Gagosian Quarterly, Winter 2019 by Gagosian Quarterly

26 56 Theaster Gates: The New World Amalgam of Charlotte William Whitney Perriand considers the artist’s art practices and social commitments.

34 Christopher Wool: Part II In this second installment of his two-part essay, Richard Hell explores Wool’s sculptural and photographic work made in Marfa, Texas.

50 Cut & Paste In this first installment of a two-part essay, John Elderfield tracks the oscillating states of unification and separation that Édouard Manet’s The Execution of Maximilian has endured since its creation, in 1868.

William Middleton writes on the legendary designer and her collaborative vision of modernism.

64 Building a Legacy: Multiples, Reproductions, and Editions Simon Stock, Marisa Cardinale, Hugues Herpin, and Jean-Jacques Neuer discuss originals, reproductions, and how best to preserve the artist’s intention when it comes to posthumous casting and printing.

76 Reading Nam June Paik Gregory Zinman, coeditor of We Are in Open Circuits: Writings by Nam June Paik, writes about his first exposure to the artist’s archives.

84 Perfect Balance Gillian Jakab considers the legacy of Sergei Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes in light of contemporary collaborations between visual artists and choreographers.

100 The Center of the Storm Carlos Valladares writes on filmmaker and photographer Jerry Schatzberg’s prolific career.

Rudolf Polanszky Hans Ulrich Obrist visits the artist at his studio outside Vienna to discover more about the origins of his practice, his experiments in freedom, and the importanc of drifting.

116 A Mythology of Forms: A Conversation about Carl Einstein Luise Mahler and Charles Haxthausen discuss the importance of this earlytwentieth-century critic’s theoretical projects.

120 Overture: Ridding the Passing Moments of Their Fat

Dirty Canvases Mark Loiacono situates Andy Warhol’s Piss and Oxidation paintings within the artist’s career.

Art historian Robert Farris Thompson has maintained a passion for Afro-Cuban dance and music since an early exposure, in 1944, to a conga line in his hometown of El Paso. Here, he tracks the spiritual, linguistic, and musical roots of mambo.

130 Huma Bhabha The artist tells Negar Azimi about her rooftop commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, her interest in the monstrous, and the influence of science fiction on her practice.

136 Rain Unraveled Tales Raymond Foye reminisces about his long-standing friendship with the poet Bob Kaufman.

Daniel Spaulding, prompted by an encounter with Piero di Cosimo’s Discovery of Honey by Bacchus (c. 1499), investigates the potential philosophical and political power embedded within the figure of the satyr.

Photo credits: Front cover: Christopher Wool, selection from Westtexaspsychosculpture, 2017 (detail) © Christopher Wool; courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York Top row, left to right: Rudolf Polanszky, Vienna, 2018 Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, 1917, vintage gelatin silver print, 4 ⅞ × 3 ⅝ inches (12.2 × 9 cm) © Man Ray Trust/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ ADAGP, Paris 2019

Bottom row, left to right: Andy Warhol, Oxidation Painting, 1978, urine and metallic pigment in acrylic medium on canvas, 28 × 30 inches (71.1 × 76.2 cm) © 2019 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

186 Game Changer Berit Potter describes the profound impact of museum director Grace McCann Morley (1900– 1985) on San Francisco and the art world at large.

Installation view, Richard Serra: Forged Rounds, Gagosian, West 24th Street, New York, September 17–December 7, 2019. © 2019 Richard Serra/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Cristiano Mascaro

142 Rachel Feinstein The artist discusses her life and work with Alan Yentob.

146 Casa Malaparte: A House Like Ourselves Wyatt Allgeier explores the legacy of Curzio Malaparte and corresponds with the avant-garde author’s youngest descendant, Tommaso Rositani Suckert.

152 Love Is Not a Flame: Part IV A short story by Mark Z. Danielewski.

Richard Serra A portfolio of the sculptor’s most recent works.

108

Man Ray: A Portrait of the Times In Man Ray’s 1963 autobiography, Self Portrait, he wrote about his time with various denizens of the Paris art world, detailing his meetings, photography sessions, and appreciation for these fellow artists. We present a selection of excerpts from these tales.

TABLE OF CONTENTS WINTER 2019

162 There’s Honey in the Hollows: Piero di Cosimo’s Form-of-Life

e wrap up our third year with a cover by Christopher Wool, a photograph from his recent Westtexaspsychosculpture series. Richard Hell’s captivating article on Wool describes how, in recent years, the artist has split his time between Marfa and New York, and the overall impact that the Texas landscape has had on his art making. This month marks an important anniversary for the gallery: in 1999, twenty years ago, Richard Serra’s Switch inaugurated Gagosian’s Chelsea space on West 24th Street in New York. Built specifically with the formidable weight of Serra’s massive steel sculptures in mind, the space quickly became a cornerstone of the neighborhood, which subsequently grew into the arts center it is today. We commemorate this occasion with a portfolio on the Serra sculptures currently on view in what are now our two Chelsea galleries. A few years later, in 2002, Gagosian was the first gallery to exhibit Andy Warhol’s Oxidation and Piss series, which have since become critical to scholars trying to understand the artist’s formal experiments. Mark Loiacono, curatorial researcher for the celebrated Warhol retrospective recently organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, considers these works anew. We look at recent work by Theaster Gates that explores the social histories of migration and interracial relations by highlighting the specific history of Malaga, an island off the coast of Maine. This issue also spotlights Paris in the years after World War I, a period of rebuilding in which creative minds joined together to renew the spirit of the nation. We have articles on the dance collaborations of Sergei Diaghilev and his Ballets Russes and on Man Ray’s portraits of and writings on many great artists from this moment. We also look at the next generation through the work of Charlotte Perriand and her generous spirit of collaboration. We continue our examinations of legacy building and the clues it leaves for scholars, this time focusing on the archives of the video artist Nam June Paik. Our ongoing Building a Legacy feature examines questions around posthumous editions of artworks, particularly in sculpture and photography. Finally our Game Changer feature focuses on Grace McCann Morley, whose legacy is a vitally important institution of American culture: Morley was founding director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Alison McDonald, Editor-in-chief

GAGOSIAN QUARTERLY ONLINE Weekly E-Newsletter For the latest updates on gallery shows, museum exhibitions, artist talks, art fairs, and more, sign up for our weekly e-newsletter, delivered to your inbox every Monday: gagosian.com/newsletter

Essay: Before the Smoke Has Cleared Angela Brown provides a glimpse into the charged ecologies of recent drawings and sculptures by Tatiana Trouvé, on view in On the Eve of Never Leaving at Gagosian, Beverly Hills.

Video: Nathaniel Mary Quinn The artist speaks to Q&A founder Troy Carter about deliverance, expression, and what drives him to make art. From top: Giuseppe Penone at Fort Mason, San Francisco, 2018 Tatiana Trouvé, Untitled, 2019, from the series Les Dessouvenus, 2013– © Tatiana Trouvé Nathaniel Mary Quinn and Troy Carter in conversation at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, September 2019

Video: Giuseppe Penone at Fort Mason On the occasion of the unveiling of a yearlong public installation in San Francisco’s Fort Mason, the artist discusses his large-scale bronze sculptures cast from trees.

"CAMÉLIA" NECKLACE IN WHITE GOLD, RUBY AND DIAMONDS "CAMÉLIA" RING IN WHITE GOLD AND DIAMONDS

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CONTRIBUTORS William Middleton

Mark Loiacono

A Paris-based writer, William Middleton is the author of Double Vision, a biography of the legendary art patrons and collectors Dominique and John de Menil, published in 2018 by Alfred A. Knopf. He has contributed to such publications as W, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Architectural Digest, House & Garden, Departures, Town & Country, the New York Times, and T.

Mark Loiacono is an independent art historian and curator. He holds a PhD in Art History from New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts. He has written extensively on Andy Warhol, and most recently served as the curatorial research associate for the blockbuster exhibition Andy Warhol—From A to B and Back Again at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Christopher Wool Christopher Wool may be best known for his paintings of large, black, stenciled letters on white canvases, but he actually works in a wide range of styles and with an array of painterly techniques, including spray painting, hand painting, and screen printing. Wool’s work sets up tensions between painting and erasing, gesture and removal, depth and flatness. He was born in 1955 in Chicago and lives and works in New York. Photo: Aubrey Mayer

Richard Hell Richard Hell and the Voidoids’ 1977 LP Blank Generation was rereleased in 2018 by Sire/Warner in a remastered facsimile edition. Hell’s books include two novels, Go Now (Scribner, 1996) and Godlike (Little House on the Bowery, 2005); his autobiography, I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp (Ecco, 2013); and the essay collection Massive Pissed Love: Nonfiction 2001– 2014 (Soft Skull Press, 2015).

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.

Berit Potter Berit Potter is Assistant Professor of Art History and Museum and Gallery Practices at Humboldt State University, where she oversees the Museum and Gallery Practices Certificate Program. Her current book project, Widely Curious: Grace McCann Morley and the Origins of Global Contemporary Art, examines the career of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s first director and her pioneering advocacy for global perspectives.

Rachel Feinstein In richly detailed sculptures and multipart installations, Rachel Feinstein investigates and challenges the concept of luxury as expressed in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, in the context of contemporary parallels. By synthesizing visual and societal opposites such as romance and pornography, elegance and kitsch, and the marvelous and the banal, she explores issues of taste and desire. Photo: Markus Jans, Architectural Digest © Condé Nast

Charles Haxthausen Charles Haxthausen is Robert Sterling Clark Professor of Art History, Emeritus, at Williams College and currently Distinguished Scholar at the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. He is working on a book reassessing Paul Klee’s position within the early-twentieth-century European avant-garde.

Mark Z. Danielewski The New York Times has declared Mark Z. Danielewski “America’s foremost literary Magus.” He is the author of the award-winning and bestselling novel House of Leaves, National Book Award finalist Only Revolutions, as well as The Familiar and the novella The Fifty Year Sword, which became a performance at redcat, Los Angeles, for three consecutive years. thrown, his “signiconic” piece on Matthew Barney, was displayed at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 2015. His work has been translated and published throughout the world. Pantheon will release The Little Blue Kite in fall 2019. Photo: Nicolas Harvard

Gregory Zinman Gregory Zinman is an Assistant Professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His writing on film and media has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and October, among other publications. He is the editor, with John Hanhardt and Edith DeckerPhillips, of We Are in Open Circuits: Writings by Nam June Paik.

Luise Mahler Luise Mahler is an art historian specializing in modern art and its criticism. Her current project, a monographic book study, compares the different Cubisms that emerged from the German-language writings of such figures as Carl Einstein and Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler with those of their European contemporaries, Vincenc Kramář among them. Photo: annako, Berlin

Daniel Spaulding Daniel Spaulding is an art historian who lives in Los Angeles, where he works in the curatorial department of the Getty Research Institute and teaches at ArtCenter College of Design. He has a PhD from Yale. Writings of his have appeared in publications such as Art Journal, October, Radical Philosophy, and Mute Magazine.

R A LPH L AUR EN

Robert Farris Thompson A longtime art history professor at Yale, Robert Farris Thompson may be best known for his book Flash of the Spirit, published in 1983 and still in print today. Tracing continuities between the black cultures of Africa and the Americas, this hugely influential work was groundbreaking in both manner and method. The teenage Thompson was led to his love of Africa by popular music and dance. He has dreamed of a book on the mambo for literally decades; the manuscript is now in progress and we are proud to publish an excerpt.

Raymond Foye Raymond Foye is a writer, editor, publisher, and curator who lives in New York’s Chelsea Hotel. A former director of exhibitions and publications at Gagosian, he co-edited the forthcoming Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman for City Lights Books. He is Contributing Editor to the Brooklyn Rail, and is currently editing the Collected Poems of Rene Ricard, to be published in 2020.

Hans Ulrich Obrist Hans Ulrich Obrist is artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries in London. Prior to this, he was the curator of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Since his first show, “World Soup” (The Kitchen Show) in 1991, he has curated more than 300 shows. Obrist’s recent publications include Ways of Curating (2015), The Age of Earthquakes (2015), Lives of the Artists, Lives of Architects (2015), Mondialité (2017), Somewhere Totally Else (2018), and The Athens Dialogues (2018). Photo: Wolfgang Tillmans

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 this fall. He has written for the San Francisco Chronicle, Film Comment, and the Criterion Collection. Photo: Cindy Shorney Pearson

Rudolf Polanszky Rudolf Polanszky is an artist who lives and works in Vienna, producing painting and sculpture using a variety of materials. His works have most recently been exhibited at the Vienna Secession, the 21er Haus, the Rubell Family Collection in Miami, and The Bunker in Palm Beach. They lie in the permanent collections of the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Belvedere Museum, Vienna, the Artotek des Bundes, Vienna, and others.

Gillian Jakab Gillian Jakab works for La Napoule Art Foundation and has served, since 2016, as the dance editor of the Brooklyn Rail.

Simon Stock

Hugues Herpin

Simon Stock has been a director at Gagosian since 2018. Previously he was a senior international specialist for the Impressionist and Modern Art department at Sotheby’s. From 2008 to 2017 he curated the annual monumental sculpture exhibition Beyond Limits at Chatsworth House, England.

Hugues Herpin is the head of the Department for Strategic Affairs at the Musée Rodin, Paris. He joined the Musée Rodin in 1998, managing its cultural programs and then becoming assistant director, overseeing all events. Herpin has organized numerous Rodin exhibitions internationally and has written extensively about the artist’s work.

Alan Yentob

Marisa Cardinale

Alan Yentob has held many prestigious positions at the BBC. In addition to these various roles, he is on the boards of the South Bank and the International Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. He is also chairman of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London.

Marisa Cardinale has been an advisor and consultant to artists and artists’ estates since 1995. She has created longevity plans for artists’ foundations, created and led strategies for artists’ transitions to multiple gallery representation, and facilitated the acquisition of substantial collections by major institutions for the Gordon Parks Foundation, the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, and others.

Negar Azimi

Jean-Jacques Neuer

William Whitney

Negar Azimi is a writer and the senior editor of Bidoun, a publishing and curatorial project. With Klaus Biesenbach, Tiffany Malakooti, and Babak Radboy, she recently curated the first retrospective of the Iranian avant-garde theater director and filmmaker Reza Abdoh at MoMA PS1, New York. She is at work on a book about the 1960s and ’70s.

Jean-Jacques Neuer is a Paris-based lawyer and a solicitor in London. He has been the official counsel of the Picasso Administration for more than twenty years, as well as of the Alberto Giacometti Foundation and the estates of Arman, Constantin Brancusi, and Yves Klein. He has also worked as a legal counselor for auction houses, art dealers, collectors, and experts.

William Whitney is a writer and critic currently based in New York. He is a candidate in the School of Visual Arts MFA Art Writing and Criticism program.

Huma Bhabha In expressive drawings on photographs as well as figurative sculptures carved from cork and Styrofoam, assembled from refuse and clay, or cast in bronze, Bhabha probes the tensions between time, memory, and displacement. References to science-fiction, archeological ruins, Roman antiquities, and postwar abstraction combine as she transforms the human figure into grimacing totems that are both unsettling and darkly humorous. Photo: Sean Thomas

D I O R .C O M

Gagosian Quarterly, Winter 2019

Editor-in-chief Alison McDonald

Founder Larry Gagosian

Managing Editor Wyatt Allgeier

Business Director Melissa Lazarov

Text Editor David Frankel

Published by Gagosian Media

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Cover Christopher Wool

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Contributors Wyatt Allgeier Negar Azimi Huma Bhabha Marisa Cardinale Mark Z. Danielewski John Elderfield Rachel Feinstein Raymond Foye Charles Haxthausen Richard Hell Hugues Herpin Gillian Jakab Mark Loiacono Luise Mahler William Middleton Jean-Jacques Neuer Hans Ulrich Obrist Rudolf Polanszky Berit Potter Daniel Spaulding Simon Stock Robert Farris Thompson Carlos Valladares William Whitney Christopher Wool Alan Yentob Gregory Zinman

Thanks Richard Alwyn Fisher Andréa Azéma Jennifer Belt Simon Bermeo-Ehmann Priya Bhatnagar Caroline Burghardt Michael Cary Serena Cattaneo Adorno Georgina Cohen Matthew Cross Rose Dergan Victoria Eatough Elsa Favreau Kate Fernandez-Lupino Lauren Fisher Douglas Flamm Emily Florido Mark Francis Jonas Fröhlich Brett Garde Theaster Gates Emma German Darlina Goldak Megan Goldman John Hanhardt Tiphaine Heron Delphine Huisinga Jacqueline Hulburd Noémie Husson Sarah Jones Lauren Mahony Susannah Maybank Rob McKeever Trina McKeever Gianni Melotti Olivia Mull

Louise Neri Ira Nowinski Hannah Pacious Jaimie Park Stefan Ratibor Michele Reverte Tommaso Rositani Suckert Alexandra Samaras Patrick Sarmiento Jerry Schatzberg Clara Serra Richard Serra Max Shackleton Nick Simunovic Rani Singh Rebecca Sternthal Anna Studebaker Quinn Max Teicher Sean Thomas Colin Torre Andie Trainer Peggy Tran-Le Daniel Umstaedter Timothée Viale Tabitha Walker Marcus Ward Ealan Wingate Kelso Wyeth Penny Yeung Jason Ysenburg

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Theaster Gates’s exhibition Amalgam—originally on view at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, in the spring of 2019, and traveling this December to Tate Liverpool—explores the social histories of migration and interracial relations by highlighting the specific history of the Maine island of Malaga. Here, William Whitney considers the exhibition in relation to Gates’s ongoing art practices and social commitments.

THEASTER GATES

AMALGAM

Theaster Gates’s 2019 exhibition, Amalgam, originally on view at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris—traveling this December to Tate Liverpool—explored the social histories of migration and interracial relations by highlighting the specific history of Malaga, Maine. Here, William Whitney considers the exhibition in relation to Gates’s ongoing practices and commitments.

