrounding walls through a portal of some sort (at no point that I recall are these two travelers ever identified).

We next see, via Man Ray and his assistant’s cameras, the château itself. Great emphasis is placed on the corridors and public halls. Beyond that, the more eccentric spaces are highlighted: the indoor swimming pool and its lounging areas; the gymnasium, with its elaborate array of diversional equipment; and so on. The spaces fill up with people—the actual guests visiting the château at that time. All sorts of frivolous activity ensues in and around the pool and its surrounding area, and in the gymnasium, with all of its paraphernalia.

Sometimes the guests are in costume, variously sporting masks that can conceal their identities.

Nothing intimate ever occurs, and no exotic dining scenes or glimpses of any sleeping rooms are ever presented. At different times, dice of varying sizes

are thrown; presumably to decide what actions would be taken according to their positive or negative outcomes. Aside from the sequences of guests cavorting, nothing really happens. Toward the end of the film, a woman and a man (the Comte de Beaumont, assuredly one of the more estimable of the guests) ascend the same hill as the unidentified duo who arrived at the beginning of the film, and, finding some oversize dice there, kick them around for a short bit of time before reverting to performing a brief session of other gyrational exercises. It is possible that this couple metamorphose into statues of stone—that, I don’t clearly remember. The final shot shows the oversize dice displayed in an articulated hand. This is followed by the word FIN, and so does this disjointed film end. The theme of the dice (and the suggestion of chance, as conjured by the outcome of the rolling of them) was evidently inspired by a poem by Stéphane Mallarmé.

I suppose that because this film was created to fulfill a whim of the Vicomte de Noailles, and simply as a diversion for his friends, it does not have to be judged as a success or a failure. Luckily, the other two films mentioned previously—Emak Bakia and L’ étoile de mer—pay ample tribute to the incontestable ingenuity and cleverness of their creator, Man Ray. Because of the artist’s variety of talents as painter, photographer, and renderer of unforgettable, ingenious objects, he really had no need to reenter the arena of filmmaking again.

DAVID REED David Reed and Katharina Grosse met at Reed’s New York studio in the fall of 2019 to discuss his newest paintings, the temporal aspects of both artists’ practice, and some of their mutual inspirations.

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We’ve been discussing our thoughts around the practice of painting in terms not only of the paintings themselves, but also how we put them in the space. Are you concerned about the arrangement of these new paintings in the gallery space?

DAVID REED Yes, these paintings are very different from one another and sometimes they don’t play well to­ge­t her. They can fight when in close proximity.

They may need a lot of white walls around them.

Also, I want to juxtapose paintings that have a lot of color with others that are black and gray. Combined they look good.

KG We aren’t used to black-and-white images anymore. Nearly everything is color. When we see photographs or movies: color. There’s not really that black-and-white vision anymore.

DR I’d love to see a painting of yours that’s black and gray.

KG Are you using colored pigments in your grays?

DR No, just different black and gray pigments.

Payne’s Gray is very cold, almost blue. Davy’s Gray is a neutral and in the right context can seem very reddish. I’m experimenting with Mars Black and Lamp black and Charcoal Grey. There seems to be an infinite number of different possible grays.

KG This reminds me of the show you did with Katy Siegel and Christopher Wool in 2017, Painting Paintings (David Reed) 1975. In the fifth-floor gallery were paintings by Joyce Pensato, Cy Twombly, and Wool; they all use black and white, in their full range of tonalities and in very different ways.

DR I’ve thought a lot about the Twombly that was downstairs [Untitled (New York City), 1967]. I’m thinking about him often while preparing for the upcoming show. In that painting, he made marks, with what I think was a wax crayon, while the paint was still wet. Then, when the paint was dry, he made an additional layer of crayon marks. So you have the marks into wet, and then dry on dry. This difference made the whole painting come to life.

KG Yes, that second, dry mark seems to draw the painting into an experience of everyday reality, whereas the wet on wet is more in the reality of the painted surface. I find your description of the painting poignant, because you’re separating the different characteristics of what makes painting the illusionistic art—its potential with hue, tonality, movement, shape. You don’t separate tonality in real life.

DR It’s such a simple distinction between marks into wet and on dry, and I didn’t realize how important that difference was; seeing both at the same time, you make all kinds of distinctions.

KG It’s also a time lapse. You can’t make the second gesture until the first has settled, but they exist together in the final outcome. It gives the viewer the experience of knowing that something has happened in between . . . or not happened in between.

DR You really appreciate how Twombly uses time in his work. You wrote about that a while back, correct?

KG Yes. It continues to fascinate me.

DR I didn’t realize how singular the use of time is in his work until I read your essay.1 KG Is that aspect of time or speed something you think about in relation to your own work?

DR Oh my goodness, yes.

KG It has a different quality from Twombly’s, I think.

DR Yes, it’s different. I’ve had a strange experience with time in my work, Katharina, perhaps you can recognize what I’ve been through. I was first inspired by post-Minimal sculpture, so my KATHARINA GROSSE

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idea was to make paintings in which the process was completely clear—a viewer could see exactly how the painting was done and how much time it took. I wanted my paintings to be in literal time: it took exactly this much time to pull a brush mark across the painting, this much time for the drips to go down. That was my goal. But now the surfaces of my paintings look photographic. One can’t tell how they were done. Time is hidden in the paintings; sometimes it even seems as if the paintings could only have been made if time were reversed.

I’ve ended up doing the exact opposite of what I originally intended to do [laughter]. I don’t know what happened. I keep trying to figure it out.

KG Doing it made you experience time differently, perhaps—I think painting offers exactly that possibility of going backward in time. You can reverse time any time you want, in a way.

DR I used to think that photography and film changed how I saw painting. Those media hide their processes. But what you say sounds right: it’s the nature of painting to manipulate time, to make different kinds of time. Lately, when I make marks, I often go against the direction of the previous marks. I thought it was a kind of canceling out, but it’s more as if I want to go back earlier in time.

KG I think painting over something—adding a second layer, third layer, fourth layer—has a lot to do with actualizing what you’ve done before.

In the beginning, I always thought that when I painted over something I had to paint a new painting. It took me a while to understand that what’s underneath has a tremendous effect on the next layer. How you read your relationship to your previous activity tremendously influences how you move forward.

DR It’s so much fun to work on these paintings.

I’ve thought about them for a long time. I don’t have to consciously think about what I’ve done before.

My hand seems to remember and to know what to do. I’ve also been having fun experimenting with painting around the sides of the canvases. Looking at the paintings from the sides as well as from the front causes another kind of time. At first I thought using stencils emphasized the flat, frontal surface, but a stencil can easily be made to wrap around the side of the canvas. Then it looks like a projected image, not flat at all KG Jo Baer’s paintings have always been very influential for me, especially early on. I was particu­ larly impressed with how she showed them: re­member her Radiator paintings from the early ’70s?

DR Yes! I often think of Jo Baer. She uses the sides of her paintings so beautifully.

Something else I’ve been obsessed with is changeant color, a conceptual use of color that started in the Italian Renaissance. It’s basically about modeling with hue rather than with value.

Andrea del Sarto is one of the inventors of this kind of color. There’s a painting of his in The Metro­ politan Museum of Art, The Holy Family with the Young Saint John the Baptist [c. 1528], which includes a phenomenal use of changeant color: the loincloth of the Christ child is modeled in incredible blues and magenta pinks. I kept asking myself why the loincloth is painted in this way. Finally I saw that the colors were a kind of camouflage: Mary’s hand is on the loincloth and she’s holding the Christ child’s penis, under the cloth—showing it to us. He’s fully human but also the son of God, sexual and otherworldly at the same time. I heard Leo Steinberg give a talk at the Studio School on his notorious subject, the sexuality of Christ, and read his book when it came out. I should have recognized 52

Opening spread: David Reed, #714, 2014–19 (detail), acrylic, oil, and alkyd on polyester, 28 × 118 inches (71.1 × 299.7 cm) Previous spread: Installation view, David Reed: New Paintings, Gagosian, 980 Madison Avenue, New York, January 10–February 22, 2020 Opposite: David Reed, #709 (For Jeremy Blake and Theresa Duncan), 2005–09/2018–19, acrylic, oil, and alkyd on polyester, 121 × 55 inches (307.3 × 139.7 cm) This page: David Reed, Working Drawing for #709 (For Jeremy Blake and Theresa Duncan), 2005–09/2018–19, mixed media on graph paper, 1 page of 14 pages, 17 × 11 inches (43.2 × 27.9 cm)

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what was going on in the painting sooner than I did.

KG The painting flips between materiality and spirituality?

DR Yes, I think so. The term changeant is French and comes from a way that cloth can be woven to be one color when seen from one side and a different color when seen from the other. The English term is “shot color.” Some art historians have written well about the use of color in Renaissance, Baroque, and Mannerist painting. Marcia Hall’s books are especially good: she writes about practical matters and why issues of color meant so much to painters. Lisa Yuskavage recently spoke of Hall’s writing about changeant color in another talk at the Studio School. Since I’ve been remembering and thinking about Italian painting and talking about Hall, perhaps we should be using the Italian term that she uses, cangiante.

KG I remember when I was young, the green– orange contrasts in Pontormo’s and del Sarto’s work were very important to me. When you put them together, you have a flicker of materiality, in a sudden way—they merge, and that adds a sense of unfinishedness to the painting. David, your works are always in progress. Does the idea of a finished painting have any relevance for you at all?

DR I don’t ever want to finish these paintings.

KG It’s a continuum. It’s amazing that you work on a painting for, how long did you say? Ten years?

DR I’ve worked on a few of these paintings for fifteen years.

KG What amazes me is that it looks like it’s just happened in a snap. And what I also find special is that you don’t make twenty of those—you don’t exploit your findings, you just go to the next.

DR I try to make a new discovery in each painting. I think that’s something painting can provide.

I never want to repeat myself.

It’s wonderful to show them to you and to talk.

I’m very much alone when I’m painting—I wonder if you feel that way? I can listen to suggestions, but I have to make decisions myself and to feel that they are right. Talking with you about my plans for the show reminds me of working with a curator: I learn about my paintings when I see how others install them, and I can use what I’ve learned in other paintings later on. Installing is a way of opening myself up to different possibilities. Katy and Christopher did a much better job installing those paintings of mine from the 1970s than I would have.

I tend to install in too regular a way, grouping like paintings with like; in their installation they put that unusual painting with the diagonals right in the midst of all the others with horizontal brushmarks. Fantastic!

1 Katharina Grosse, “C.T. S.T.,” in Jonas Storsve, ed., Cy Twombly, exh. cat. (French edition, Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2016; English edition, Munich: Sieveking, 2017).

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Installation view, David Reed: New Paintings, Gagosian, 980 Madison Avenue, New York, January 10–February 22, 2020 Artwork © 2020 David Reed/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Photos: Rob McKeever

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FASHION AND ART This is the first in an ongoing series of articles exploring the collaborative potentials when artists and fashion designers meet. In this installment, Derek Blasberg speaks with Lazaro Hernandez and Jack McCollough, the designers behind the New York fashion brand Proenza Schouler, about their influences and collaborations, from Mark Rothko to Harmony Korine.

PART 1: PROENZA SCHOULER

drawings and start the editing process. It’s almost like a storyboard and we build it all out. What does the beginning look like? How does it evolve?

Does it get more built up or does it disintegrate as the show evolves? That’s our blueprint for the season. Then we split apart again and I’ll fit the things I drew and Lazaro fits the things he’s drawn. We put it all together in the end, during the show process.

LH: Sometimes it’s very verbatim. Some looks are exactly as drawn, and then sometimes the drawing doesn’t work in real life and in the fitting it becomes something else.

DB: I recently wrote a piece on Cindy Sherman and she said that she had tried to hire assistants in the past, but she ultimately felt like when she had a team she was forcing herself to work more, to look busy in front of them. It’s interesting that you get most of your work done alone.

LH: We’re leaving on Monday for the country to start working on the show. Just me and Jack locked up in our studio for a week.

JMcC: But then we come back and the team helps us execute the ideas.

What we do takes such an army of people to make happen. There’s a lot of production involved with the whole thing. So our creative process, at least where it starts, is just the two of us, but the creative process has different parts.

Derek Blasberg: I see images of Mark Rothko paintings pinned on the wall in the studio. Talk to me about how the two of you research artists and how you agree on what direction to take. Do you guys ever fight over which artist, which picture, which painting?

Jack McCollough: We’re in the thick of that right now. We’re just gathering information, I’m gathering sources and Lazaro is gathering sources.

We both take stacks of images—that’s what you see up on the wall right now—and we sift through research, research, research, so many images.

And as we sift, that starts to form a dialogue. There’s never one specific thing that gets a collection going. There are two of us, so it’s always a mix of our ideas coming together and, hopefully, creating something greater.

Also hopefully, the sources blur and become abstract, so in the end you can’t put your finger on a single thing.

Lazaro Hernandez: We go to museums and galleries and look at books that friends send us—the traditional places to find inspiration, of course.

Last season we were doing a lot of sharp lines, very ’80s, with a lot of edges. But this season, looking at the Rothkos, it feels like the edges should be softer and blend more. I went by myself to the Met a few weeks ago to see the Epic Abstraction show and there’s a room of Rothko paintings. I looked at some of the edges and came home and said, “Oh, Jack, Rothko’s interesting. I’m into those lines and the line quality.” And he pulled out some Sigmar Polke images that had a diffused quality too. And we had our starting point.

DB: How long have you two worked together?

JMcC: We started the company in 2004.

LH: Can you believe that?

DB: It’s incredible because it feels like yesterday. How has your process changed in the last decade and a half?

JMcC: It’s evolved. In some ways we still work the same way we did in the very beginning. We’re very analog. We do all of the research and then go to our place in the Berkshires, sit at a long table, and sketch for ten days, twelve hours a day. That’s old school.

LH: That’s the place to get our creative work done.

New York is where we’re dealing with meetings and our teams and the business side of things. But in terms of the creative side, the country is where we can go hear our thoughts, hear our ideas, and not have the distractions of the outside world.

JMcC: Our sketches riff off each other. Maybe I’ll draw a collar detail, and then Lazaro will see that and he’ll riff off that and he’ll do a jacket.

Back and for th and then at the end of the ten days we’ve got this huge stack of 58

This page, clockwise from top: Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez in their New York studio, 2019.

Photo: Derek Blasberg John Currin, Heartless, 1997, oil on canvas, 44 × 36 inches (111.8 × 91.4 cm) © John Currin. Photo: Rob McKeever

Proenza Schouler, Fall Winter 2014, courtesy Proenza Schouler Opposite: Proenza Schouler, Spring Summer 2017, courtesy Proenza Schouler

DB: Have you ever worked with an artist who’s given you feedback on your process?

LH: Ron Nagle. We saw his work for the first time at the Venice Biennale. We fell in love with the palette, forms, shapes, textures . . . all of it.

So we went deep into Nagle. We reached out to say, “We’re really into the work. We hear you live in San Francisco; we’re going to be out there and we’d love to visit you.” He invited us to the studio and when we got there we saw Proenza Schouler advertisements. So he was sort of a fan of ours and we were a fan of his. He agreed to do a shoot with us for W magazine and then we did a whole season based on his work, and it felt like this divine blessing. That was cool.

JMcC: John Currin inspired some of our designs too.

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LH: I once had dinner with him and Rachel Feinstein and we were talking about his painting Heartless [1997]. There’s a girl in a gold dress with the heart cut out. That was the starting point for another show. We had a chat with John and then the entire show sort of shape-shifted around that point.

DB: Did you tell him that the painting inspired you?

LH: Actually, yes. We asked, “Hey, we have a reproduction of Heartless on the wall. Is it weird if we just copy that on a sweater?” And he said, “I would love that. It’d be so great.”

DB: Did you give Rachel one of the sweaters?

JMcC: Yes, of course.

LH: But you know, the art references are very subtle and they’re very insider-y. We know these artists when they’re alive, usually. We don’t often like looking at vintage fashion as a reference. The world’s much bigger.

We’re really into music so we listen to a lot of music, and we go to a lot of shows, we see a lot of art, and that usually finds its way into the collection.

Every season there’s some sort of major art reference.

DB: How was it to work with Harmony Korine?

JMcC: Harmony’s someone we grew up with. Larry Clark’s film Kids [1995], for which he wrote the screenplay, was a hugely influential movie for our entire generation.

This page, left: Harmony Korine, Nudity Clause Line, 2014, house paint, oil, and collage on canvas, 60 × 54 inches (152.4 × 137.2 cm) © Harmony Korine. Photo: Rob McKeever This page, right, top: Proenza Schouler × Harmony Korine, PS1 Medium, courtesy Proenza Schouler

This page, right, bottom: Proenza Schouler × Harmony Korine, PS1 Tiny, courtesy Proenza Schouler Opposite: Film stills from Harmony Korine’s Act Da Fool, 2010, courtesy Proenza Schouler

LH: It was so scary at the time, remember?

JMcC: That movie defined our generation in a lot of ways, and we all watched it right before we got to New York. So it was kind of instrumental in our early days here in New York.

LH: Harmony defines that New York ’90s thing. He’s kind of the male counterpart to Chloë [Sevigny].

JMcC: He did two films for us a few years ago. The process was, we let him do his thing. We gave him carte blanche to create something and recontextualize our collection in a different way. We sent clothes down to Nashville, they did a street casting of girls, and he put this little poetic piece together.

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We see a lot of art, and that usually finds its way into the collection. Every season there’s some sort of major art reference.

LH: That was actually the same year we launched the first PS1 bag.

DB: Why was it called PS1?

JMcC: Proenza Schouler, the first bag. It was kind of based on a schoolboy’s satchel. We like the school reference. It’s very New York.

LH: It’s also a museum. All of those correlations were interesting to us.

DB: Have you done a PS2? PS3?

JMcC: We’ve done a PS11. And we’ve done a PS19, last season.

LH: PS2 is taken because of PlayStation!

DB: Ha, that’s fascinating.

LH: For the ten-year anniversary project we wanted to collaborate with an artist, and Harmony seemed like the perfect fit. The first time we did an artist collaboration with Harmony was around PS1.

JMcC: The Harmony collaboration is our original bag shape but with motifs and patterns sourced from Harmony’s body of work. They’re the paintings that he did for his first show at Gagosian. It’s interesting, we thought we were going to use some of his new images, but we kept going back to that original body of work.

DB: Talk to me about Isa Genzken and the installation she did for one of your shows.

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There’s never one specific thing that gets a collection going. There are two of us, so it’s always a mix of our ideas coming together, which, hopefully, is creating something greater. Also, hopefully, it blurs and becomes abstract so in the end you can’t put your finger on a single thing.

LH: That was our big coming-back-to-New York show after a year of shows in Paris, and we wanted to do something out of the box for us. So as you came in, there was this huge installation that featured some of our clothes. You came up the elevator and it was there.

DB: I remember! Do you think that fashion people understood what they were looking at?

JMcC: Honestly? No. DB: Do you care?

LH: Not really. Because it was so amazing and we loved it. We went to Berlin and we met Isa and she was up for it, so we sent her early samples that we created. We didn’t know what she was going to do at all. At one point she went missing. We didn’t hear from her. It was getting down to the wire, just before the show, and we were wondering, “Did she forget?”

And then a week before the show she sent images of the entire installation and we loved it. Even if we had to figure out how to ship it to New York in time for the show.

JMcC: That was less of a collaboration and more of a conversation.

You know, we sent her clothes that she then made a piece with, and then we took that piece, riffed on it, and built those ideas into the collection. It was more of a conversation than her making clothes for the actual collection.

LH: There’s no commercial product.

JMcC: It seems like more of a modern way of collaborating.

LH: There was no Isa Genzken T-shirt. It was literally an art piece t h at we p r e m i e r e d at the show.

DB: And where is it now?

JMcC: She took it back; she wanted to build on it even more.

LH: It sold for millions of dollars, I’m sure!

DB: Did she get to keep the clothes?

LH: Yeah. They’re part of the work now. They’re part of the mannequins.

It’s amazing. The clothes are the work.

DB: Why do you think it’s important to have an element of contemporary art in your fashion-show ex­perience or in your world?

LH: To be original. It’s im­p ortant to have your actual interests as part of the dialogue. Fashion is

This spread: Isa Genzken, Untitled, 2018, five mannequins, Proenza Schouler garments, ladder, plastic tube, glasses,

adhesive tape, printed paper, plastic, foil, foam material, and spray can, dimensions variable © Isa Genzken, courtesy Proenza Schouler

superpersonal. We’re creating fashion, not for a legacy house but for our own house.

JMcC: That’s the big difference. We’re not working for a heritage brand with all these codes to pull from. We’ve made this up from scratch all ourselves. In a lot of ways, what we do is autobiographical.

LH: And one of our biggest interests in life is art. It’s really natural for us, we’re looking at it all the time.

DB: Do you think the people who wear your clothes understand art?

LH: No, but I think they see stuff like that and are like, “Oh, is it cool?”

It’s New York, it’s alternative, you know? So it’s artistic.

DB: Do you feel that in some way you’re helping to educate your consumers? Introducing them to ideas they maybe didn’t know about before?

LH: With context it becomes fashion. It’s interesting to populate the narrative of the brand.

JMcC: Also, for what it’s worth, we’re doing it for selfish reasons. The fashion cycle is so relentless. It’s a hamster wheel. It’s like season after season after season. So to do these collaborations and interact with people outside our field keeps it interesting for us—it keeps us energized.

DB: Have any of the artists you’ve worked with been upset by what they’ve inspired in your designs?

LH: No, but one time we were worried. After the Cy Twombly collection. . . .

JMcC: In 2006 we won the CFDA [Council of Fashion Designers of America] Award and Chloë wore a dress inspired by Cy Twombly. And the day after the awards, we got a call from Larry Gagosian’s office.

LH: Our CEO at the time came in and said, “Larry Gagosian’s office just called.” We thought for sure it was a lawsuit or a cease-and-desist.

JMcC: But he ended up just wanting to buy one of the dresses for a friend.

LH: Which was a relief.

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YOUNG GERD Richard Calvocoressi reflects on the monochrome world of Gerhard Richter’s early photo paintings.

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powerful exhibition devoted to the formative years of four towering figures in postwar German art closed in Hamburg on January 5, after opening in Stuttgart last spring.1 Among other revelations, Baselitz, Richter, Polke, Kiefer: Die jungen Jahre der alten Meister (The Early Years of the Old Masters) drew attention to Gerhard Richter’s early work at a particularly opportune moment: the year 2018 had seen the release of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s controversial film Never Look Away (in Germany titled Werk ohne Autor, or Work without author), a fictionalized account of Richter’s life up to the mid-1960s, when he was still signing his work “Gerd Richter.” Although Richter coopera­ ted with Donnersmarck, he later disowned the film.

Donnersmarck had been inspired to make his film after reading investigative reporter Jürgen Schreiber’s book Ein Maler aus Deutschland: Gerhard Richter. Das Drama einer Familie (A painter from Germany: Gerhard Richter. The drama of a family), published in 2005. In a long and engrossing interview with the exhibition’s curator, Götz Adriani, in the Stuttgart/Hamburg catalogue,

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Richter takes issue with Schreiber’s biographical approach to his paintings of the 1960s, especially those such as Uncle Rudi and Aunt Marianne (both 1965), which were based on black-and-white photographs in the family album that Richter took with him when he emigrated from East Germany in 1961.

There was no strategy behind my choice of photos. . . . On the one hand, I was familiar with the pictures, but on the other hand they could have come from any family album from that time. That’s why I don’t think you necessarily need to know any background information about the people depicted. . . . The penetrating search for knowledge about the content and subjects puts the mystery of the image at risk of getting lost. . . . [Schreiber] believed that pictorial invention could only be explained and interpreted from one vantage point.2 Richter’s uncle Rudi (Rudolf) Schönfelder, his mother’s brother and an attractive figure heroized by the family, is portrayed smiling in full Wehrmacht dress uniform, in front of the outer wall of what looks like a barracks. He was killed on the

Previous spread: Gerhard Richter, Uncle Rudi, 1965, oil on canvas, 34 ¼ × 19 ¾ inches (87 × 50 cm), CR: 85 This page: Gerhard Richter, Aunt Marianne, 1965, oil on canvas, 39 ¾ × 45 ¼ inches (100 × 115 cm), CR: 87 Opposite: Gerhard Richter, Family at the Seaside, 1964, oil on canvas, 59 × 78 ¾ inches (150 × 200 cm), CR: 35

Western front in 1944, when Richter was twelve.