In the context of the Negro problem neither whites nor blacks, for excellent reasons of their own, have the faintest desire to look back; but I think that the past is all that makes the present coherent, and further, that the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly. —James Baldwin, “Autobiographical Notes,” 1955

Previous spread: Theaster Gates, Paris, France, 2019. Photo: Julien Faure/Paris Match/Contour by Getty Images Opposite: Installation view, Theaster Gates: Amalgam, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, February 20– May 12, 2019. Photo: Chris Strong Above: Theaster Gates, Dance of Malaga, 2019 (still), singlechannel video, color, sound, 35 minutes 4 seconds Following spread, top left and bottom right: Installation view, Theaster Gates: Amalgam, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, February 20– May 12, 2019. Photo: Chris Strong Following spread, top right: Installation view, Theaster Gates: The Black Monastic, Museu Serralves, Porto, Portugal, September 7–19, 2014

Seeking to reinvigorate forgotten objects and spaces through unorthodox methods, Theaster Gates aims to create platforms that will spark conversation and provide underserved communities with the means to participate in their own revitalization. Born in Chicago, the youngest of nine children, Gates still lives in the city, melding his reallife experiences with the skills and knowledge he acquired in academia, where he majored in urban planning as an undergraduate, then pursued an interdisciplinary combination of fine arts and religious studies two years later. Deeply cognizant of his role as both an artist in the world and a black artist in America, Gates has always understood the dynamics of capturing the public’s eye. His first major art project, Plates Convergence (2007), at Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, saw him host a seated dinner for one hundred guests, serving traditional Southern food while introducing the audience to the work of Shoji Yamaguchi, a legendary Japanese ceramist whose plates are specifically designed for the food of African Americans. With each guest seated at a specific spot to ensure dynamic and thought-provoking conversations, the event was a resounding success, even as it became clear the story of Yamaguchi was entirely fabricated. Seeking to hone his practice to resonate as both object- and engagement-based, Plates Convergence deployed Gates’s status as an outsider to create a conversation around use value and locality, while also highlighting the power of art created without the influence of major institutions. Gates credits the project with helping him to establish an outsider practice, and to realize that working effectively outside major institutions could eventually be the key to attracting those institutions’ interest.1 Gates trained in pottery but he incorporates sculpture, painting, video, performance, and music into his practice, refusing to limit himself to a single medium in part because he believes that different issues require different platforms. In 2010, Gates was represented in both the Whitney Biennial and a solo exhibition at the Milwaukee Art Museum. For the Biennial, which served as his formal introduction to a larger public, he revamped

the museum’s sculpture court with found objects, transforming the space into a gathering area for performances, social engagement, and contemplation. Through the duration of the show, he used the space to meet with historians, artists, and street musicians, hosting a series of talks and musical performances. In Milwaukee, Gates’s show To Speculate Darkly: Theaster Gates and Dave the Potter featured a 250-person gospel choir singing musical adaptations of the poetic inscriptions that the nineteenth-century enslaved American ceramist Dave Drake left on pots he made. Accompanying the choir were original ceramic pieces from local artisans. The first artist to reinterpret Drake’s work and legacy, Gates connected the conditions for African Americans in the antebellum South to concerns regarding labor and craft in present-day America.2 Gates has also sought to create change outside his studio practice through his Rebuild Foundation, a nonprofit platform directed toward neighborhood regeneration and cultural development through the use of educational and arts programming. The foundation, established in 2010, develops affordable housing, studio, and live-work space, with many of its initiatives focusing on revitalizing Chicago’s South Side. While it isn’t necessary for artists to have more than one kind of practice in order to have an intellectual impact, Gates recognizes that in order to make a real impact with his community program, he requires a multitude. “In my case, I needed two, or three, or even four or five different platforms, because that seemed the truth of the devastating need in the community where I live,” Gates says. “If there is no community development corporation, if there is no bank that’s loaning locally, there are very few allies to black and brown artists.”3 Rather than running from the issues in his community, Gates does what he can to help, yet he insists that he is not an activist but rather just an artist, calling this kind of work one of the beauties of the profession: The beauty of being an artist, is that you have the freedom to talk about the things that you want to talk about, and to be generous in the direction of those things. There are times when I want to talk about homelessness and poverty, and then there are other times when I want to talk about the colour red, . . . [or] want to continue what had been a verbal conversation into the material world. Or there’s just a set of ideas that deal with my past. Having the freedom to materialize whatever I will is the gift of the 29

artist. It’s the gift that you have when you don’t have much else. 4 An eager mind with a keen eye for detail, Gates deals with topics that hover just beneath the surface of society’s collective consciousness. He created the Civil Tapestry series by cutting up and stitching decommissioned fire hoses over wooden supports to make singular works of abstract art. While the fire hoses reference the struggles of the Civil Rights Movement, Gates’s use of readymade objects recalls the practices initiated by Marcel Duchamp and followed through by many other artists. In providing the hoses with new meaning, Gates reminds viewers of the nuances of the fight for racial equality, asking them to grapple with how quickly relatively recent historical moments can turn vague, their presence acknowledged but no longer examined. In repurposing the fire hoses, he makes a charged statement through modest means, transforming readymade objects into a quiet demand that America’s history be remembered. What he calls his “acts of transformation” force viewers to contend with the power that objects can take on when placed in an artistic setting.5 Redemption is a key motivation for Gates, in terms of both materials and history, and as a way of extending art into issues of social justice and distribution. In his exhibition Amalgam Gates uses a wide spectrum of mediums, including sculpture, assemblage, video, and sound, to explore social histories of migration and interracial relations. An amalgam is a mixture or fusion of different elements, a fitting term for Gates’s revalidation of discarded materials. The exhibition focuses on the small island of Malaga, Maine, where in 1912 the state’s then 30

governor, Frederick W. Plaisted, expelled a population of forty-five people who were poor and either multiracial or in an interracial relationship. The origins of this community are believed to trace back to 1794, when Benjamin Darling, an African American married to a white woman, Sarah Proverbs, bought an island near Malaga, Horse Island (now called Harbor Island). One of Darling’s children sold Horse Island in 1847, when the family is thought to have moved to Malaga, which was unoccupied.6 In the early 1900s, Maine underwent drastic increases in real estate values and tourism. In this context the residents of Malaga Island were scorned for the unbecoming wooden huts in which they lived; at the same time, with the rise of the eugenics movement, they faced disdain for their darker skin and mixed-race features. The term “Malaga” became a stigma within the neighboring white communities. In 1903, the legislature placed Malaga in the township of Phippsburg, in Sagadahoc County.7 Fearing association with the island, the town sued successfully to repeal the legislation, leaving Malaga under state control and its residents wards of the state. Upon visiting the island in 1911, Governor Plaisted remarked, “The best plan would be to burn down the shacks with all their filth. Certainly the conditions are not creditable to our state, and we ought not to have such things near our front door, and I do not think that a like condition can be found in Maine, although there are some pretty bad localities elsewhere.”8 In a series of quick legal actions, the state awarded ownership of Malaga to the Perry family of Phippsburg, who proceeded to sell the island back to the state for $400.9 Following this purchase, the incumbent mixed-race community was informed of its eviction from the

island, to be scattered through the mainland. Some were involuntarily committed to psychiatric institutions, while others suffered internment. Originally planned to be a tourist destination, the island has remained uninhabited since this community was removed, as if haunted or damned. In 2018, Gates began a three-year residency at Colby College, Maine, as the school’s first distinguished visiting artist and as director of artist initiatives at its Lunder Institute for American Art. He learned of the island’s history in his first week at Colby while out on a weekend boat ride with friends. His experience in Maine aligned with earlier explorations he had made into broad questions about the conventions of history: how it is told, who it is told for, and what narratives and experiences it omits or elides (more often than not in the United States, those of African Americans). To Gates, “How we reckon with history is super important, and how we either choose to reconcile these deep complexities with honor or we choose not to says a lot about the character of our nation.”10 Colonialist practices are so deeply embedded in our society that they are often overlooked, and even when acknowledged, they are rarely scrutinized carefully. Yet what makes the story of Malaga so pertinent for an exhibition such as Amalgam is the discomfort one feels in learning what occurred there, and in imagining the horrific experience of Malaga’s residents. That discomfort is only intensified by the fact that the story remains largely suppressed a century later. The first work that viewers encountered in the Paris installation of Amalgam was Altar (2019), a giant slate-shingled section of a rooftop. While the work’s impact came from its powerful incongruity and surreality, the gesture reflected both the

houses destroyed on Malaga Island and the prevalence of slate rooftops all over Baron Haussmann’s Paris. The work also references Gates’s father, a roofer who left his son his tools upon passing away. Altars have religious meaning as places of sacrifice, and Gates’s Altar is no different, evoking the slaughter attached to the idea of racial purity. The author Richard Dyer, in his well-known 1997 essay “White,” discusses the rhetoric of whiteness built into the United States: “This property of whiteness, to be everything and nothing, is the source of its representational power. . . . if the invisibility of whiteness colonises the definition of other norms— class, gender, heterosexuality, nationality and so on—it also masks whiteness as itself a category.”11 In regards to Malaga Island, Gates acknowledges the role of whiteness, but rather than engage in an examination of what it is to be white, he probes the beauty and fear associated with being “the other,” using his artistic language to challenge viewers with an exhibition that highlights the dramatization of race. Gates’s multipart installation Island Modernity Institute and Department of Tourism (2019) unites traditional African artifacts with fictional archival documents depicting an imagined archaeological study of Malaga. A sign, enclosed in a vitrine elevated on a central podium, reads “In the end nothing is pure” in neon-green letters. Presented thus as a museological artifact, the sign exemplifies Gates’s ideas of beauty, referring both to interraciality and to his own combinatory art practices. Situated next to Island Modernity Institute . . . in Paris was a blackboard bearing a chalk sketch, a concise history of America’s relationship to black people, slavery, and miscegenation. The

blackboard also put forward the idea of a department of tourism for Malaga Island and presented a stream of consciousness regarding famous mixedrace and black people who can “pass”: actors Jesse Williams and Halle Berry, musician Alicia Keys, athlete Colin Kaepernick (dubbed “the kneeling football player”), and “some models like Winnie” (Harlow, who has vitiligo). Each medium combined with the other to envelop viewers in an immersive experience that was both educational and provocative. Gates conjoined the idea of the amalgam with

his own resistance, as an artist and thinker, to narrowness about what constitutes a work of art; each gallery offered disparate experiences thanks to his careful use of distinct mediums in a flurry of varied tones and emotional draws. Gates’s exploration of interracial identity serves as a reminder of a period when fear was rampant and difference was used as an excuse to subject others to cruelty and hate—issues still relevant under the current presidential administration. Coupled with that reminder is an open question

posed to Gates’s viewers regarding the beauty and strength of mixed-race people, whom society so often presents as enigmas. Such people have attachments to different histories that are typically not examined through collective discussion. This makes their existences unique, both blessing and curse, with few examples to follow in dealing with the conundrum of being biracial. Amalgam deals with the past in an unexpected way. The feeling throughout the exhibition is one not of outrage but rather of sorrowful and remorseful reflection, a haunting sadness tied to the unchallenged understanding of difference as abhorrent. The show touches a nerve in current society, where immigrants are demonized everywhere and tensions are growing among bordering countries. “Dépaysement,” one of many French words with no exact English equivalent, describes a feeling of homesickness or disorientation in being away from one’s home country. It came to mind as I reflected on Amalgam: the island’s residents were banished from their homes, unable to return because of the greed and fear that blinded some to their humanity. Gates has also made a film, Dance of Malaga (2019), in collaboration with the American choreographer Kyle Abraham. The work mixes interracial scenes from archival feature films selected by Gates with a performance choreographed and performed by Abraham on Malaga itself. The soundtrack—by the Black Monks of Mississippi, an experimental music ensemble, formed in 2008, led by Gates with the musicians Yaw Agyeman, Mikel Patrick Avery, Michael Drayton, and Khari Lemuel—is as eerie as it is enthralling, imparting a sense of both beauty and dread.12 The Black Monks experiment with the specifics of black sound, combining black music of 32

the South, such as the blues, gospel, and wailing, with East Asian monastic traditions to give life to the found objects that Gates collects. Their presence, in the film and in general, provides the audience with an understanding of the black voice in its utter uniqueness, and speaks to the experiences that Gates seeks to exemplify in his art. In the final station of the Paris exhibition, So Bitter, This Curse of Darkness (2019), bronze casts of African masks were set atop roughly hewn pillars of ash wood. On the wall adjacent to the works was a quote from Gates: “These trees were dying. A miller said they were not fit for timber. Useless. Somewhere in the death of a tree is the truth of its strength.” The installation foregrounded Gates’s preservationist determination to ensure that the memory of Malaga Island cannot be erased from historical dialogues again. Gates’s belief in the power of found objects, buildings, and communities allows a constant expansion in his work, as he explores different ideas and closely examines materials for potential new found meanings. In searching for perfection he became invested in the language of practice, ultimately finding joy in revitalizing everyday materials to present viewers with difficult questions, ranging from the complexities of the social and political world to the black experience. Rather than claim to supply answers, Gates looks to engage the public in a conversation, providing a starting point for discussions that need to occur for major change to happen. In a world in which everything is processed very quickly, Gates slows things down, challenging societal barriers while helping his community—a community so often excluded in so many ways—to benefit.

Installation view, Theaster Gates: Amalgam, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, February 20– May 12, 2019. Photo: Chris Strong Artwork © Theaster Gates

1. See Lilly Wei, “Theaster Gates,” Art in America, December 2011. Available online at www.artinamericamagazine.com/newsfeatures/magazines/theaster-gates/ (accessed August 27, 2019). 2. See the Milwaukee Art Museum’s website for To Speculate Darkly: Theaster Gates and Dave the Potter, online at https://mam. org/exhibitions/details/theasterGates.php (accessed August 27, 2019). 3. Gates, e-mail conversation with the author, July 7, 2019. 4. Ibid. 5. Gates, in Tim Marlow, interview with Theaster Gates (London: White Cube, 2012). Video available online at https://whitecube. com/channel/channel/theaster_gates_in_the_studio_2012 (accessed September 21, 2019). 6. See William David Barry, “The Shameful Story of Malaga Island,” DownEast Magazine, November 1980. Available online at www.malagaislandmaine.org/updates2013/The%20Shameful%20 Story%20of%20Malaga%20Island,%20DownEast%20 Magazine,%20November%201980.pdf (accessed August 28, 2019). 7. Ibid. 8. Frederick W. Plaisted, quoted in the Brunswick Times Record, July 21, 1911. Quoted in Maine State Museum, “The History,” available online at https://mainestatemuseum.org/learn/malagaisland-fragmented-lives-educational-materials/the-history/ (accessed August 28, 2019). 9. Maine State Museum, “The History.” 10. Gates, e-mail conversation with the author. 11. Richard Dyer, White (London and New York: Routledge, 1997, reprint ed. 2017), pp. 45–46. 12. See Laura Robertson, “The Black Charismatic,” Frieze, April 24, 2017. Available online at https://frieze.com/article/blackcharismatic (accessed August 29, 2019).

christopher wool part ii

gray turns to pink or his 21st century, much of it in texas text by richard hell

Previous spread: Christopher Wool, Untitled, 2018, oil and silkscreen on paper, 44 × 30 inches (111.8 × 76.2 cm) Opposite: Christopher Wool, Untitled, 2015, enamel and silkscreen ink on linen, 108 × 78 inches (274.3 × 198.1 cm) This page, all images: Christopher Wool, selections from Road, 2017

It took me a couple of years to fully appreciate Wool’s notorious early black-and-white paintroller and stencil-figure pattern paintings and giant panels of black-enamel-letter stencilings on whitepainted aluminum spelling such phrases as run dog run. When I encountered them in the mid’90s, ten years after he’d begun making them, I was innocent of recent painting. But I soon came to love them. They looked flat, like street signs or graffiti, and seemed preconceived—the act of painting them was apparently a formality once they were planned—and the graphic content was minimal. They felt aggressive but impassive and intelligent, while also often funny on levels. Wool made them for fifteen years. One might have assumed that this was his fundamental aesthetic. Then, around the turn of the century, he started making big, complex, black/white and gray, smeared and whorled and spray-paint-looped canvases that were partly about improvisation and largely about sophisticated composition—“the gray paintings.” As time goes on, things become less black and white. The paintings of the first two or three decades of Wool’s career had a particular, consistent, unusual quality, by my lights: they were uncanny. Almost all of them were black/white/gray; they seemed to eschew the sense of a human hand producing them. Even the smeary and graffiti-esque, highly elaborated gray paintings often used as their ground, or even their entire content, silk-screened photos of previous gray paintings, and after all, the reduction of all color to black and white and gray is not exactly humanistic, so to speak (though there’s always been humor in every period of Wool’s work). To me the paintings felt as if they’d simply appeared—like the writing on the wall, or like the world before you know anything about it—rather than painted by a person in time, despite the drips and the layering. I have to tell this story about a trippy twist on the experience of seeing that Wool enabled for me. For a year across 2006–07 I visited his studio every week to work with him at a computer monitor on a set of images we were creating together to make a book. In the process I was more and more humbled by his visual sense, the way he seemed to always know what looked interesting. I’d thought that the concept of a “visual person” was sloppy and goofy, like being a “feelings person” or an Aquarian or the beneficiary of “crystal power” or something. Being visual, I thought, was just a matter of educated taste. But Christopher had something extra, something innate, it seemed. Then, one late afternoon, returning home from working with him, I was walking through Tompkins Square Park in the East Village when the contents of my field of vision suddenly lost all meaning. There was no signification to anything before my eyes, just pattern and shape. A tree wasn’t a tree, it was a shape, and a building wasn’t a building, it was a pattern. Dimensionality was changed too, flattened, or made unnoticed, and color also diminished in effect. It was thrilling but also frightening. It was uncanny. It only lasted for a few seconds, but I felt like maybe this kind of seeing was part of what comprised a “visual person,” and that maybe it was in Christopher’s repertoire and helped explain his abilities. (The other paintings I’ve noticed reminding me of that walk in the park are Cézanne’s. It’s as if he wasn’t painting what he knew was there, but rather painting what he saw sans any influence of previously acquired information about it: it’s not an apple, it’s an area occurring in his field of vision.) 37

Oddly and probably not really relevantly, my mother had always picked up odd pieces of wire—often coat hangers—on the streets of Chicago. When I was first at Chinati I found a piece of wire that looked exactly like my drawing line only better and I thought it was funny to take this baroque piece of wire off the Judd landscape, so I sent it to my mother. As I started to find more pieces of wire that were like drawn line, I started saving them, for no particular reason. It was only years later that it dawned on me that these flattened balls of wire could be reconfigured in a three-dimensional way. The most recent part is realizing how important scale and setting are to sculpture—as opposed to the usual situation around painting. This led to the notion of designing sculpture for a specific environment—Marfa—and installing pieces around the property so I could try to see how these issues might work in situ. In the ’70s, sculptors, especially so-called modernist sculptors, were making work with the idea that what was important was internal formal dynamics; they tended to ignore setting or environment. And this came to be known derogatorily as plop sculpture for the seemingly casual way the sculptures looked once installed, often in urban plazas. With works like Tilted Arc Richard Serra and other sculptors of his generation specifically addressed the environment around the sculpture as part of the work, calling this idea 38

This page, top: Christopher Wool, Untitled, 2007, enamel on linen, 108 × 108 inches (274.3 × 274.3 cm) This page, bottom: Christopher Wool, Untitled, 2018, oil and silkscreen on paper, 44 × 30 inches (111.8 × 76.2 cm) Opposite: Christopher Wool, 2017

A strange sidebar semisupport of this occurred in an interview I recorded with Christopher in advance of something I was writing. He said of his painting, “You could almost say I’m picturing something in a nightmare, or a dream. . . . You know how nightmares can be so unbelievably powerful without really being about anything? Sometimes I have these terrible nightmares and I wake up and Charline asks, ‘Well, what were you dreaming?’ And I was sitting in the park and there was something—it was the scariest thing that ever could have happened. But nothing happened.” In the first years of the new century Wool began making the gray paintings, and he continued focusing on those up through the planning of his 2013–14 Guggenheim Museum retrospective in New York. In the mid-aughts he spent a period in Marfa, Texas, as an artist in residence at the Chinati Foundation, the complex of exhibition and installation spaces created there by Donald Judd, which opened to the public in the ’80s. Wool liked the environment. His wonderful-painter wife, Charline von Heyl, scored a residency too, and soon they decided to buy a house on the outskirts of town. So by 2010 they were spending a large part of the year in Texas. They continue to divide their time between New York and Marfa. Wool started organizing the Guggenheim exhibition with curator Katherine Brinson in 2011. During that period he also made his first large bronze sculpture. It was finished just in time to be installed in front of the museum for the show. He continues to make sculpture; to date he’s created ten large ones, two smaller, editioned works, and a piece in found barbed wire. The large sculptures are reminiscent of some of his canvases of loose spraypainted loops, but they were suggested to him by the lengths of discarded wire common in ranch country. The sculptures began as fencing wire that he bent and twisted into loose bundly shapes, though he was always conceiving of them as much larger pieces.

Opposite, top: Christopher Wool, 2018 Opposite, bottom: Christopher Wool, 2017 This page, all images: Christopher Wool, selections from Yard, 2018

site specificity, where sculptures didn’t exist as full works if they were removed from the specific site itself. And the appeal of thinking and working this way is pretty obvious, but much more complicated to actually accomplish than it sounds. Tilted Arc [on display in downtown Manhattan from 1981 to 1989, when complaints by some users of the site led to the work’s forced removal] was just blocks from my Chinatown loft and it really was a brilliant piece. But—the construction of the sculptures. . . . It’s not what I consider a great way of working, making something small and blowing it up. And in the past, until you could do it digitally, as things got larger they got more and more rounded at the edges and less and less detailed because you were basically doing it the Renaissance way, with a little thing moving here connected to a little bigger thing moving there, a rough mechanical enlargement. But now it can be done digitally with almost no loss of detail, which brings it back to a kind of handmade feeling. I left all the welds so you can see the process of assembly, and that, to me, is a lot like looking at a silk-screen painting where you can see that it’s handmade but it’s a mechanical hand. I really didn’t want them to look mechanically enlarged. And by leaving the welds and dispensing with patina, there’s really no way of seeing that they came from something small, which I think is important. They do tend to be quite flat, as much relief as sculpture. I’ve had trouble learning to work in three dimensions. They don’t stand up when they’re flat so there’s incentive to make them three-dimensional. I’m still a beginner. I’m a painter making sculptures, that’s clear. Personally, I love best the way the sculptures look in the wide-open Texas spaces, without any busyness crowding them or their internal view-framing. In the stolid glory of the Texas plains, they’re like funny tumbleweed, or doodles grown up, looming in droll homage like the landscape’s benevolent imps of the perverse, or its jesters. Early in my Marfa visits, pretty much contemporaneously with finding the wire, I had this strong notion that all the space and openness in Texas was kind of an ideal environment for sculpture. Just in the sense that sculpture is so much more physical than painting, and the landscape and access to material were almost calling for this. And that’s when I started taking pictures of things in the area that were sculptural, in a sense, without actually being art. Or at least not until I might have designated them as art. These photos—basically notes on sculpture—became the book Westtexaspsychosculpture [2017]. I took those photos over eight years before I put them together in a book. By then I had discovered what I could do with the wire and had opened that can of worms. The Texas photographs and the artist’s books in which they’re collected have things in common with, but are also strikingly different from, Wool’s prior photo books, such as Absent without Leave (1993) and East Broadway Breakdown (2003). East Broadway Breakdown was in part a tribute to Wool’s New York of the ’80s and ’90s. All the pictures were taken at night in the industrial/derelict neighborhood between his studio 41

This page, all images: Christopher Wool, selections from Westtexaspsychosculpture, 2017 All artwork © Christopher Wool; courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York

and his apartment. They’re grainy and cloudy but high contrast, black and white—all his photos have been black and white—and he shot them with flash without even looking through the viewfinder, then printed them via drugstore development services (though he adjusted for contrast in Photoshop afterward). There are no people in the pictures—just streets, puddles, garbage, buildings, fencing, battered cars, stains, and poles, reflecting flashbulb light at night. A stray dog or cat here and there. (Absent Without Leave is similar in approach and technique, but was shot on Wool’s travels overseas.) The Texas photos are also all exteriors and devoid of people, but they were deliberately framed with a digital camera in bright sunlight and then computer adjusted for clarity and emphasis with meticulous care. They’re radiantly crisp and subtle. As Wool said, his original motive was to conceive his choice of the clutter, debris, stackage, and storage around the small town of Marfa as sculpture, rather as Martin Kippenberger treated stray objects and specialized structures as buildings in his 1988 photo book Psychobuildings, or as Robert Smithson imagined industrial landscapes as sculpture. Another of Christopher’s Texas photo books, Yard (2018), combines images, as if doubly exposed, from the Westtexaspsychosculpture pictures and manipulates their tones to make intricate compositions. A third, Road (2017), is all photos of rutted, winding, rocky West Texas desert and mountain roads, and a fourth, Swamp (2019), combines pictures, as in Yard, but uses a wider variety of them and also adds a rust-brown color to areas of each image. These large books, with much white space per page to isolate the photos, are formatted and printed to the acknowledged highest standards, whereas his earlier books were done carefully but within a statement of values that downplayed classical “quality” picture-taking and printing. All the pictures in Absent without Leave, for instance, were photocopied for publication, degrading them extremely. Wool has also completed about forty large paintings in the last five or six years, as well as a series of smaller ones on paper and in oil paint, which medium is a radical departure for him, as is these works’ variety of mostly pastel colors, an outbreak of tint that may be an even greater departure. The large paintings are vintage Wool, but also, to me, seem done with a lighter touch than before. There’s humor: drips go sideways; a series uses arrangements of silk-screened typography that are then blotted and overpainted in a way that feels elegantly playful; Wool secretly includes his own profile in a silk-screened blot. If these paintings are less austere and impassive than his first couple of decades of paintings, the multicolored oil paintings on paper are positively sensuous. As is common with him, the papers underlying the oil paintings are silk-screens (of previous paintings) and etchings of his. The oil imagery is also recognizably Wool in its line, technique, and aesthetic, but newly warm and lush. There’s a little of the way Philip Guston handled paint in his later, cartoony, pink and gray works, though there’s no figuration in the Wools—they’re strictly abstract compositions, strong and lovely oil abstractions. So this twenty-first-century middle period of Wool’s is distinguished by a turn toward concentrating on deep composition, and toward the more warm and amused and serene—in contrast to the austere, aggressive, often gridlike appearance of much of his earlier work—without any loss in power or level of interest.

LO S A N G E L ES

N E W YO R K

LO N D O N

RICHARD SERRA

Weight is a value for meâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;not that it is any more compelling than lightness, but I simply know more about weight than about lightness and therefore I have more to say about it, more to say about the balancing of weight, the diminishing of weight, the addition and subtraction of weight, the concentration of weight, the rigging of weight, the propping of weight, the placement of weight, the locking of weight, the psychological effects of weight, the disorientation of weight, the disequilibrium of weight, the rotation of weight, the movement of weight, the directionality of weight, the shape of weight. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Richard Serra

Opening spread and previous spread: Richard Serra, Nine, 2019, forged steel, nine rounds, 7 feet × 6 feet 4 ¾ inches diameter (213.4 × 194.9 cm), 6 feet 6 inches × 6 feet 7 ¾ inches diameter (198.1 × 202.6 cm), 6 feet × 6 feet 11 inches diameter (182.9 × 210.8 cm), 5 feet 6 inches × 7 feet 2 inches diameter (167.6 × 218.4 cm), 5 feet × 7 feet 7 inches diameter

(152.4 × 231.1 cm), 4 feet 6 inches × 8 feet diameter (137.2 × 243.8 cm), 4 feet × 8 feet 6 inches diameter (121.9 × 259.1 cm), 3 feet 6 ½ inches × 9 feet diameter (108 × 274.3 cm), 3 feet 2 ¼ inches × 9 feet 6 inches diameter (97.2 × 289.6 cm) Opening spread photo: Rob McKeever Previous spread photo: Cristiano Mascaro

This spread: Richard Serra, Reverse Curve, 2005/19, weatherproof steel, 13 feet 1 ½ inches × 99 feet 9 inches × 19 feet 7 inches (4 × 30.4 × 6 m); plate: 2 inches (5 cm) thick Artwork © 2019 Richard Serra/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

CUT & PASTE In this first installment of a two-part essay, John Elderfield tracks the oscillating states of unification and separation that Édouard Manet’s The Execution of Maximilian has endured since its creation, in 1868.

Left: Fernand Lochard, photograph of Édouard Manet’s The Execution of Maximilian, December 1883, albumen print, 2 7⁄8 × 3 ¾ inches (7.2 × 9.5 cm). National Gallery, London Opposite: Édouard Manet, The Execution of Maximilian, 1867–68, oil on canvas, 6 feet 4 inches × 9 feet 4 inches (193 × 284 cm). National Gallery, London, Bought 1918

Ambroise Vollard was not only one of the most important French art dealers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—some would say the most important—he was also an extremely gifted writer who published biographies of Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, and Auguste Renoir: promotional vehicles for his artists, to be sure, but great reading nonetheless, full of wonderful firsthand anecdotes. Among the pleasures of his book on Degas are the half-dozen nicely rambling pages recording the artist’s thoughts on the subject of paintings being altered after their completion by those who had not made them. Degas was testy about his dislikes, and began by fulminating about a conservator wax-lining a painting: “giving it an ironing,” as he described it. Then he got to what was really on his mind: people cutting off from paintings a part they didn’t like. Someone he knew had said of the painting of a nude woman: “A good many society ladies come to my house, and I thought the lower part of the torso was not quite proper, so I cut it off.” Degas: “To think that an imbecile like that hasn’t been caught and locked up.” More alarmingly personal, Degas had painted a double portrait of his friend Édouard Manet and his wife in exchange for a still life of fruit. Visiting them, he “had a fearful shock”: Manet had “thought that the figure of Madame Manet detracted from the general effect,” and had cut it off. When Degas got home, he returned the still life with a stiff note: “Sir, I am sending back your Plums.” Then came the most interesting story. Vollard writes:

Sometime later I happened to meet Degas accompanied by a porter wheeling one of Manet’s pictures on a cart. It was one of the figures from the subject picture entitled, The Execution of Maximilian, and showed a sergeant loading his gun for the coup de grâce . . . [Then Degas shouted] “It’s an outrage! Think of anyone’s daring to cut up a picture like that. Some member of Manet’s family did it. All I can say, is never marry. I remember admiring this painting of the upper half of a soldier when I first visited the National Gallery in London as a teenager. The label said that it was a fragment of a large, damaged painting of the execution of the Emperor Maximilian in Mexico, on June 19, 1867; I hadn’t heard of this incident, the history then taught in British schools being almost exclusively British history. And the label had nothing to say about how the fragment got to the National Gallery. Little did I know, of course, that I would eventually learn a lot about both of these things while preparing an exhibition of Manet’s paintings on this subject—for there were more than this one—that opened at New York’s Museum of Modern Art late in 2006. Among the works shown there were photographs related to Maximilian’s execution that Manet would have seen. In an extraordinary irony, while the exhibition was on view, images of the execution of Saddam Hussein in Iraq were beamed around the world. T. S. Eliot famously wrote that the art of the past is altered by that of the present, as much as that of

the present is directed by the past. Looking back at Manet’s enterprise now, in a period of the production of far more art with a political message than a decade ago, does alter it. I will say something about that in the companion essay to this one to appear in the next issue of this magazine. Now, I will be arguing that the cutting up of this painting, deplored by Degas, now contributes to its delivery of its message. But let us first learn how the fragment showing the soldier got into the collection of the National Gallery in London. This is what happened: the painting was a fragment of, in fact, the second of Manet’s Execution of Maximilian paintings, abandoned by the artist in 1868—of this, more in a moment—and left rolled up at his wife’s home, where it languished in storage. Probably before Manet’s death, in 1883, the left side of the canvas was cut away, by Manet or someone unknown, perhaps because it was damaged, thereby removing the images of Maximilian and one of the two generals executed with him. That was when the only contemporaneous photograph we have of it was taken. “Some member of Manet’s family”—in fact Léon Leenhoff, who has been described both as Manet’s stepson and as his half-brother; his paternity has never been revealed—subsequently discarded and burned the by-then, he claimed, seriously damaged lower sections on either side of the composition, and cut up the remainder into four pieces. Then, in Degas’s words, “the sergeant loading his rifle . . . was hawked about and eventually sold 51

for 500 francs to [the art dealer Alphonse] Portier who let me have it.” (This was the delivery Vollard saw on the cart.) Degas then set about searching for the other pieces that remained of the picture: one large piece, depicting the remainder of the firing squad of soldiers, and two smaller ones, showing the upper part of the second general. He eventually found them, and now with all four, Vollard reported, “proceeded to glue them onto a canvas prepared for the purpose, leaving necessary space for the missing parts in case they should ever be recovered.” None others were recovered; and this was how the painting remained until Degas’s death, in 1917. The following year, the London National Gallery purchased it in the sale of Degas’s private collection—and, extraordinary though it now seems, proceeded to unglue the four pieces from the canvas on which Degas had so lovingly recomposed them. And so matters remained until another painter intervened. It is the National Gallery’s rule to itself that an artist should occupy a term position as one of its trustees; and when the painter Howard Hodgkin was appointed to that role, in 1978, he campaigned to have the painting returned to how Degas had left it, and eventually succeeded. The composition was first exhibited in that form in 1992. So, three artists—Degas and Hodgkin in addition to Manet—are responsible for the painting that now hangs as it is in London; as well as, of course, Léon Leenhoff.

W hat may be said in defense of what t he National Gallery did? First: there is no reason why, in principle, Manet would have objected to the exhibition of a figure removed from a composition with which he was dissatisfied. Leaving aside what he did to Degas’s double portrait of the Manets, when one of his own compositions, showing a death in a bullfight, was actually on the walls of the 1864 Salon, Manet “boldly took out a pocket knife and cut out the figure of the dead toreador,” a friend reported. And he made an independent painting of it. Second: if Manet was a divider, Degas was a combiner. In his later years he enjoyed making paintings from pasted-together pieces of paper. The work that the National Gallery acquired could be thought a joint production of Manet, the divider, and Degas, the combiner. And third: while the jigsaw that Degas assembled from the pieces of Manet’s painting would have fitted very comfortably into, say, the recent ecumenical exhibition of “unfinished” works of art at the Met Breuer, New York, it would not have done so on the walls of any major museum in 1918. Tastes have changed enormously since then, when the first modern collages had appeared only six years earlier. Now that collage techniques having persisted for almost seven decades—amazingly, longer than the entire period from Romanticism to

He then brought into his studio a squad of French infantry to pose, and also painted the face of the sergeant loading his rifle to resemble Napoleon III. This was sheer provocation on Manet’s part, and while his painting had been announced for exhibition in the official Salon due to open in May 1868, there was no way that he could have received permission to show it.