Aunt Marianne, meanwhile, depicts Rudolf ’s sister Marianne some ten years earlier, as a young teenager holding her nephew, the four-month-old Gerhard, in her parents’ garden in Dresden. By the end of the decade, diagnosed as a schizophrenic, she would be incarcerated in mental hospitals and forcibly sterilized. In February 1945, as part of a second phase in the Nazis’ euthanasia program and in order to free up hospital beds for wounded German soldiers in rural areas that were less likely to be bombed, she was murdered and buried in a mass grave.

In reply to probing from Adriani, Richter maintains that he “never deliberately concealed the contents”: I just didn’t mention them and never discussed them. There are many “Uncle Rudis” in Germany and the universality of it is what interested me. He symbolically represents the soldiers of the “Third Reich.”3 A third picture, Family at the Seaside (1964), was based on a photograph in the album of Richter’s

then wife, Marianne (Ema) Eufinger. Considerably enlarged (the painting measures about sixty by seventy-eight inches), it shows the Eufinger family —father, mother, and two children, including the six-year-old Ema—in bathing costumes, grinning at the camera, against a backdrop of the Baltic during a summer holiday in 1938. From this apparently innocent image it would be impossible to infer that Professor Dr. Heinrich Eufinger was a respected gynecologist who had joined the SS in 1935, and from then until the German surrender in 1945 had carried out some 900 forced sterilizations of the mentally ill at clinics in Dresden and Leipzig, including the clinic where Richter’s aunt was sterilized. On his fiftieth birthday, in 1944, Heinrich Himmler promoted him to the rank of SS-Obersturmbannführer. After the war, he spent a brief period in Soviet imprisonment, then resumed his medical career in West Germany, retiring in 1965 on a full pension. Although Richter was aware of the fate of his aunt, none of Heinrich Eufinger’s story was known until Schreiber revealed it in 2005.

Herr Heyde—another painting of 1965, this time based on a press photo—shows the psychiatrist Dr. Werner Heyde, one of the chief architects of the

Nazi euthanasia program, his head in profile and partly concealed by the uniformed upper half of a burly policeman at the moment he surrendered to the authorities in 1959. We know this because at the bottom of the painting Richter has faithfully reproduced the original newspaper caption, using a device favored by American Pop artists but dropping their bright synthetic colors and delight in glossy consumerism and celebrity culture. The drab gray tones and indistinct facial features of Richter’s portrait are more appropriate to his sinister subject. Heyde had evaded justice for over a decade, living and practicing in West Germany under an assumed name. In 1964, five days before his trial on war-crimes charges was due to begin, he committed suicide.

Richter’s reason for working with found imagery such as family snapshots, or photographs in newspapers and magazines, was “to turn something artless into a form of artless art.”4 It became clear to me that, although absurd and epigonic, copying a photo helped me to convey something new. It was of particular importance to me to disassociate myself from art made in

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the service of leftist politics. . . . it was important that the viewer was not hit with some message or other in my works. . . . For me it wasn’t at all about politics or family but rather about the banality and ambiguity of the source material.5 Like his fellow Saxon Georg Baselitz—who grew up under the same two dictatorships, National Socialism and Communism, and whose father was also a schoolteacher and a member of the Nazi party—Richter admits that he is “extremely allergic to intolerant political, ideological, or artistic statements.”6 What attracted him to the photograph he used for Family at the Seaside was, again, its universal quality: I was particularly struck by the two arms [of Heinrich Eufinger] that contain, as it were, a family. The protective, beaming father was in fact my father-in-law, but I knew that he was actually an authoritarian whom I really hated at times. He was the typical representative of a generation of fathers that had experienced an authoritarian upbringing themselves and built their careers in the “Third Reich.” I was

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fascinated nonetheless by fathers who radiated strength, success, and prestige unlike my stepfather.7 Uncle Rudi, Aunt Marianne, and Herr Heyde are classic examples of Richter’s technique of blurring the image by means of dragging a dry brush over the wet paint. The effect is to flatten surfaces, soften outlines, and dilute shadows.

When you paint a photograph, it looks terrible at first. But when I went over it with a wide brush I was amazed at how good the whole thing suddenly seemed. . . . When the effects of blurring make superfluous details disappear, the subject seems clearer but at the same time more mysterious. In cases where I didn’t use my special “sfumato technique,” I just left the pretty thickly applied paint alone.8 With its pronounced chiaroscuro and modeled forms, Family by the Seaside falls into the latter category, in which the paint was left alone. The result is closer to painterly painting, but its monochrome palette makes clear its derivation from a holiday snap.

This page: Gerhard Richter, Mr. Heyde, 1965, oil on canvas, 21 5⁄8 × 25 5⁄8 inches (55 × 65 cm), CR: 100 Opposite: Gerhard Richter, Ema (Nude on a Staircase), 1966, oil on canvas, 78 ¾ × 51 1⁄8 inches (200 × 130 cm), CR: 134 Artwork © Gerhard Richter 2020 (0024)

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For Richter, “The blurring . . . is an opportunity to express the fleetingness of our ability to perceive.”9 Fleetingness, ambiguity, mystery: Richter’s preoccupations convey a profound skepticism about the camera’s claims of verisimilitude. Art historian Cindy Polemis has recently commented on this paradox: In this age of instant digital reproducibility, [Richter’s] works interrogate how images that seemingly portray truths—real stuff—can be wholly untrustworthy and unstable, giving painting a powerful role in the twenty-first century as a medium for confronting the images of our time.10 When Richter finally came to paint his wife, he selected a pose that echoed Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) of 1912. Ema (Nude on a Staircase) (1966) is a life-size, fulllength portrait based on a staged photograph of Ema that Richter took in the stairwell of his Düsseldorf studio. “It bugged me,” he tells Adriani, “that [Duchamp had] declared painting to be superfluous and drawn a line under it.”11 The tall, enigmatic figure in Ema (Nude on a Staircase), with its

“perfect” female body, raises interesting questions about Richter’s attitude toward beauty. As Adriani tells Richter, “You courageously resurrected forms of beauty that had long been dismissed as banal by a modern age to which Baudelaire had added ugliness.”12 Compared to the very different route taken by other postwar German artists, notably Baselitz’s conscious identification with a Gothic tradition of Hässlichkeit (ugliness), Richter’s reply is surprising: Looking back, I’m sometimes amazed at the certainty that underpinned my idea of beauty.

Beauty might well seem old-school and passé to someone focused on the postmodern. My preoccupation with Titian’s Annunciation, with Vermeer and Caspar David Friedrich, is also related to a concept of beauty that art history teaches us.

My initial problems with it soon vanished, especially when I realized what a wonderful aspect it is that, in many regards, has unfortunately faded from view and is lost to us now.13 Just as Baselitz has regularly put obstacles in the way of his own smooth progress, however, Richter’s next step was prompted by “the feeling that I was

Looking back, I’m sometimes amazed at the certainty that underpinned my idea of beauty. Beauty might well seem old-school and passé to someone focused on the postmodern. My preoccupation with Titian’s Annunciation, with Vermeer and Caspar David Friedrich, is also related to a concept of beauty that art history teaches us. My initial problems with it soon vanished, especially when I realized what a wonderful aspect it is that, in many regards, has unfortunately faded from view and is lost to us now.

—Gerhard Richter

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becoming far too settled and everything was turning into a routine.”14 In October 1966 he exhibited his first Color Charts at a gallery in Munich—largescale reproductions of paint-factory sample cards.

These works, which Adriani calls “the negation of painting,” signified the artist’s first mature experiments with abstract painting, albeit based on found source material. 15 For the next half century he would alternate between “photo paintings” and “abstracts” (to use the terminology on his website), in ever more compelling variations of subject matter, form, texture, and color.

1. See Götz Adriani, Baselitz, Richter, Polke, Kiefer: The Early Years of the Old Masters, exh. cat. for Staatsgalerie Stuttgart and Deichtorhallen Hamburg (Dresden: Sandstein Verlag, 2019).

2. Richter, in ibid., 128.

3. Ibid., 130.

4. Ibid., 100.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid., 93.

7. Ibid., 128.

8. Ibid., 104.

9. Ibid., 106.

10. Cindy Polemis, “Gerhard Richter: Seeing and looking away,” Standpoint, September/October 2019, 56.

11. Richter, in Adriani, Baselitz, Richter, Polke, Kiefer, 146, n. 1.

12. Adriani, in ibid., 147.

13. Richter, in ibid.

14. Ibid., 148.

15. Adriani, in ibid., 147.

Roe Ethridge During a conversation with David Rimanelli, Ethridge reflected on the following works that he made during the late 1990s and early 2000s after moving to New York.

I shot this in my parents’ basement. My mom is a bit of a basement hoarder and I went down there one day to just dig through, maybe get rid of some things for her, maybe take some photos. This one box had all of these random items in it—the pink bow, but also a Christian brochure and old pictures that I had taken when I was really young. I was compelled to take this picture because it sort of resonated on a Jeff Koons by way of Paul Outerbridge level—color adoration, the elevation of what others might call kitsch. I loved that stuff; it is a part of who I am.

Roe Ethridge, The Pink Bow, 2001–02, chromogenic print, 30 × 24 inches (76.2 × 61 cm)

It wasn’t my original intention, but it was out of necessity that I had to rent the pigeons.

I tried to do it in the city, with the pigeon racers on the rooftops, but it was just too unwieldy.

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Roe Ethridge, Pigeon, 2001, chromogenic print, 50 × 35 inches (127 × 88.9 cm)

I needed a more controlled environment and then I realized, oh, in TV and movies the birds are just like models. It transformed into this “rent-a-muse” context that I ended up loving.

Roe Ethridge, Pigeon, 2001, chromogenic print, 38 × 30 inches (96.5 × 76.2 cm)

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I had this unending love for the decorative, for pattern. I was and remain obsessed with Henri Matisse.

But I also loved the flat, neutral way a 4 × 5 camera rendered the architectural lines. My photo Refrigerator [1999] is a good example of these dueling impulses. The composition was aesthetic, but it was also personal, a nostalgia for the eye-boggling, baroque interiors that I grew up with in the South.

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Roe Ethridge, Refrigerator, 1999, chromogenic print, 30 × 24 inches (76.2 × 61 cm)

When I took this picture I was shooting portraits of UPS drivers, so I had my large format camera and film and I was heading back to Williamsburg. As I was walking to the L train, there at 6th Avenue and 14th, there was this scene—and if you remember, there was a newsstand there on the northwest corner of the street, and I told the guys working there, “I work for the New York Times. I need to get on your roof.” And they’re like, “Okay, you can do whatever you want.” And then the cops came and of course said, “Get down from there!”

I was like, “It’s okay, I work for the New York Times.” [laughter] It worked for enough time for me to get eight frames off. Of course, I wasn’t working for the New York Times that day, but I had a few weeks prior…

Roe Ethridge, Ambulance Accident, 2000, chromogenic print, 40 × 50 ¼ inches (101.6 × 127.6 cm)

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At the time of this photo I was working on a show that was connecting the pigeons, water, and delivery systems.

I was pleased with the works I included in the Greater New York show at MoMA PS1 in 2000; that’s when I showed a model portrait, the UPS logo, and I got into the conversation around this idea of delivery systems and photography’s complicity in those mechanisms. This photo of a river upstate that leads to the Hudson plugged in perfectly with this. I was trying to devise a method for making a photo show that didn’t have a thesis. I didn’t want to do German “objective” photography, and I didn’t want to be just intellectualizing. I wanted to actually author pictures and make beautiful pictures that surprised me; I desired to discover something. Looking back, I can see how I was trying to do it all. I think that’s why The Pink Bow was so important; it’s this metaphor for that thinking, a ribbon looping back on itself with a decorative flourish.

Roe Ethridge, New York Water Catskills, 2000, chromogenic print, 32 × 50 inches (81.3 × 127 cm) 78

Artwork © Roe Ethridge

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The World According to Kelly Reichardt Carlos Valladares writes on Kelly Reichardt’s films, exploring the director’s interest in subtle details and care for complex characters.

W hat’s it like to exper ience a f ilm by Kelly Reichardt—who, along with Terrence Malick and Frederick Wiseman, is among the most consistently exciting directors cranking out narratives in the USA? She has now made seven features. The latest, First Cow (2020), based on Jonathan Raymond’s The Half-Life: A Novel (2004), will receive more eyes than usually go to Reichardt’s films thanks to the ballyhoos of A24 producing it. First Cow offers another extension of Reichardt’s unbroken series of down-and-out drifter types, whose ambling ways were first haltingly enunciated in her debut feature, River of Grass (1994), a sedate Everglades reworking of the lovers-on-the-lam gun plays of yesteryear (They Drive By Night, Bonnie and Clyde, Badlands). Despite being a hit at the 1994 Sundance Film Festival, listed as one of the best films of 1995

by Film Comment, the Village Voice, and the Boston Globe, Reichardt was unable to make another narrative feature film for twelve years; she said in a 2011 interview that the “door wasn’t open” to her in the same way it was for other, male contemporaries, such as Kevin Smith (Clerks) and David O. Russell (Spanking the Monkey). As Reichardt puts it, “I had ten years from the mid-1990s when I couldn’t get a movie made. It had a lot to do with being a woman.

That’s definitely a factor in raising money. During that time, it was impossible to get anything going, so I just said, ‘Fuck you!’ and did Super 8 shorts instead.”1 Those Super 8 shorts, Ode (1999), Then a Year (2001), and Travis (2004), were avant-garde experiments in elongation and duration, clearingsof-the-throat in preparation for Old Joy (2006; two male besties go camping in Oregon), which marked Reichardt’s re-emergence and initiated the third phase of her career: the now-familiar pared-down narrative style, which she would continue to refine 80

in Wendy and Lucy (2008; a poor drifter and her dog get stuck in Oregon), Meek’s Cutoff (2010; a caravan of 1820s settlers encounter a Native American man on the trail to modern Oregon), Night Moves (2013; three would-be fundamentalists bomb a dam in Oregon), and Certain Women (2016; people in Montana are lonely).

First Cow opens with a line of William Blake’s: “The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship,” suggesting Reichardt’s lack of interest in recording “known” facts whose sole purpose is to tame life’s pulse into a straight ray. Reichardt is less interested in showing you the twig (though she’s damn good at making you see a twig like you’ve never seen a twig before) and more interested in revealing the protective, Mother Hen impulse that provokes the bird to turn the twig into a nest in the first place.

First Cow will be welcomed with five stars and cries of “Masterpiece! Masterpiece!” as Reichardt’s sunniest and funniest film, but such truisms threaten to simplify the hard-edged nature of the film’s unsentimental humor. It starts with textures—the soft fur of a fox tail, a bushy owl that takes ages to budge its head, an aphoristic phrase or two from Raymond (Reichardt’s regular screenwriter)—before sliding into a Plot: two outsiders—one Chinese (Orion Lee), one white (John Magaro), both softies—need a place to rest their head for several nights (Old Joy territory) before they embark on an extraordinary American hustle as honey-glazed-biscuit bakers. The batter is made from the milk of the titular bovine, owned by a regal English nobleman (Toby Jones); he is as out-of-place as Lee or Magaro within the rocky American terrain, but Jones, cruci­ ally, comes from money. At one point, the camera, in love with the kind of valueless minutiae that don’t add up to blowout receipts at the box office,

slips into Lee and Magaro’s tent and we are made to sense the comfort of their makeshift mattress, cobbled together out of itchy, termite-infested beaver pelts. In the Pacific Northwest of First Cow (an alternate title could have been “Love in the Time of Capital”), everything of import happens in the teeming margins: a teen boy’s unmuddied shoes are elevated to “fancy boots, lad, fancy boots” by a hermit from mumbly Robert Altman land (the now-late René Auberjonois, a regular player in the legendary Altman stock company). Reichardt’s knack of sketching out entire stories with only the most transitory pillow shots reaches new heights in First Cow: a drunk man snores at a campfire, a pail of milk sloshes as it is carried by a young Native American girl in a red dress (a sound rhymed by the splashes of water lapped by a dog drinking faster than its tail wags). In such moments Reichardt completely upends the silent-era screenwriting teacher Frederick Palmer’s classic distinction between movement or motion and action, a distinction that nearly all American narrative movies have hewed to since 1919: “One might write: ‘The whirring blades of the electric fan caused the window curtains to flutter. The man seated at the massive desk finished his momentous letter, sealed it, and hastened out to post it.’ The whirring fan and the f luttering curtain give motion only—the man’s writing the letter and taking it out to post provides action.”2 Reichardt’s genius is centralizing “mere” movement and relegating action to the periphery.

Singularized, sharp, cool, her movement lets us feel the beauty her two migrants feel in the brisk, pine-scented air they breathe in with such ease.

Certain Women, based on three world-weary short stories by Maile Meloy, is a depressed Montana triptych in which Zamboni machines,

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corgis, paper napkins, lint rollers, and unfinished jigsaw puzzles are the lead heavies, stealing attention from big stars such as Laura Dern, Michelle Williams, and Kristen Stewart, who themselves disappear into the shells of loners with names like Laura, Gina, and Beth. The film moves like an Altman film, most of all his revisionist western McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), whose unglamorous bearskin-coat-wearing hustlers and shivering prostitutes speak in mutters, as if their mouths were stuffed with marbles—which is to say, they barely speak at all, because the historical record (with its knowing, cloying finality) cannot pick up what they’re saying with any clarity. Indeed, most of the characters in Certain Women, and in most of Reichardt’s films, are fated to live hidden lives and to rest in unvisited tombs. Auberjonois, one of Altman’s favorite actors, appears in Certain Women as a decaying, Alzheimer’s-riddled grand­pa named Albert, who wears a gray polo and frayed blue cardigan, looking ready to be taken by demented Death. Next to him, Williams’s Gina (running around in shiny-bougie Patagonia track suits) is leechlike as she pines after the bricks of native sandstone that gather dust on Albert’s property.

What’s eerie about this scene is the memento mori that pile up around Albert and Gina: the useless remembered facts that fly out of Albert (a three-note whistle, used to attract quails, that comes straight out of Altman’s M*A*S*H), reminding us that this tattered old man, once young and sprightly, will soon be forgotten. To his grave he will take all the intimate love he has of the sandstone, which, according to Albert in one of his sputtering fits of 82

talk, “used to be the old schoolhouse, you know, when the town was settled. . . . It was cut from the massive sandstone around here. . . . The schoolhouse was built before the church. . . . I never thought it a pretty church, even when I thought I might get married in it.” Each memory that Albert lets loose is doomed to dissipate, steamlike, back into the atmosphere of the present, when the best years of his life have left him: “You know, my brother and I—he’s dead now—we used to. . . . ” Albert does not realize that Gina does not realize the significance that the bricks have for Albert, but neither will Gina’s Gen Z daughter realize the significance that the bricks will have for Gina. The daughter holds up a mirror to her mother, reflecting back the sullen opportunist that Gina is; the daughter is as obsessed with the monotonously present unreality of her iPhone as the mother is stuck on her plastic cups and shiny dreams of grills made from native sandstone. No one within the film realizes any of this; we see it all. Suddenly, my attention is pierced, in the style of Roland Barthes’s punctum, by a jigsaw puzzle lying dormant, unfinished, in the corner of Albert’s living room. Gina doesn’t notice it, and her husband, Ryan, is barely in the scene so he wouldn’t see it either. But this jigsaw puzzle is what occupies Albert’s quiet “down” moments. It’s his life. In the same manner, I recall how the jigsaw puzzles of Andrew Wyeth paintings that my grandmother worked on before her death became her life as well—how I saw that they became her life, but was never quite able to figure out why.

Back in 2008, Reichardt proved that she could turn even the mundanity of a parking complex into

an event. In Wendy and Lucy, we seldom venture past the empty, white-chalked lines of a neocapitalist Walgreens lot. The film was released in post-Katrina America just a few months after the first rumblings of the subprime mortgage crisis, and its period shows—not through any of what the bitter characters say (which, again, is not much—a compliment to Raymond’s cultivation of nonflash), but through the way a homeless white Indiana drifter (Williams) burrows her ashamed eyes into the ground and mumbles “Thank you” every time someone gives her money, a flip phone, or thoughts and prayers. Wendy and Lucy begins with a sliding horizontal track that follows a woman walking her dog through the forest, the same kind of camera track used by the postwar Italians (Pier Paolo Pasolini in Mamma Roma [1962], Bernardo Bertolucci in 1900 [1976], Francesco Rosi in Christ Stopped at Eboli [1979]) when they wanted to allegorize the relentless forward flow of history, and to visualize that movement in the language of film.

Wendy is always humming to herself, a simple, eerie four-note tune that floats throughout the film like an incantation. It’s heard during the opening camera-slide into the Great Recession, and it’s picked up, Long Goodbye style, by the muzak in a local Jack’s Grocery—the last decrepit remains of a mom-and-pop America, before gas stations, convenience stores, and phones were rebranded as Shell, Walgreens, and Apple. “I’m just passin’ through,” Wendy repeats over and over, to any stranger who bothers to acknowledge her existence. She has convinced herself that her downward spiral is only temporary and only affects herself;

soon, she tells the old Walgreens security guard with the bushy white brows, she will be working at a cannery in Alaska, and it’s at that point that she expects a community will emerge. She has no money; but this, too, will pass.

There’s no dreamy or communal uplift anywhere in Wendy and Lucy. It confronts us with the raw lo­­ gistics of what it looks like to be a drifter/dreamer in 2008 America: a cold state, and, if you are a young woman, one of constant psychic violation.

Color is drained in this world, as it will be again in Night Moves (a drab palette of green-black covers Dakota Fanning and company) and Certain Women (as brown and as stubbornly withdrawn as a Wyeth wheat field). Williams in Wendy and Lucy has meticulously removed all quirks of movie-star charm that would bog down or distract from Wendy’s antisocial power walks or from her dead gaze, which focuses fetishistically on peat and weeds and shit, her only friends on the ground. Wendy and Lucy is, in part, Reichardt’s tribute to those houses passed on the highway on the way to a big party in the big city—that flash second when, seeing those houses, one begins to imagine the lives of the people who live in this rattling apartment or that broken-down car, the lives of the petty kids who mistake Christian neighborliness for ratting out a starving vagabond and dooming her to jail and her dog to the pound, the petty old men and old women who themselves will die without having ever asked the neighbors who lived fifty feet to their right about something, anything, other than how’s the weather. Reichardt extends that flash second to eighty minutes. She herself is just passing through.

Meek’s Cutoff is a late-blooming western, another monotonous miracle. Reichardt is treading the prime territory of Budd Boetticher, another similarly unsentimental American director whose westerns are anchored by unchanging, ungiving

faces tired of life (Randolph Scott for Boetticher, Williams for Reichardt), and whose stealth concern is how many different permutations of trees-rockscacti can be configured across seventy minutes.

Meek’s is about the hardship of hauling stuff thousands of miles by wagon (a process never more aridly depicted in the movies). Zoe Kazan, in a fried yellow dress that has lost all its MGM prairie charm, chases her hat blown away in a windstorm, which gives Reichardt and cameraman Chris Blauvelt an excuse to stage a breathtakingly parched scene: as Blauvelt cranes up to the heavens, Kazan is pinched into the punishingly cracked and craggy desert ground, while the camera does a sideways slide over her head. The resulting image suggests a scary-open landscape watched over by the eye of a Kenji Mizoguchi ghost-god who has long lost patience with these miserable pilgrims. As in Night Moves, an eco-terrorist thriller that elides the terrorism and flattens the thrills, we’re often left in states of tedious anguish because we don’t know what will happen next. Reichardt fanatically refuses to signpost anything that might smack of a main event. Time and again in her work, we’re left to ponder the eerie nondimensions of endless pitch dark: a lantern that does not light the scene (Meek’s); a campfire that chills (First Cow); Jesse Eisenberg’s on-location truck cycling through the Oregon forest night as if it were stuck in Alfred Hitchcock’s rear-projection booth (Night Moves).

In Meek’s, Reichardt leaves in all the sixty-three seconds it takes a pioneer woman to shoot a rifle, reload it, then shoot it again. People will often irritatingly tag as “slow” Reichardt’s love of stretching scenes far beyond a normal Hollywoodish length, a complaint that devalues the spillover life captured in her empty shots of wagons wheeling, or of morning-after hookups dressing to start a gray work day. Monotony that would ordinarily

drive someone to madness is given ascetic lift by Reichardt’s framing: Blauvelt’s sleek white moonglow over the river in Night Moves; Stewart’s dabbing of her lips with a diner’s white napkin that still has the spoon and knife inside; the bare white wall in the apartment where an affair has taken place, the white paint scraping like a Clyfford Still painting. This last item—a wall with a dinginess like the hotel room that starves John Cassavetes and Peter Falk in Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky (1976)—divides the two Certain Women lovers from each other; at break of day, they don’t want to see the fat paunches that the night kept hidden.

Whence Reichardt’s obsessive concern with little things? Last April, she came the closest she’s ever come to writing a director’s manifesto when, in Film Comment, she published “Surface Funk,” a brief but telling essay about her admiration of the painter and film critic Manny Farber. In the essay, she sweats over an ambiguous observation of Farber’s about Altman’s magnificent Nashville (1975), which he is both maddened and fascinated by, calling Altman “a Svengali of surface funk.”3 Maybe this is also what Reichardt hopes to achieve as a director: to be an unseen cataloguer of microcosmic actions and gestures that stick in the mind, working like the aging all-male squad who make sure the model trains run on time in Jean-Pierre Gorin’s Routine Pleasures (1986). One paragraph of “Surface Funk” in particular betrays Reichardt’s obsessions: Lately, Farber’s paintings have me considering my desktop. His table-scapes are way more fun and mysterious than the stack of bills and to-do lists I’ve got laying around. Farber has railroad tracks that split and circle around making his desk a great expanse. He has lollipops and Tootsie Rolls, tiny neighborhoods, a few dead bodies,

Previous spread: Kelly Reichardt.

Photo: Jack Davison Opposite: Film still from Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow (2020).

Photo: courtesy A24 This page: Michelle Williams as Gina Lewis from Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women (2016).

Photo: Nicole Rivelli, courtesy IFC Films Following spread: Kristen Stewart as Beth Travis in Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women (2016).

Photo: Jojo Whilden, courtesy IFC Films

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Each line of dialogue in a Reichardt is chemically refined to give only the minimum of exposition.

a dog trekking across the plains of his desk, and a train track that just breaks off. He has landlocked boats, grounded airplanes, cars parked on spiral-bound notepads. For all we know, the dog may be carrying a message. God knows what that train is hauling. Bright colors section off one area from another. His desktops are like a board game version of Richard Fleischer’s Violent Saturday, or the last quiet moments of normal, small-town life before [Sam] Peckinpah’s men jump into action. You can almost hear the far away sound of children playing. 4 “God knows what that train is hauling”—a mysterious elision, yet the film artist is able to conjure a scene by the careful selection of oddball details: those ambulances and speedboats and flying saucers that have been beached and abandoned on the shore, those Tootsie Roll wrappers a kid and her kid-date toss across the sticky cinema floor. There are two words for this kind of philosophy, which starts from the particular and webs ever out­w ard: “termite art,” as described in Farber’s groundbreaking 1962 essay “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art.” In the style of Howard Hawks or Ousmane Sembène or early Werner Herzog, Reichardt starts with small concerns and an endless series of questions (Old Joy: what kind of bird is heard in the remote Bagby Hot Springs, east of Portland, Oregon?) in order to branch out and reveal fresh, pinecone-sized insights about human relationships in the twenty-first century (“Man friendship”). In this process of discovery, she neatly avoids all of the white-elephantine filmic tendencies of the new century: the fashionable cynicism-nihilism-pessimism (Lobster/Deadpool cinema), the rapid-fire editing that grabs the social-media addict’s attention but does little with it, the segregation of politics and art that values one over the other instead of seeing them within and through each other, the postmodern self-referencing that never stakes out anything original because the postmodernist is frozen in place by the weighty notion of a constantly recycled Now.5 The time of Reichardt’s films doesn’t show—a good thing, for she is in the business of making 84

bewitching images that have life beyond a day (so against the current trend for one-day ephemer­a lity!).

In Certain Women there’s the hellish image—very 2016, but also indicative of bogged-down-by-capital moods that are evergreen—of an indigenous man in full-on blue-feathered regalia ordering orange chicken at a knockoff Panda Express. I think the miracle is that Reichardt can make a Red Desert (1964) out of a strip mall without ever resorting to the now-cliché imagery of “Antoniennui” (blankfaced and pursed-lip mannequins crawling at an unsettling zombie pace, yellow daisies in gray industrial landscapes, wide open fields of sinister green, blonde photographers with empty blue eyes, etc.). All the same, she taps into Michelangelo Antonioni’s ingenuity while renewing it for our current moment. She’s a common-sense storyteller; the type of material that she shoots and edits cannot be instantly gratified or commodified in the hooks department, and she strays so far into the atmospheres of her brooding people that she refuses to consider the “both sides” of their world, like a false demigod. It’s obvious in 2019 that the climate leftists of Night Moves’ 2013 have the right political hunches, but she’s sly in showing them as messy, fear-filled, kiddish idiots first, political symbols later . . . or, well, not at all.

Fanning, Eisenberg, and Peter Sarsgaard are jealous, horny, puny minded, jaded, confused, and idealistic in pure quarter-life-crisis mode (in an age where a new generation has grown up cracking cynical jokes that they’ll never have to pay off their student loans, they’ll be dead by then, so why worry). Each line of dialogue in a Reichardt film is chemically refined to give only the minimum of exposition; otherwise, we bump like atoms through the roughly contoured shapes of her characters’ bitter lives, which stop before those lives get assimilated into the zone of the grander, fixed, easyto-digest narratives with which most US directors are comfortable.

In my favorite of her films, Reichardt teases us with big climaxes, as big as the bomb exploding the dam in Night Moves, but she instead pivots and ends each of her Certain Women stories in sad, dejected puffs. A would-be gunman (Jared Harris)

is captured off-screen, and sits glum-faced in the back of a police car in dead-still embarrassment.

Auberjonois simply recedes McCabe-style back into his empty house, into the cobwebs of his jigsaw puzzle, as his memory-scarred native sandstone is hauled off to serve as the base for God-knowswhat-grill. Perhaps the most moving moment in all of Reichardt’s cinema comes when the brilliant Blackfoot/Nez Percé actor Lily Gladstone, drowsy and heartsick after being ghosted by Stewart’s millennial lawyer, falls asleep at the wheel of her truck and slides off the side of the freeway into a nondescript field of brown. There are no trees to portend a fiery crash; there is only a fence made of chicken wire, which the truck easily plows through, and the unsexy forces of friction that bring the truck to its natural halt: no fanfares, no tears (from the actors), just a sleepy rancher who is offered a glimpse of excitement before she is hurled back into routine, into the humdrum daily.

1. Ryan Gilbey, “Kelly Reichardt: How I trekked across Oregon for Meek’s Cutoff then returned to teaching,” Guardian, April 8, 2011. Available online at www.theguardian.com/film/2011/apr/09/ kelly-reichardt-meeks-cutoff (accessed December 21, 2019).

2. Frederick Palmer, quoted in David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (London: Routledge/ Taylor & Francis E-Library, 1985 [2005]), p. 14.

3. Between 1967 and 1975, Manny Farber’s film criticism was the result of a collaboration between him and his then partner, later wife, the painter Patricia Patterson. These pieces, Farber’s best, must be seen as the product of two sensibilities. See “Manny Farber and Patricia Patterson Interviewed by Richard Thompson,” Film Comment 13, no. 3 (May–June 1977): 36–45, 54–60.

4. Kelly Reichardt, “Surface Funk: On Manny Farber,” Film Comment, April 17, 2019, available online at www.filmcomment. com/blog/surface-funk-on-manny-farber (accessed December 23, 2019). The essay was initially written to appear in Manny Farber: Paintings and Writings, ed. Michael Almereyda, Jonathan Lethem, and Robert Polito (Los Angeles: Hat & Beard Press, 2020).

5. The only questionable patch of Night Moves is an artificial, unusually flashy camera-crane-into-the-ceiling shot of Jesse Eisenberg in the library browsing the Internet and discovering that his shenanigans with the dam have killed a camper.

Reichardt is rarely as obviously beholden to her influences as, say, a Quentin Tarantino or a Noah Baumbach, so the direct allusion to a crane shot in Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (when Teresa Wright goes to the local library, thumbs through old newspapers, and realizes with horror that her uncle Joseph Cotton is the Merry Widow murderer) is jarring. Luckily, the film’s ecoterrorist triad (already an elephantine character type in 2011) are infected less by that kind of razzmatazz and more by the spirit of Shadow of a Doubt’s mopey waitress (Janet Shaw), one of Hollywood cinema’s great supernumeraries.

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It was such a pleasure to visit the studio and grasp the full scope of your current project.

From the exhibition model to the paintings at various stages of completion—to me, it all revealed how your attention to light penetrates nearly every facet of production, form, layering, and exhibition design. A critical underpinning of your upcoming show in New York, and of your practice, it seems, is to reveal the visceral and even metaphysical charge that light both contains and emits, particularly through color. In particular, the light here on the West Coast, which we love, is approached through the forms of nineteenth-century color theory and chakra methodologies.

The tone for your show is set at the start with the introduction of the serpent, which visitors will first encounter from the street, through the window next to the gallery’s entrance. You told me something about how the snake surfaced in the studio: can you talk a bit more about how it came to be?

JENNIFER GUIDI W hen I was painting my f irst abstract dot paintings, in 2012, they were small, textural dots of white oil paint on black grounds and their surfaces were similar to snakeskin. The LAURA FRIED

first time the snake itself surfaced in the studio was when I began making black-and-white snake stick sculptures, in 2013. My favorite sculptures at the time were Jim Lambie’s psychedelic soul sticks and André Cadere’s colorful wooden bars. I’d always loved the idea of sticks as sculptures propped up against the wall. Many cultures have used sticks to symbolize strength, power, and healing; if you think of walking canes, prayer sticks, and magic wands, these objects contain an unknown power and mysticism.

LF What is the relationship of the serpent to this show?

JG In many histories, serpents represent fertility and a creative life force, they’re symbols of rebirth, transformation, immortality, and healing. I like these concepts and ideas, but for me, serpents are also a way to play with line and shape.

LF As we enter the first gallery, we begin with a series of paintings ordered in the hierarchy of the seven chakras. Have you always played with the spectrum of colors in the way you do here?

JG This is the first time I’m lining up a series of paintings in this order. In past exhibitions I’ve played with rainbow colors, thinking about how color

The artist speaks with Laura Fried about her most recent paintings, the symbol of the serpent, and her evolving relationship to color.

JENNIFER GUIDI

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occurs in nature and how we’re affected by color and light. This series of diptychs is the first time I’m thinking of these works as specific sources of energy. Chakras are energy centers within the human body—there are seven along the spine. The word “chakra” in Sanskrit translates to “wheel”or “circle”; I like the idea of circular energy sources,and I visualize them during meditation. But although I’m attracted to this type of symbolism, and to thinking of the triangles as pyramids or mountains and the circles as suns or moons, I’m also just exploring geometric shapes and the color spectrum.

LF Can you talk a bit about your interest in theories of color, and about the role they play in the exhibition?

JG For this exhibition I’ve transformed two color-theory illustrations, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s triangle and Ignaz Schiffermüller’s color circle, into large paintings. Rooted in both nature and science, they act as anchors on either side of the large gallery. Goethe’s nine-colored triangle is a diagram of the human mind, linking color combinations with emotions, and he felt that it was the artist’s responsibility to take each color into account. Schiffermüller, a naturalist who mainly studied insects, believed that nature produces all colors. His twelve-color circle was the first image that arranged complementary colors opposite each other. For me, these two paintings tie together color, shape, nature, and philosophy. I like how the colors in the charts are

charging us externally and internally. I translate these colors into works every day. On an intuitive level, I’m guided by the colors in nature.

LF I’ve been thinking about the two large landscape paintings in your studio, about our discussion of California light, and about Goethe’s color triangle. All this has called to mind a painting by J. M. W. Turner from 1843, Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory)—the Morning after the Deluge—Moses Writing the Book of Genesis. There’s a serpent at the center of Turner’s painting, and, religious subtext aside, he’s so attuned to the transience of natural phenomena, all in service of the sun. Whether color for Turner was biblical or analytical, we’ve discussed how for you it’s tied to the innate fundamental characteristics of the natural world. In various ways, each body of work in the show seems conditioned to these taut moments where light breaks through—more explicitly in the phases-of-the-moon paintings, more subtly in the vibrations that emanate from the black monochrome sand paintings. How do you approach the qualities of—and conversely the perception of—light in each disparate body of work?

JG Light is constant ly coming and going, whether it’s the sun rising and setting, as in the two landscape paintings, or the moon waxing and waning in the phases-of-the-moon paintings. The hours of light and the hours of darkness that we have in a day are in constant flux. I’m searching for a certain light or contrast, a mood or a feeling. In the landscape paintings I’m using color, mark-making, and

Previous spread: Jennifer Guidi in her Los Angeles studio, 2020.

This page: Jennifer Guidi, Third Quarter Moon, 2020, sand and acrylic on linen, 36 inch diameter (91.4 cm diameter) Opposite: Jennifer Guidi, The Essential Order (Goethe), 2019, sand and acrylic on linen, 207 × 237 ½ inches (525.9 × 603.3 cm)

WHEN I’M IN FRONT OF ONE OF THESE PAINTINGS I WANT TO FEEL ROOTED, AND TO LOOK UP AT IT AS IF I WERE SEARCHING THE NIGHT SKY. 88

Opposite: Jennifer Guidi, To Protect and Hold You Up, 2019, sand, acrylic, and oil on linen, overall: 96 × 58 inches (243.8 × 147.3 cm), snakes: 66 × 23 inches (167.6 × 58.4 cm) (each), circle: 24 inch diameter (61 cm diameter) This page: Jennifer Guidi, A Thousand Petals (Crown Diptych), 2019, sand, acrylic, and oil on linen, overall: 54 × 58 inches (137.2 × 137.2 cm), circle: 24 inch diameter (61 cm diameter), triangle: 24 × 58 inches (61 × 147.3 cm) Artwork © Jennifer Guidi Photos: Brica Wilcox

texture to evoke a certain atmosphere. I’m influenced by the color and the light of Los Angeles, a light like no other. I try to capture those fleeting moments of the bright colors in the sky, how the colors of the mountains change, how the light reflects off the buildings. These are the moments that capture my interest and resonate with me.

LF Can you say a bit about the qualities of symmetry and reflection you were after in your approach to the exhibition?

JG For me, symmetry creates a peacefulness and a calmness, which I feel a person needs to sit and reflect and think. There are literal symmetries in the exhibition—the paintings reflect off the floor, the light reflects off the water in the landscapes— as well as more symbolic and psychological symmetries: the show’s title, Gemini, comes from the twins of the zodiac, and the viewer’s introduction to the exhibition is a set of two snakes that reflect one another, like identical twins mirroring each other.

There are other symmetries at play: night/ day, light/dark, sunrise/sunset, new moon/full moon. The phases of the moon are shown in a complete cycle, from full moon to new moon and back again. We are all connected and affected by the lunar cycle and the influence of gravitational pull; moon phases, like color, affect our behavior, so there’s a common thread running through the exhibition.

I imagine that mirroring will be powerful in experiencing the black paintings—their reflection in the high-gloss floor will make them seem to be melting onto the surface. Yet the physicality of these mandala-like paintings is arresting: your mark, your gesture, persists in them. What struck me in these black monochromes was not only how much the subtle tonal shifts in their bright underlayers reminded me of the glitching seriality of Andy Warhol’s Shadows [1978–79], but also how strong qualities of texture and opacity lead to incredible translucency and light. Can you tell me more about these paintings?

JG The black sand paintings at first glance seem monochrome, but on closer inspection they also contain the color of the chakras. These paintings echo Goethe’s theory that black is not an absence of color but dark mingling with light to create color.

The viewer encounters a dark wall of seven large paintings. At first there seems to be an absence of color, but as one gets closer the colors reveal themselves in the underpainting, the raised tips that rise around the indentions, and the dots. Although each painting is made the same way, no two are alike.

My intention is for each one to seem all encompassing, so that one can feel completely immersed.

When I’m in front of one of these paintings I want to feel rooted, and to look up at it as if I were searching the night sky.

LF

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JOHN MASON Rani Singh speaks with Irving Blum about his time with the artist at the Ferus Gallery, Los Angeles. The two discuss Mason’s revolutionary approach to ceramics and his friendships with the wider LA art community.

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n the early 1950s, much of the country viewed “traditional” art forms, such as ceramics, through the narrow lens of craft and utilitarian function. But beginning in the mid1950s, a group of dynamic Los Angeles artists centered around Peter Voulkos, who began teaching at the Otis College of Art and Design in 1954, moved ceramics into direct conversation with the contemporary avant-garde.

Voulkos and his colleagues Billy Al Bengston, John Mason, and Kenneth Price developed innovative methods to create large-scale, abstract ceramic sculptures that revolutionized the possibilities of clay. Their work gradually began to appear in local galleries, museums, and private collections and to be seriously reviewed in art, design, and craft publications.

Blooming in the cultural desert that many thought Los Angeles to be at the time, Ferus Gallery was at the vanguard of the city’s artistic activity and played a pivotal role in this dissemination.1 Founded in 1957 by future curator Walter Hopps, artist Ed Kienholz, and poet Bob Alexander, the gallery saw cutting-edge shows but few sales in its first year, and it acted more like a collective than like a business with a need for profit. Enter, in 1958, the suave and erudite Irving Blum, with his movie-­star good looks and his design background at Knoll furniture. Replacing Kienholz in the gallery’s management, Blum shifted its direction, a 94

change that ended up altering not only the trajectory of Mason’s career but the status of ceramics in the fine-art realm. One of Blum’s first moves was to winnow the artist roster from seventy-five artists to fewer than twenty. Mason made the grade. Blum’s training at Knoll as a salesman equipped him with an eye for mid-century design and minimalist presentation along with business acumen.

Born in Madrid, Nevada, in 1927, Mason developed an interest in the arts, including photography and jazz, at an early age. Wanting a hands-on arts education, he enrolled at Otis, where he eventually met Voulkos, who founded and was developing the ceramics program there. The two were kindred spirits, both of them interested in breaking out of the traditional forms of ceramics and creating something new. By 1957 they were sharing a studio on Glendale Boulevard, where, fueled by coffee and cigarettes, they worked around the clock, fearlessly entering uncharted territory.

Voulkos and Mason aimed to scale ceramics up to match the ambitious painting and sculpture of the period. But first they needed to break with convention, free themselves of dogma, and defy the definition of ceramics as craft. They did so by creating traditional ceramic objects—vessels, cups, and vases—and then completely transforming those shapes into something entirely their own.

They bought industrial dough-mixers to work with larger quantities of clay than anyone had before,

and built a walk-in kiln that could fire a piece six feet high. It was in this Glendale Boulevard studio space that the artists created some of their most innovative work.

As Blum relates, Voulkos’s personality and art were dominating. He spent the summer of 1953 at Black Mountain College, where he met Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, and Merce Cunningham. In this spirit of cross-pollination, Voulkos continually drew inspiration from movements in other disciplines, notably Abstract Expressionism, telling Mason, “Don’t look at the craft people. Look at the painters. They have the energy.”2 Working quietly to create objects that were weighty, expressive, and solid, Mason engaged the physical properties of the clay medium and ideas of symmetry, surface, form, and color, concepts that he would continue to refine until his passing, in 2019, at the age of ninety-one. By 1957, he had begun to shift from vessels to expansive wall reliefs, working on the floor and physically slamming large slabs of clay in a manner akin to “action painting.” He also worked in a painterly fashion, creating pieces upright on an easel.

It was the distinctive sculptures of this period that caught the attention of the Ferus crew. In July 1957, with Paul Soldner and Jerry Rothman, Mason participated in a group show at the gallery, Clay Forms; three months later he was given a solo show, which set his Spear Form (1957) in the gallery’s iconic window on busy La Cienega Boulevard. He continued to show at Ferus until it closed, in 1966, with numerous solo exhibitions and group shows. Some works, including the large Blue Wall (1959), moved to the gallery’s courtyard and stayed on view for months at a time. The grand display of the wall works led to multiple commissions, including one for the Palm Springs Spa (1959) and another for the Hollywood actor Sterling Holloway (1962).

The next development in Mason’s radical vocabulary took the form of tall monolithic structures and armatures. Orange Cross (1963), its painterly glazed surface making it a combination of painting and

sculpture, is a pivotal work of this period. Evolving at each stage of his career, Mason embraced the unpredictable qualities of clay, exploring shape and surface and looking for expressive potential.

To get a better sense of Mason’s early days at Ferus, I visited Blum at his home in Holmby Hills, Los Angeles.

RS

First, could you tell me a little bit about that iconic Ferus window? I think Mason really used it well.

IB Yes, he did.

RS You desig ned t hat w indow? A nd what inspired the gallery logo?

IB Well, it was natural. When I got to California, in 1957, Ferus occupied a little space on La Cienega.

It was incredibly run down, and when I decided to join the gallery by buying Kienholz’s share, I said to Walter, “We can’t continue in this space.” A place across the road from the original Ferus gallery became available. It already had the window that you referred to, and I decided to accentuate it with typography. You have to remember that I’d worked for Knoll for nearly two years, so I was alert to a lot of what was new in design.

RS I think Mason very much benefited from your experience with design and architecture.

IB I think he did. I was thinking about that period, my relationship with John, and the work I showed, and I want to emphasize that insofar as there was a giant in terms of artmaking here in California, it was Peter Voulkos. He dominated the artistic landscape and he taught a lot of the Ferus artists, for example Ken Price and Billy Al Bengston. Mason and Voulkos had this relationship, and it seemed to me that the only contemporary alliance that was similar was [Georges] Braque and Picasso [laughs].

RS Well, so much of it was about Voulkos’s macho personality.

IB Absolutely, this aggressive personality that he had. He was like a big bear.

RS So that was Peter. Could you tell me a little

about John? Was he quiet and contemplative?

IB He wasn’t aggressive in any way; he was a lovely guy and I liked dealing with him. In retrospect he was uncomplicated.

RS It’s amazing that you sometimes kept Mason’s work on display outside for a period of one to two years—Blue Wall, for example, which was one of his largest works.

IB Well, you know, Blue Wall made me think differently about John. We put it up behind the gallery and I just thought it was completely fabulous, that it represented some kind of breakthrough for him. I wanted it to be seen and that explains why it was there for as long as it was.

RS It’s interesting that Peter and John were working in ceramics and clay while Abstract Expressionism was burgeoning. Can you talk a little about that?

IB Well, in the art world of the 1950s, Abstract Expressionism was the dominant style. I understood it intimately, having been exposed to it as often as I was in New York. And I thought that John, working in clay, was very much influenced by that style. I thought of his work as Abstract Expressionist—I mean, Blue Wall is an example of just that.

RS Very much so. At one period, Voulkos and Mason shared a studio on Glendale Boulevard.

IB Yes. RS You must have visited the studio—can you explain what it looked like and what your feeling about it was?

IB I did. It was just a rough space. John seemed to occupy much less than half of it, but after looking at Peter’s work and at John’s, I remained interested in what John was up to. In John’s work there was a strong sense of control and grace. There’s more attention to subtle geometric forms than in Peter’s.

RS One project you were involved with was the Sterling Holloway commission.

IB Right. Sterling Holloway was a very wellknown actor, he appeared in many movies. He was deeply interested in collecting art and bought quite

Previous spread: John Mason, 1965 Opposite: Installation view, Ferus Gallery, Los Angeles, 1957 This page: John Mason working on Blue Wall, 1959

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Opposite: Installation view, Ferus Gallery, Los Angeles, 1959 This page: John Mason working, c. 1958 Artwork © 2019 Estate of John Mason.

All rights reserved.

Photos: courtesy John Mason studio

a lot from me. His house in Laguna Beach acted as a gallery; it was very open, with large walls. Shortly after moving into this house, he had the idea of commissioning something by John, which I encouraged, and that was the result.

RS In one of John’s oral histories he says he got a call from you saying Holloway was building a new house and wanted to know if John could make ceramic doors. So John talked to the architect and they came up with a solution for the suspension of the doors. You can see that the tile work appears on both the inside and the outside.

IB Boy, they weighed a ton, too [laughter]. They were really heavy but I thought they were completely successful. And Sterling loved them. We went on to do business together for a long, long time. He’s gone now, unhappily.

RS The house is beautiful and you can tell that the art serves as a major consideration in how you come through the entryway.

IB No question. It played a major role in terms of decoration.

RS I think there was a refinement in John’s work over the years: he got into more of a Cubist, Minimalist style at a certain point. He really was able to push the idea of geometry and play with mathematical formulas.

Yes, you could see that in the late work. Early on, there were very few great Abstract Expressionists working in clay, I mean the guy really had his own space. Yet he continued to evolve his own point of view throughout his career; he was always working and experimenting and thinking at the same time.

It’s important to note the shift in the reception of this work into the fine-art realm. Price, Mason, and others were wholly responsible for this; now we take it for granted. People have totally forgotten this part of history.