Opposite: Édouard Manet, Execution of the Emperor Maximilian, 1867, oil on canvas, 6 feet 5 1⁄8 inches × 8 feet 6 ¼ inches (195.9 × 259.7 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, gift of Mr. and Mrs. Frank Gair Macomber. Photo: © 2019 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Left: Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, The Third of May, 1808, 1814, oil on canvas, 8 feet 9 ½ inches × 11 feet 4 5⁄8 inches (268 × 347 cm). Museo del Prado, Madrid Below: Agustín Peraire, Maximilian’s Execution Squad Standing at Attention, June 1867, Albumen carte de visite, 2 × 3 inches (5.1 × 7.4 cm). Research Library, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles

Cubism—the current appearance of Manet’s painting speaks to us anachronistically as an example of the art of assemblage. I said that the painting now in London was the second that Manet had painted on this subject. The first, now at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, would also qualify for an exhibition of “unfinished” works. It appears to have been begun within days of news reaching Paris, on July 1, 1867, of Maximilian’s execution in Querétaro, north of Mexico City—quick at that time for a distant event that had taken place less than two weeks before. It was begun, therefore, before engravings and photographs that pretended to show episodes or objects documenting the event started to appear, in August of that year; and it is generally agreed that when Manet eventually saw such images he abandoned this first painting, which would not be exhibited until 1905. As it stands, its unfinish in fact speaks of the uncertainty of the story it purports to tell, and of how Manet changed his mind about what to represent when he made the London painting. In shaping the Boston composition, Manet borrowed freely from Goya’s Third of May, 1808, a painting of 1814 in the Prado that depicts the execution of Spanish nationalists by invading French soldiers under the orders of Napoleon—the uncle of Napoleon III, the monarch of France in Manet’s time. Manet was imagining a situation that was, at face value, almost opposite to Goya’s subject: Mexican nationalists executing the representative of a French invasion. And he dressed his execution squad in flared pants and sombreros, which conformed to popular notions of what ordinary Mexican soldiers then looked like. Yet the borrowing from Goya suggests that he was beginning to implicate France. In the London painting that followed, the implication was made explicit. Manet learned from a report of August 11, 1867, in the newspaper Le

Figaro, that the uniform of the Mexican soldiers resembled the French uniform, and probably soon thereafter he saw photographs of the firing squad. He then brought into his studio a squad of French infantry to pose, and also painted the face of the sergeant loading his rifle to resemble Napoleon III. This was sheer provocation on Manet’s part, and while his painting had been announced for exhibition in the official Salon due to open in May 1868, there was no way that he could have received permission to show it. A photography dealer was jailed simply for being in possession of some of the photographs, by then in clandestine circulation. The painting therefore languished in Manet’s studio— what happened to it we already know—and Manet

eventually began a third and final large painting, which is now in the Kunsthalle Mannheim. I will defer to the second chapter of this story the changes in Manet’s imagining of this subject in that third painting, the extent to which they were influenced by incoming reports about what had actually happened in Querétaro, and how this relates to issues of political and polemical art and its censorship. To conclude now, I want to return to why I think the collage that Manet’s second painting became is such a compelling work. We are to imagine the artist making this composition poring over a succession of newspaper stories of a distant, horrifying event, hoping for

Right: Adrien Cordiglia, Commemorative picture of the Execution of Emperor Maximilian, 1867, glass plate negative, 3 3⁄8 × 4 ¾ inches (8.5 × 12 cm). Austrian National Library, Vienna, Picture Archive Below: Édouard Manet, Boy with a Sword, 1861, oil on canvas, 51 5⁄8 × 36 ¾ inches (131.1 × 93.4 cm). Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, gift of Erwin Davis, 1889

clarification and definitive truth, as we do now with such events, and either not finding it or disbelieving it, as we do now. We are also to imagine Manet piecing together fragments of news, knowing that they did not realistically or completely describe what had happened but offered, rather, the means of an imaginative act of rediscovery of something that was quickly receding into the past. It is purely accidental, of course, that the London canvas conveys something of this in its collagelike format, the parts not composing a complete picture and not

quite matching up with each other. Still, its incomplete status as a painting gives it particular power as an incomplete remembrance. And knowing that Manet drew on composite images of the execution, images themselves made by collaging together photographs of the victims and the firing squad, reinforces our awareness of the process of assembly that shaped its imagery. In the sky at the center of the London painting can be seen a diagonal motif, apparently a sword, that appears in neither of the other two compositions. It is especially puzzling because we cannot see the soldier holding it, Manet having hidden him behind the line of the soldiers who are firing their muskets. Late-nineteenth-century viewers would have known that it was customary in executions by firing squad that the command to fire be signaled by an officer either abruptly raising a sword or slowing raising and then abruptly lowering it. Now that that meaning has faded, the motif has become akin to what Roland Barthes famously called a “punctum,” something that catches our gaze without disclosing why it is there, even what it is, as opposed to the “studium,” the manifest meaning of a composition; therefore, inviting of subjective interpretation. I don’t think many people will associate the sword, this cutting device, with what happened to this painting, but it is there to wonder at in the sky; and perhaps some people will. What is unquestionably strange is that in 1861 Manet had painted a charming portrait, Boy with a Sword, now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which was in his possession when he put the sword in this Maximilian composition— perhaps even made him think of doing so. The boy portrayed in that canvas holding the sword was the young Léon Leenhoff, who would eventually cut up

the extraordinary painting that Degas then saved. Whether or not we know this, what remains unexplained is what precisely is happening in this cut-up painting. The muskets are firing, but one of the two generals who survived the cutting also seems to be surviving the execution; so presumably does the missing person—Maximilian?— whose hand he is holding. But why are there two left hands? And why is the general so unrealistically tall? And why is the soldier with a rifle so disengaged from the action as to seem almost to invite being cut off? In our age of assemblage, such narrative anomalies, far from further damaging the damaged painting, come across as entirely consonant with its now collaged format, the two forms of disjunction together fueling the excitement of unresolved recognition of what happened at Querétaro on June 19, 1867. But then, Manet himself did not know that when he made this painting; and when he did, he made yet another one. To be continued . . .

Bibliographical Note The information presented here is drawn from my Manet and the Execution of Maximilian (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2006), supplemented by my “Soldiers of Misfortune,” The Guardian, January 6, 2007, from which I have taken a few sentences. I also refer to Ambroise Vollard, Degas: An Intimate Portrait, translated by Randolph T. Weaver (New York: Greenberg, 1927); T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” 1917, in his Selected Essays, 1917–1932 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1932), and widely anthologized; and Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, 1980, translated by Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981).

THE NEW WORLD OF CHARLOTTE PERRIAND

Inspired by a visit to the Fondation Louis Vuittonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s exhibition Charlotte Perriand: Inventing a New World, William Middleton explores the life of this modernist pioneer and her impact on the worlds of design, art, and architecture.

rt is in everything,” insisted Charlotte Perriand, the pioneering French architect, designer, and multidisciplinary creative force. “It is in a gesture, a vase, a cooking pan, a glass, a sculpture, a piece of jewelry, a way of carrying yourself. Making love is an art.” Perriand, whose work is a high point of French modernism, had a broad vision of creativity. She termed it “synthesis of the arts,” an approach that expanded to include all of the fine and applied arts. Throughout the seven decades of her career, this idea became her manifesto. On the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of Perriand’s death, the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, is giving her a major retrospective, Le Monde nouveau de Charlotte Perriand 1903–1999 (retitled in English Charlotte Perriand: Inventing a New World ), on view now and into February 2020. An ambitious exhibition four years in the making, it brings the full scale of her vision into focus for the first time. “Shortly after she died,” says Pernette Perriand Barsac, Perriand’s daughter and one of the show’s curators, “a friend of mine said that you have to wait fifteen or twenty years after the death of an artist to understand fully their place in art history.” The Fondation Vuitton’s Perriand exhibition incorporates a vast amount of design and architecture—200 objects, seven “reconstitutions” of historic rooms, four recreated structures, and twentyfive architectural models—as well as 200 works of art, lent by museums and private collectors around the world, by such artists as Georges Braque, Alexander Calder, Henri Laurens, Fernand Léger, Jacques Lipchitz, Joan Miró, and Pablo Picasso: paintings, sculptures, photographs, photomontages, and tapestries. “This is the largest exhibition we have ever dedicated to a single artist,” explains Jean-Paul Claverie, the director of the Fondation and for thirty years the cultural advisor to Bernard Arnault, chairman and CEO of the Vuitton parent company LVMH. “It marks the five-year anniversary of our Frank Gehry–designed building, which is itself a work of art. It is the first time we have focused on a female artist, and it is our first exhibition that incorporates design. If you ask me if this is a design exhibition, I will say that you are right. But I will also say that you are wrong.” One curatorial goal was to contextualize Perriand’s work. The Fondation Louis Vuitton has had a relationship with Pernette Perriand and with her husband, Jacques Barsac, who is overseeing the ongoing publication of a multivolume catalogue raisonné. “When Pernette mentioned to me that the anniversary of her mother’s death was approaching, I spoke with Bernard Arnault and he was immediately enthusiastic,” Claverie explains. “We worked very closely together because we agree that the genius of Perriand, her extraordinary designs, took place in the context of a variety of movements— intellectual, social, political, artistic, and philosophical—during a time of profound transformation, the birth of modern society in the twentieth century. This had been suggested in earlier exhibitions but not developed in detail.” The paintings and sculptures, selected for their connections with Perriand, explore her sense of a “synthesis of the arts”—in fact that was the exhibition’s working title. “The term is connected to the nineteenth-century utopian ideals of a total work of art,” says Olivier Michelon, the Fondation’s chief curator, “but Perriand makes the concept more precise. It is not a totality of art but a

union of different artistic expressions, integrating a vast range—of works, of artists, of media—within a universal need, the lived environment.” As Jacques Barsac suggests of his mother-in-law, “Every time Charlotte presented her work, she included tapestries by Le Corbusier, paintings by Léger. Whenever she organized an exhibition, she called her friends— Miró, Calder, etc.—to loan works. She believed that art should be everywhere, that it needs to be part of daily life.” The tone is set from the first galleries, where two pieces in tubular steel—the iconic reclining lounge chair Chaise longue basculante, B306 (1928), and the equally significant swiveling armchair Fauteuil pivotant, B302 (1927), stand in front of a monumental machine-age painting by Léger, Le Transport des forces (Transport of forces, 1937), and Picasso’s Femmes devant la mer (Women by the sea, 1956), underscoring the designer’s connection with the artist and her fascination with nature. “Right away, you see where the exhibition is going,” Barsac explains. “Without Picasso, you cannot understand modern architecture. When you see Charlotte’s chaise longue, chair, and tables in front of that immense Léger, you cannot imagine the design without the art—it is a global vision.” On an adjacent wall, Collier roulement à billes chromées (1927)—a silver choker made from automotive ball bearings that Perriand not only designed but wore—is placed next to a Léger painting, Nature morte (Le Mouvement à billes) (Still life [Movement of ball bearings], 1926), which shows the same objects. Perriand’s 1925 drawing and watercolor of the American dancer Josephine Baker, whose sense of freedom fascinated the designer, hangs next to Calder’s Josephine Baker (III) (c. 1927), a wire sculpture of the same subject. A few steps beyond is one of the complete interiors, La Maison du jeune homme (House for a young man), a rigorous reconstruction based on drawings and archival documents. Originally built for the 1935 Exposition Universelle in Brussels, the rooms were intended to show how a young bachelor could live and work. A sixty-three-squaremeter space (about 680 square feet), it encompassed a studio apartment and an adjacent gym. Perriand,

Previous spread: Charlotte Perriand in her studio on the place Saint-Sulpice, 1928. The hands holding a plate halolike behind her head are Le Corbusier’s. Archives Charlotte Perriand Opposite: Charlotte Perriand, Travail et Sport (Work and Sport), project, pl. 22, published in Répertoire du goût moderne II, 1929, printed plates, 12 5⁄8 × 9 5⁄8 inches (32 × 24.3 cm)

Above: Charlotte Perriand in the Chaise longue basculante, B306, 1928, Le Corbusier, P. Jeanneret, C. Perriand © F.L.C/ADAGP, Paris 2019; © ADAGP, Paris 2019; © Archives Charlotte Perriand Below: Charlotte Perriand, Fauteuil pivotant B302 (Swivel armchair), 1927, chromeplated tubular steel, metal springs, sheepskin cover, and down padding, 28 5⁄8 × 24 5⁄8 × 21 7⁄8 inches (72.7 × 62.5 × 55.5 cm). Vitra Design Museum, MST-1009-1. © ADAGP, Paris 2019

who worked closely with Léger on the concept, intended it to allow a range of artistic disciplines as well as activities of health and sport, which were vital to her. The living and office space included modernist metal furnishings, a large wooden desk, an armchair in wood and straw, and a large blackboard. She herself created a socially conscious photomontage depicting the relationship between humanity and progress, and she placed a Léger painting of an aloe plant on a wall with shelves containing objects found in the forest and on the beach. “One of the great objectives of this exhibition is to be able to re-create this talent she had that was both spatial and discursive, being able to create a dialogue between space, objects, and bodies,” explains Michelon. “Perriand was not a painter or a sculptor but she was an artist, not only as an architect but as we would now think of an installation artist.” One of the greatest elements of La Maison du jeune homme is also one of the highlights of the exhibition. Along the top wall of the adjacent gym was a massive painting by Léger, La Salle de culture physique. Le sport (Exercise room. Sport, 1935). Over seven feet tall and thirteen feet wide, it is a vibrant abstract work in vivid yellow, blue, red, and green. The arms of a couple of players reach for a volleyball, a gymnastic rope loops around a climbing rack, a barbell f loats in the air, and a group of three athletes prepares to enter the action. Le sport has not been seen publicly since the 1930s; “We thought it had disappeared,” says Claverie. “We were lucky to find it, in a private collection in Palm Beach.” Not only did Claverie and his team track down the painting, and convince a very discreet collector to allow them to ship it to Paris, but they placed it in its intended position, soaring above the space. “It is undeniably one of the strongest moments of the exhibition,” says Michelon. “Léger’s canvas becomes like a cross between a studio painting and big-screen cinema.” Pernette Perriand is equally enthusiastic, noting the stir caused by the painting’s arrival in the galleries in September.

“Charlotte asked him to do this painting,” she says of her mother and Léger. “This is the first chance to see it since 1935—I don’t know whether it’s also the last. And it is extraordinary.” Although Perriand’s work is certainly known in the design world, the scale of her contributions has not been clear to the wider public. “In my life, I have always found great comfort in the world of art and my relationship with artists as I have navigated the paths of my own career,” explains Gehry, in an essay, “Charlotte and I,” that he insisted on contributing to the exhibition catalogue. “My lack of awareness of the breadth of her work is a travesty, and I am sure many share this oversight. Her work has genuinely enlightened me and will serve as an inspiration in my own future work.” Patrick Seguin, who opened his eponymous Paris design gallery in 1989, has specialized in the work of Perriand and the great French modernists Jean Prouvé, Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret, and Jean Royère. He is convinced that Perriand’s design is not just important historically but vital for today. “Charlotte Perriand has now found her place in museums and in the most prestigious collections,” Seguin explains. “The interest has increased gradually over the decades, due to international exhibitions and the evolution of style. And because her work was in perfect harmony with the modern art of its time, it is able to have the same rich dialogue with contemporary art, which also helps explain her popularity with today’s collectors.” The Fondation Vuitton stresses the timelessness of Perriand’s mission. “Our goal with this exhibition is to position Charlotte Perriand as someone who is still contemporary,” Claverie says. “In her work and her life, she explored the role of women and feminism, the relationship with international cultures, and our relationship to nature and the environment. All of these engagements are completely contemporary—they could just as easily be expressed by a twenty- or thirty-year-old woman today. She was profoundly visionary, avant-garde, and we want the exhibition to make that clear.”

Below: Fernand Léger, La Salle de culture physique. Le sport (Exercise room. Sport), 1935, oil on canvas, 92 ½ × 156 inches (235 × 396.3 cm). Private collection. © ADAGP, Paris 2019; © Silvia Ros

Left: La Maison du jeune homme (House for a young man), Exposition Universelle, Brussels, 1935. Archives Charlotte Perriand © ADAGP, Paris 2019. Photo: © C. Vanderberghe Below: Charlotte Perriand, Bibliothèque Nuage (Cloud bookcase), Steph Simon edition, c. 1958, wood, folded sheet metal, and plastic, 64 ¼ × 131 ½ × 15 inches (163 × 334 × 38 cm). François Laffanour—Galerie Downtown. © ADAGP, Paris 2019. Photo: © Studio Shapiro/Galerie Downtown— François Laffanour