IB

1. “In the years immediately after the war, an artistic infrastructure with major public museums had not yet fully developed in Los Angeles as it had in New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Chicago.” David Bomford and Thomas W. Gaehtgens, Foreword, in Rebecca Peabody, Andrew Perchuk, Glenn Phillips, and Rani Singh, with Lucy Bradnock, eds., Pacific Standard Time: Los Angeles Art, 1945–1980, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute and J. Paul Getty Museum, 2011), xviii. See also, e.g., Judith Delfiner, “L’art de la contre-culture californienne des années 1950,” Eng. trans. as “The art of California counter-culture in the 1950s,” trans.

Olga Grlic, Perspective 2 (2015).

2. John Mason paraphrasing Peter Voulkos, in Mary Davis McNaughton, Clay’s Tectonic Shift: John Mason Ken Price Peter Voulkos 1956–1968, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: Scripps College/ J. Paul Getty Museum, 2012), 157.

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THINK BIG

WE VOTE FOR TOMORROW

THE

ICONO— CLASTS BY

ANNE BOYER PART 1

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t would be easy to blame architecture for all that had gone wrong, and as the world began to fall apart, some of us did. The extraction, manufacture, and distribution of building materials, the ubiquity of air conditioning and heating systems, and the billions of stoves, refrigerators, and electronics appeared inextricable from the rise of the bad weather. We believed buildings should be held responsible, too, for the erosion of any possibility of happiness or real feeling between us. Our suffering looked suspiciously adhered to everything we inhabited, and not only to buildings, but to all that was inside of buildings: bosses, conference tables, novelty-coffee-mug collec­ tions, families. Without walls, we reasoned, there could be no prisons. Without headquarters, we thought, all the institutions would disappear, and with them bureaucrats, greed, waste, and wickedness. Every gas station, elementary school, museum, and single-family dwelling rose from the horizon as a stark monument to what had failed.

We hated buildings, but the legal consequences of destroying them were too great for most to bear. There was nothing, however, to stop what happened next, so in the spring of 2021 some of us began to refuse to go indoors. Eventually, thousands and tens of thousands refused buildings, sleeping on the streets, gathering in parks or on lawns, lobby­i ng whoever passed by to take a position, too, against skyscrapers, strip malls, post offices, duplexes, and vacation homes.

At first, we all went outside—some to look, some to be looked at, each of us capti­vated by the atmosphere of the unthinkable. It was difficult to distinguish those who’d come to marvel at the converted from those who were the converts. All were old and young, poor and rich, a mix of types, and the line between

onlooker and believer easily dissolved with a single decision. Those who stayed were the faithful. Those who went home were not.

No one knew under what category to file the events in the first days, but those who stayed outside began to write impassioned tracts that were first read out of curiosity, then imbibed as an elixir of conversion. This, they declared, is not politics. This, they wrote, is not madness. This, they insisted, is divinely inspired . To stop going inside had become, because we had no other term for it, a religion.

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he refusal of shelter at first seemed partial and provisional, but after a few weeks it became clear that the believers intended to stay outside for good. It was mass psychosis, the rest declared, triggered by the bad news lately about storms and scarcity and extinctions and elections.

Some communities sent mental-health workers into the crowds only to find that the social workers and counselors, too, were absorbed into them. The old religions sent imams and rabbis and pastors, but so many of them became converts that churches, mosques, and temples instructed their followers to stay away to protect themselves from this contagion, to pray for their lost loved ones from afar. Yogis wandered away from ashrams. Activist groups sent organizers, who, upon absorption into the streets, abandoned their causes and never returned.

Journalists sent to cover the story converted, too, and their investigative reports turned into live-TV admonishments to come outside. Eventually, there were too many stories to tell: minor celebrities who posted ecstatic

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conversion vlogs, retired athletes bringing with them constellations of girlfriends and assistants, entire units of firefighters, elementary school teachers who took the third graders out for recess and then drifted away, leaving pensive, confused children at the slide.

Someone asked me later if I found it strange that when so many seemed newly riveted by the possibility of good, I was headed toward peak evil. Surely, they said, with all this religion in the air, I knew I was doing something wrong. This is what I answered: now, it seems like our history is divided only into before and after, and all that came before was dropped the moment after the new feeling arrived. It is easy to believe that the light from heaven had come down and everyone could see it, but to me it did not look like a light. It looked like more of the same foolish and empty nonsense. Whatever light people saw was not an authentic illumination, but the same tired and deceptive glimmer. Besides, I reminded them, I had started my work in the weeks before the conversion event, that time when so many of us believed in nothing and thought we never would. I had no faith before, and I didn’t have any faith after, at least not for a long time.

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espite the rumors, no leader of this new religion ever said outright that its followers should allow themselves to die of the weather. Most even argued, at least on the record, that it was a spiritual respons­ibility to vigorously fight to preserve one’s life and the lives of coreligion­i sts in order to feel more fully, and across a long life, the effects of the destructive

habits of our species. To be alive meant to experience the elements—however benign or terrible—with receptive, sensitive bodies.

The religion’s primary sacrament, then, was that of feeling damp, or heat struck, or chilled, or windswept, or desiccated, or endangered.

Death would be feeling’s evasion.

Regardless of what anyone said about not going out of one’s way to find death, it was still true that if anyone did die from lack of shelter, they joined a forming canon of heroes.

There were hurricane martyrs and flood saints, and the beloved and virtuous who perished of earthquakes, heat waves, and blizzards, all of them memorialized in online hagiographies at weathersaints.com and climatemartyrs.org.

The worst thing a person could do was sin against the present, or at least this is what the believers claimed, and they believed that the worst sin against the present was any attempt to escape its misery. By misery what they meant was not the regular misery of all the human centuries before, but a new and special kind: the angry new weather and its consequences, the megastorms taking over the sea edges, the fracking quakes in the interiors, the droughts and deluges and dieoffs, like how in September the Canadian geese began to fall dead from the sky, denting cars, injuring toddlers, and terrifying everyone else. The only way for our species to be redeemed, they argued, in the wake of what we had done to the world was to feel the hard consequences of our sins against our own sensate and naked skins. The believers were thus drenched by rains, punished by wind chills, paralyzed by heat, singed by brush fires, bored or lulled by placid and balmy nights.

The conversion event was global but it took on local variations. North Americans

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flooded to regions with notorious weather: the Gulf Coast, the Burning West, Tornado Alley. Elsewhere, favelas and shantytowns once avoided by the wealthy became pilgrimage sites for some of the newly faithful who believed that in a special dispensation the poor had already, in their open-air, weather­ saturated, and violable forms of living, been practicing the faith as prophets. Other converts joined existing refugee camps dotted throughout Europe as climate missionaries, bringing what they claimed was the capacity to transform the seemingly pointless suffering of political and economic consequence into what they offered as the ennobling frame of faith.

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aw enforcement hated the new re­l i­g ion, as did architects, health i n s p e c t o rs, t h e c o n s t r u c t i o n industry, HVAC repair people, mortgage brokers, fascists, and landlords. Only weeks after the initial conversion, the children of the faithful were being taken away from their parents and placed in indoor foster care, forcibly enrolled in indoor schools.

There were protests, lawsuits. Within eighteen months of the conversion event the Gutierrez vs. State of California case had tra­veled to the US Supreme Court, which then decided that a religious doctrine against shelter was protected through the separation of church and state. The children could live outside with their families as long as they were adequately educated, cared for, fed, and protected from the most deadly or debilitating effects of the weather. That decision at least nominally restored families, but as the conversion expanded, and more and more

people were without homes, the law expanded too. Cities and states responded by intensifying trespassing, public-urination, and indecent-­exposure laws into felonies. The jails and prisons filled up, and with this new population came hunger strikes, protests, and agitation for outdoor prisons in which the faithful could practice their sacrament of exposure.

Eventually the faithful began to escape the law by accumulating vast holdings of private land for open-air living. Each convert who owned a home gave it, as a mode of baptism, a ritualized demolition and opened the land to others. First the possessions inside the house were sold to outsiders in a public auction, then the faithful worked to destroy the building from the outside, ardent as termites as they tore down the house, ripped off shingles and planks, careful to never once enter under a horizontal beam or framing until the whole home and everything in it was taken apart.

Congregations the size of villages lived on this land, the fundamentalists among them refusing to cover their bodies, too, hoping that by this they could feel the angry climate to its fullest effect. Naked or mostly naked, open to the wind, their skin leathered and their hair faded, these converts of the new religion huddled together under the starlit skies, their exhalations mingling with the heavens, waiting for the future to arrive.

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nce my work began in earnest, I regretted that it only took a few days outside for my own skin to tan, for my own hair to grow lighter, my own complexion to become rougher, but what I regretted more was that the more time

I spent among these crowds of converts, the more I felt the tragedy of my contempt for them. Good obviously thrived among them—mutual aid, joy, comradery—but my belief did not. The faithful weren’t the hypocrites I’d presumed them to be, at least not all of them. Most of them seemed to truly believe, but in what was the question.

Like any religion, this one also had its mystics and its legalists. Among the legalists, debates drew out for hours over the nature of sin, whether thinking of the future should be allowed or prohibited, and if one shouldn’t think or talk of the future, as many asserted, how long a time “the future” was meant to be.

They didn’t, however, talk much about God, referring to the divine mostly as “that which has turned its back” and “that which has walked away.” There were panel discussions and lectures for the livestream, attempts to define “shelter,” attempts to define “atonement,” attempts to define “season.” Rest under the shade of a tree was allowed, but not the shade of buildings. The faithful were allowed to walk through but not to linger too long under bridges and overpasses. An afternoon spent under a natural rock overhang was allowed; covered stoops were to be avoided.

People could enter a cave but not claim one as their home, and they could dig a hole for a latrine, even erect privacy structures around it, but only if they left overhead an opening for the sky.

One of the most contentious debates took place over whether to use a piece of canvas, Mylar, or plastic attached to a tree, or staked to the ground, as shelter in a storm was a sin. Some believed this kind of provisional shelter was not a violation, using as analogical support the dams of beavers, the dens of foxes, and the nests of birds.

They argued that the real abomination was

to be found inside permanent structures, that it was indoors that was the original sin, and as long as the air that they breathed, that hit their skin, and the temperature in which they lingered was that made by the earth and the atmosphere, what they were doing when putting up a tarp in a storm was not a sin at all. A piece of fabric over a branch or some other supporting structure was to some no different from a sweatshirt or an umbrella, both of which were allowed, though the umbrella was met with suspicion by those whose greatest desire was the purest sensation of the weather. Others believed that a piece of fabric overhead was shelter and should be forbidden as such, even if it was so inefficient at protection that it remained shelter’s crude approximation. Even bad sex, they offer­ed as their own supportive analogy, can constitute fornication.

Some believed, at first, that this religion was yet another extension of the movement toward the natural. The nature-lovers, however, were the religion’s earliest heretics, active at first but purged from the faithful within months of the conversion, sometimes beaten, spat at in gauntlets, mocked on social media, then setting up camps of their own.

None of this new way of living was about conforming the behavior of the human species to nature, the righteous said, which anyway involved a fiction about our species that had always served to absolve it from its peculiar criminality: that we were either outside of nature or an error of it and our only hope was to fit ourselves in. The natural and the desire for it were like a perfume sprayed in an outhouse, they said, its only function being a superficial and transitory appeasement of a mutual condition that smelled like shit.

The mystics did not concern themselves with arguments. The mystics looked up at the

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thundering clouds and waited for the freezing winds and said that this was a religion with a single, urgent, unflawed commandment: atone. And what its believers had to atone for was that the earth itself had been ruined—irrevocably, tragically, and without remedy. To atone was the purest exercise of love, they said, and a crystalline perfection of grief. To atone was the only possible act of humanity, which had known from the beginning that it could never survive. These were the believers who sought to feel climate change most keenly of all, to lament and to suffer as dramatically as possible for the sinfulness of the built world, to take on the burden for all of humanity and perhaps all of creation. What these converted seemed to want most, as a form of redemption, was to be directly restored to all the terrible consequence that human ingenuity had once protected them from. They wanted to know by their every sense not the falsehood and fabrications of society but the brutal, vivid effects of nature exceeding its course.

A

ll who were unhappy seemed susceptible, and so many of us, in those days, were unhappy, that a lot of people I knew ended up leaving the inside for the out. I see now that like anyone else I could have even­t­u ally believed with the believing crowds, but at the start of the second week of the conversion event, I saw what I needed to harden me against them for good. It was my ex, Claire, with her new partner, their arms and faces raised to the sky, eyes empty and wide, assuming a pose of ostentatious conversion, taking a photo with a selfie stick.

They posed as if begging for the rain to fall on them or the lightning to come or the sun to come out of the clouds and beat down on them, but whatever the posture of devotion meant, it only existed for the camera. For Claire, any trend had always been embraced like a necessary life-saving procedure for which no expense was too great. The street of converts seemed with her in it as banal as any music festival, and this new way of life as ephemeral as an app or an oatmeal restaurant. In a few weeks something else would call to Claire and all the others. They would rush to what was next, I was certain, hoping to soften whatever pain of the present with ever more extreme forms of novelty. Then when that failed, they would, as most did in those days, rush again, stupidly, convinced of something else.

The day I saw Claire on the street I hurried back to the house where I rented a room.

I turned on the air conditioning. I turned on the oven. It was only May, and the flowers bloomed and birds sang as if they still believed in spring and had never read the news cycle’s dire predictions. The house didn’t need to be cooled, nor did I need to cook, but I did need the assurance that I wasn’t one of the lunatics in the streets and never would be.

I flipped up all the light switches, pulled the cord on the ceiling fan in my bedroom until it spun as fast as it could, filled up a plastic glass with ice, filled up another, and set them both down to melt. I ran the dishwasher with only three plates in it. I transferred the recycling into the trash bin. I peed in the toilet and flushed four times, changed my tampon, meditated on the beauty of the pearlescent plastic applicator and the lavender plastic paper that had wrapped it. I was a person who lived inside a building, and I planned to stay that way forever.

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Building a Legacy In this ongoing series we speak with experts in the field of artists’ estates and legacy stewardship to offer insights that might prove useful to artists, their staff, foundations and estates, scholars, and others. Here Katy Rogers, the vice president and secretary of the Dedalus Foundation, director of the Robert Motherwell Catalogue Raisonné project, president of the Catalogue Raisonné Scholars Association, and founding member of the International Catalogue Raisonné Association, speaks with the Quarterly’s Alison McDonald about best practices for scholars looking to begin a catalogue raisonné. They also discuss legal concerns, what artists can do to lay the groundwork for scholars, and the differences between publishing a catalogue raisonné in print and online.

What advice do you have for artists about how to set up archival records, preserve correspondence, and maintain digital files that will later allow a scholar to embark on a catalogue raisonné project?

KATY ROGERS Artists’ preparations should reflect their own studio practice as well as up-to-date archival and conservation best practices. It’s always best to begin thinking about preserving materials as early as possible, but for many artists this tends to be a retroactive process. It’s never too late to begin. It’s a good idea to hire professionals to assess your current record-keeping systems and create a realistic, comprehensive approach to preserving the materials in the format you have made them in. This will need to cover both hard-copy and born-digital files as well as plans for the eventuality that some file formats and operating systems may eventually become obsolete. Incorporating the artist’s recollections and intentions for their legacy is always valuable at any stage.

AMCD For artists working today, whether they are making sculptures, paintings, or films, what are generally the main types of information that a scholar would benefit from? Photographs, letters, correspondence. . . .

ALISON MCDONALD

Catalogue raisonné research casts a very wide net. The goal is typically to present the most complete record of both individual artworks and the overall oeuvre. Comprehensive photography, including high-quality images of the recto, verso, and other angles of three-dimensional works, is invaluable. Studio inventories and registration files that reflect the movements of works of art, especially consignment records and financial records related to the sale or gift of artworks, is also crucial. Scholars additionally rely on datebooks or calendars, personal as well as professional correspondence (including e-mails and letters), oral histories, conservation records, gallery records, exhibition checklists, installation shots, catalogues, and press clippings. In recent years there has been a focus on studio materials and a greater interest in documenting how an artist works. This helps conservators and art historians understand how to present and preserve these artworks in the future. These materials in particular can also support future understanding around the sometimes sensitive issues of dating and authenticity.

AMCD For catalogue raisonné projects in particular, the issue of authenticity tends to enter in, even KR

when authentication boards have separate teams dedicated exclusively to that work.

KR Yes, at the Dedalus Foundation, which was created by Robert Motherwell, we continue to give opinion letters, but those letters state whether or not a work will be included in the catalogue raisonné or its supplement rather than commenting on its authenticity. Many scholars are moving in that direction now because while a catalogue raisonné is meant to document the authentic corpus, it’s created by humans and relies on other humans, so there may be gaps in these publications.

In terms of authenticity, access to studio materials, understanding how the artist worked, documented signatures over the course of the artist’s career, and organized, searchable studio records really make things much clearer for future scholars. We’ve had a few instances where a signature or a collage element has faded. In those cases, having visual documentation was key, because a lot of written documentation is open to interpretation.

AMCD How does a scholar approach a project this vast? What do scholars need to understand before committing to a catalogue raisonné project?

KR The main concerns I hear from scholars who are just starting out have to do with funding, 109

A catalogue raisonné is very specific, it’s meant to be a resource for scholars, artists, students, curators, and the market. In fact the market can drive this type of research because people are concerned about the authenticity and history of a work.

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databases, and legal protections. This is especially true of independent scholars, who may engage in a project without the protection or funding of an institution, but all scholars need to consider the best research and database methods as well as legal pro­t ec­t ions for the oeuvre in question.

It’s best to begin with the materials most closely related to the artist: known artworks and archival materials. Once those materials are processed and understood within a database structure, the scholar will be better able to identify gaps in knowledge. Studio archives will never be comprehensive; there will be artworks that were given away, photo­g raphs that weren’t taken or preserved, dimensions that were recorded wrong, or a database or file format that you can’t access anymore. A catalogue raisonné is the rare time when everything will be seen in context, and it’s important to provide enough time and support to engage in this level of research thoroughly.

AMCD For scholars who are looking for financial support or funding, what resources would you recommend they look into? Are grants available for this type of research?

KR Catalogue raisonné projects require sustained and consistent funding over long periods of time. Many are supported by an artist’s foundation or estate, or by a gallery that has a significant stake in the artist’s legacy. When these sources of funding are not available, a scholar or project organizer should look for potential partners that may have a vested interest (collectors, dealers, museums).

They have to be careful to make sure the presence of a given funding source will not offer an opening for the integrity of the project to be called into question, or hinder research due to confidentiality concerns. Independent scholars may find support through academic institutions or by applying for funding from open grant programs. A good resource for the latter is the Foundation Directory Online [https://candid.org/find-funding].

AMCD Regarding a database, it’s worth noting that there are online publishers who have their own proprietary platforms, but scholars and artists should be aware that if they use those programs, their information will be easily viewable by the creators of those databases. There are also database providers who license software that scholars may need to customize and pay for, but then they control the data. At the same time, they may be putting themselves in a position where they need to make everything happen without the support of an established publisher.

KR Yes, the first online catalogues raisonnés have been around for more than a decade at this point, and scholars continue to grapple with issues of both short- and long-term access. The Catalogue Raisonné Scholars Association [CRSA] did a conference in 2011 about online CRs [a recording is available at https://www.catalogueraisonne.org/ programs-archive], and the same concerns were asked then as now. At this point there are more platforms available and more models for online publications, but we have also begun to understand the ways in which the Internet will continue to change. CRSA recently hosted a panel discussion about the need to preserve catalogue raisonné research in multiple forms because, as one of our speakers titled his presentation, “Assume that despite your best efforts, it will all eventually break” [also available at www.catalogueraisonne. org/programs-archive, under the title “Preparing for Tomorrow—But How?”].

AMCD Do you see print and online CRs on the same

artist as being in conflict or as benefiting each other?

KR They can function together in a symbiotic way that benefits multiple end-users. A catalogue raisonné is very specific, it’s meant to be a resource for scholars, artists, students, curators, and the market. In fact the market can drive this type of research because people are concerned about the authenticity and history of a work.

AMCD It’s often that connection to value that creates a drive to fund the scholarship.

KR Exactly, that’s true for both well-known and lesser-known artists or estates who are looking to put themselves out there, to bring themselves more visibility, which can lead to more exhibitions, publications, and more people engaging with the work broadly. But in response to the print-versus-digital question, for earlier generations, catalogues raisonnés were finite. When a CR is a book, its users are looking at the same thing at the same time.

I can send you a copy of the page and we know that the information isn’t changing. The drawback of course is that new research isn’t reflected or accessible. Whereas an online catalogue is expected to change, and it’s used as though it will change. There’s consequently a sense that anything published online will always be absolutely up to date. At Dedalus we have a hybrid approach where we have an online supplement to our printed catalogue raisonné for when we find new works or information.

AMCD While that ability to continuously update the information is amazing, it’s also a burden.

KR Exactly. Who keeps it updated? Who pays for those updates, as well as for the general maintenance of the website? Will that website still work in the future, when we’re all gone and the Internet is something very different? Who looks after these sites in the future—is that the responsibility of a library, an estate, or a scholar? There’s no model in place.

AMCD In terms of legal protections, is it appropriate for a scholar to ask whoever is funding the research for provisions in this regard? What specific protections should they be thinking about in advance of accepting a position?

KR If the scholar is accepting a position within a foundation or an estate, the organization or institution should have errors-and-omissions insurance that covers the scholar in case of a lawsuit. A foundation or estate needs to be concerned with protecting the assets of the institution, and a scholar should make sure that he or she is covered under the same policy.

To protect the scholar and the institution, it can be helpful to have a legal agreement with owners who submit works for authentication. The drawback is that if the owner doesn’t want to sign a complex legal agreement, you might lose access to that work, so an experienced attorney who can craft language that protects the parties without hindering research is key.

Another advantage about publishing online, incidentally, is that it’s appealing to be able to put off giving an opinion until you feel confident. If new research becomes available it can go up later.

With a book, at a certain point it’s either in or out.

AMCD How do you announce a CR project at the start? How do you let people know you are accepting submissions?

KR While you’re processing archival material and adding it into the database, you’re also adding public and private contacts from the archives.

Hopefully, the artist has kept track of collectors,

Increasing the opportunities for discussion is always a mutually beneficial endeavor—any opportunity for conversation is valuable in these types of longterm and far-reaching projects. There’s something to be learned in every conversation or at every event, whether it be a nuance of law or a successful method of outreach or a new innovation in publishing.

galleries, and public collections that own or have handled her work. Those resources can be used to create an initial mailing list for either a digital or a hard-copy announcement. Sometimes a hard-copy letter gets more attention.

Then you reach out to the dealers who worked with the artist, and to people noted on labels affixed to the backs of the works or listed in exhibition catalogues. It grows from there. You can also ask auction houses to let you know when a work comes across their field of vision, whether it be a work that is consigned to them or one they hear about or see in a collector’s home.

AMCD Do you buy advertisements?

KR A lot of auction houses include announcements in the back of their catalogues. Many projects advertise in art-world trade publications, both online and in print. It can also be helpful to do something more targeted. For Motherwell, he lived in East Hampton in the 1940s, so we placed advertisements in the local newspaper there.

AMCD Did you get more feedback from t hose regional ads than from the others?

KR We rec eived more releva nt feedback , although we heard from collectors through other forms of advertising as well. It’s important to understand that the search for works will take years.

AMCD You are the president of CRSA, which offers resources, support, and dialogue for anyone interested in learning more. What do you see as the organization’s mission and goals? And how do members benefit from participation?

KR CRSA was founded in 1993 as an affiliated society of the College Art Association. The idea, in part, was to bring more visibility to object-based art history, as opposed to more theoretical approaches.

It has grown significantly since then; not only is there more interest in object-based art history now but there’s also a focus on catalogue raisonné work in particular. That’s driven in part by the art market doing well and collectors being concerned about authenticity. Artists are also thinking about legacy in a different way and starting to plan earlier.

CRSA aims to be as inclusive as possible by making its services available and cost effective for our members. We have chosen to remain primarily a professional networking organization and we are not a nonprofit. Many of our members are independent scholars with no funding, no protections, no database, and they benefit from the support and connections provided by the organization. We’re a volunteer organization focused on creating a space for dialogue among scholars, to let them talk to each other about these exact questions: how do I find a good lawyer, what’s a good database, what should I think about when I’m starting, how might I shape a catalogue raisonné or build a research team? Members pay $30 a year, and the main benefit is that you’re supporting this kind of dialogue and expansion of a knowledge base. Those fees pay for public programs and recordings and the maintenance of our listserv and website, including a growing number of project profiles. Our members tend to be concentrated in New York and major cities, but some are located around the country and the world, sometimes working in isolation. All of those scholars are able to bring up questions and engage in dialogue through the listserv, and to make direct connections with other members.