Perriand was born and raised in Paris, the daughter of a tailor and a seamstress. “Her parents were originally from the country but they worked in the field of luxury, so there was a sense of quality, an appreciation for beautiful fabrics, beautiful craftsmanship,” explains Jacques Barsac. Her drawing talents were clear during high school, and from 1920 to 1925 she was a student at the Union Centrale des Arts Décoratifs, studying the applied arts as well as painting and drawing. Two of her student projects—the binding of an architectural book by Paul Valéry, Eupalinos ou l’architecte, and a wrought-iron gate—were displayed at the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, the event that gave the world the term “Art Deco.” Within two years she had broken with the more decorative school, pursuing functional furniture designs in sheet metal and tubular steel. She designed the interior of her own small atelier and apartment, tucked into an attic on the place SaintSulpice, and joined the architectural office of Le Corbusier and Jeanneret, Le Corbusier’s cousin, where she was responsible for residential interior furnishings and furniture from 1927 until 1937. In 1929, Perriand was a founder of the Union des Artistes Modernes (UAM), the French answer to the Bauhaus, joined by such other modernists as Prouvé, Le Corbusier, Pierre Barbe, Pierre Chareau, Sonia Delaunay, Eileen Gray, René Herbst, Robert Mallet-Stevens, and Jean Puiforcat. In 1930 she met Walter Gropius and Léger, who became a very close friend and joined the UAM. That year, at the first public exhibition of the UAM group at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, the metal furniture credited to Le Corbusier, Jeanneret, and Perriand was shown for the first time. Seven pieces were promptly produced by Thonet, including four that Perriand had created entirely. By 1930, she was designing furnishings for Le Corbusier, including those for his Villa Savoye, west of Paris, and overseeing construction of her first complete work of architecture, an airline building at Le Bourget that would become the earliest Air France terminal. The ’30s marked the beginning of Perriand’s political engagement: along with figures such as André Gide, Louis Aragon, André Breton, Max Ernst, Robert Capa, and René Crevel,

she joined the Association des Écrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires, a leftist group that advocated for revolutionary acts in culture. In those years she made to trips to Moscow, where she encountered the Russian avant-garde; to Cologne, where she met the German modernists; and to Athens, to participate in the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne, a group of progressive European architects. In 1932 she moved from the place SaintSulpice into a photographer’s atelier in Montmartre, above the studio of Léger, where she would work with the artist and Jeanneret on her photography— primarily images of rocks, shells, and tree trunks that she would find on walks in forests around Paris and shoot in place or back in her studio. In 1936, Perriand met Picasso and Josep Lluís Sert, architect of the pavilion of the Spanish Republic at the Exposition des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne, in Paris in 1937. Sert’s building housed Picasso’s Guernica that summer. In 1938, she worked on her first projects in the Alps—interiors and architecture—and designed such innovative pieces as a free-form desk for her studio in Montmartre, and, for the editor of the daily newspaper Ce Soir, the Boomerang desk and a coffee table, which

included engravings by Picasso and drawings by Léger. As World War II approached, she worked with Prouvé and Jeanneret to develop a wide range of low-cost furniture that could be produced during the war. In 1940, at the invitation of the Japanese minister of commerce and industry, she made her first trip to Tokyo. She would spend two and a half years in Japan, a stay that had a profound impact on her aesthetic. In 1943, Perriand settled in French Indochina (today Vietnam), where she was the inspector of applied arts for the French colonial administration. There, she met and married Jacques Martin, director of French economic affairs in Indochina, and gave birth to their daughter, Pernette. After she returned to Paris, in 1946, her practice expanded exponentially during the period of postwar growth. She designed interiors for Georges Monnet, founder of the European Union, and for the author Louise de Vilmorin and other clients; worked on furnishings for Le Corbusier’s Cité Radieuse in Marseilles; and designed interiors for Air France offices from Tokyo to Brazzaville to London. In 1952, she contracted with Prouvé to collaborate on furniture, reinvigorating his practice and producing some of the great designs of 1950s France. In 1956, Perriand designed the interiors for the Galerie Steph Simon, on the boulevard Saint-Germain, soon to be the premier design gallery in Paris. Perriand and Prouvé were the stars of the gallery’s roster and she was the artistic director, conceiving the space’s installations for a decade. On her return from Asia, Perriand began living and working in an apartment on the rue Las Cases, a small, charming street in the elegant Faubourg Saint-Germain. In 1959, in the nineteenth-century building across the street, a two-car garage came onto the market. It was a sixty-square-meter space with a ceiling height of four meters (about thirteen feet), with two large garage doors opening onto the street. She decided to buy it and turn it into her office. Perriand converted the back door, off the building’s lovely courtyard, into the entrance, leading first to a living space: black stone floors, an open kitchen with a large rectangular wooden table, and a stairway of simple wooden planks, anchored into the wall but giving the impression of floating, that went up to a sleeping loft. Beyond, the loftlike main room, with the same black floors, had white walls, oak bookcases and work tables, and Prouvé chairs. On the far wall Perriand converted the garage doors into two plate-glass windows with, on the exterior, a horizontal metal grill on the bottom third for privacy. It became a wall of windows, with floor-length white sheers filtering the northern light, making it resemble an artist’s atelier. “I did not know what to expect when I visited Charlotte Perriand’s apartment for the first time,” remembers Gehry. “Sure, I knew about her beautiful furniture designs and her work with Le Corbusier, but I was not prepared for what I experienced firsthand: her mastery of space and composition. Everything was exquisitely composed at the human scale, immediate but not contrived. It was clear to me that she understood sculpture in the highest sense of the word, as the relationship between objects in the world.” The poetic rooms on the rue Las Cases are now the Perriand archives, where Pernette Perriand and Jacques Barsac work to secure her legacy. “People often forget, or stories are repeated, myths are created,” says Pernette Perriand. “Everything Jacques has done is based on archival documents.” Barsac, formerly a documentary filmmaker, left his career 62

to join his wife in processing the archives’ mass of information and overseeing the publication of books—one on Perriand’s work as a photographer, another on her production in Japan, as well as the catalogue raisonné. “It is only through the archives that the real story can be established,” Barsac says. “Even though we had a very good sense before, to be able to plunge into the archival material, to study it in a comprehensive way, to have these four volumes of the catalogue raisonné—now we can show definitively what she accomplished.” The fourth and final volume of the raisonné, covering the years 1968 to 1999, is being published in conjunction with the exhibition. The 528-page tome, with 800 illustrations, covers a remarkable burst of productivity in the final decades of Perriand’s career. It includes her design of the Île Saint-Louis apartment of noted art historian, curator, and dealer Maurice Jardot (1967–87); the Galerie Louise Leiris, founded by Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, the first great Picasso dealer (1989); and an open-air

Japanese tea house on the grounds of the Paris headquarters of unesco (1993). Her greatest work also took place in those years, a series of Alpine ski resorts in the Val-d’Arc, in the Savoie (1967–88)— essentially an entire city built from scratch, with 30,000 beds across three sites. Perriand was the architect and urban planner, as well as designing most of the interior furnishings. The ensemble is a masterwork of humane modernism. Given the vastness of Perriand’s architectural output, the incorporation of art in the Vuitton exhibition is particularly impressive. “All it required was following the example of Charlotte Perriand,” Michelon points out. Claverie is convinced that to fail to fuse architecture and art would have been unfair to the subject: “To celebrate an artist is also to respect them, to understand the depth of their vision, their engagement,” says the director, “and this was hers. We can’t talk about Charlotte Perriand without respecting this line that she traces throughout her career, this dialogue, this ‘synthesis of the arts.’”

Fernand Léger, Charlotte Perriand, and Pablo Picasso, Table basse-manifeste pour Jean-Richard Bloch (Manifesto table for JeanRichard Bloch), 1937. On the tabletop, two engravings by Picasso from the series Sueño y mentira de Franco (The Dream and Lie of Franco), 1937, and two drawings by Fernand Léger, Tire-bouchon (Corkscrew) and Fragment de vitrage (Glass fragment), 1933. © ADAGP, Paris 2019; © Charlotte Perriand/ Archives Charlotte Perriand; © Succession Picasso 2019 All images courtesy Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris

judygeib.com Jumbled “I LOVE YOU” ruby-encrusted necklace, 22k and 18k gold and silver, 2019.

Building a Legacy In this series we speak with experts in the field of artists’ estates and legacy stewardship to gain insights that might prove useful to artists and their staffs, foundations and estates, scholars, and others. With this installment we turn to the subject of editions of sculpture and photography. In Paris this spring, Gagosian’s Simon Stock talked to Marisa Cardinale, an advisor to artists and artists’ estates; Hugues Herpin, director of strategic affairs at the Musée Rodin, Paris; and Jean-Jacques Neuer, an avocat in France and solicitor in England and Wales. They discussed originals, reproductions, and how best to preserve artists’ intentions when casting and printing posthumously. SIMON STOCK We’ll

be talking today about issues pertaining to artworks created in editions. The topic has ramifications not just for artists but for the market and for the understanding and perpetuation of artists’ legacies. There are legal ramifications too, so I thought we would start with where we stand legally in terms of posthumous reproduction. As you’re probably aware, a bronze cast made after the death of the artist can still be considered original. Jean-Jacques, in France, what is the legal limit on the number of casts of a work of art that can be considered originals rather than reproductions? JEAN-JACQUES NEUER In France, the maximum number is twelve: eight numbered casts plus four artist proofs. These works must be cast from what we can refer to as the “initial plaster.” Let’s say an artist models a sculpture in clay. When the artist hands the raw clay to the molder, he or she receives a unique plaster in return; this is the initial plaster. Both the clay and the lost mold used to cast this plaster are destroyed during the process. If the artist is satisfied with the outcome, a new mold is created from the initial plaster and is used to cast a second generation of plasters—usually called “workshop plasters,” “foundry plasters,” or “plaster models.” The artist checks and validates this second generation of plasters and eventually sends one sample to the foundry with an order to cast. One must admit that neither the “initial plaster” nor the “workshop plaster” is original; both are just tools produced by an artisan. The ability to produce “original bronzes” out of these tools is 64

recognized because of, first, their direct descent from the clay and, second, the control assured by the artist or the artist’s successors during all the steps of their fabrication. From France, this number of twelve has made its way around the world and has entered, for example, American legislation to serve as the basis for defining multiple originals. The main problem here, though, is this term “original,” because there is not just a legal definition or interpretation of what’s original but also an artistic or philosophical one, and the latter isn’t totally objective. In my view, it’s not the business of lawyers or judges to say what’s original and what isn’t; it’s the business of scholars, specialists, and experts. They all have a point of view, and their debates around this issue are very healthy. The business of lawyers or judges—even more so, I would say, in the United States than in France, as the laws are different—should be whether a cast is authorized or not. And of course, whether it is authorized and whether it is compliant with the initial plaster are two different things, but if a cast is totally compliant with the initial plaster, and if it’s authorized by the legal copyright holders, and if it’s within the legally allowed edition size, then you have an original artwork. To avoid problems, we have to present a work for what it is. There are people who refuse to say whether a work is posthumous or was cast during the artist’s lifetime because they believe that the two are equivalent. But there are also people who think they’re not equivalent. So we have to tell the

public exactly what a work is: is it a posthumous cast or a lifetime cast, when was it produced, by which foundry, how many casts. . . . SS I agree, it’s about moving toward clarification. Could you tell us, Jean-Jacques, how the law about twelve casts came into effect? JJN It’s a crazy notion, isn’t it? How could you have an original artwork that is also multiple? [Laughs] At its origins the law had to do with taxes. It wasn’t about art, it was defined in the tax code. As sculptors began to make multiples the problem became: when is a work an original multiple, and when is it a reproduction? The problem was also about economics. Let me explain: the making of an edition was typically paid for by the art dealer, who set the sales price at three times the cost of the edition. Let’s say you had an edition of twelve that cost $120 to make and the dealer could resell it for $360. The dealer paid $120 to the foundry; gave a third of the edition to the artist for artist’s proofs, which were numbered with Roman numerals; and kept the eight other casts. If the total value of the edition of twelve was $360, the value of the four artist proofs was $120 and the value of the eight others was $240. Subtract the amount the dealer had paid to the foundry and he’s left with $120 profit. The idea was that the artist, the foundry, and the dealer would each receive one third of the value. SS Before this, one of the great French foundries, that of Ferdinand Barbedienne, signed a contract with Rodin stating that they could produce up to, in some instances, eighty or ninety casts of

a given model, and sometimes in up to four different sizes. This is wonderful, because the proliferation of these bronzes means that so many people can enjoy them. But what’s interesting is that there are anomalies like this in the history of replication and editions that we have to get our heads around. HUGUES HERPIN Yes, you’re right. Rodin had a contract with Barbedienne in his lifetime. Under this agreement, Barbedienne produced several subjects in diverse dimensions and up to 100 casts for one of these réduction. These were made not from the original mold but from a chef modèle, a mold from a bronze cast. These casts are really appreciated in the market and attract very high prices for pieces that could be considered multiples. The difference in the market value between these lifetime casts by Barbedienne and some casts made today as original casts can be quite surprising. At the Musée Rodin, when we make a cast we begin the casting process with the original mold—with the most original step. When you make a cast from a chef modèle, you have something less defined than when you make it from the original mold. So I understand the idea of something made during the artist’s lifetime being valuable, but in some ways it seems strange when you consider the quality of the pieces. SS Yes, and it takes a lot of explaining. Sometimes people will say point blank, “I will not buy a posthumous cast.” Fair enough, but I think the codification of posthumous casting is often not fully understood. It doesn’t mean there’s any dropoff in quality. Essentially, we have to face the fact of what an original artwork is. To state the obvious, even during an artist’s lifetime the bronzes being produced are not made by the artist. They’re made in a foundry by a plethora of assistants, who pour the bronze, chase it, finish it, and patinate it—separate skills undertaken in separate areas of the foundry. So you can see that if an artist gives permission for a work to be editioned, the process doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time. I feel that perhaps one could classify lifetime, early-posthumous, and late-posthumous casts, the latter produced sometimes decades after the artist’s death. Let’s say an artist dies suddenly—a tragic situation. But the praticiens in the foundry are still working the next day, just as they were before; the same people are still finishing the bronzes; and so on. Qualitatively there may be very little difference, if any at all, between a work created before the artist’s death and one created soon after. Marisa, we’ve touched on editions as they relate to bronzes. You have advised several photographers’ estates. How does that apply in the photography world? MARISA CARDINALE Interestingly, even into the 1970s photography was defending itself against the charge of being a craft rather than an art because of its replicative nature. I know photographers who used to score their negatives so that they couldn’t be reproduced. In fact, this was a selling point at many vintage-photography galleries back in the 1970s and ’80s—that the artist had scored the negative. SS The equivalent in sculpture being destroying the molds. MC Yes, so that a work can never be replicated. In the case of Robert Mapplethorpe you had a clear directive from the artist. When he died—of aids, in 1989—he was mid-career, forty-two. He had established the editioning of his photographs in the

mid-1970s, mostly editions of ten with two artist’s proofs. He had an enlarger and a darkroom in his studio, but the prints were not made by his hand; he employed a printer who printed what he said to print. And like many photographers, he didn’t print the entire edition at the moment he decided that a photograph was going to be an artwork. He typically printed from one to, say, seven of his editions of ten; it was unusual for him to print a complete edition. Knowing that he needed to plan for the end of his life, Robert decided that he wanted his editions to be completed. He participated in the design of a stamp that would go on the back of all the photographs printed after his death, stating the year of the creation of the image and the year of the print. And he had the good fortune to be in the position that his foundation was able to continue to pay his printer, so the great majority of the posthumous prints were printed by the same printer who had printed them during Robert’s lifetime. No expert can tell the difference between one and the other. It’s imperceptible. SS It’s so interesting, there are so many crossovers here: the year of the creation of the image could be the year of the original model for a sculpture, and the year of printing could be the year of casting. In terms of lessons learned: obviously, the clearer the directive from the artist, the better the legacy can be maintained. Hugues, what was the case with Rodin? Did he leave a directive? Many sculptors have had strong opinions about posthumous casting—Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth—some artists haven’t wanted any posthumous casting at all. Rodin felt very differently. He came from a different tradition, had worked in the studio of [Albert-Ernest] Carrier-Belleuse, a big factory that produced multiples of Sèvres porcelain and other things. So what was Rodin’s view? HH Rodin left some instructions, but they weren’t very precise. He said nothing about edition sizes, for example. In 1916, he made three donations to the French government, donating all his original molds, all his models, his entire collection, and the only instruction he provided was, essentially, “I give this for the Musée Rodin, and the Musée Rodin will be authorized to exploit my work.” This means he agreed with the idea of casting works from his plasters. The difficult thing for us is to understand what for Rodin constituted a finished work and what was just a study without artwork status. We have to analyze, and we try to adhere as closely as possible to his intent. We are fortunate in having his personal archives at the Musée Rodin, and he kept everything, so it’s often easy to make a deduction. SS This begs the question, obviously, whether posthumous reproductions further an artist’s legacy. Some artists leave no instructions, so the decision about whether or not to make posthumous casts or prints may be taken by others—an artist’s estate, or other people. Marisa, do you have any experience with this? MC Yes, this brings me to Gordon Parks. Gordon was a well-known photographer who early on shot for Life magazine and went on to have a very diverse career. He directed the movie Shaft [1971], for example, and made several other films; he was a poet, he created a ballet, and he was a musician. And there’s minimal evidence available that he even thought about the archival maintenance of what he had created—everything we

Every decision—about whether or not to make posthumous prints, or even how to sell lifetime work, really—has to come from a solid understanding of the mission of the artist’s foundation and what its goals are for the future. . . . knowing what the end point is lets you create a road map to get to that goal. —Marisa Cardinale

have suggests that he was always on to the next adventure, always pursuing the next thing. In this he was quite different from Robert Mapplethorpe, who was very methodical and organized, with everything in numbered boxes, everything in order. When I met with the Gordon Parks Foundation, in 2010, they had a large inventory of works, many of them unique images. There were virtually no editions. The foundation wanted to revive Gordon in the contemporary market, but it also had the mission of preserving at least one example of every work—a stipulation that immediately removed thousands of photographs from consideration for sale or even exhibition, because of their fragility. So we ended up with a very small number of pieces that could represent the artist. At the same time, we found boxes of slides and some negatives that we realized were entire bodies of work that hadn’t been printed, or had had very limited exposure, and these were important for understanding the artist’s entire body of work. So I took what I considered a radical step, for the first time advising a client to make limited-edition posthumous prints of previously unknown works. These photographs simply would not have been seen, appreciated, and understood as part of Gordon’s body of work if we hadn’t made these posthumous limited editions. I want to step back a moment and say that every decision—about whether or not to make posthumous prints, or even how to sell lifetime work, really—has to come from a solid understanding of 65

the mission of the artist’s foundation and what its goals are for the future. There are very few artists like Rodin, whose work will financially support a foundation in perpetuity; most exist under other conditions, and knowing what the end point is lets you create a road map to get to that goal. In the case of the Gordon Parks Foundation, they knew that they wanted funding for a facility that would house the artist’s work and make an impact on education with a bent toward social justice. With this idea in place, we knew what had to be accomplished. And we also knew that the existing inventory contained relatively few works that could be sold, and that it didn’t describe the full breadth of the artist’s achievement. So these posthumously printed works aren’t multiples of lifetime prints; they’re entirely new bodies of work. In some ways I feel that this is a very conservative approach. We’re not making multiples of things that have already sold out, for example. If they sold out in Gordon’s lifetime, they’ve sold out; that’s the end. And in some ways it’s radical in that we’re saying, “We are very confident that the artist did not intend this to remain unknown.” SS Hugues, have you also had the experience of being able to bring back to life a work or a plaster model that provided a new angle on Rodin? HH That’s something very exciting for us. We have the mission of diffusing Rodin’s work as widely as possible. The Musée Rodin exhibits lifetime casts, posthumous casts, plaster models, clay studies, and marbles, all at the same time; it mixes these materials in exhibitions as Rodin used to do during his lifetime. As a rights holder, the museum is authorized to produce original editions from molds made by Rodin. Even in the last year or two, we have rediscovered molds by Rodin and have been able to make plaster casts from those molds, and then bronze casts from the plasters. Some of these works were exhibited during Rodin’s lifetime, some were not. In the latter case, Rodin planned the edition, and we can say that because he produced the kind of mold that allowed him to make new casts and to give a plaster to the fondeur. These are the kind of criteria we use to decide whether or not we can cast from a mold. We have to look at a lot of things: was the work exhibited by Rodin himself, even if it was a plaster? Did he exhibit a work very similar to one that he didn’t exhibit? And so on. But conceptually it’s very exciting to know that a century after his death, Rodin is still creating through the original molds he gave to the French government and to the Musée Rodin. I just want to add something about the word “reproduction,” a term now defined in France by a decree dating to 1981, so quite recent. The distinction between a reproduction and an original cast was made very clear: if you make a reproduction, you’re supposed to put the word “reproduction” on the cast, indelibly, and to refer to the cast as such. It’s totally different from an original cast: it is purely an object, not an artwork. SS Interesting. That’s something that benefits not just the artist’s legacy, and the foundation, but also the market. Collectors want to be protected, and to be sure that they’re not being exposed to inferior pieces or unauthorized reproductions. In an ideal world, I think we’d all love to see some sort of international best-practices or conduct codification. Jean-Jacques, having dealt with cases on both sides of the Atlantic, having advised artists’ 66

The main problem here is this term “original,” because there is not just a legal definition or interpretation of what’s original but also an artistic or philosophical one, and the latter isn’t totally objective. —Jean-Jacques Neuer

estates yourself, where do you see that heading? Is common ground being found? JJN It’s all about transparency. The public needs not to be deceived. This is the law in New York: people have to know what they’re buying. The best practice is to describe the cast thoroughly, to say everything that’s known about it, to present it for what it is. And then let the market decide. SS Marisa, how does that look in regard to photography? MC I recommend using the printing year as part of the public-facing information. So if I know that a print was made during the photographer’s lifetime, I state the year or just say “lifetime.” I also provide the printing year of anything produced after the artist’s lifetime. So if you have “Department Store, 1956, 2019 print,” it’s clear that this is a posthumous print, not part of the original edition. We also do a little visual trick: all of the posthumous works are printed with a black border. If a print has that black border you immediately know that it was printed posthumously. SS And with sculpture? JJN There’s no legal requirement to state the year of a cast, but I think it’s better—to state both the year of the original model and when the sculpture was cast. AUDIENCE MEMBER With posthumous casts and prints, how does one deal with changing materials and technologies—either original materials disappearing or new materials and options being available? Marisa, I’m assuming that Parks’s original prints were analogue and printed

in a darkroom, whereas now t here are new digital technologies. MC I advised the Gordon Parks Foundation to make any artwork that comes from a negative into a gelatin-silver print rather than a digital print. The Foundation does make digital exhibition prints for venues that don’t have climate control or security or other museum standards, because it’s part of their mission to do outreach in educational settings; they make destroyable digital prints for those temporary uses that aren’t part of the marketplace. With transparencies, we make digital color prints. We use two different printers with expertise in each. We also disclose what we do— the name of the printer, the ink set in the case of inkjet digital prints, all of that is publicly available. With Mapplethorpe, a number of the papers he used changed in their manufacture in the 1990s, not long after he died. The silver content was different. So we tried to replicate the results, looking for the closest match we could possibly find. We wouldn’t print if we weren’t going to get an excellent result. The result needs to be excellent. SS Hugues, could you speak about that in regard to sculpture? HH I’m not going to talk about 3-D technology for now, it may be too soon and there’s a lot of legal research being done around this. I will say that I have a problem with the idea of mixing several techniques in the same edition. To have unity within the edition, I think you should use the same technique. SS It comes back to the concept of the original. If a work was produced in one material in the artist’s lifetime and you’re trying to protect the fact that you can sell an original as it was, it must talk to the lifetime cast original or plaster that it comes from. Jean-Jacques, if an artist decides to make three casts and numbers them one of three, two of three, and three of three, is there still an ability to make the four Roman-numeral proofs posthumously? JJN If you go to a foundry and say, “I think that this sculpture should be initially cast in three originals,” and they are numbered one of eight, two of eight, and three of eight, then you can later add the five other casts plus the four Roman-numeral artist proofs, making it twelve casts in total. The edition can be posthumous in full or in part. But if you decide from the beginning, with the foundry, to make fewer than twelve casts, let’s say six, and the casts are numbered one of six, two of six, three of six, and so on, you cannot decide after everything has sold to then make two more. In theory you could still add four Roman-numeral artist proofs, but good practice consists in the artist’s proofs representing one-third of the total edition, so in this example that would be three (six numbered casts and three artist proofs in a total edition of nine). SS Thank you. To wrap up, I think the message we’ve heard today is: for those managing living artists or artists’ estates, understand and be clear about the artist’s intention for the work. And for everyone, be as transparent as possible and get the best advice. It’s key in replication and reproduction that people know exactly what they’re getting and are well informed. Just as important, the process should preserve the artist’s intent. Adapted from a panel discussion hosted by Gagosian in Paris in June 2019 as part of the gallery’s Artists’ Archives and Estates initiative.

DIRTY

Situating Andy Warhol’s Piss and Oxidation paintings. Text by Mark Loiacono

CANVASES

n 1976, the poet Michael Andre interviewed Andy Warhol in his studio for a feature in the underground literary journal Unmuzzled Ox. At one point Andre asked Warhol, perhaps in jest, if he had any “old non–representational paintings . . . that no one knows about.” Much to the poet’s surprise, Warhol replied that he did: “The only ones I have are the piss paintings,” he off handedly remarked, “I have a couple. That was a long time ago. . . . I thought they were all diseased so I rolled them up and put them somewhere.”1 With the interview, Unmuzzled Ox reproduced a grainy, off–centered black-andwhite photograph of a stained unstretched canvas splayed out on the studio floor. The caption reads: “Andy Warhol: Piss Painting, urine on canvas, 46 × 80, c.1961.”2 If the dating of c. 1961 is correct, it means that Warhol was experimenting with aleatory abstraction around the same time that he was making his first Pop paintings of comic strips and advertisements, examples of which appeared in a window display at Bonwit Teller in April 1961. Given the 70

positive response to his Pop paintings from artworld insiders such as Emile de Antonio, Gene Swenson, and Ivan Karp, it is not surprising that Warhol rolled up and abandoned the “dirty canvases” he had been experimenting with soon thereafter.3 What is startling, however, is that he returned to the idea of making abstract paintings with urine some sixteen years later. From the summer of 1977 into the first half of 1978, he would make around 113 works with urine, many including a ground of metallic pigment that oxidized upon contact. 4 Collectively, these Piss and Oxidation paintings, as they are now known, constitute Warhol’s first major series of paintings that do not include a hand–painted or silk-screened representational image, making them his first, and among his only, fully abstract paintings. Most often seen as anomalous in Warhol’s artistic output, the Piss and Oxidation paintings have occupied a liminal space in the commentary on the artist. The primary reason is obvious: in the absence of a pop-cultural referent, the paintings are not immediately recognizable as Warhols. Even

Benjamin Buchloh, one of the most astute and influential observers of Warhol’s practice, was baffled when he first encountered them. “Seeing the Oxidation paintings for the first time at Documenta 7, 1982,” he later admitted, “gave me one of the rare, and increasingly impossible experiences that one searches for in exhibitions: to be utterly stunned by an unknown work by an unknown artist.”5 How then can we begin to situate these abstract paintings within Warhol’s career as a whole? Or, to put it another way, what is particularly Warholian about aleatory stain paintings made with urine and metallic pigments? From a formal and a procedural perspective, the Piss and Oxidation paintings can be seen as an evolution of Warhol’s previous experiments with abstract picture-making strategies during the 1940s and ’50s, before the advent of Pop.6 In the late 1940s, while still a student at Carnegie Tech in his native Pittsburgh, Warhol had experimented with aleatory painting techniques in Samuel Rosenberg’s painting and drawing class. One classmate recalls him “splashing yellow, blue, and cadmium

Previous spread: Andy Warhol, Oxidation Painting, 1978, urine and metallic pigment in acrylic medium on canvas, 78 × 207 ¾ inches (198.1 × 527.7 cm) Opposite: Andy Warhol, Piss, 1978, urine on HMP paper, 31 ¼ × 23 ¾ inches (79.4 × 60.3 cm) This page: Andy Warhol, Oxidation Painting, 1978, urine and metallic pigment in acrylic medium on canvas, 32 × 24 inches (81.2 × 61 cm)

red paint on the canvas and having it run down, forming droplet patterns,” in a manner reminiscent of abstract Surrealism and the contemporaneous work of Jackson Pollock.7 Another remembers that, when asked to illustrate a fictional story of a young man’s suicide, Warhol produced a “striking red blob of tempera paint.”8 As his practice matured in the 1950s, Warhol was continually drawn to the indeterminate painterly effects of aqueous solutions such as watercolor and ink. His signature “blotted-line” technique of these years, itself a method of indirectly staining a drawing surface, involved tracing a design in ink and then blotting it onto an attached sheet of paper, creating a slightly distorted mirror image of the original. Around 1954, he applied a similar albeit more haphazard logic to a suite of decorative drawings made by immersing paper in a combination of pigment, oil, and water to create an abstract marbleized pattern. Robert Fleisher, the manager of the stationery department of Bergdorf Goodman in the 1950s and one of Warhol’s figure models, remembers that “the bathtub was always

filled with dyes and water because he used to make his own paper. He had a technique of putting paper through dyes in the water that made it look like that old Italian and French endpaper.”9 Although Warhol adorned some of these drawings with cursory figurative designs—drawn using the blotted-line technique—others were left to stand on their own as aleatory abstractions, similar to the Piss paintings and drawings that he would go on to make in the early 1960s and then again in 1977–78.10 Both the marbleization process and the blottedline technique allowed Warhol to quickly and efficiently generate an instantaneous image that could be serially repeated to produce distinctive copies in each successive iteration. This anticipated the innovative photo-silk-screening technique that he would famously adopt in the 1960s. In the case of the marbleized drawings, it also resulted in works that unironically participate in the primary concerns of the most advanced abstract painting of the time: formal problems associated with the unity of image and surface, color and shape; notions of anticompositionality and the decorative; challenges to

spatial orientation; and the relationship between figure and ground. Yet despite this, and despite producing other innovative works that challenged received notions of abstraction and figuration, fine art and commercial design, the mechanical and handmade, the retrograde and the contemporaneous, by the end of Warhol’s first decade in New York he had failed to gain recognition as a fine artist. It is likely that his struggles to find acceptance in the city’s progressive art world factored in his decision to combine the aleatory techniques of his earlier work with a material—piss—that could only carry associations with the avant-garde. Although still somewhat of an outsider, in the late 1950s and early ’60s Warhol was a frequent presence in downtown galleries, artists’ studios, and performance spaces such as the Judson Memorial Church. His first experiments in painting with urine might well have been prompted by the recent work of Cy Twombly, which featured scatological daubs of paint, and by Robert Rauschenberg’s John Cage–inspired Dirt Paintings of the early 1950s. He would have also been well aware that, while it 71

might have been considered an untraditional art material, urine was rife with art-historical referentiality. Bodily excretions as a subject or material for art were a well-established trope amongst the historical avant–garde, most notably in the work of Francis Picabia and in Marcel Duchamp’s seminal readymade urinal, Fountain (1917). Had Warhol exhibited his Piss paintings in the early 1960s, most viewers and critics would likely have made an immediate connection between them and Pollock’s famous “drip” paintings (as most did when Warhol’s 1970s Oxidation paintings were finally shown for the first time at Gagosian in 1986). 11 For his part, Bob Colacello, Warhol’s assistant for much of the 1970s and ’80s, remembers the artist telling him that his Piss paintings were “a parody of Jackson Pollock,” and that they were inspired, at least in part, by the (perhaps apocryphal) tales of a drunken Pollock urinating in Peggy Guggenheim’s fireplace or on paintings that were bought by collectors he did not like.12 If this was the case, Warhol’s early experiments with painting in piss could well stand, like his paintings of Marilyn 72

Monroe shortly after, as an artistic response to the death of a mythic cultural figure. Pollock’s spectacular death by car crash in the summer of 1956 echoed that of actor James Dean a year earlier, a subject treated by Warhol—with an appropriate air of tragic romanticism—in a private drawing from around that year. Pollock’s death was also compared, at the time, to the similarly mythologized deaths of Vincent van Gogh and Arthur Rimbaud. “This ultimate sacrificial aspect of being an artist,” Allan Kaprow wrote in 1958, “seemed in Pollock terribly modern, and in him the statement and the ritual were so grand, so authoritative and all– encompassing in their scale and daring that, whatever our private convictions, we could not fail to be affected by their spirit.”13 Warhol’s initial Piss Paintings can then be read as both a response to Pollock’s calamitous death and the tragedy that it represented to the continued viability of modernist abstraction. As Kaprow explained, “Pollock was the center in a great failure, his heroic stand had been futile. Rather than releasing the freedom that it at first promised, it caused not only a loss of power

and possible disillusionment for Pollock but also [signaled] that the jig was up.”14 We know that Pollock’s death was on Warhol’s mind when he decided to return to painting with piss in the summer of 1977. According to his diaries, he was then in conversation with Ruth Kligman, Pollock’s mistress at the time of the artist’s death, regarding a possible film adaptation of her recently published tell-all memoir. Though the project never came to fruition, Warhol seems to have taken it seriously enough to approach Jack Nicholson to play the male lead and was still considering buying the rights to Kligman’s book as late as 1984.15 Apart from latently satirizing (while ironically memorializing) the romantic ideal of the heroic male artist/genius, Warhol’s Piss and Oxidation paintings are, like the best of his work, also a kind of history painting.16 In their abject materiality and embrace of the contingent, these paintings speak to the social reality of the world in which they were made, even in the absence of a specific historical referent. At the moment when Warhol decided to return to the idea of making piss paintings, New

Apart from latently satirizing (while ironically memorializing) the romantic ideal of the heroic male artist/genius, Warhol’s Piss and Oxidation paintings are, like the best of his work, also a kind of history painting. In their abject materiality and embrace of the contingent, these paintings speak to the social reality of the world in which they were made, even in the absence of a specific historical referent.

York City was on the verge of bankruptcy. Unionized police officers, teachers, and sanitation workers were all on strike, leading to social unease and a buildup of uncollected trash on the streets. As in major European cities such as London and Paris, unemployment and poverty were on the rise, as were arson and crime. Racial tensions were intensified by the rioting and looting that took place during a citywide electrical blackout on July 13, 1977. David Berkowitz, the so-called Son of Sam killer, was still on the loose. Everywhere the city seemed on the edge of chaos. In both the early 1960s and the late 1970s, Warhol turned to the idea of piss painting at a moment when he felt he needed to assert his position within the avant-garde. Having become best known in recent years as a portraitist of the international jet set, after a fateful trip to Paris in the spring of 1977 he reported to his diary that he felt inspired to “rush home and paint and stop doing society portraits.”17 While he never stopped accepting portrait commissions, the Piss and Oxidation paintings, which he began as soon as he returned to New York, were an 73

Previous spread: Andy Warhol, Piss Painting, urine on gessoed canvas, 78 × 194 inches (198 × 492.8 cm) This page: Andy Warhol, Oxidation Painting, 1978, urine and metallic pigment in acrylic medium on canvas, 40 × 30 inches (101.6 × 76.2 cm) Artwork © 2019 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Photos: Rob McKeever

attempt to align himself with the radical energy of the emergent downtown scene. As he explained in his book Andy Warhol’s Exposures, “Uptown is for people who have already done something. Downtown is where they’re doing something new. I live uptown but I love downtown.”18 Socially, Warhol now began dividing his evenings between exclusive discos such as Studio 54 and punk clubs such as CBGB’s and the Mudd Club, with the occasional sojourn to downtown drag bars and sex clubs such as the Gilded Grape, the Anvil, the Ramrod, Crisco Disco, and the Toilet, a bar that, he jokingly observed, “lives down to its name.”19 What makes the 1970s Piss and Oxidation paintings especially Warholian, then, is their particular alchemy of high and low, a quality that the artist’s assistants at the time deemed “piss elegance.”20 Even more important, the paintings resist the normative grammars of modernist abstraction and proffer an unburdened and liberating trajectory for the future of abstract painting.