As the public demand for catalogue raisonné research increases, geographic particula­ rities, especially in terms of the legal rights of scholars and heirs, have come to the fore. Laws, protections, and funding models can vary widely

by region. Recently we’ve been happy to support the development of a Europe-based catalogue raisonné organization: the International Catalogue Raisonné Association [ICRA], which will present more events and opportunities overseas.

AMCD Lately, it seems as though more people interested in CRs are actively hosting symposiums and other kinds of public programming. Do you see these various initiatives as mutually beneficial?

KR Increasing the opportunities for discussion is always a mutually beneficial endeavor—any opportunity for conversation is valuable in these types of long-term and far-reaching projects. There’s something to be learned in every conversation or at every event, whether it be a nuance of law or a successful method of outreach or a new innovation in publishing. I’m happy to see this type of specialized support and dissemination model increasingly used in the artist-legacy field, both on the nonprofit and the commercial sides. I can think of several of these, including a foundation-registrar group, a foundation-archivist group, a new foundation-leader group. Each focuses on direct engagement between individuals and specialized professions, and that can be really valuable. There’s never only one way to do something—each project, archive, studio, or collection will have a different set of circumstances—and we can learn from each other at all levels.

AMCD From my point of view, there are huge benefits in everyone sharing as much information as possible, but also having common ways of structuring, universal languages, et cetera. Especially with online CRs and archives, the potential longevity of everyone’s project can benefit by tapping into models that already exist and building on them. Let’s say technology changes: everyone’s data is more secure when a greater number of people are using those shared systems.

KR Absolutely. There are some really incredible resources, for instance the Getty Vocabularies project, which they’re continuing to expand, and the Archives of American Art’s digitization projects.

The New York Art Resources Consortium [NYARC] is also dealing with these types of questions, particularly by looking at web archiving but also talking about best practices for the back end in terms of language. CRSA has partnered with librarian and archival organizations such as NYARC and ARLIS [Art Libraries Society of North America]. I’d love to have more partnerships with librarians and archivists where we learn about how they preserve this information, how they’re looking at it, because those are often the repositories where these materials will get stored after our projects are completed.

Best practices for preservation and continuing access will always be changing and improving, and it’s in the best interest of artists, heirs, and legacy professionals to be involved in the development of those systems.

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BY THE BAY Elizabeth Mangini writes on Giuseppe Penone’s installation of two sculptures at San Francisco’s Fort Mason.

In Rotterdam a large tree hovers preternaturally three feet above the ground, in Münster a fallen trunk becomes the conduit for a spring, while in Rome architectural fragments seem precariously lodged in a tree’s high branches. Walking among Giuseppe Penone’s outdoor sculptures, one has the sense of being in a landscape at once surreal and surprisingly natural. With an installation at Fort Mason, a former military site now part of Golden Gate National Recreation Area, San Francisco joins a select group of international cities to host the artist’s bronze tree sculptures. Penone’s public works, which illuminate the correlations between organic forms and their environment, have graced the grounds of such storied landscapes as the royal gardens at Versailles, the Boboli Gardens/Forte Belvedere in Florence, and New York’s Madison Square Park. Several are on permanent display in such cities as Paris, Rome, and Abu Dhabi.

Emerging as an artist in Turin in the late 1960s, Penone was first associated with Arte Povera, a critical and curatorial conceit that recognized a penchant for experience over representation among emerging Italian artists. Along with these peers, Penone’s works were included in landmark exhibitions, from Venice to Kassel and from Amsterdam to Tokyo. Penone’s persistence in work­i ng with organic forms has also led critics to link him with the Land and environmental art movements that were emerging in the late 1960s, but his material and conceptual commitment to sculpture often exceeds the boundaries of stylistic terminologies. Through five decades of making and exhibiting art around the globe, Penone has become one of the most recognized Italian artists of the postwar era by probing the place of human activity in the natural world.

In Alpi Marittime (Maritime Alps, 1968), one of his earliest works, Penone measured the effect of his touch on young trees in the woods of the Maritime Alps, making long-term sculptural interventions that he documented in photographs. The most succinct of these was a metal cast of his hand that he attached to a young sapling, which grew around it. Penone later became known for carving industrial wood planks so as partly to recover the organic forms of the trees from which they had been milled. In these Alberi (Trees, 1969– ), a reversal of human intervention introduced new perspectives on the “lived” experience of organic

materials over time. The large-scale bronze works that Penone began to make in the 1980s are rooted in such investigations, bringing conceptual and material criticality to the ancient traditions of sculpture as public monument.

The two works installed in San Francisco are La logica del vegetale (The Logic of the Vegetal, 2012) and Idee di pietra (Ideas of Stone, 2004). Together they ex­em­pli­f y central tenets of Penone’s art, offering a glimpse of the breadth of a half-century of production. Penone’s large-scale public installations provide an incisive view of his career-long investigation of the role of the artist in society. His conceptual engagement with the site also allows a focus on the complex histories of land use. Most radically, the forms and materials of these works have the potential to shift one’s perception of time itself.

Idee di pietra is a towering bronze tree that lofts several large river stones high in its bare branches.

This striking combination of materials and forms inspires awe as well as trepidation. The weathering bronze mimics the trunk from which it was cast so well that this carefully engineered sculpture presents itself as natural. The vertical assemblage appears to be the monumental result of a decades-long struggle between gravity and photo­ synthesis—opposing forces here held in tension— in contrast to boulders that the artist has installed on the ground nearby. The installation asks us to reflect on the form-giving relationships between organisms and their environment.

In a recent interview, Penone remarked that trees in nature perfectly model the work of the sculptor, since they conserve experience in their very structures. 1 A tree’s size, the condition of its bark, the thrust of each branch, all testify to its interactions with its environment. At Fort Mason, Penone’s sculptural trees are installed on the grounds of the Great Meadow, among Monterey cypresses, sequoias, and other species both native to the region and introduced to it by California’s many waves of immigrants. The integration of Penone’s bronzes among these live specimens creates an intensified experience of both nature and art, prompting us to consider the complexity of the earth’s ecosystem and the role humans play in it.

La logica del vegetale further reinforces the interconnectedness of organic life. Here a twisting bronze trunk sprawls horizontally across the meadow. Its massive upended root ball presents a

Opposite: Giuseppe Penone, Idee di pietra (Ideas of Stone), 2004, installation view, Fort Mason, San Francisco, 2019 This page: Giuseppe Penone, La logica del vegetale (The Logic of the Vegetal), 2012, installation view, Fort Mason, San Francisco, 2019 Following page: Installation view, Giuseppe Penone at Fort Mason, Fort Mason, San Francisco, October 24, 2019– October 25, 2020 Artwork © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York ⁄ ADAGP, Paris Photos: Matthew Millman

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visually arresting tangle of bronze forms. Meanwhile, the branches of this seemingly felled tree recede into the distance, like five fingers at the end of an outstretched arm. At the tips of these bronze branches five living trees rise vertically, all native varietals planted by the artist (valley oak, coast live oak, California bay laurel, and bigleaf maple).

Emulating the way decomposing matter reaches beyond itself to provide for the survival of other organisms, the work underscores the interdependencies inherent to our existence.

Works such as La logica del vegetale are at their rhetorical best in long-term or permanent installations that give their live elements a chance to grow.

Albero delle vocali (Vowel Tree), a similarly recumbent bronze trunk, has been installed in the gardens of the Tuileries in Paris since 1999, allowing visitors to witness a changing dynamic between the sculpture and the landscape. The five live trees planted at the ends of that tree’s bronze branches have matured over two decades, while vines and other flora camouflage the artifice of the sculpture’s root end. Allowed to stay in place for decades, the work becomes slyly subversive, inserting a large, apparently dead tree trunk into a meticulously manicured Baroque garden. Similar permanent installations of Penone’s take root in Kassel, Maastricht, and Turin. Presenting the evolution of forms, structures, and materials over time, such works index the ways in which even the smallest human actions impact the material world.

Indeed, Penone’s outdoor sculptures spark the recognition that the landscapes and parks in which they are installed are not really “natural” at 114

all. Instead, they are palimpsests of human occupation, intervention, exertion, and sculpting of the earth. The area that is today Fort Mason was once part of the homeland of the Ohlone people.

In the eighteenth century Spanish settlers recognized the strategic value of the site, overlooking the sole access from the Pacific Ocean into San Francisco Bay, and founded a military battery there in 1797. Over the ensuing two centuries, the land passed under Mexican control (1822), was seized by American rebels (1846), and by the time of the Civil War had become an upscale neighborhood. The site of relief camps after the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, it was an important embarkation point for US troops heading to the Pacific during World War II, all before becoming part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area in 1972.

In terms of human activity, struggle, and development, the 250 years since the late eighteenth century constitute a long time. That period encompasses all of the US presidents, more than fifteen family generations, countless wars and battles, endless building campaigns, the invention and obsolescence of many technologies, the identification and development of cures for a good number of diseases, and so on. Two hundred and fifty years, though, may be a small part of a tree’s life. Several species can live over 1,000 years, and California’s prized sequoias (Sequoiadendron giganteum) can survive for more than 3,000. Penone’s works often allow us to set our own, corporeal sense of time against the more extended lifespan of a tree, a stone, and ultimately the earth itself. Gauged by such

yard­sticks, a political cycle, a human lifespan, or even the longer life of a particular culture seems remarkably brief. Occupying their intersection of sculpture and vegetation, Penone’s public works bring the profound aspects of organic life into focus.

Given this network of concerns, it comes as something of a surprise that it has taken so long for any of Penone’s monumental trees to go on public view in Northern California, whose residents consider themselves at the forefront of progressive environmentalism. But like Idee di pietra, the Bay Area is marked by fundamental tensions between opposing forces: social activism versus rampant, technology-driven capitalism, or the preservation of ancient forests such as Muir Woods versus the development of an increasingly ephemeral culture.

Without providing solutions to such disparities and conflicts, Penone’s works at Fort Mason offer an opportunity to reflect on them, showing that the same complex interdependences exist in the natural world. Adopting the temporal perspective of nature, even for the relatively brief moment of our encounter with his sculptures, can profoundly affect our worldviews and, ultimately, hopefully, our actions.

Giuseppe Penone at Fort Mason is presented by Gagosian in partnership with the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy and Golden Gate National Recreation Area through the Art in the Parks program.

1. See “Giuseppe Penone: Gli alberi: sculture perfette,” video interview, Rai Cultura, 2014. Available online at www.raicultura. it/arte/articoli/2018/12/Giuseppe-Penone-gli-alberi-scultureperfette-1fa8f82c-f4f6-4bb2-8874-4043af51a2c5.html (accessed December 1, 2019).

Lunch Monday–Saturday 12–3pm Dinner Monday–Saturday 6–11pm 976 Madison Avenue, New York T. 212 906 7141 reservation@kappomasanyc.com

DEATH IN THE

AFTERNOON In this second installment of a two-part essay, John Elderfield resumes his investigation of Édouard Manet’s Execution of Maximilian, focusing this time on the political and historical implications of the artist’s formal treatment of real, violent events.

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On June 19, 1867, Emperor Maximilian of Mexico was executed by firing squad, along with his generals Tomás Mejía and Miguel Miramón, at Querétaro, just north of Mexico City. Napoleon III of France had installed him there three years earlier after deposing the liberal government of Benito Juárez; when Juárez proved resurgent, Napoleon abandoned Maximilian to defeat. This essay continues a discussion, begun in the preceding issue of the Quarterly, of the French painter Édouard Manet’s response to this event. The story told thus far mainly concerned the unusual fate of his second painting of this subject, cut up and pasted together not once but twice. The subject of what follows is reenactment: Manet made three of these paintings altogether, each one not only comprising a new version of the preceding one but also, thereby, creating a new version of the event described—a new acting out of an event that was receding into the past, a new performance of the execution.

I said in the preceding essay that looking back at Manet’s enterprise now, from a period when art with a political message is common, alters it.

But how? Let us begin with the introduction to a recent issue of The Brooklyn Rail, written by its publisher: “No work of art has ever prevented or stopped a war. No work of art has ever solved poverty, unemployment, or any other political or social crisis.” Nonetheless, the introduction argued, artists should be activists in their art by vigorously drawing attention to such issues. Many artists now do so, of course, hoping that their expressions of advocacy or disapprobation of matters that they them­selves cannot directly affect will influence public opinion and propel action from those who can.

At face value, Manet did just that in response to the shocking execution of an emperor imposed in French neocolonial tutelage over Mexico. However, as we learned in the first essay, if he did begin with the aim of drawing attention to an injustice, he then sabotaged the possibility of his doing so: whereas in the first painting he had shown the

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execution squad in sombreros, in the second he showed them in the uniforms they had actually worn, which resembled those of French soldiers.

This could be taken to impute French responsibility for the execution, and Manet was “dissuaded” from exhibiting the painting. Then, far from bowing to the continuing risk of state censorship, he maintained the squad’s appearance in his subsequent works on the subject: a small oil sketch, a lithograph, and finally a third large painting completed to the artist’s satisfaction in 1869. That painting waited to be shown until a full decade later, and then it was in the United States; only a quarter century after that was it exhibited in Paris, and on both occasions it attracted little public attention, for the cause it addressed was little remembered. So, do we regret that Manet’s holding to this one point of principle—no “fake news” about the soldier’s uniforms—meant his surrendering the option of being an activist in his art at the very moment when it was most needed? Could he have found a way around this problem?

An answer is provided by the writer Émile Zola, a great supporter of Manet’s who saw a trial proof of the lithograph in the artist’s studio shortly after the authorities had refused to allow its publication.

(It was published only posthumously.) Zola wrote that it was because Manet “truly loves truth” that he had drawn the soldier’s real costumes and infuriated the censors. The writer was unquestionably thinking of a kind of truth akin to the meticulous documentation that he used to compose his own novels, but Manet was not a stickler for truth of that kind, and certainly not about everything that he knew had happened at Querétaro. In fact he altered what he knew, unquestionably deliberately, and his alterations speak of his commitment to truth of a different kind.

Let us take just one example. The discarded second painting discussed in the previous essay had a neutral background that could be thought to represent the hillside on which the execution took place. In making the three new works—the oil study, the lithograph, and the third painting—

The sense of watching a performance pervades his composition: the performance of Maximilian’s execution is shown with what the poet and critic Paul Valéry called Manet’s own “resonance of execution,” through which the artist could “convey all his force, and completely realize his aim.”

Previous spread: François Aubert, The Shirt of the Emperor, Worn during His Execution, 1867, albumen silver print from glass negative, 8 ¾ × 6 ¼ inches (22.2 × 15.8 cm). Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gilman Collection, Gift of the Howard Gilman Foundation, 2005 Opposite: Édouard Manet, The Execution of Emperor Maximilian, 1868–69, oil on canvas, 99 ¼ × 118 7⁄8 inches (252 × 302 cm). Kunsthalle, Mannheim This page: Pablo Picasso, Massacre in Korea, 1951, oil on plywood, 43 3⁄8 × 82 5⁄8 inches (110 × 210 cm). Musée Picasso, Paris. Artwork © 2019 Estate of Pablo Picasso/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Mathieu Rabeau © RMN-Grand Palais/ Art Resource, New York

Manet increasingly refined the background, referring to his own recent painting of a bullfight he had seen in Madrid, “one of the finest, most curious and most terrifying sights to be seen,” he had reported. The result was to make the scene of the execution look like a place devoted to the ritual killing of animals, with a curious audience looking down into it watching the performance. Manet was amplifying the intimations of a topical event, finding objective correlatives for the human sensations and impressions occasioned by it.

The truth of Manet’s representation of the soldiers’ uniforms is akin to the authenticity uns­ wervingly expected of a documentary photograph.

(But can even Robert Capa be trusted?) The wider truth of Manet’s painting is also a matter of authenticity, but not of that kind: “Do you take me for a history painter?” he said. “Reconstructing histori­c al figures—what a joke.“ The Querétaro experience was not simply imagined—thought up—by the artist; rather, he imagined it after, or into, his knowledge of what had occurred, and showed it with a good-enough realness to be persuasive. This is akin to what we expect from a convincing performance, and Manet’s reimagining of the previously neutral background was extremely important in this respect. The sense of watching a performance pervades his composition: the performance of Maximilian’s execution is shown with what the poet and critic Paul Valéry called Manet’s own “resonance of execution,” through which the artist could “convey all his force, and completely realize his aim.”

Before going further, we need to remember that even as more news and images from Querétaro reached Paris, Manet could not have been fully informed about what happened there, or why. That itself makes his project of contemporary interest, for there are the obvious parallels between what took place in Mexico and our own troubled present—we are familiar with the baleful consequences of military intervention and regime change exacerbated by ignorance of the culture of the invaded country. And while the speed of communications is today immeasurably greater than in the nineteenth century, their reliability is often not; so we may still understand how, as the reports reaching France in 1867 accumulated, they proved to be contradictory, unreliable, censored.

Manet probably understood correctly that in deposing Juárez and installing Maximilian in 1864, Napoleon III was in search of mineral wealth abroad and prestige at home. But Manet could not have known, nor could most others, that in January of 1866 Napoleon had lied to France’s Corps

Législatif when he said, first, that France had done its duty in Mexico, and second, that Maximilian was strong enough to stand alone. The first claim was based on the French army having successfully driven Juárez out of M exico and into Texas, in April of the preceding year—the same month as the end of the American Civil War (and of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, the previous sensation­a l death in the Americas). Napoleon’s second, spurious claim was in fact a consequence of that ending: the French assumption of power in Mexico had depended on the United States being otherwise occupied, and once the Civil War was over, the US government, favoring the Republican cause, had persuaded Napoleon to stop supporting Maximilian. It had even considered an invasion to reinstate Juárez. There was more than one player in this unworthy affair. The United States, having annexed roughly a third of Mexico after the Mexican-American War of 1846–48, had no interest in a European country maintaining influence that might challenge its “manifest destiny” in the region; and Napoleon, rather than be forced to stand against the United States, pulled out his army, thereby eventually sacrificing his proxy.

It is fair to assume that Manet worked in ignorance of all of this. Knowing it now—knowing of the underhanded pact that led to the defeat and execution of Maximilian—adds, I think, both power and poignancy to his painting; for how familiar that betrayal now sounds. However, it speaks of broader subjects than Franco-American culpability in a dishonorable abandonment of French allies to their deaths in the later 1860s.

Manet was correct in saying he was not interested in reconstructing historical figures, but he protested too much when he called that project a joke.

I have suggested that he was interested in staging a reenactment: that is precisely what used to be called history painting, a vivid reimagination and reminder of events of public importance, not so much as a polemical instrument of social or political change than as a mode of understanding both the triumphs and failures of human behavior. On the side of the failures, Manet had great paintings of tragic events to inspire him, notably Théodore Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa of 1818–19, in the Louvre, and especially Eugène Delacroix’s Scene of the Massacre at Chios of 1824, still controversial enough to remain at the Musée du Luxembourg rather than be transferred to the Louvre. Manet’s approach was different, though, in its absence of both emotive drama and the attribution of blame.

An early viewer of the f inal version of the painting in Manet’s studio, Edmond Bazire, said, 119

Manet’s painting reeks of death and rigidity less in the depicted incident —only Mejía is reacting as if being shot—than in the alienating frozenness of the depiction.

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“It is incontestable that the effect is prodigiously terrifying.” For present-day viewers, regularly exposed to far more violent imagery than Manet’s audience was, it is hardly that—except, perhaps, that what remains terrifying is its effect of the absence of affect, drawn to our attention by the one exception of the figure of Mejía, whose head seems gruesomely decapitated by the gun smoke surrounding it. This is in part an anti-Romantic, Realist concern for objectivity akin to Gustave Flaubert’s, who once wrote that there was “nothing feebler than putting one’s personal feelings into a work of art.” Such antisentimental sentiments became part of mainstream modernist taste: suspicion of the display of anything ingratiating. But in this painting by Manet it goes further than the shunning of empathetic appeal.

A critic wrote recently of a violent film by Martin Scorsese, “so calm and remorseless is the clarity with which Scorsese charts the events of that day that you somehow yield to them not as flights of fancy but as the reconstruction of an established truth. Such is the method of the movie: patient, composed, and cool to the point of froideur.” This was Manet’s method, far different from the vivid displays of disaster and despair by the Romantics Géricault and Delacroix. Walter Benjamin wrote of a “kind of mimesis of death,” a “capacity to become rigid” in the writings of Manet’s friend the poet Charles Baudelaire. In these terms, Manet’s painting reeks of death and rigidity less in the depicted incident—only Mejía is reacting as if being shot—than in the alienating frozenness of the depiction, most evident in the mechanical repetition of the execution squad’s soldiers in the final version.

Moreover, the squad’s performance of the execution seems somehow unmotivated. As dis­ cussed in the preceding essay, the raised sword of an officer giving the command to shoot cuts diago­n ally across the background of Manet’s second painting of this subject. It remains in the succeeding oil sketch and lithograph, and—we know from X-rays—originally remained in the final

composition. Painting it out, Manet imagined an execution without an immediate cause, something happening implacably by itself, with spectators looking on, as we now look on, not knowing who commanded the killing. Manet’s decision that his composition would be improved by erasing the sign to shoot suggests he had concluded that the cause of the execution did not matter; what did was the effect, the human cost. The result of death intended, as shown in the second canvas, was bad enough; of death unmotivated and uncaring, in the third, morally far worse.

Manet was frequently accused of indifference, of creating figures without psychological interiority, and the anonymity of the firing squad has often been cited as exemplary of this. In fact, although it is true that the faces of the shooting soldiers cannot be seen, the squad is not so much anonymous as ordinary in its cold automatism. That was why Manet needed realistic uniforms, although they looked French; the alternative—unattributable costumes—could not have provided the standard soldierly effect he required. Compare the result to Picasso’s 1951 nude version of Manet’s canvas, painted to deplore a massacre in the Korean war.

That work may be more straightforwardly polemical, but the soldiers (and victims) are so strangely dehumanized as to have an almost science fiction– like appearance—not, I think, a wise move from the painter of Guernica. Manet painted a group of ordinary human soldiers, shooting in a calm and composed way—conforming to a routine.

When Manet decided to present the squad in this manner, in the first painting he also set apart, at the right, a sergeant paying no attention to the shooting, but looking down instead at the musket he is carrying. His seeming lack of interest has a narrative justification: it was his duty to deliver the coup de grâce if the squad had not managed to kill the condemned men. (In reality, it hadn’t; the squad was inept.) That, in turn, personalizes responsibility for the killing: as noted in the preceding essay, Manet provocatively painted the sergeant’s face to resemble Napoleon III.

Opposite: Édouard Manet, Bullfight, 1865–66, oil on canvas, 18 7⁄8 × 23 ¾ inches (48 × 60.4 cm). The Art Institute of Chicago, Mr. and Mrs. Martin A. Ryerson Collection This page: Édouard Manet, The Execution of Maximilian, 1868–69, oil on canvas, 18 7⁄8 × 22 7⁄8 inches (48 × 58 cm). Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen

In the final canvas, he retained the sergeant preparing for this task, but now showed him standing further from the squad and concentrating on pulling back the firing hammer of his musket. If we notice this, Manet presumably hoped we would also notice that a shadow now falls into the painting at the sergeant’s feet—the shadow of someone standing to look at him from where we ourselves are standing. We wait with him as he waits, apart in his halted world, while the immobile squad fires silently. And we are to imagine him in Querétaro a split second later, starting at the deafening blast of the muskets and then walking over to the victims.

Since we in the West read texts from left to right, it has been conventional in narrative paintings to arrange the movement of the action in that direction too. Manet followed the composition of Goya’s Third of May, 1808, a painting of 1814 in the Prado (a scene of execution discussed in the previous essay), in doing the reverse. Further, he asks us to imagine the sergeant resembling Napoleon soon repeating that movement by walking across the painting from right to left to complete the executions. This doubling of the movement of the narrative adds time to what at first looks like a picture of the instant of execution.

Manet also amplified it in other ways. He had probably seen photographs showing that it was customary to have separate firing squads for each prisoner, which newspaper reports confirmed had indeed been the case in Querétaro. But he ignored that truth to retain from Goya’s Third of May the example of one single squad of soldiers. In the service of vividness and clarity, he also surrendered verisimilitude by showing apparently just three muskets fired in a single salvo by the six soldiers at the three prisoners. But to follow the reactions of the prisoners is to see that he did adopt the fact that the three men did not die simultaneously. Only the general closest to us and at Maximilian’s right, Mejía, seems to have been hit; across his body, the smoke of the muskets is compacted in an ugly dark gray to convey the thud of the bullets. Maximilian himself still lives but, pale and ghostly, seems to be fading into another realm, even while, in a tender

gesture, holding the hand of the other general, Miramón, who remains alert, apart, and curiously observing the action as if it didn’t concern him.

Beside him, the smoke drifts, dispersing in time, transparent in places to the wall behind. Manet shifts temporal as well as spatial relationships, showing us not only the instantaneous moment but also the moment extended in slow motion, and we may replay the action the longer we look, even before we imagine the sergeant walking over to deliver the coup de grâce.

Why, we must wonder, did Manet show General Mejía in death and General Miramón alive? Standing to each side of the blonde-bearded Maximilian, both are conspicuously of what the French then disdainfully called the races latines. Of the two, however, Mejía was the more prominent: an Otomi Indian from Querétaro—like the poor Indians gaw­ king at his execution—he was a deep conservative who had supported the French against the liberal President Juárez in the hope of returning Mexico to monarchism, and to Catholicism as its state religion. Manet perhaps knew no more than the news­papers’ reports that Mejía was Maximilian’s principal commander, the one who had surrendered to Juárez and was therefore most culpable for what was now occurring. But the painter was the son of a prominent member of the French legal administration and had been well informed on Latin American affairs since his days as a naval cadet in Rio de Janeiro, so he may well have known of Mejía’s background, and that the general’s execution was important to the Juárez leadership to erase symbolically the causes for which he stood.

Either way, Mejía was politically the most important man in the painting; and since most of the newspaper reports said that it was Miramón who was killed first, it was a definite decision on Manet’s part to give priority to Mejía. Indeed we may reasonably ask if it is the execution of Mejía that this painting is really about. At the least, by giving him precedence in death, Manet gives prominence to an influential indigenous victim of this sorry business beside an aristocratic European one.

Manet is not po­le­m i­c al; he does not urge. But he does dramatize as he reports. He is political in the strict sense of pictur­i ng the result of an unforgivable ethical failing in the practice of government and international affairs.

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Top: Édouard Manet, The Execution of the Emperor Maximilian, 1868–69, lithograph on chine collé, 13 3⁄8 × 17 ¼ inches (34 × 43.8 cm). Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Rogers Fund Bottom: Anonymous, Execution of Maximilian, 1867, photograph, 2 1⁄8 × 3 5⁄8 inches (5.4 × 9 cm).

Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC

To further complicate the question, there is something odd about the soldiers. They fire their muskets in a horizontal plane parallel to that of the canvas surface and pictorially much closer to us than the diagonally recessive, more distant group of the three victims. I am not suggesting that Manet’s painting implies that the squad was so inept that it missed hitting Mejía, but it does not exactly depict him being hit, only reacting as if he had been. Manet at once shows us this climactic and gruesome moment of the story and leaves us in doubt about it, but does so without clouding the issues; and he complicates the story without complicating the painting.

Most of what is usually called political art is really polemical art, pointing a finger to assert a belief or assign a blame. In that respect, it can substitute for activism, while urging it. Manet is not po­le­m i­c al; he does not urge. But he does dramatize 122

as he reports. He is political in the strict sense of pictur­i ng the result of an unforgivable ethical failing in the practice of government and international affairs, but I think he leaves us with something even more fundamental, something there in the very means of his painting. We owe to him the pioneering modernist, personal lesson: however adept artists are—and Manet was extraordinarily adept—they should not be self-congratulatory in the execution of their work. This was particularly critical in dealing with so important and sensitive a subject. It led Manet to be skillfully prosaic, scrupulously careful not to make perfidy look attractive.

It is true that no work of art has ever prevented or stopped a war. But Manet tells us that a work of art (of any kind), by dispassionately dramatizing an event of war, can warn of how readily unconscionable acts do occur, and of how sadly commonplace institutionalized violence can be.

Bibliographical Note In addition to the publications listed at the end of my previous essay on this subject, from which derive much of the information and many of the quotations presented here, this one has also benefited from: Robert H. Duncan, “Political Legitimation and Maximilian’s Second Empire in Mexico, 1864–1867,” Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 12, no. 1 (Winter 1996):27–66; Brian Hamnett, “Mexican Conservatives, Clericals, and Soldiers: the ‘Traitor’ Tomás Mejía through Reform and Empire, 1855–1867,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 20, no. 2 (2001):187–209; and Kristine Ibsen, “Spectacle and Spectator in Edouard Manet’s Execution of Maximilian,” Oxford Art Journal 29, no. 2 (2006):213–26. I have also quoted from Phong Bui, “Dear Friends and Readers,” The Brooklyn Rail, July–August 2019, p. 7; and from Anthony Lane, “There Was Blood” (on Scorsese’s The Irishman), The New Yorker, November 4, 2019, p. 66.

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VERA LUTTER Vera Lutter: Museum in the Camera, opening in March at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), marks the culmination of Lutter’s nearly two-year residency at the museum. From February 2017 to January 2019, Lutter documented the changing campus of the museum, as well as the permanent collection there, using her distinctive photographic technique. Here, she speaks with the museum’s director, Michael Govan, about the experience.

I wanted to start with a work of art that you made here at lacma as part of this residency. It’s an image of the Rodin garden, one of the sites that you selected to look at. Could you talk about this picture and why you made it?

VERA LUTTER When you first invited me to come to lacma and consider the opportunity to portray a museum and its art, I spent a lot of time walking around the museum, thinking about its different aspects. The Rodin garden was of astounding beauty. Standing on the outdoor plaza level, you’re at the palm trees’ midheight, and you feel how the palms move. You’re standing in the wind, in the movement, in the city, and in the museum all at once. That was part of what I tried to capture with this image.

MG There is this sense of the wind, as there is a blurriness to the foliage in the picture that doesn’t exist in the architecture, which is perfectly sharp.

I think that’s one of the most amazing things about this picture, that subtle movement in the foliage.

When I first encountered your pictures, I found an aspect of memory or even dream to them. You turn the world into an abstraction of black and white, and then its reversal is a further abstraction. I don’t know if that’s a fair thing to talk about, memory and dream, in relation to this.

VL I’m interested in finding a fairly familiar, often urban place, a place we all know well, and in turning this image into my work. I want to keep it recognizable but place it at the edge of something new that makes us interested in exploring what it really is that we’re looking at.

MICHAEL GOVAN

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When I originally asked if you would be interested in doing this, I had this idea that we often remember our past through snapshots, that it becomes harder to conjure actual memories without a picture. People will remember some of the buildings at lacma, Robert Irwin’s Primal Palm Garden, this particular arrangement of Rodin. . . .

Somehow the picture is a kind of ever present memory. I don’t know if you ever think about that in terms of how these images function.

VL Absolutely, but there are so many different forms of memory, and different layers of those forms as well. Some images I found in dreams, others just come up or become clear as I see something in the world. What I make of them is very different. Some of the images I have yet to realize because I haven’t yet found an opportunity in reality to bring them about. I’ve always thought that I’m in a way mapping the world for myself; this map is of course also a memory. After I moved to New York, especially in the beginning, I was excited about the city and I wanted to make it my own, adopt it. Making images of it was an attempt to do so.

MG You’re not a photographer in a traditional sense, because most photographers see something and then make a picture of it. I remember our first conversations, about helping you get into airports— you had a dreamlike image and you were looking for the place that met the dream. But it seems like you have an image in your mind and then you have to find the thing that fits it.

VL That’s right. I know the image I want to make, but then I have to find a place in the world that offers me that opportunity and work on it until it matches my mind’s eye.

MG How this project came about in part was that you had in your mind’s eye an image of museums, right? You had done a few experiments where you MG

had taken your smaller camera into museums and made images of works of art. I feel like you conjured us as a site as well, maybe.

VL That sounds right, I had an idea and I called you. It’s charming to think I conjured you as a site, but I also knew that you were the only person I could do this with.

MG The project really had three parts as we resolved it, which were, one, to look at the exterior of the museum; two, to create what we joked about as “copy stand” images, since your interest was also in making images of other art; and three, the notion of the museum interior. On the second of these principles, you said you’d been interested in photographing collections but people were a little unsure about letting you take an expensive painting to your studio to make an image. In our case we brought you to the museum and you lived in the museum for a while. But working inside a museum, and working with masterpieces of art, is complicated. We had to figure it out through months of discussion. For one of your first very large images of pictures in the collection, for example, you took a big European painting, Ludovico Mazzanti’s Death of Lucretia [c. 1735–37], and made an image that had an exposure time of around thirty-five days, plus or minus. Patrice Marandel was chief curator of European art at the time, and one of the things he said about your picture is that the subject of the painting is martyrdom, and somehow you turned martyrdom into ascension. That was a complete transformation of one subject into another.

Your photograph is and is not a document of the original painting.

I know you’d never made a picture like this before. Did you have an idea of what you would get through this process?

VL I seem to always know, but then my work continues to surprise me. I believe I succeeded

Previous spread: Vera Lutter, Rodin Garden, I: February 22, 2017, 2017, unique gelatin silver print, 95 × 126 inches (241.3 × 320 cm) This page: Vera Lutter, Ludovico Mazzanti, The Death of Lucretia, c. 1735–37: February 10–March 16, 2017, 2017, unique gelatin silver print, 72 1⁄8 × 56 inches (183.2 × 142.2 cm) Opposite: Vera Lutter, Art of the Pacific, II: September 21, 2017–January 5, 2018, 2017–18, unique gelatin silver print, 97 1⁄8 × 168 inches (246.7 × 426.7 cm) Artwork © Vera Lutter

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in extracting an essence from the artworks I photographed. Transferring them into a black-andwhite negative form lets us see their skeleton and structure. It’s a reductive process, in a way a simplification that eliminates distractions. In our case Mazzanti painted martyrdom, but in my image we look at its reversal and realize it is an ascension.

Obviously I am happy to have succeeded in demonstrating this on my first attempt.

MG But this wasn’t in your mind’s eye for a while.

You had done other, smaller experiments, but you’d never actually had a chance to make a big picture of another picture.

VL No, it started with my desire to photograph sculpture. A friend who is a curator at the Metropolitan Museum in New York made it possible for me to photograph in the Greek and Roman collection. I was interested in the fragmented body, the rupture between the once perfect antiquity and what we see today. I photographed works with a smaller, portable version of my camera obscura.

After that first step, the National Gallery of Art in Washington invited me to work with them, and back in New York, The Museum of Modern Art asked me to participate in a project about its sculpture garden. All of those projects were about sculpture; before working with lacma, I’d never photographed painting.

MG For me, though, paintings become more sculptural in your work. Somehow the blackand-white abstraction, the dark chiaroscuro, the light and shade, bring out figures that have a strange kinship to some of your other images of objects and things. They lose some of their flatness. Without the frame, I’m not sure they would read as paintings.

VL Yes, that would be another success of this transformation through my work, but I can only show it because it’s already in the painting.

MG One picture that surprised me definitely has a sculptural quality, the image of objects in our Oceanic tribal-arts collection. How did this picture come to be in your mind?

VL When we structured our project in three parts, as the “trilogy” it became, we started with the anchor of the gallery interior, the European old master painting gallery. You pretty quickly followed up with the wish to create a record of the exterior architecture—back to the idea of memory, you wanted an artistic memory of what was there before it was to change. Then there was also the “copy stand” idea of photographing works from the collection directly and individually. To help me do that the museum created secured spaces in the galleries where I was able to install and photograph pieces of my choice for periods of up to two or three months.

I was excited to find the amazing installation of Oceanic art at lacma when I first visited you.

Curator Nancy Thomas generously allowed me to work with the collection, which was really a dream come true, something incredibly great and fulfilling for me. With the help of lacma’s team and my assistants, we spent days and days arranging these works in front of my camera. I sat inside the camera, looking at the reversed and upsidedown projected image with a wide-open lens, and instructed the team.

MG We should talk about the scale of the camera you’ve been using here at the museum. As you say, it’s a camera you can sit in.

VL Yes, it’s a pinhole camera and the scale is architectural, like a small cabin, about nine feet tall with a ten-by-six-foot footprint. Of course it’s

completely light tight and therefore dark inside.

I usually sit with my back to the lens and look at the image projected on the screen. It takes about a half hour for the eye to adjust to the very little light that comes though the pinhole. At that point one can see the projected image clearly.

MG And you’re using a larger hole here too, not just pinhole size, so that you can get a test image.

With the bigger hole you get something that in pinhole-camera terms is like an instant image— what might take months with the pinhole takes a few days?

VL That’s right. This is new for me and became a necessity when making images in galleries with very low light levels. The larger opening projects a brighter image, which is of course much less focused, but it lets me determine what I’m seeing and what I’m doing.

In any case, after this extensive installation of the Oceanic works, we came up with the arrangement in the photograph. It is intentionally ahistorical and intuitive, bringing creatures together that aren’t from the same tribe or island and might not really speak the same language, but I wanted them to interact with one another and I believe I succeeded in doing that. This was a three-month exposure and for all that time I kept that part of the collection in my secured space. The museum maintained it meticulously every day during this period.

MG On one level it might not make art-historical or geographic sense, but it is also true that these objects weren’t meant for museums; they were meant to be animated, to be part of performances, to be living things. I think that in this picture is a kind of living abstracted energy.

VL My technique lets me change the scale of objects. Some appear to be much bigger in the image than they really are, and they gain greater prominence, displaying their full spirit and power.

MG I want to go back now to your discovery of this approach: it uses photographic techniques but it’s a lot like painting, and we’ve talked about your involvement in sculpture. I know architecture, too, is very much part of it because you literally build spaces to make pictures. Your first camera was— VL My bedroom.

MG Your bedroom. Can you talk a little about this? It’s a bit of an epiphany. You’d never even picked up a camera to make art, right?

VL Just before I left Munich for New York, in 1993, I experimented a little with photographic collage work, but before that I made ceramics and then objects. I knew change was in the air so it was great to come to New York. I lived in a terrific space on the twenty-seventh floor of a highrise in the Garment District with fabulous views to the east over the entire neighborhood and the Empire State Building. The view south was the World Trade Center and Ellis Island. This was so new and impressive that in my first piece I wanted to bring all these impressions of my new life into one image. That’s when the idea came up to turn the space into a camera obscura, to capture these many impressions and sensations.

MG In addition, you’re using your portable camera on Wednesdays, when we’re closed to the public.

Between 5 P.M. on Tuesday and 11 A.M. on Thursday is just enough time to be able to make what we’ve been calling the “point and shoot” pictures, where you use a smaller box.

Yes, these smaller box cameras of mine are roughly thirty by twenty by fifteen inches. I came up with that early on, when I started doing this work. It was hard for me to find locations that would accommodate my request to photograph using a room-size camera. In the museum it gave me the flexibility to move through the galleries and experiment with time and light and the great variety of art displayed. These small images are surprisingly hard to make—time and again I’m surprised how hard they are.

MG Are there things you’ve learned from being in the museum, things you’re going to do in the future because of this?

VL I learn every day, every hour I make work, but this has been an extraordinary opportunity to work in a way that I probably never will again. At lacma I had four room-sized cameras installed, all of them recording at the same time but essentially different installations or aspects of the museum. One of them had two seven-month runs, another began on an exterior site and then was brought into the museum and used there for a three-month exposure. Given the complexity of the installations, the enormous timeline, the expertise in lighting, and much more, the opportunities the museum afforded me were entirely unique. But the most wonderful experience was the intimate and almost unlimited exposure to art. The museum gave me such deep and personal time with art, the kind of time that is necessarily revealing on many levels. It was a unique experience, and the outcome, however carefully I planned and thought it through, was always a surprise to some degree. Every moment was learning.

VL

Text: © 2020 Museum Associates/LACMA

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STAN L E Y WHITNEY

THE RUI NS

F o r A m e r ic a n pa i n t e r S ta n l e y W h i t n e y, I ta ly r e m a i n s a c e n t r a l a n d e n du r i n g s ou rc e o f i n s pi r at ion . A h e a d o f h i s u p com i n g e x h i b i t ion o f r e c e n t pa i n t i n g s at G ag o s i a n , Rom e , M at t h e w J e f f r e y A b r a m s , t h e au t h o r o f a n e w mon o g r a ph on t h e a rt i s t, r e f l e c t s on t h e pro f ou n d a n d fa r- r e ac h i ng i n f lu e nc e of t h e c i t y ’ s a rt a n d a rc h i t e c t u r e on W h i t n e y ’ s a rt.

Previous spread: Stanley Whitney, Naples, 1997. Photo: Anne Yoch This page: Stanley Whitney, Palazzo Farnese, Rome, c. 1994 130

At right about this time last spring, Stanley Whitney and I began meeting and conversing. I would describe our subsequent chats, which have spanned the interim period, as “casually intense.” By this I simply mean that we seem to share a desire to really talk about his work—to grapple with it, rather than simply label it—while also sharing a desire not to take ourselves too seriously.

What follows is an excerpt from a book, Stanley Whitney (forthcoming from Lund Humphries, London), that first took shape during those initial meetings.

One could say that the story of Stanley’s career is also an argument for a certain way of looking at the world, which today feels more important than ever.

All the more reason to highlight the painter’s years in Rome, which marked a crucial turning point in his practice. Indeed, there has been no greater watershed moment in Stanley’s career than his extended visit to the Eternal City in 1992. Consider what fol­lows, then, as some brief notes on that era: an introduction to an artist in crisis and an artist in triumph.

Color Bar remains one of Whitney’s crucial paintings. Dating from 1997, it inhabits the rough midpoint in Whitney’s later maturation, between the breakout dots of the 1980s, such as Sixteen Songs (1984), and the monumental canvases of the 2010s, such as Night Café (2017). This was when those trademark horizontal registers finally appeared, a maneuver that stabilized the picture plane while avoiding anything like the grid and its enforced precision. Whitney also honed his already energetic brushwork: a daub and streak here, a flick and slash there. Now his colors became so thinned out that they blend and smear, like the rose-pink and speckled yellow blocks near the top of Color Bar, or the azure and malachite-green blocks near the bottom.

This feels less like painting oil than spreading water.

Whitney’s gestures create shapes within the shapes, although in a manner that diverges from his earlier, stained fields. We should, in turn, remember how Whitney himself describes this shift: “connections, not layers.”1

Paintings like this mark the late-1990s moment when Whitney’s circular forms vanished. The sweet little color dumplings of Sixteen Songs, which persisted throughout the early 1990s, were squared off. The formal arrangements for which Whitney is best known today—seas of right angles—would soon dominate the painter’s practice. If nothing else, this ongoing project demonstrates a real fastidiousness, and an eagerness for labor. Whitney, a child of Baptists, may have escaped his parents’ faith, but he couldn’t escape their Protestant work ethic, and there is an almost scientific spirit in this practice— something rigorous and disciplined. Consider the sheer endurance required to investigate a single compositional arrangement for thirty-five years and counting (the geometries may have changed, but the geography, as it were, remains the same). There are precedents for such dedication, of course, perhaps most notably the old Bauhaus Meister Josef Albers, who produced an almost unimaginable archive of color relations with his epic series Homage to the

Stanley Whitney, Sixteen Songs, 1984, oil on linen, 66 × 108 ¼ inches (167.6 × 275 cm) 131

Square (1950–76). The critic Robert Storr expertly flushes out the two men’s connection in his essay “The Sound He Sees”: It may be helpful to mention that Whitney studied at the Yale University School of Art, where, after his stint teaching at Black Mountain College, Josef Albers served as overall director of the program. In that capacity Albers empirically tested and revamped Bauhaus pedagogy most importantly perhaps in the way artists were taught about color. The key to his method was to stress that a given hue was never absolute and immutable, but rather always something to see in relation to other hues, and that the visual inter­ action amongst any combination of colors alters them—a dim patch of red becomes radiant when surrounded by darker shades, or a bright patch of yellow becomes muted when embedded in a still more saturated yellow.2

Storr is right. Like Albers before him, Whitney does not play favorites. Both artists are equal-­ opportunity color lovers. In terms of palette, each is a chromophiliac—a genuinely polyamorous painter. And in both cases, one simple format— trios of nested squares for the German, stacks of connected blocks for the American—provided enough source material for a lifetime of inquiry. But while Albers meditated on the interaction of color, Whitney, we shall see, became more concerned with the space of color, if not its mass. And in this way it is the intense seriality of Giorgio Morandi, not that of Albers, that most closely rhymes with Whitney’s later project. This Italian modernist plumbed the aesthetic and philosophical depths of a weighty or dense kind of painting. The very idea sustained him for decades. Always more phenomenal than optical, Whitney’s work was about to make its own, decidedly architectural turn.

Can color be architectural? Which is to say, is there room in our conception of color for, well,

room? What would it mean if we could find “space in color, instead of color in space,” as Whitney so cannily puts it?3 Sixteen Songs set an important precedent for later works of Whitney’s such as Untitled of 1992. The whirling dervishes of color, which seemed to float and drift at will through Sixteen Songs, are now ordered into loose rows (more like stacks). Note the drips. Note the rills of oil running down the linen, some even dripping off the bottom stretcher.

Get closer to the canvas and you’ll see tributaries of washed-out paint, thinned to its very limits. The palette here is dark and muddied with fluorescent snatches peering through, which is atypical but also not unheard of for Whitney, who interests himself in all manner of color arrangements. Within each color stack are loose shapes filled with gorgeous strokes of paint that create a loose hatching or a wandering line.

Like these two paintings, their two years, 1984 and 1992, form a continuum in Whitney’s career. The first brought him to the American West; the second

Stanley Whitney, page from the artist’s sketchbook, 1994, graphite on paper 132

brought him to Rome; both brought him to space. In retrospect, Whitney sees the connection:

“Where am I in this mix?” And then I went to Rome, and that’s when architecture came in.4

But Sixteen Songs, that was a big year because I was traveling across the country a lot, and going through landscapes, and sitting up on great spots. . . . Yes, the southwest, the Four Corners, Canyon De Chelly, Grand Canyon, Monument Valley . . . all the sacred places of the West . . . the Badlands . . . North Dakota. We went to all these places with Marina [Adams, Stanley’s wife and fellow painter]. I was teaching at Berkeley and Stanford for a few semesters. We enjoyed it a lot. And that kind of landscape really influenced me. That kind of openness in space, that kind of light. . . . I really think of it as an American kind of space. A big open space. But it was all about landscape and I didn’t want it to be landscapes, I wanted it to be space. So I was still looking for my paintings, asking, like . . . “What are my paintings?,” looking at everything I could wondering

It is no coincidence that Untitled was painted the same year Whitney relocated to Italy. First, to move from the American West to the Eternal City is to go from inhabiting a region defined by awesome landscapes to inhabiting a land defined by awesome landscape paintings. While the painters of the Northern Renaissance arguably got there first, the origins of the entire Western tradition of landscape painting are no less rooted in Italy. And what better place to think about space, fresh from a place like Canyon de Chelly, in Arizona, than by the Pantheon and the Forum, surrounded by all those lovely Cinquecento portraits of seated courtiers, always with a window over their shoulder opening out onto a larger world—a new conceit that allowed more space into the picture plane five centuries ago. Such works did not go unnoticed by Whitney, but it was really Rome’s buildings—recalling the geologic

formations of the American West in their rootedness and scale—that held his fascination. “Looking at all the architecture in Rome,” he recalls, “and really being knocked out by the Colosseum and those great monuments, it was really starting to affect my work.”5 Indeed it was. In Naples’s Museo Archeologico Nazionale, an unmatched repository for ancient art, Whitney encountered the famed Boscoreale frescoes. Consider for a moment what these frescoes would have meant to an artist then obsessed with ancient Roman space and architecture. Perhaps the finest surviving examples of Roman Second Style wall paintings, panels like those from the Villa Boscoreale are treasures of human culture. In one of these frescoes, a pair of fluted columns flanks an interior, smoother pair adorned with ionic capitals.

The rich red of the fresco wall has since faded, but imagine this very room filling up with ash from an erupting Mount Vesuvius, burying and preserving the works from 79 AD until their discovery, in 1977.

Stanley Whitney, Color Bar, 1997, oil on linen, 72 ¾ × 85 ¼ inches (184.8 × 216.5 cm) 133

Note carefully the narrow bands or registers that divide the illusory space, itself filled with all kinds of trompe l’oeil devices, like the columns, the chandelier with its winged, putto-esque god, and the row of statuettes holding up an illusory shelf like miniature caryatids. The Pompeiian artist smartly balanced color, restricting himself to some muted gray blues, a luscious pastel red, and a warm dirty yellow.