1. Michael Andre, “Andy Warhol,” interview, Unmuzzled Ox 4, no. 2 (1976):41–47. 2. Although it was never shown during Warhol’s lifetime, the painting illustrated in Unmuzzled Ox has since been stretched and sold by the Warhol Foundation. When it appeared at auction in 2012 it was erroneously dated to 1978. See Andre, “Andy Warhol,” p. 44. See also Sally King-Nero and Neil Printz, The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné, vol. 5, Paintings 1976–1978 (New York: Phaidon Press, 2018), 138–39. 3. Warhol, in “Andy Warhol,” Unmuzzled Ox. See interviews with Emile de Antonio and Ivan Karp in Patrick S. Smith, Warhol: Conversations about the Artist (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1988), and Gene Swenson, “The New American ‘Sign Painters,’” Artnews 61 (September 1962):44–47. 4. The Oxidation paintings differ from the Piss paintings in their inclusion of a metallic pigment, usually copper or gold, that oxidized when exposed to the acids in the urine, creating a richly patinated surface. The Warhol catalogue raisonné identifies twenty Piss and ninety-three Oxidation paintings made in the late 1970s. Warhol also created a suite of Piss paintings on paper at this time. See King-Nero and Printz, Paintings 1976–1978, pp. 138–219. 5. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “A Primer for Urochrome Painting,” in Andy Warhol: The Late Work, ed. Jean-Hubert Martin and Mark Francis (Munich and New York: Prestel, 2004), p. 80. 6. See King-Nero and Printz, Paintings 1976–1978, p. 144. 7. According to the classmate, this painting was called Rain. Quoted in Bennard B. Perlman, “The Education of Andy Warhol,” in The Andy Warhol Museum (Pittsburgh: The Andy Warhol Museum, 1994), p. 160. 8. Ibid., p. 157. 9. Robert Fleisher, in Patrick S. Smith, Warhol: Conversations about the Artist (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1988), p. 144. 10. Warhol exhibited a selection of these drawings, folded into geometric shapes and tacked to the wall or left on the floor, in

a group show at New York’s Loft Gallery in 1954. Most were destroyed in the course of the exhibition. See Smith, Warhol: Conversations about the Artist, p. 77. 11. See, for instance, David Bourdon, “Andy Warhol at Dia Art Foundation and Larry Gagosian,” Art in America 75, no. 4 (1987):213–14; Thomas Kellein, Andy Warhol: Abstracts (Munich and New York: Prestel–Verlag, 1993); and Joseph D. Ketner II, Andy Warhol: The Last Decade (Milwaukee: Milwaukee Art Museum, and Munich and New York: DelMonico Books–Prestel, 2009), pp. 62–65. 12. Bob Colacello, Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up (New York: Harper Collins, 1990), p. 341. 13. Allan Kaprow, “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock,” Artnews, October 1958, repr. in Kaprow, Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, ed. Jeff Kelley (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1993), p. 1. 14. Ibid., p. 2. 15. See the entries for December 12, 1976, January 17, 1977, January 31, 1977, and October 13, 1984, in Warhol, The Andy Warhol Diaries, ed. Pat Hackett (New York: Warner Books, 1991), pp. 6, 16, 19, 607. 16. See Anne M. Wagner, “Warhol Paints History, or Race in America,” Representations no. 55 (Summer 1996):98–119, and Okwui Enwezor, “Andy Warhol and the Painting of Catastrophe,” in Donna De Salvo, Andy Warhol—From A to B and Back Again, exh. cat. (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2018), pp. 34-41. 17. See the entry for May 25, 1977, in Warhol, The Andy Warhol Diaries, 45. 18. Colacello and Warhol, Andy Warhol’s Exposures (New York: Andy Warhol Books/Grosset & Dunlap), p. 232. 19. Ibid., p. 235. 20. See John T. O’Connor and Benjamin Liu, Unseen Warhol (New York: Rizzoli, 1996), n.p.

Earlier this year, the MIT Press released We Are in Open Circuits: Writings by Nam June Paik. Here Gregory Zinman, coeditor of the book along with John Hanhardt and Edith DeckerPhillips, writes about his first exposure to the artist’s archives, the discoveries made there, and the relationship between Paik’s writings and his larger practice.

READING NAM JUNE PAIK

Previous spread: Nam June Paik in art/tapes/22 video tape production, Florence, 1974. Photo: © 1974 Gianni Melotti Opposite: Nam June Paik, Sonata quasi una fantasia for Billie Kluver, c. 1965. Courtesy Nam June Paik Estate Above: Selections from the Nam June Paik Archive, Smithsonian American Art Museum, gift of the Nam June Paik Estate. Photo: Gene Young Next spread: Nam June Paik, Binghamton Letter, 1972. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Nam June Paik Archive, gift of the Nam June Paik Estate

very scholar granted access to an artist’s archive dreams of that moment of serendipity: stumbling across a passage that confirms a long-held speculation, gives voice to an artist’s intention, or unlocks a connection to an unstated influence. Even more alluring is the idea of discovering an artwork long obscured or lost altogether. This latter occurrence is rare, the academic equivalent of real-life art-historical jackpots like Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Martin Kober’s—a painting behind his couch in Buffalo may be a Michelangelo—or the six possible Willem de Koonings found by the Chelsea art dealer David Killen in a New Jersey storage locker. Yet the archive nevertheless promises the dream of discovery: opening up a new passage of art history, providing a corrective to the record and the accepted wisdom, counteracting master narratives, and expanding the possibility of finding meaning in the creation of art. The reality of the archive is different, however, as I learned during the nine months I spent immersed in the archive of Nam June Paik, the Korean-born visionary whose innovations in using television and video as artistic mediums transformed the cultural landscape of the twentieth century. Paik’s archive was acquired by the Smithsonian American Art Museum (saam) in 2009, three years after the artist’s death, at the age of seventy-three. Its materials, culled from his three Manhattan studios, required two tractor-trailers and five box trucks to move to Washington, D.C. Once at saam , the materials were

divided into two parts: objects and paper. The first of these sections resides in saam’s offsite facility in Largo, Maryland, and contains paintings, works on paper, photographs, videotapes, and sculptures by Paik, as well as images of David Bowie, Allen Ginsberg, Humphrey Bogart, and others, all festooned with his colorful writing and doodles. The object archive also houses a hearty sampling of his inspirational and working materials, including Canal Street schlock bought in bulk, such as toy airplanes and plastic robots, alongside scores of vintage cameras, radios, and antique television sets and cabinets. While this collection is fascinating on its own, my remit involved the other section: the paper archive, measuring 55 linear feet—a veritable blue whale of paper. This paper archive consists of box after box, file after file, page after page, of documents such as phone bills, missives haggling over costs of equipment and shipping, and tax information. It contains correspondence in which Paik was chasing down money and proposals for projects that never received funding and so were never realized—his suggestion that he become a “peace correspondent” for public television, for example. But this papery flotsam points to a life, one not of spotless galleries and tony auction houses but rather one of almost comical mess, lived in piles of electrical cords, hollowed out CRTs, and seemingly endless handwritten lists of people Paik wanted to call or had promised to call back. This overwhelming tide of material also contains substantial project plans and long essays,

many of them unpublished or in drafts that differ from their published versions. Wide-ranging, discursive, and often astonishing in their originality and prescience, these writings cover a variety of topics, from the oil crisis of the 1970s to the migrations of ancient populations in Europe and Asia. Others forecast facial-recognition software—this as early as 1966—and, more famously, the “electronic superhighways” of the Internet, as early as 1974. Some pieces are concrete in their specificity and limpid in their aims, as when Paik wrote, in “Binghamton Letter” (1972), that the “ultimate goal of video revolution is the establishment of space to space, or plain to plain communication without confusion and interference each other.” But he also had a more exploratory mode of address. A sixteen-page “fantasia” nominally addressed to Bell Labs engineer Billy Klüver, for example, includes the passage, “Maybe we can send certain waves directly to brain, which modulates brainwaves, and entertain, enlighten, expand the brain,,[sic] a kind of electronic LSD.” Paik repeatedly stated that the challenge of using new media was to “humanize” the technology. While this goal could have lofty, even utopian ramifications, he also refused to ignore the baser, even carnal intersections of technology and humanity that would become powerful cultural forces, writing in the mid-1960s about sex robots with “expandable-shrinkable cathode ray tube,” concluding, “please, tele-fuck! with your lover in rio.” Something that becomes clear in reading through an artist’s archive is that the artist in

In his art making, Paik habitually oversaw dozens of projects at the same time. He wrote the same way, iteratively, crossing out items and revising, reordering, rethinking, continuously plan-B-ing. His love of idiom and adage comes to light in the archive through notebooks and scrapbooks containing cut-and-pasted passages from Diderot, Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Lao Tzu.

question was a person. Not only a significant historical figure—though that, too, surely— but someone with friends and collaborators, someone with debts to pay, someone who tried to challenge himself as an artist. Yet the archive doesn’t serve as a biography, or as a rounded accounting of a life. Too many details are missing. Partly through his background in the Fluxus movement, partly through his ingratiating personality and a sense of humor that ranged from witty to juvenile, and partly through the Western racism that made some unwilling to look past his aphoristic broken English, Paik was often described as “funny,” a “prankster.” “Chaotic” was a familiar descriptor of his working methods among both critics and collaborators. And yes, Paik embraced both chance and indeterminacy as central components of his practice, but reading his writings makes clear how he made plans and worked through ideas: methodically, deliberately, but also with flexibility when something needed to change, or when he came up with a better option. He also absorbed and repurposed lessons from philosophy, political science, music, and painting and applied them to his art. Reading Paik adds unexpected depth to his work, and gives us access to his inspirations, frustrations, methods, and process. In his art making, Paik habitually oversaw dozens of projects at the same time. He wrote the same way, iteratively, crossing out items and revising, reordering, rethinking, continuously plan-B-ing. His love of idiom and adage comes to light in the archive through notebooks and

scrapbooks containing cut-and-pasted passages from Diderot, Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Lao Tzu. (Cutting-and-pasting, of course, was the same technique he borrowed from Dadaist photocollage and applied to his video editing.) Paik blended his lifelong interest in philosophy and modernist music with an insatiable curiosity about the new. He was convinced of the salubrious potential of an accessible avant-garde, imagining poetry by Ginsberg and Jackson Mac Low, music by La Monte Young and John Cage, and films by Stan Brakhage and Jonas Mekas being piped into every home by a “laser TV station.” Equally at home in Darmstadt and Danceteria, he made works that could be seen on public television and collected by museums. In letters and plans, he courted pop stars like Bowie, Laurie Anderson, and the Thompson Twins, then gave them the same platform in his art that he granted to Merce Cunningham, Joseph Beuys, and Charlotte Moorman. In We Are in Open Circuits, many of these letters and other works find new life as concrete steps in the creative process, offering a window into the mind of one of the most important artists of the postwar period. Arguably the most significant piece of “writing” I came across in the Paik archive, though, didn’t make it into We Are in Open Circuits. Early on in my time at saam, I read through folders containing files related to Paik’s time at Bell Labs, in Murray Hill, New Jersey, where he was an artist in residence at the telecommunications research and development center in 1967–68. The folders contained stacks of continuous-feed computer

printout paper, which in turn included a series of numbered studies for various works, among them what would become Confused Rain (1967). My eye landed on another page, titled Etude 1, also dated 1967, and credited to “Paik/Noll”—the latter a reference to A. Michael Noll, a Bell Labs engineer who, with his colleague Béla Julesz, exhibited the first show of computer-generated art in the United States, at the Howard Wise Gallery, New York, in 1965. (While Noll helped bring Paik to Bell Labs, he told me that he does not recall working on Etude 1 with the artist). Another sheet in the folder showed an image of four overlapping concentric circles made up not of lines but of letters forming the words dog, god, love, and hate. Looking at the code—yet another language learned by Paik, who also spoke or wrote Korean, English, German, French, Chinese, and Japanese—for the printout of Etude 1, it quickly became clear that the image had been output by a version of the program. The studies, as well as Etude 1, were composed in for tran 66, a computer language long out of date. The scholar’s archival fantasy had become real: this was a previously unidentified work of Paik’s, and it turned out to be one of the earliest pieces of computer art ever made by an artist. What Paik created at Bell Labs was necessarily minimal, the work of a neophyte programmer using notoriously buggy and complex General Electric mainframes. Even so, the outcome remains appealing in its simplicity and sly conceptual and material reversals—code into words, language into geometry, music into image. Of course, nothing can be “discovered” in

Opposite: Nam June Paik, “Good Morning Mr. Orwell,” n.d. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Nam June Paik Archive, gift of the Nam June Paik Estate Above: Nam June Paik, Etude 1, 1967–68, printed Thermofax paper with additions in ink, 8 × 11 inches (20.3 × 27.9 cm). Smithsonian American Art Museum, Nam June Paik Archive, gift of the Nam June Paik Estate All artwork © Nam June Paik Estate

an archive without the work of countless others. Ken Hakuta, executor of the Paik estate, wanted a home for the artist’s materials. Elizabeth Broun, director of saam at the time, agreed to take and archive them. John Hanhardt, then saam’s senior curator of media arts, working with the museum’s registrar, Lynn Putney, waded through them, making countless decisions about what should and should not be preserved. Christine Hennessey, the chief of research at saam , and Hannah Pacious, the archive’s coordinator, and others all worked tirelessly to inventory, catalogue, and make the materials accessible to researchers. In other words, Etude 1 was already there in the archive. What scholars do is attempt to make meaning from what they “find.” In this case, it became my challenge to think through how Paik understood, made use of, abandoned, then prophesied the use of computational media to make a new kind of art. As was the case with Etude 1, the most generative thing about reading papers in an archive is how they provoke more questions. Sometimes, to answer those questions, you have to cross-reference other archives. When John suggested that we edit a selection of Paik’s writings into a collection, we naturally availed ourselves of the resources at saam , but I also traveled to the Paik estate in California, where I found his Bell Labs notebook in the bottom of a box; to the Rockefeller Archive Center in Sleepy Hollow, New York; and to the John Cage and Charlotte Moorman archives at Northwestern University, among other repositories. John’s and my coeditor Edith Decker-Phillips reached out to the Joseph Beuys Archive in

Düsseldorf and returned to the Sohm Archive, in the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, to pore over the documents that had formed her previous compendia of Paik’s writings, published in German and French, in order to obtain materials for our volume. Building out context for the writings in the book meant soliciting the memories and recollections of people who knew the artist. And so we conducted interviews with people like Carol Brandenburg, a longtime Paik supporter and producer at WNET who helped orchestrate and navigate the complex constellation of people, stations, and technologies that constituted Paik’s three satellite works of the 1980s, Good Morning, Mr. Orwell (1984), Bye Bye Kipling (1986), and Wrap Around the World (1988), which combined resources and talent from dozens of countries. We called on the resources of Peter Wenzel, owner of one of the world’s most significant collections of Paik’s published writings and exhibition texts. We talked to contemporaries of Paik’s such as the video artist Steve Beck. We studied previously published interviews for corroborations and elaborations, and relied on a previously unpublished conversation between Paik and fellow Fluxus artist Dick Higgins that had been incorporated into saam’s archive. I never met Nam June but John had curated his work, written about him extensively, and considered him a good friend. Before a screening of Zen for Film (1962–64), Paik’s zero-degree investigation of cinematic materiality in which a reel of clear leader accrues dust motes and scratches as its imagery, he told John to kick the reel across the floor before the screening,

in order to gather further scuzz and make the image more complex. That’s information that’s not in a letter, not in a book, not in an archive. These are what Paik scholar and curator Hanna Hölling calls “microarchives”—repositories of knowledge that escape inscription. Such microarchives include the institutional memories of museum registrars, a conservator’s knowledge of CRT screens, and the anecdotal remembrances of someone like Jon Huffman, Paik’s longtime assistant, project manager, and now curator of the Paik estate. All of these different people, resources, and institutions are crucial components in the construction of an art history. We Are in Open Circuits includes an essay called “Random Access Information” that Paik wrote for Artforum in 1980. It is at once provocatively speculative, digressive, and whimsical—a perfect encapsulation of Paik’s rhetorical style. “We have a thing called art and we have a thing called communication,” he wrote, “and sometimes their curves overlap. (A lot of art does not have much to do with communication and a lot of communication has no artistic content.)” To read Paik’s writings is to try to identify and illuminate such moments of intersection. The result, of course, is not definitive, it’s a collection. An assemblage. An attempt to mount a few new antennae on the tower of Paik’s oeuvre as signals to others. It provides some insights into Paik as an artist and innovator, and it is designed to spur others to further finds and interpretations and, ultimately, to new art histories.

PERFECT BALANCE Gillian Jakab considers the legacy of Sergei Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes in light of contemporary collaborations between visual artists and choreographers.