Encountering Boscoreale is different from encountering, say, the Colosseum: Whitney was looking at a surviving element of ancient Roman architecture, itself composed of trompe l’oeil paintings of ancient Roman architecture—a sort of mise en abyme of antique space. And as it had for so many scholars, writers, and artists before him, Boscoreale entered Whitney’s mind and would not leave (Whitney’s mature format, comprising paintings within paintings, forms another mise en abyme). Moreover, Untitled of 1992, Whitney admits, became an astonishing translation of Boscoreale, in both its sophisticated conception of space and its brackish-beige

palette.6 And by the by, weren’t these murals among the works that inspired Morandi, who also created his own architectural space in painting?

How do we differentiate between a space and a field? Is it not true that fields allow for color to exist as a concept, while space allows for color to exist as an object? These are the sorts of aesthetic questions that Stanley likes to ask, to the viewers of his paintings as to the visitors to his studio. Indeed, his unique conception of space-in-color—as something anti­podal to color-in-space—has propelled his work for more than thirty years. And for what it’s worth, it seems to magnify whenever he works out of his Italian studio, where he summers every year, and where he can dwell both upon and within domestic Italian architecture.

The move to Rome was crucial for Whitney, but his life abroad held one more surprise. “The last piece of the puzzle wasn’t Rome,” Whitney says. “It was Egypt.”7 The space between Rome and Giza is the space between Untitled of 1992 and Color Bar five years later. The shift is visually apparent, to be sure:

Stanley Whitney, How to Speak to Trees, 2019, oil on linen, 96 × 96 inches (243.8 × 243.8 cm) 134

the same verve that Whitney had applied to his lines of ink on Mylar he now applied to swatches of color.

Those earlier works, which span from the late 1960s into the early 1970s, represent another radical aesthetic break for the even-younger artist: partly under the influence of Philip Guston, Whitney swung deep into line, and drawing, in these years. The Mylars consisted of energetic ink-wash lines and fields applied to a synthetic, transparent medium.

Two decades later, those sweeping, unf linching lines reappear, only now they articulate much neater geometries (as in Color Bar). Note as well how the interstitial spaces between the discrete forms that we find in Untitled have been squeezed out of Color Bar. These new forms, all loosely rectangular, stand cheek by jowl, and in rows no less neat than the trompe l’oeil registers of Boscoreale. This shift involved a gradual filling out, an understanding that putting color all over a canvas in greater and greater densities wouldn’t necessarily stifle the painting.

By the time we reach the later works, such as Night Café or the deliriously beautiful Homa Roma from the same year (or, for that matter, Home Rome of 2018), this densifying has advanced. Yet the works still don’t feel choked or glutted, but rather bathed in powerful colors. All of this, in turn, goes back not to Naples but to Giza, where, in 1994, Whitney and his partner Adams made a trip to see the pyramids.

That, Whitney claims, is where he found the confidence to make this final step:

I can see how Whitney could have stood at the base of the Great Pyramid, beheld this veritable mountain of stacked blocks, and got to thinking about mass, density, and various stacking operations.

There was no longer a need, he realized, to ventilate the canvas. The air, as he said, was already in the color. And besides, if this unimaginably heavy pile of stone could still have a sense of lightness about it—if it could almost float on the horizon, silhouetted by the Mediterranean sun—then surely his paintings could absorb a heavy load too. There is, then, in both I started telling myself I had to go to Egypt, the Great Pyramid and in a monumental work like because in front of the Pantheon, I was amazed Homa Roma, a sort of tender massiveness—a gentle­by the size of the pillars, and in Egypt, I knew the ness that manifests despite an object’s size and power. scale would be even more impressive. . . . I really An “intimate immensity,” we might call it, to borrow felt I had to go there. . . . When I went there, I Gaston Bachelard’s famous phrase.9 And is this not realized I could put all the color together and not what it means to find space where none was thought lose the air: I realized the space was in the color. to exist?

That’s when I started making my mature paintings. 1993, 1994. I went there, and I was like “Got Text © Matthew Jeffrey Abrams. Text adapted from Stanley Whitney it!” Density was the last piece of the puzzle.8 (London: Lund Humphries, 2020).

1. Stanley Whitney, in an interview with the author, spring 2019.

2. Robert Storr, “The Sound He Sees,” in Stanley Whitney: Dance the Orange, exh. cat. (New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem, 2015), p. 44.

3. Whitney, in interview with the author. Stanley has used similar terms with others in the past.

4. Whitney, in Grégoire Lubineau, “Interview Stanley Whitney,” transcript of unpublished interview, p. 30. Lubineau, then a graduate student, later translated the interview into French and included it in the appendix to his thesis. The original transcript cited here, therefore, is the more accurate of the two.

5. Ibid., 33.

6. Whitney, in interview with the author.

7. Whitney, in Lubineau, “Interview Stanley Whitney,” 32.

8. Ibid.

9. See Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 1957, Eng. trans. Maria Jolas (New York: Penguin, 2014).

Stanley Whitney, That’s Rome, 2019, oil on linen, 96 × 96 inches (243.8 × 243.8 cm) Artwork © Stanley Whitney

Photos: courtesy the artist 135

JAY DEFEO Suzanne Hudson speaks with Leah Levy, executive director of the Jay DeFeo Foundation, about the artist’s life and work.

Let’s start with the painting Incision [1958–60], as I just saw it yesterday at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. When you walk into the gallery, you come across it obliquely at first; it’s hanging on the wall immediately to the left. What struck me was its physical presence. It’s wall-bound, but it’s really a spatial object; it protrudes into the room. It made me think of Albert Pinkham Ryder, of the accumulation of paint and process that’s so visibly manifest in his work. But in Ryder’s paintings, quite unwittingly, the outer coating seems almost like a balloon holding all the interior contents, as if they’d slid down the surface over the years. Incision seems much more tensile, and impervious to time, even though it seems to register the accumulation of time through its evident and labor-intensive process. The gallery is dotted with freestanding sculpture, which underscores how sculptural the work is.

So perhaps we can begin with how Jay DeFeo thought about mediums and the sanctity of their conventions, and how much she cared about those categories at different points in her career.

LEAH LEVY From the beginning, DeFeo defied the notion of a hierarchy of mediums, even as a student at the University of California, Berkeley, in the late 1940s. In addition to general college-curriculum and art and history classes, she took courses in sculpture, at that time given through the architecture department. She was very unhappy with what she called “that terrible Plasticine,” the only material that was offered, so she brought in rags, plaster, and sticks to work with, creating freestanding works or large shaped forms adhered to the wall, innovations that she worked with for the next decade and beyond. In the late 1950s, when she was gaining recognition for works like Incision, she SUZANNE HUDSON

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referred to her work as “a marriage between painting and sculpture.”

Her studio process included sometimes reaching for what was available. She was often attracted to materials and objects outside the tradition of artmaking, although she was highly influenced by her deep knowledge of art history as well.

SH It’s interesting that she was thinking about this—about a cross-media approach to making, and the pragmatism of taking what’s at hand and making something out of it—in the late 1950s. It seems so distinct from what was happening in New York at that moment, with the consolidation of Clement Greenberg’s theories about medium specificity and formalism. Her work offers a totally other world of possibility to that; it feels less oppositional and more about the possibilities within materials and seeing a longer history of art. Maybe she comes closer to Robert Rauschenberg and his Combines [1954–64], though his concerns were quite different from hers.

LL Certainly she was free of the burden of Greenbergian dogma. But her work was really a mix. There are relationships between it and that of other artists in the San Francisco Bay Area, but her art didn’t fit with California found art or Funk, or with the assemblage movement. Creating work based on the dictates of materials and her response to them was part of the process that inspired and drove her: a powerful mingling of intent and discovery.

SH To go back a little, would you talk about how she got to Berkeley?

LL She was from the Bay Area. When she graduated from high school, she wanted to go to art school but her father in­s isted on a university. So she went to Berkeley and got a BA and MA in art there, taking a full range of courses, especially in

art and art history. She sought out whatever nonWestern history courses were available. And she was a voracious reader throughout her life.

While she was at Berkeley, Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still were teaching at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco, but she never studied there. She saw black-and-white pictures of Abstract Expressionist work, read about it and heard the talk, but she didn’t see the actual work or know the people—she was in a different milieu.

The teaching at Berkeley was still focused on Cézanne and Cubism.

SH And Hans Hofmann had taught at Berkeley in the early 1930s.

LL Yes, Hofmann had a huge influence at the school, even though he was only there for two summers. He taught some of DeFeo’s professors and influ­enced that program profoundly by instilling a spirit of experimentation. More directly, DeFeo was supported and inspired by Margaret Peterson, whose interest in cave paintings and other prehistoric work had a lifelong impact on DeFeo’s art.

SH What did she do after graduating?

LL She won a postgrad scholarship for travel.

She spent three months each in Paris and London, tracing images of cave paintings from the libraries, and soaking up the “old crumbly walls,” which looked to her like ready-made Abstract Expressionist paintings. The general atmosphere and grayness of postwar Europe impressed her a great deal.

After traveling through Spain and Morocco, DeFeo settled in Florence, where she found a wonderful place to live and work and made hundreds of works. These are recognized as her first mature artworks and her most clearly defined Abstract Expressionist period. She made her own egg tempera in rich colors and developed a

voca­bulary of shapes and forms that she continued to build on. There are quite a few crosses in these works, but she said they were not religious; rather, they were inspired by church architecture and other structures she saw as she rode through Florence on her bicycle. There’s a sense of her finally being in a situation where she could paint uninterrupted for the first time, and she worked at a feverish pace.

On the way back to California, she stopped in New York for three weeks, in January 1953. She saw a lot of art and also created sculpture while she was there, the Unflyable Kites—objects that hung from the ceiling and were based on architectural forms. She also made a series of beautiful drawings on stationery. Then she returned to Berkeley, and soon moved from a large studio to a small apartment and started making tiny sculptures. When she needed income, the tiny sculptures morphed into what became accomplished jewelry objects, which she sold.

SH It strikes me that with the Unflyable Kites, something capable of movement is arrested in its location. Meanwhile the jewelry is composed of small components that move with the body; it’s flexible and allows for motion.

LL Right. Even with the jewelry there was a tethering, as it was attached to the body. We have a note from her about one of the earrings that says, “Sprays of wire are movable and have the effect of shooting stars when worn.” She imagined them flying through space as they moved.

Twenty years later, in the late 1970s, some of the jewelry became models for an extraordinary series of drawings that capture the sense of a portrait of an object in motion. This play of setting objects in space was fascinating to DeFeo, blurring the definitions of landscape, portraiture, and still life. At the same time, she was putting her attention on other objects in her life as models.

There were swimming goggles, because she was learning to swim. There were shoe trees, which she drew in great detail, examining them from every angle and imbuing them with anthropomorphic character. She composed portraits of her compasses and her tripod.

Some of these drawings are masterful in their delicacy, and others, of the same objects, are so abstracted, so layered, that they’re sculptural. She tore the paper, cut holes in it, layering materials in very unlikely ways. Her interest in investing these everyday objects with enlivened attributes led to a series of interrelated, almost kinetic drawings.

She was especially happy when an artwork transcended the object model and created a new, not quite recognizable image. She was after the mystery of evolving shape and form.

SH So both the jewelry and the everyday items and personal attributes contributed to the change of scale in the 1970s, with the works being extrapolated from what almost become maquettes, but not only for sculptures. The translation into the image field of something with volume that takes up real space and has many facets also seems so important to her. How do you think the move from Berkeley to San Francisco in the 1950s contributed to the work she did in the intervening years?

LL By that time she had met Wally Hedrick, who was studying at the California College of Arts and Crafts. In 1955 they rented a studio together on Fillmore Street in San Francisco, in what would become a kind of “grand hotel” of artists, musicians, and poets, famous as the center of great artmaking and of great parties. Joan Brown, Sonia Gechtoff, Ed Moses—an array of artists lived

Previous spread: Jay DeFeo working on The Rose (then titled Deathrose), photographed

by Burt Glinn in 1960 © Burt Glinn/Magnum Photos, New York Opposite: Jay DeFeo, Pend O’Reille No. 1 (Eternal Triangle series), 1980, acrylic with collage on Masonite, 48 × 72 1⁄8 inches (121.9 × 183.2 cm) This page: Jay DeFeo, Untitled (Jewelry series), 1977, acrylic, charcoal, graphite, and ink on paper, 20 × 15 inches (50.8 × 38.1 cm) Following page: Jay DeFeo, Geisha II, 1984/87, oil with tape on canvas, 96 × 72 inches (243.8 × 182.9 cm) Artwork © 2020 The Jay DeFeo Foundation/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

there at different times. Poets Joanna McClure and Michael McClure were residents, Dave Getz from Big Brother and the Holding Company lived there for a while, and many others. Through the McClures, DeFeo met Bruce Conner, and they became lifelong friends.

The scale of her work grew in the Fillmore studio. In 1957 and 1958, she started working on twelve-foot-high sheets of heavy paper. She also cobbled together really large canvases and started to develop an incredibly poetic, painterly style, using a palette knife to apply the paint and create texture. The Verónica [1957] is actually painted on paper mounted on canvas, as some of her paintings are into the late 1980s. She liked the feeling of working on paper but wanted the stability of the canvas.

SH Right. She was prominent within this community, but how early did her work find audiences beyond her immediate peers, and even beyond the broader San Francisco context?

LL She received recognition very early on.

Walter Hopps became interested in her work as he was developing Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in the mid-1950s; he included her work in many exhibitions there over the years. Then in the summer of 1959 Dorothy Miller, curator at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, came to San Francisco to visit artists’ studios as she was preparing the exhibition Sixteen Americans, which opened in December of that year. She visited DeFeo and decided to include works by both DeFeo and Hedrick in that groundbreaking show.

Fascinatingly, though DeFeo was still working on The Rose [1958–66] and therefore could not exhibit it in Sixteen Americans, an image of it in its unfinished state was reproduced by Miller in the catalogue. So there was an intense draw to The Rose—now of course her best-known work—even

early in the process of its making. Sixteen Americans opened and within a month or two, after working on the painting for a year, DeFeo adhered the original canvas to a larger one in order to “center the center,” as she said. She worked on it until early 1966. The Rose is now in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art and is currently on view there through 2021.

When DeFeo and Hedrick had to leave their apartment in 1965, Hopps—who had been watching the making of The Rose over the years—arranged for the painting to be removed from her studio and transported to the Pasadena Art Museum, where he was director. This was accomplished by cutting out a section under a second-story window of the studio building’s front wall, a process Conner captured in his beauti­f ul film The White Rose [1967]. After The Rose went to Pasadena, DeFeo followed and for three months did the final work on the painting.

SH It brings to mind Marcel Duchamp and The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (aka The Large Glass) [1915–23], the work he called “definitively unfinished” until it shattered in transit after it was shown at the Brooklyn Museum. Only then did he decide it was done.

LL And both were created over a span of eight years. We have photographs in the Foundation archive showing a portrait of Duchamp hanging in DeFeo’s studio.

SH Coming back to the question of the institutionalization of DeFeo’s art, what happened after Pasadena?

LL For close to a decade she lived essentially in obscurity. She and Hedrick split and she moved to Marin County, north of San Francisco. In 1969 she moved to a house with a tiny porch, where she was able to create a studio, and she started to make 139

art again. This began a new decade of fresh sources and materials. The first major work she did was After Image [1970], now at the Menil. It’s an exquisite, small drawing of a shell form bursting out from an overlay of tracing paper, like a chick from its shell—a rebirth, in a way.

She didn’t use oil paint during the 1970s, and she didn’t work on canvas, for various reasons: acrylics became more available to her in the early 1970s, and they were cheaper and dried more quickly than oil. Masonite and plywood were also accessible and much more stable supports than canvas, which was the issue that had overwhelmed the stability of The Rose. The works she was making were still very textured. In the 1950s and 1960s, she had made oil behave like a sculptural material, and in the 1970s she made acrylic imitate oil in some ways, adding textured media to the paint. At one point she added Bisquick for additional texture.

She was also collaging paper and plastic sheeting and even some objects in her paintings.

This was also the decade in which DeFeo was ab­sorbed with photography, making many hundreds of photographs, photocollages, and photocopies that only came to be understood and exhibited after her death.

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And the transition to Oakland, and back to oil paint? Will you say more about her last decade?

LL In 1981 DeFeo moved to Oakland, California, and was hired to teach painting at Mills College, a position she held until the end of her life. She built the largest studio she had ever had, enjoyed her community at Mills, and had money to buy supplies and more. Good gallery representation in San Francisco and Los Angeles generated public exposure to her art. She started to work in oil on canvas again with both trepidation and relish.

DeFeo was photographing what she was doing in the studio, surrounding herself with her early work and adding images of works by other artists. She was opening up to a new level of ab­strac­ tion based on her own eccentric models—torn and cut photocopies, images of Japanese prints hung upside down, a realm of “models” that intrigued her. She also made large paintings with colors she hadn’t used as extensively since the 1950s— the 1970s works were almost exclusively black and white.

And she began to travel—to Japan and to Europe, and in 1987 to Africa, where she climbed Mount Kenya. When she came back, she did an extraordinary series of works titled Reflections of SH

Africa. Not long after that, she developed a cough, which she soon learned was lung cancer. In the last year and a half of her life, with her uncompromising hand and eye, she made an extensive body of works that all but vibrate with spiritual energy.

SH With DeFeo’s work there’s development and experimentation, but there’s also consistent commitment, irrespective of who was watching. And now, because of the halting moments of reception during her lifetime, it’s as though the work were being delivered to us all at once, in a way that doesn’t often happen. The framing of her work, and not only of The Rose, now seems to relate less to 1958 or 1968 than to 2020. Do you have any thoughts on that?

LL What I see is that artists internationally are drawn to her work in a profound way, for a number of reasons. One is the fearlessness of her experimentation—an openness to new ideas that created their own internal frameworks, and therefore not like anything else. Her work can be positioned art historically, but it’s an uneasy categorizing; the work makes its own place. Her exceptional relationship with materials—following their unlikely directions and communing with their sensations and possibilities—is revelatory. There’s an enormous pull to her work because of that inventiveness. Her works also resist traditional definitions, predating the opening up of medium and genre that is blossoming now.

SH It’s work that’s so true to itself at every stage, but it never occupies a head-in-the-sand kind of position, and I think that’s really rare. A lot of the language of AbEx had an almost onanistic singularity; somehow being self-expressive necessarily meant that although you were in proximity with others, you paid no attention to them—you wouldn’t admit that you had any relation to anything and had to negate it if you did. But her language has a sense of erudition—the voracious reading that you mentioned, the imbibing of the history of art and architecture, you feel that in the work, even though you don’t see didactic pretensions or clear references. It’s as though she were acknowledging that she wasn’t alone in the world, even when she was actually working much more on her own than a lot of others were. I feel like her work is very human in that it is about proximity, maybe to people and ideas, art, the stuff close at hand. And the fact that she didn’t sell a lot of work during her lifetime meant that she lived with it in a different way than if she had sold more of it off throughout.

LL It was alive for her. In every period of her life, she reviewed and surrounded herself with early work, pairing it with what she was doing in the studio, historicizing it all for herself—and now, as it turns out, for us.

SH Did she destroy any work?

LL She told her students never to throw anything away, but we know she did destroy work over the years. Her process of surrounding herself with her own work and images from art history is documented by hundreds of photographs of works in progress in her studio. These photographs sometimes record works that her journals say she later destroyed.

SH Increasingly over time, her own work became a source she was looking at alongside works by other artists.

LL Exact ly. T hose connect ions drove and refreshed her imagination and inventiveness.

An exhibition of works by Jay DeFeo will be presented at Gagosian, London, June 4–July 31.

New York March 5–8 2020

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In April 1957 the protean artist Marcel Duchamp delivered his manifesto “The Creative Act” to the American Federation of Arts in Houston, Texas.

His conclusion: The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualification and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.

This becomes even more obvious when posterity gives a final verdict and sometimes rehabilitates forgotten artists.1

ISABELLE WALDBERG

Jacquelynn Baas profiles Isabelle Waldberg, writing on the sculptor’s many friendships and the influence of her singular creations.

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Duchamp’s final words imply that each generation brings new ways of seeing to the perception and evaluation of art and artists. Duchamp was always involved in the art of his time, but the phrase “rehabilitating forgotten artists” suggests he may have intended to close his address with a word of encouragement to his artist friends.

One of the closest of these was Isabelle Waldberg. Born Margaretha Isabella Maria Farner in the canton of Zurich in German Switzerland in 1911, Waldberg came from a long line of blacksmiths, but her father, as the younger son, could not inherit the family forge and was relegated to farming. Waldberg loved spending time at her uncle’s forge, and it is tempting to attribute her future career as a sculptor to her family history.

In 1932 she moved to Zurich, where she studied sculpture and immersed herself in the city’s art scene.

In 1936, Waldberg relocated to Paris, where she got to know a number of artists including her compatriot Alberto Giacometti, who would be an artistic influence on her. At that point in her life, she was a free spirit who derived an income from the sale of her erotic drawings and small sculptures. In 1937 she met the American writer and political activist Patrick Waldberg at Café Dôme.

They quickly became romantically involved, and Patrick convinced her to use the name Isabelle (his estranged wife was named Margareta). Patrick was associated with the writer and political subversive Georges Bataille, and together he and Isabelle became core members of Bataille’s secret society, Acéphale. When Bataille’s partner Colette Peignot, known as Laure, died of tuberculosis in November 1938, Isabelle and Patrick moved in with him at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, near Marly Forest—site of Acéphale’s secret sacrificial and sexual rituals, in which Isabelle appears to have played a central role.2 With the onset of World War II, Acéphale unraveled and Patrick volunteered to serve in the French infantry. In August 1940 he was awarded the Croix de Guerre and demobilized. As an American citizen, Patrick preceded Isabelle to the United States, where he lived for a while in New York and then traveled through California and the West. With considerable difficulty, Isabelle finally managed to come to New York with their young son, Michel, in July 1942, one month after Duchamp’s return to the city. The little family moved into an apartment at 18 East 57th Street, one floor above Duchamp’s friend and future biographer Robert Lebel and his family. Isabelle and Patrick married in September 1942, just before he departed for London, where he had been assigned by the American Office of War Information (sponsor of Voice of America, where Patrick found employment for artist friends including André Breton). Patrick subsequently moved between

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Previous spread: Isabelle Waldberg, with Construction (1943), in her studio, New York, 1943.

Photo: H. Brammer Opposite: Isabelle Waldberg’s studio on rue d’Orsel, Paris, c. 1960.

Photo: Michel Waldberg, courtesy Corinne Waldberg This page, top: Isabelle Waldberg, Zurich, c. 1931 This page, bottom: Isabelle Waldberg, Luminaire, 1946, plaster, 15 × 9 7⁄8 × 8 ¼ inches (38 × 25 × 21 cm). Fonds de dotation Jean-Jacques Lebel © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris

London, North Africa, and Paris while Isabelle remained in New York, seeing him only briefly on the rare occasions when he could get leave. Meanwhile, Isabelle developed a romantic and intellectual relationship with Lebel that would last until Lebel’s death, in 1986.

Isabelle Waldberg quickly immersed herself in New York’s artistic and intellectual life. In a hardware store, she discovered flexible birch dowels that she could soak in water, bend, and fasten together with string along the lines of Giacometti’s spare Palace at 4 A .M . (1932), which had deeply impressed her when she saw it in his Paris studio in 1936. She was encouraged to pursue her new “dematerialized” sculpture by Breton and Lebel, who early in 1944 published a book of

erotic poetry, Masque à lame, featuring photographs of Waldberg’s “constructions,” as she called them.3 The title Masque à lame translates into English as “Blade mask.” Lebel’s son Jean-Jacques plausibly suggests that his father’s title is a pun on masque à l ’âme—“mask for the soul”—in other words, the body. 4 “I loved my life in New York,” Waldberg recalled in 1963. “In Paris I had studied ethnology at the Sorbonne and I became friends with André Breton and Marcel Duchamp. Marcel seemed kind to everyone, but he didn’t really like people that much.

Of course, he had very good friends, but he only liked a few people. He didn’t talk much; he wasn’t like the other Surrealists.”5 There is little doubt that Waldberg was one of the young women who occupied the bed of the charismatic “Inventor of Free Time,” as Lebel portrayed Duchamp in a contemporaneous story.6 Although it is hard to know how close she had been to Duchamp in Paris, in New York Waldberg was clearly one of Marcel’s few “very good friends.” “He liked young women,” she wrote. “Marcel came to my studio often, and sometimes we would have dinner. . . . He had one simple room on West 14th Street. When I returned to Paris after four years, Marcel let me take over his small seventh-floor studio in rue Larrey.”7 Their professional collaboration was as strong as their personal relationship. Waldberg worked with Duchamp on both of the bookstore windows he created for Breton in 1945—in April for Breton’s autobiographical book-length essay Arcane 17, and the following November for an expanded edition of Le Surréalisme et la peinture. A central feature of this second window was one of the bent-wood sculptures Waldberg had been making over the previous two years. Reversed, the pose of her now-lost 1943 Construction, which Lebel had paired with his poem “Toujours là bel aqueduc” (Always there, beautiful aqueduct) in Masque à lame, is identical—right down to the absence of a head—to the pose of the figure that Duchamp would adopt in Étant donnés: 145

This page, bottom: Isabelle Waldberg in the garden of her Paris studio, c. 1958 This page, top: Isabelle Waldberg, Répertoire des idées, c. 1968, plaster, painted wood, and collage, 11 x 20 x 5 7⁄8 inches (28 x 51 x 15 cm).

Collection of Michel Waldberg. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris

1. La chute d’eau, 2. Le gaz d’éclairage (Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas, 1946–66).8 Everyone but Patrick returned to Paris after the war. Duchamp would begin working on Étant donnés in 1946, a year in which Waldberg created an even more startling precedent. Luminaire is a plaster sculpture that appears to have been cast from a female pudendum, perhaps as a “how-to” exercise for the plaster-cast female body in Étant donnés.9 It is the obverse of Duchamp’s plastercast Female Fig Leaf (1950), which was reproduced on the cover of Le Surréalisme, même in 1956.

Duchamp had carefully lit his little sculpture and then retouched the photograph, transforming it into the shadowy image of a vulva. Notably, the vulva in Luminaire is a hole, like the hole at the center of the figure in Étant donnés. Waldberg’s title—Luminaire (Light)—evokes the lamp held up

by Duchamp’s figure. Luminaire was unlike anything else Waldberg was doing at the time; she tended to work in series, and this bleak plaster sculpture makes little sense except in the context of Étant donnés.

In January 1947 Duchamp would return to New York and his lover Maria Martins, who is usually considered the inspiration for Étant donnés. In terms of Duchamp’s emotional involvement with Martins, that is not wrong; but in terms of artistic inspiration, Waldberg would appear to have been the more important source. When he left for New York, Duchamp invited Waldberg to move into his Paris studio. Twenty years later, shortly after finishing Étant donnés, he wrote a pithy paean to her: Isabelle sculpte, ausculte, s’occulte et exulte—“Isabelle sculpts, sounds, occults, and exults.”10 His tribute reveals not only Duchamp’s affection but also his deep respect for Waldberg’s talent, perception, discretion, and spirit.

Waldberg played a number of roles over the course of her life, including translator (Nietzsche, for Bataille) and writer/editor (the Encyclopaedia Da Costa, for Duchamp and Lebel). But it is as a sculptor that she deserves—to use Duchamp’s term—rehabilitation. Fascinated as a child by the form-creating construction in timber and plaster of a house near the family farm, Waldberg primarily worked in wood and malleable plaster, casting in bronze to achieve more permanent form. Despite her scholarly interest in ethnology and Native 146

American culture, and her friendship with Breton, she did not think of herself as a Surrealist. Her participation in the window displays for Breton’s books, and her friendships with artists such as Giacometti, Max Ernst, André Masson, and Matta suggest that she was a consummate networker.

She was also generous: when Peggy Guggenheim offered her a solo exhibition at Guggenheim’s Art of This Century Gallery, in 1944, Waldberg responded by inviting the Latvian expressionist painter Rudolf Ray to show with her.

Returning to Paris after the war, Waldberg wrote her husband, still in New York, asking him to bring a supply of birch dowels from a hardware store “at or near the corner of 60th Street and 3rd Avenue.”11 Duchamp showed her airy sculpture La nue, or Premier du fil (The nude/cloud, or First thread) in his “Rain Room” at the 1947 Paris Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme. In 1948, Waldberg began to reinterpret her wood constructions in iron and then returned to plaster, with its infinite possibilities of form. Drawings and paintings on paper constituted yet another aspect of her ongoing oeuvre, which would come to encompass bronze, pigmented plaster and wood, cork, and other materials.

As a sculptor, Waldberg explored the eroticism engendered by the polarity between figuration and abstraction. Occasional intimations of violence betray her formation as an artist between two catastrophic wars. Her dual emphasis on emergence and dissolution, protection and openness, conveys not a Cartesian dualism between spirit and matter, but a yin-yang morphology inspired by Asian and Native American perspectives on reality.

Waldberg’s fundamental focus was on le masque à l ’âme: the connection between physical form and consciousness. A philosopher might call it panpsychism: the view that mind is omnipresent within tangible reality.

Duchamp would have simply called it art.

Pierre Larousse, whose “abstract” words he mined, defined art as application des connaissances à la réalisation d ’une conception—application of knowledge to the realization of a conception. 12 For Waldberg, sculpting was both an act of conception and an art of love: “a sculpture is held close,” she wrote, “we are in dialogue, it becomes the other.”

She experienced this polarity with “eyes wide open to the light of day; for it must be full day or

illuminated night to absorb infinitely all the lights available outside of time.”13 Difficult to translate from the original French, her words suggest that Luminaire was intended (among other things) as a portal to infinite enlightenment.

Essay adapted from Marcel Duchamp and the Art of Life (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2019).

In addition to the citations below, see also Robert Lebel, “Isabelle Waldberg: à l’entrée ou à la sortie de son palais de la mémoire,” in Étant donné Marcel Duchamp, no. 7 (2006), 86–107. The Isabelle Waldberg Committee maintains a website: www.isabellewaldberg.com.

1. Marcel Duchamp, “The Creative Act,” Artnews 56, no. 4 (Summer 1957):28–29.

2. Due to the secretive nature of the group, precisely what went on during the secret, “inner” meetings of Acéphale remains a subject of conjecture. See Jacquelynn Baas, Marcel Duchamp and the Art of Life (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2019), 229–38.

3. Robert Lebel, Masque à lame (New York: Liberal Press/Éditions Hémisphères, “1943” [1944]; repr. ed. Geneva: Mamco, 2015).

The term “dematerialized sculptures” is from Catalogue sculpteurs (Geneva: Editions Claude Givaudan, 1966), n.p.

4. See Paul Franklin, “Coming of Age with Marcel: An Interview with Jean-Jacques Lebel,” in Étant donné Marcel Duchamp, no. 7 (2006):17.

5. Isabelle Waldberg, “Peggy Guggenheim, Marcel Duchamp & André Breton,” in Étant donné Marcel Duchamp, no. 7 (2006):138.

6. Published in Robert Lebel, La Double vue, suivi de L’Inventeur du temps gratuit (Paris: Le Soleil Noir, 1964). See also Baas, Duchamp and the Art of Life, 190ff.

7. Waldberg, “Peggy Guggenheim, Marcel Duchamp & André Breton,” 138.

8. In Étant donnés the head is hidden, with only a shock of blond hair visible. The connection between the pose of Waldberg’s “Endless Aqueduct” and that of the figure in Étant donnés was first noted by Thomas Girst, in “Duchamp’s Window Display for André Breton’s Le Surréalisme et la peinture” in the January 2002 issue of the online journal tout-fait, available at www.tout fait.com/duchamps-window-display-for-andra-bretons-lesurraalisme-et-la-peinture-1945/ (accessed December 29, 2019).

9. On Duchamp’s process see Melissa S. Meighan, “A Technical Discussion of the Figure in Marcel Duchamp’s Étant donnés,” in Michael R. Taylor, Marcel Duchamp: Étant donnés, exh. cat.

(Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, in association with Yale University Press, 2009), 244.

10. Reproduced in Étant donné Marcel Duchamp, no. 7 (2006): 102. Ausculte refers to listening to the body, as with a stethoscope.

11. Patrick and Isabelle Waldberg, Un amour acéphale: correspondance, 1940–1949, ed. Michel Waldberg (Paris: Éditions de la Différence, 1992), 432.

12. Petit Larousse illustré (Paris: Librairie Larousse, 1912), 64.

See Baas, Duchamp and the Art of Life, 5.

13. Isabelle Waldberg, quoted in Michel Waldberg, Isabelle Waldberg (Paris: Éditions de la Différence, 1992), 47–48. The quote reads in French, “les yeux grand ouverts à regarder la clarté du jour; car il doit faire grand jour ou nuit illuminée pour absorber à l’infini toutes les lumières disponibles pendant les temps illimités.”

This page, bottom: Marcel Duchamp, Étant donnés: 1° la chute d’eau, 2° le gaz d’éclairage…/ Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas…, 1946–66, mixed media, 95 ½ × 70 inches (242.6 × 177.8 cm).

Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA, gift of the Cassandra Foundation, 1969 © Association Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, 2020 This page, top: Marcel Duchamp and Isabelle Waldberg, 11 rue Larrey, Paris, c. 1960. Photo: Véra Cardot and Pierre Joly Images sourced from Michel Waldberg’s Isabelle Waldberg (Paris: Éditions de la Différence, 1992)

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BOOK CORNER ON COLLECTING WITH NORMAN DIEKMAN Rare-book expert Douglas Flamm speaks with designer Norman Diekman about his unique collection of books on art and architecture. Diekman describes his first plunge into book collecting, the history behind it, and the way his passion for collecting grew.

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Could you tell me when your love affair with art and architecture books began?

NORMAN DIEKMAN I finished high school in 1958 and went on to study architecture at Pratt. I had a fabulous teacher there; he would instruct us to go to The Museum of Modern Art bookstore, as well as several others. I learned a great deal from these trips, but the real beginnings commenced when I landed a job at the architect Philip Johnson’s office a few years later. Books arrived frequently in Johnson’s office, mainly from Germany and Italy. They were beautiful publications of all different sizes and kinds. He was so generous, a real gentleman, and I think he could tell how excited I’d get when they arrived; he would tell me, “Norman, I’ve got this book, take a look at it.” Eventually he would even let me take a book away on the weekends. So then I’d ask him, “Where did you get this or that?” He introduced me to Wittenborn & Co., at 1018 Madison.

From that day forward it was a Saturday visit to Wittenborn’s every week. They had wonderful things.

One of the first books I bought there was an Andy Warhol catalogue from Philadelphia for $3; I still have the receipt.

DF Is that the 1965 Samuel Green catalogue from the ICA? ND Yes, exactly. At Wittenborn & Co. I had my first look at Drawings for a Living Architecture [1959], the Frank Lloyd Wright book; that book blew my mind.

It was as if you’d opened the filing cabinets at his studio, Taliesin, and you had a free look at all the drawings you wanted to. Absolutely beautiful. At the time, I didn’t have the money—$35 and money was tight! Next time around, $60, same thing. Finally I had money when it was about $600, and that’s when I bought it.

DF Johnson was really a pivotal figure in igniting this passion, it would seem.

ND Yes, I would say he was pivotal. You know, I came from a poor family and things were difficult. I had financial trouble getting through college at Pratt, and Johnson helped with that.

I’ll tell you one story: one day Mr. Wittenborn was telling me about a time Johnson came by his store in Berlin, which he had owned before coming to New York—he had heard I worked for him, and if people like Wittenborn and others heard you worked for Johnson, they treated you very nicely because you were connected to a man whom they adored. It’s like if you worked for Leo Castelli. He told me about a time when Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock were researching for their co-curated exhibition Modern Architecture: International Exhibition [1932], at The Museum of Modern Art, and they stopped by the Berlin store. He said they arrived in a silver RollsRoyce [laughter], and they filled the Rolls-Royce with books! Wittenborn had suffered through the awful economy in Germany before Hitler, and he and everybody else in the store found the whole thing so amazing. He always remembered that. I guess that may have played some role in his coming to America, which is nice.

DF Even from early on, the books you were buying seem to have informed your practice as a designer?

ND Yes, they were a source of inspiration. The number one, and number two, of my passion was the excitement of seeing something I hadn’t seen before and never even thought possible to do. When people asked me about the furniture I designed, I would tell them my influences were artists and architects.

Architecture books from Germany, Italy, and burgeoning presses in New York were suddenly available in Wittenborn’s shop and, later, Ursus.

DF Were there books that you’d seen before, at DOUGLAS FLAMM

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work or on some other occasion, that you actively began searching for when you were able?

ND Yes, I remember being keen to acquire books on Mies, anything on Le Corbusier, and Charles and Ray Eames to a degree. One time I was in New Haven and I went to visit Josef Albers to try to have a chat, but unfortunately he was out. His daughter was at home and she was very gracious, she told me “You can wait, they might be coming back.” So I sat in the living room and I perused their bookcase, jotting down book titles at Albers’s house, and afterward I pursued them. It was a full-formed passion by that time.

DF Did Johnson tell you about any books that remained elusive for a certain time, but that you— ND I remember falling in love with the Maison de Verre while working with him, but being unable to find a proper publication on it.

DF Yes, the Maison de Verre is interesting in that reproductions of it took so long to be published; it really wasn’t until that GA book came out, in its expanded version in 1988, that we had decent illustrations.

ND Yes, when that special issue of the GA came out, I was in the Prairie Avenue Bookshop in Chicago. I was chatting with one of the proprietors and we went into the back to look at the new arrivals.

I was so, how do you say, “good” in the bookshops that they let me into the back room. The secret was the back room. It was the same in the back room of Castelli’s—they’d let me look around, I’d see something in the back, not on display outside. I purchased a John Chamberlain sculpture that way! Anyway, she opened the box and there on the top is the Maison de Verre book with the blue cover. I flipped out! I looked through the pages and I said, “Oh, you’ve got to sell me this!” I walked out with that book and I was so happy. You could build a Maison de Verre from that book if you put your head together; it was so exciting to get all of those details.

DF What have been some other exciting finds?

ND At one point I was buying a lot of books by or on early Le Corbusier. I went and bought Quand les cathédrales étaient blanches [When the Cathedrals were White], published by Librairie Plon, Paris, in 1937, for $3. I was also excited when I found a first edition of Learning from Las Vegas [1972] by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour. I got Robert and Denise to sign it later on. The graphics were interesting because they were a touch on the Pop art side, with real contemporary graphics from billboards, TV, and so on.

DF Yes, it’s a larger format.

ND I had it for a long time and then, when I went to sell it, I got $3,000 or something like that, which I thought was terrific. I came home after selling it and I found the receipt, and I’d thought I’d paid about $350 or something, so I thought I’d made good money. I look at the receipt and I see I paid $175!

DF It’s clear that a book’s content was a chief concern in your collecting—you mention Frank Lloyd Wright, Venturi. But does the book as a design object itself hold interest for you, as well?

ND Oh yes, of course. One of the best is Des canons, des munitions, the Le Corbusier book from 1938. Des canons, des munitions is the power book, and frankly, you buy it for the cover and that inside color page.

DF I’m sure you came across copies in poor condition. Was the condition of the publication an important piece of the puzzle for you?

ND Absolutely. I was finicky in a way. That’s why I didn’t buy very much from the Strand; Strand books look like they came out of an artist’s studio that was a barn somewhere. There were drips and humidity.

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Previous spread: A bookshelf in the home of Norman Diekman Opposite: Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, L’Architecture vivante. Publié sous la direction de Jean Badovici.

Paris: Éditions Albert Morancé, 1927–31 This page, top: Andy Warhol.

Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1965 This page, bottom: Donald Judd, Furniture.

Rotterdam: Museum Boymans van Beuningen, 1993 Photos: Carey MacArthur

I also found out to be careful about buying books in East Hampton because the salt air would get in them and then you’d find out later. Although I did buy a signed Roy Lichtenstein at the Guild Hall museum for $35, which I thought was great. I wish I could have bought five!

DF Did you like collecting signed books?

ND Well, I liked meeting the artists and asking them to sign. Most of them were very cordial. I went to a lecture at the Guggenheim on the Peter Lewis House that Frank Gehry was designing. I went up afterward and asked Mr. Gehry to sign the book. He said, “Okay,” and then he turns around and says, “Peter, Peter, come over here, sign this book for this chap.” It was like a shared experience, he didn’t just walk away, which was so nice. Ed Kienholz did the same thing—he wrote a nice inscription in his book and then he said to his wife and collaborator, Nancy Reddin Kienholz, “Nancy, this young man enjoys our work, sign the book.” He was jolly about it.

DF Are there other people besides Johnson who helped inform your collecting of books? You mentioned you would go to Wittenborn on a weekly basis, and to other bookshops—is a relationship with the bookseller an important part for you?

ND Yes, I have to have a rapport with the dealer.

The civility of the experience counts for a great deal.

Seymour Hacker of Hacker Art Books was always an interesting experience. I thought he was sour for the longest time, but we developed a mutual respect and rapport. He was from the Abstract Expressionist generation and he enjoyed discussing art, knowing what the new generation of artists was doing.

DF It sounds as though, in the beginning, you bought what you stumbled upon and what caught your interest. At what point did your collecting become more systematic and methodical? Looking at your collection, you clearly developed an interest in certain series or publishers.

ND I can’t remember when I first discovered Ettore Sottsass, but I recall thinking that he was incredible; his whole attitude to interiors, furniture, and architecture was astonishing. I quickly began to search methodically for anything published by Sottsass. For a while, anytime I went to a bookshop, I’d ask that they let me know if anything came out by Ettore.

DF In addition to collecting architecture and design books, you also put together a significant art library. Was there, in your mind, a dialogue between the two?

ND Definitely a private dialogue between the two libraries and in regards to my own work.

DF Yes, you mentioned that your work was ins­ pired more by fine artists than by other designers and architects.

ND Absolutely. Once I got completely hooked on book collecting, I was living in a time, and I and my books were defined by that time. Robert Rauschen­ berg, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol: I was living in their world. If a new book came out on Warhol, I was interested in having it, even though the same pictures were in it, but they were in it in a different way and the text was different, the stories were different maybe. It was the same with Anselm Kiefer: I had almost twenty Kiefer books at one time. I got to a point where, honestly, and it may be silly, but I got to a point where I was buying a book for one photograph! This happened mainly with Cy Twombly.

There’d be a Twombly sculpture that I hadn’t seen in any other book or any other place and I just wanted to keep looking at that sculpture, so I’d buy the book.

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Rachel Feinstein: Maiden, Mother, Crone On view through March 22 Tickets at TheJewishMuseum.org/Rachel Feinstein Rachel Feinstein: Maiden, Mother, Crone is made possible by the Knapp Family Foundation, The Susan and Leonard Feinstein Foundation, Ann and Mel Schaffer, Melva Bucksbaum Fund for Contemporary Art, the Peter Jay Sharp Exhibition Fund, The Barnett and Annalee Newman Foundation, and other generous donors. In-kind support is provided by Gagosian Gallery.

The Jewish Museum is under the auspices of the Jewish Theological Seminary.

5th Ave at 92nd St, NYC TheJewishMuseum.org

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Theaster Gates, Black Madonna series © Theaster Gates in collaboration with JNL Design

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Ruína de Charque – Nova Capela [Nova Capela Jerked-Beef Ruin], 2003 Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro, London/Venice Private Collection, Switzerland Photo: Jeff McLane, 2003

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Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Leonor Antunes, Henrike Naumann, Adriana Varejão — 29.03.20

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STERLING RUBY

THE INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART/BOSTON ON VIEW FEB 26 – MAY 26, 2020 ICA GALA HONORING STERLING RUBY AND VIRGIL ABLOH APRIL 17, 2020

icaboston.org

Sterling Ruby is organized by Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator, ICA/Boston, and Alex Gartenfeld, Artistic Director, ICA Miami, with Jeffrey De Blois, Assistant Curator and Publications Manager, ICA/Boston.

Major support for Sterling Ruby is provided by Sprüth Magers, Gagosian, and Philanthropic Action Xavier Hufkens.

Philanthropic Action

managed by the King Baudouin Foundation

Additional support for the Boston presentation is generously provided by Stephanie Formica Connaughton and John Connaughton, Jean-François and Nathalie Ducrest, Bridgitt and Bruce Evans, James and Audrey Foster, Ted Pappendick and Erica Gervais Pappendick, David and Leslie Puth, and Charlotte and Herbert S. Wagner III. Sterling Ruby, Mapping (Pink), 2005. Nail polish on paper. 39 3/4 x 31 3/4 inches (101 x 80.6 cm). Courtesy Sterling Ruby Studio, Los Angeles. © Sterling Ruby

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Richard Artschwager February 29 >> May 10, 2020

night painting, 2005, Flashe on linen, 64 x 69 inches, Private Collection, photo by Fredrik Nilsen Studio

mary weatherford

Canyon Daisy Eden Paintings from three decades February 1–July 12, 2020

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GAME CHANGER PEGGY COOPER CAFRITZ Cullen Swinson pays homage to the founder of the Duke Ellington School of the Arts, Washington, DC, and explores the intersections of her engagements as an educator, art collector, philanthropist, and civil rights activist.

Peggy Cooper Cafritz believed that “the absence of equity diminishes beauty.” The much beloved cofounder of Washington’s Duke Ellington School of the Arts grew up in Mobile, Alabama, in the 1950s and ’60s, and what she described in her diaries as “the relentless search for beauty” is rooted in her memories as a black child of the segregated South, diminished by the constant racism that defined the boundaries of her world. As a child, Cafritz had difficulty seeing beauty in herself; as an adult, she cofounded one of the nation’s premier schools of the arts, a school that has produced some of the nation’s most successful black artists across all disciplines—from world-renowned mezzosoprano Denyce Graves through artist Hank Willis Thomas, Emmy Award–winning comedian/actor Dave Chappelle, and celebrated writer/journalist Adam Serwer to critically acclaimed actors Corey Hawkins and Samira Wiley, to name a few. Not only that, she amassed one of the largest and most important private collections of works by artists of color in the world, in a game-changing approach to collecting art that was rooted in finding beauty where the larger society often reduces or ignores it.

Cafritz traced the lack of equity faced by black artists dealing with the larger (and still largely

white) art world to the system of American chattel slavery, which sought to strip newly arrived African enslaved people of every vestige of self-identity and self-determination, from language to religion to cultural expression. In effect, the system sought to erase the psychological underpinnings, the fixed points of self-understanding, that are the starting point for any meaningful artistic expression.

Couple that with the idea that blacks were considered incapable of reaching the heights that white artists could achieve—a notion at one time reinforced by a legally segregated society, and later by the habits and social practices of a white elite wittingly or unwittingly dedicated to preserving the status quo—and what results is an art world in which black artists must struggle for significant presence. In short, many white critics, collectors, museums, and gallerists—and, too often, even white artists—cannot see black art due to the legacy of slavery and racism in American society.

For Cafritz, the lack of a significant and recognized black presence in the arts was due not to a lack of talent but to historical racial and political injustice.

Cafritz sought to correct this injustice by seeking out, supporting, and nurturing black artists, especially those at the beginning of their careers, or at critical junctures in them. Artists such as Thomas,

Peggy Cooper Cafritz in her home, Washington, DC, 2015. Photo: April Greer for the Washington Post/Getty Images

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Titus Kaphar, and Kara Walker, who challenge the stereotypes associated with people of color, were of particular interest to her. The work of these artists reflects Cafritz’s belief that black artists are a part of the legacy of self-affirmation, of insisting “I am human,” going back to the original slave narratives that use the first-person voice, saying “I am” or “I was born.” Cafritz believed that authentic black art was a palliative against the psychologically crippling effects of both historical and contemporary racism, and that great black art actually has the potential to restore and even cure not only black people but the nation itself of the disfiguring effects of racism. She also knew, however, that if such a cure was to be effected, old institutions (galleries and museums) had to change and new institutions to be erected.

Cafritz sought to change the institutions of the art world as both activist and participant. Early in her career, she would often visit galleries and museums and ask to see works by black artists.

Most often there were none; she asked the question because she wanted dealers and curators to think about why that was so. She also established relationships with established black artists including Sam Gilliam, Lloyd McNeill, and Lou Stovall, and formed friendships with some of the few gallerists who did promote black artists, such as Jack Shainman and Claude Simard. She later met many other artists and art dealers, curators and art historians, including Tilton, Betsy Broun, David Ross, and Will Villalongo. It was Ross, then the director of New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, who asked Cafritz to join that museum’s acquisitions committee for painting and sculpture, on which she served for nine years. Broun was the director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and Renwick Gallery, in Washington, DC, where she amassed the largest collection of African American art in the world; after Cafritz cofounded the Duke Ellington School of the Arts, she was also a key ally, making certain that the school’s students were participants in the museum and its programs.

The Duke Ellington School of the Arts was born from the partnership of Cafritz and the celebrated choreographer Mike Malone, who together, in 1968, founded Workshops for Careers in the Arts to develop arts programs in association with George Washington University, Washington, DC. The school grew out of that enterprise, and has become a model institution, not only producing successful artists in Washington but inspiring other cities to invest in underserved children and create equity, so that all children can find the beauty that a young Peggy Cooper Cafritz could not find in herself through the authentic, permanent beauty of their own art.

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