Previous spread: Efimov and Woizikovski of the Sergei Diaghilev Ballet Company performing in Renard (The Fox), with music by Igor Stravinsky, costumes by Mikhail Larionov, and design by Natalia Goncharova, July 16, 1929. Photo: Sasha/ Stringer/Getty Images Opposite: Premiere of Four Quartets at the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, July 6–8, 2018. Photos: Maria Baranova

hat do you get when you cross a master choreographer, a luminary painter, and a virtuoso composer with a legendary poet? In the recent stage production Four Quartets, Pam Tanowitz’s choreography, Brice Marden’s paintings, and Kaija Saariaho’s score coalesced in a surprising interpretation of T. S. Eliot’s mystical poem. The production earned the highest praise possible, with Alastair Macaulay, in his farewell essay as chief dance critic for the New York Times, calling it “the most sublime dance-theater creation this century.”1 This harmonious intermingling of talent across the arts prompts a look back in dance history—and cultural history in general—to Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, a singular force uniting artistic titans from diverse disciplines at the dawn of the twentieth century. Eliot himself was certainly familiar with the Ballets Russes: he attended the company’s performances and they reverberated through his writings.2 Born from the group of artists affiliated with the Russian journal Mir Iskusstva (World of art), founded by Diaghilev in 1898, the Ballets Russes, from its beginnings, engaged painters, writers, and composers with the long-neglected art of dance. Diaghilev and his dancers propelled ballet into the twentieth century, pulling it abreast with avantgarde movements in the other arts, not least by partnering with them. Yet as dance historian Lynn Garafola notes in the definitive work on the company, its story is far more complex than a recipe of joint creation by equal partners.3 Interviewed for the Gagosian Quarterly online, Brice Marden named the collaborative aspect of the Four Quartets project as the source of his interest in it.4 His interviewer was Gideon Lester, the artistic director of Bard College’s Fisher Center and the man behind the commission. Experienced in playing Diaghilev’s impresario role, Lester clearly has an eye for affinities and complements. Sometimes, however, grouping big-name talents is not enough. Reviewing this summer’s multidisciplinary dance production Dragon Spring Phoenix Rise at Manhattan’s Shed for the Financial Times, for example, Apollinaire Scherr writes that “each member of the artistic team . . . is certified best of the best of their kind” and calls the venue’s artistic director “Diaghilev-ish,” yet the result “counts for less than the sum of its parts” to the point where it “serves as a cautionary tale.”5 Why do some dream teams coalesce while others flounder? The power of the artists’ personalities, the resonances (or lack of) between their ideological and their aesthetic values, their sense of the communicative power of particular art forms, and the skill of the overall impresario—these are some of the determining elements. To peel back the curtains of certain Ballets Russes collaborations and peek at their behind-the-scenes dynamic, I went from coffee with Garafola at Columbia to the Palais Garnier archives in Paris. The history of the Ballets Russes is in part a history of partnerships between the company’s vanguard choreographers and an A-list of early-twentieth-century painters and composers: Léon Bakst, Salvador Dalí, André Derain, Giorgio de Chirico, Natalia Goncharova, Juan Gris, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and many others, as well as Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, and Igor Stravinsky. Some Ballets Russes creations, such as Pétrouchka (1911) and Les Noces (The Wedding, 1923), have become classics of the ballet canon; others may be known today less as dance productions than as slides in an art-history course; and still others are forgotten or were never realized at all. Even in their time, some offerings of the Ballets Russes were better received than others. Picasso’s creations for Parade (1917) are a landmark of modernist visual art in ballet; the oft-cited examples of flawed collaborations are some involving Dalí, whose personality and vision often overpowered the choreography. Garafola demonstrates that the artists more often than not carried out their part of the work without being co-visionaries. “Far more than collaboration,” she explains, “what held together the pieces of Diaghilev’s best works was the community of values to which their contributing artists subscribed.”6 This does not mean that Diaghilev adhered to one artistic movement or a single belief system. Rather, the visual, musical, and choreographic elements of the ballets ebbed and flowed with the various incarnations of modernism from which Diaghilev’s artists emerged. Nor does this mean that they all came from the same movement or subscribed to the same aesthetic philosophy; in fact, even in a single work, they often represented different artistic perspectives. When Vaslav Nijinsky, a brilliant dancer and Diaghilev’s choreographic protégé, shocked Paris society with Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring, 1913)—famous for signaling a modernist turning point with its angular neoprimitive movement and Stravinsky’s heavily rhythmic, dissonant score—the painter Nicholas Roerich’s stage designs and costumes depicted the ballet’s ancient pagan rituals in the company’s earlier Symbolist style. Two examples make for good deep dives. Bronislava Nijinska’s collaboration with Goncharova matched the first woman visual artist, and an avant-garde artist at that, to contribute to a Ballets Russes production, Les Noces, with the company’s only woman choreographer; and the pairing of Matisse with Léonide Massine on Le Chant du rossignol (The Song of the Nightingale, 1920) sheds light on the relationship of art and dance and produced the first examples of Matisse’s cutout technique. While Four Quartets was playing at London’s Barbican this past May, the city’s Tate Modern was preparing to open the first British retrospective of Goncharova’s work. This major exhibition ended with an entire room devoted to her designs for the stage, noting the onset of her international fame after her

Opposite: Violette Polunin, Sergei Diaghilev, Vladimir Polunin, and Pablo Picasso, Covent Garden Studio, London, 1919, from an album of 21 photographs taken during the execution of the curtain for the ballet Le Tricorne. Musée national Picasso, Paris. Image: © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, New York This page: Pablo Picasso’s study of the curtain for Soirées de Paris production of Mercure, 1924, pastel on gray paper, 8 ¼ × 12 5⁄8 inches (25 × 32 cm). Musée national Picasso, Paris. © 2019 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Photo: Daniel Arnaudet © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, New York

productions for the Ballets Russes. Like Diaghilev’s company, Goncharova was as versatile and fluid as she was radical. The Tate exhibition highlit her “everythingism,” a term coined by the painter Mikhail Larionov and the writer and artist Ilia Zdanevich “to describe the diverse range of Goncharova’s work and her openness to multiple styles and sources.”7 The artist’s range allowed her to roll with the tides of collaboration where others might have held fast to their moorings, to destructive effect. Goncharova’s first Ballets Russes collaboration, the opera/ballet Le Coq d’or (The Golden Cockerel, 1914), paired her with the choreographer Michel Fokine. Her colorful sets and costumes, drawn from Russian folk tradition, combined with Fokine’s supple and curvilinear choreography to give fashionable prewar audiences the orientalist visions they so desired, but here found expressed through Goncharova’s fragmented Cubo-Futurist style. These visual choices commanded attention and, according to Garafola, made the ballet “the one genuine success of the 1914 season.”8 Goncharova’s 1923 collaboration with Nijinska on Les Noces was markedly different, both in the relationship of dance to visual art and in the work’s aesthetic. Minimalist and muted, the visual design played an understated supporting role for Nijinska’s bold choreography. Nijinska had a clear vision for the piece and held her ground during the collaborative process.9 The collaboration benefited from Goncharova’s range and flexibility, Nijinska’s sensitivity to visual art, and the values the two artists shared through their personal histories. But it did not just fall into place. As Goncharova later wrote, “By what miracle (I cannot find another word) did the performance of Les Noces become so perfectly balanced, so that the part of each collaborator completed those of the others, in spite of the fact that each worked without much thought of the others and without knowing their intentions or the path they were following?”10 The “miracle” was Diaghilev, whose skillful mediation averted a potential irreparable clash. According to Nijinska, after visiting Goncharova’s studio with Diaghilev she let the impresario know that she could not work with the artist’s colorful designs for Les Noces.11 Diaghilev initially quipped that in that case she wouldn’t be part of the project, but he let Nijinska realize her conception. In Goncharova’s account, she herself sensed that her original designs were off and worked toward a deeper understanding of what was at stake choreographically.12 After some hints from Nijinska through the go-between of Diaghilev, she peered beyond the jovial facade of a country wedding to the cruelty of marriage predicated not on love but on necessity. The story exemplifies a valuable attribute of Diaghilev’s, his keen judgment as to when to make demands of an artist and when to let the artist take the reins. Facilitating a delicate balance of autonomy and exchange through studio and rehearsal visits, the impresario allowed the choreographer to steer without turning the painter into a passive passenger. As two women raised in provincial Russia, making their art in a man’s world, Nijinska and Goncharova shared childhood cultural referents and a sensitivity to the plight of women. Les Noces took on a kind of protofeminist character, reworking traditional gendered steps, such as pointe work, to eschew conventional balletic depictions of femininity. Goncharova’s final design lamented the somber, preordained path of a young woman toward marriage with gray-scale and earthen colors, uniform in tone. The artists’ shared sensibilities, arguably feminist dispositions, and each one’s belief in the expressive power of the other’s forms served to harmonize their contributions to Les Noces—that, and Diaghilev. 89

Henri Matisse’s costume for a mourner in Massine’s ballet Le Chant du rossignol, 1920, wool felt and velvet. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. © Succession H. Matisse/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: V&A Images, London/Art Resource, New York

1. Alastair Macaulay, “Hail, Dance, and Farewell to the Critic’s Life,” New York Times, December 28, 2018. 2. See, e.g., Nancy D. Hargrove, “T. S. Eliot and the Dance,” Journal of Modern Literature 21, no. 1 (Summer 1997):61–88. 3. Lynn Garafola, Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes (Boston: Da Capo Press, 1998), p. 45. 4. “Brice Marden and Gideon Lester,” Gagosian Quarterly, June 6, 2018. Available online at https://gagosian.com/ quarterly/2018/06/06/brice-marden-four-quartets/ (accessed September 25, 2019). 5. Apollinaire Scherr, “Dance is the winner in Dragon Spring Phoenix Rise at The Shed, New York,” Financial Times, July 1 2019. 6. Garafola, Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, p. 45. 7. “Exhibition Guide: Natalia Goncharova,” Tate Modern, 2019. Available online at www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/ tate-modern/exhibition/natalia-goncharova (accessed September 21, 2019). 8. Garafola, Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, p. 43. 9. This was not always Bronislava Nijinska’s style: when working with Jean Cocteau the following year for Le Train Bleu (The Blue Train), she found herself in a different dynamic and took a backseat while the poet, fancying himself a choreographer, imposed his will. Cocteau saw choreography as an illustration of a literary libretto rather than its own communicative art form, whereas Nijinska’s practice had cultivated a distancing of movement from traditional narrative. 10. Natalia Goncharova, “The Metamorphoses of the Ballet ‘Les Noces,’” Leonardo 12, no. 2 (Spring 1979):137–43 (part of an article first published in Russian in Russkiy Arkhiv nos. 20–21 [1932]). Translated from a French version of the original text by Mary Chamot. 11. Garafola, Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, p. 125; Nijinska, “Creation of Les Noces,” n.p., trans. Jean M. Serafetinides and Irina Nijinska, box 19, folder 15, Bronislava Nijinska Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress. 12. See Goncharova, “The Metamorphoses of the Ballet ‘Les Noces,’” Leonardo 12, no. 2 (Spring 1979):137–43. 13. Vincente García-Márquéz, Massine: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), p. 20. 14. See Hilary Spurling, Matisse the Master: A Life of Henri Matisse. The Conquest of Colour, 1909–1954 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), p. 230. 15. Juan Gris, letter to Sergei Diaghilev, n.d. Bibliothèque Nationale, Opéra, Kochno collection, kochno-39 fund (9-10). 16. See Spurling, Matisse the Master, p. 336. 17. Léonide Massine, My Life in Ballet (London: Macmillan, 1968), pp. 211–12.

Perhaps even more than Goncharova and Nijinska, Matisse and Massine shared a deep interest in one another’s art. In 1909, the same year the Ballets Russes first appeared on the Paris stage, Matisse created La Danse I, his iconic painting depicting the incarnation of movement and color through figures dancing in a circle. For Massine’s part, his interest in visual art began in his childhood in Russia. As a young ballet student, he enrolled in an art school to study painting and drawing, and “in this warmly supportive environment . . . began to familiarize himself with the works of such artists as Van Gogh, Degas, and Toulouse-Lautrec.”13 This was 1912, the year before Massine was discovered by Diaghilev, who opened his eyes to the radical developments of twentiethcentury modernism. Of all the Ballets Russes choreographers, Massine most closely shared Diaghilev’s attraction to the visual arts and often found inspiration for dance movement in museums. After his formative collaborations with Picasso on Parade, Le Tricorne (The Three-Cornered Hat, 1919), and Pulcinella (1920), he was ready for more. One might expect that Matisse’s lifelong fascination with the rendering of movement would make him receptive to a ballet collaboration. But when Diaghilev approached him—first around 1918, for a remake of Scheherazade (1910), and again a year later for Le Chant du rossignol— Matisse was reluctant, protesting that the project would take time away from his painting.14 Again, it was Diaghilev who saved the day. An astute psychologist and infinitely persuasive, he convinced Matisse to view the ballet collaboration as a laboratory for his easel work. Diaghilev’s influence, it would turn out, ran deeper. Le Chant du rossignol did indeed allow Matisse to experiment; the costumes’ geometric textile cutouts marked the first instance of the celebrated technique that would reappear in the work on paper of the artist’s final years. But the production met mixed reviews and the experience soured Matisse to ballet design generally. When Diaghilev dispatched the painter Juan Gris to follow up on a proposal for another project in the early 1920s, Matisse was so cold to the idea that Gris played the exchange as if the Ballets Russes director hadn’t sent him with the sole purpose of persuasion.15 Time healed the wound, however; the seed Diaghilev had planted bore fruit again after his death, in 1929. In 1939, Matisse designed the sets and costumes for Rouge et noir (Red and black), a ballet choreographed by Massine for one of Diaghilev’s successor companies, the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo. Although Matisse had refused again and again to work with the Ballets, he and Massine remained close friends, with the choreographer paying him weekly Sunday visits while the company was in residence in Monte Carlo. The story goes that Massine was one of the first to arrive at a small, informal showing of Matisse’s Dance mural (1932–33) before it was shipped off to the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania, and declared “that Matisse had embodied his dream of what dance should be.”16 Designed to fit into the bays of three vaulted windows, the mural consists of corresponding arched panels. Only parts of the dancers are visible, as if the viewer were gazing into another world beyond the windows; limbs curve and stretch behind the archways in color blocks of pink, blue, and black. Later, Massine pleaded with Matisse to translate the mural into a design for a ballet. The choreographer would recall, “I pointed out to him that [the mural designs] were very similar in conception to the ballet I was planning, which I visualized as a vast mural in motion. He became suddenly very interested.”17 And so, after twenty years, the two artists reignited their collaboration and the rhythm of architecture, dancing bodies, and color of Matisse’s Dance became the basis of his stage design for Rouge et noir. Matisse incorporated the vaulted archways into the set, framing the dancers on a large scale. The costumes consisted of unitards punctuated by geometric designs in primary colors. The effect was as Massine predicted: an abstract painting in motion. And just as Diaghilev had done in his contract with Matisse for Le Chant du rossignol, archived in the Palais Garnier, Massine insisted that the artist create the curtain and sign the fabric. These two artists had careers that pioneered and spanned many developments in their respective fields. Their collaborative success was founded on a shared belief in movement as a profound expressive tool and on their shared interest in translating dance into visual images and vice versa. With the death of their matchmaker Diaghilev, each in a sense channeled him to bring their art into alliance. As modern ballet and dance evolved and their locus shifted from Europe to the United States, Diaghilev’s models of the impresario and of collaboration gave way to others. In the modern-dance world, the choreographer and the impresario were the same; Martha Graham, for example, forged a decades-long collaboration with the sculptor Isamu Noguchi without an intermediary. Merce Cunningham’s later roster of visual artists was more closely equivalent to that of the Ballets Russes, but both Cunningham and his musical collaborator John Cage rejected the idea of artistic fusion, insisting on the complete autonomy of disciplines, which were, in theory, only brought together on opening night. Today, the prevalence of productions like Four Quartets and Dragon Spring Phoenix Rise may signal a closer return to the Diaghilev model, with its successes and failures dependent on the unifying vision, curatorial instincts, and managerial charm of the nonartist impresario. So: what do you get when you cross a master choreographer, a luminary painter, and a virtuoso composer with a legendary poet? It depends on “you.”

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Rudolf Polanszky in front of his country studio outside Vienna, 2019

HANS ULRICH OBRIST Rudolf, how long have you had

this studio in the country? RUDOLF POLANSZKY This ruin? Since 1979, but I never used it much in the past. Back then, it was just land on a dead-end street; there was nothing. But the location was so convenient, an easy half hour from Vienna. HUO And before you were working out here, your studios were always in Vienna, right? RP Yes, but those too were always somewhat morbid structures of decay. I have a type, apparently. I had a huge basement studio—450 square meters—beneath a restaurant in Schlösselgasse. It was spacious, enough to parcel out two defined spaces there. I eventually shared the space with Franz West. We were working there for a while until they threw us out and turned it into a swinger club—not a bad solution. HUO This was in the 1970s? RP That was in the late ’70s, early ’80s. HUO To go back in time a bit, at what age did you first realize that you were interested in art? RP Well, t hat’s an interest ing quest ion. I wonder about this myself. My father was a jazz

musician and my mother was something of a designer. They were always abroad. We were never stationary, never native, so to speak; we were always alienated, in a sense. On the one hand, that was very good; on the other hand, always having to get used to dif ferent people presents a problem, for young people especially. When I became independent, I returned to Vienna and settled down in a way that I never had before. It was then that I got to know people who were interested in literature, philosophy, and art. Of those, the concept of art struck me as the most difficult and therefore the most engaging. One of the main ideas back then was about art’s inability to be defined. Anyone can claim that something is art; no one wanted to define it, or at least people were saying that it couldn’t be defined. So I said, Why not? I thought about it for a long time and realized that art and the questions surrounding it are the only way for me to think clearly. Art seemed to be the only way of proceeding with a maximum of what I felt so robbed of, namely, the idea of freedom. There are no parameters for good and bad, true and untrue—all these

RUDOLF POLANSZKY Hans Ulrich Obrist visits the artist at his studio outside Vienna to discover more about the origins of his practice, his experiments in freedom, and the importance of drifting.

This page: Rudolf Polanszky’s studio in Vienna

limiting elements in life. In art there were different questions, procedural ones: What can I do? How can I decide how to do it? Of course I must be clear in speaking to you that I’m using the concept of freedom in a limited sense. The way we are made, what we can do and believe—there are real limits. Freedom is a chimera in a sense, but this illusion is realized as far as is possible in art. I can do something, and you can say “No, don’t do that, that’s wrong,” but I’ll do it anyway. HUO What year would that be, this epiphany? RP That must have been in the early ’70s. I started making the Lard Drawings in 1976. Those were the first experiments. The problem I was looking into was, Why do I make an artwork and how do I approach it? Do I make any decisions for doing that, and how do I justify them? And then I thought, I must find concepts that give me a preformation, a method already created, or created in me. When I believe something is self-evident, even though it is not, how do I bypass and turn it off, so to speak. That means not doing anything for purposes of beauty, good, right, or whatever. I’ve been trying to find structures that will make these factors impossible. With the Lard Drawings, for instance, I made them in the dark. HUO A kind of rule of the game: no light. RP Exactly—darkness was the control I chose in that case. Consciousness should be limited as much as possible. And they’re drawings, so there are linear structures—that happened immediately—but they were just a kind of ladder to or skeleton of something else. HUO Why use fat? Joseph Beuys chose that medium as well. RP Yes, but he had different methods and different goals. I used fat because it doesn’t bind. That is, if I make a nice stroke on the paper one day, the day after tomorrow it will be completely different. So I can’t really decide how it will be— that was the joke of it. HUO So the work remains contingent, or built around coincidence. RP After those works, I began studying physics and quantum mechanics. The language and methods of those fields appealed to me, especially the building of avoidances into the game 94

YOU GO INTO THE FOG AND FEEL YOUR WAY THROUGH. — Rudolf Polanszky

itself. That idea led to the Coil Spring Pictures, for which I used a coil spring, hopping around with great difficulty and lapses of control. The results were impossible to predict in advance. HUO The final images were the quasi-relics of these processes? RP Yes, the relics. In using a method like that, I get just the results that emerge among the many possible outcomes of the method. HUO These action-based practices recall the Aktionismus generation of the ’60s in Vienna, but you felt no relation to activism, unlike West or earlier artists in that lineage. Can I say it like that? RP You can say it like that. Of course that background and history were there in my subconscious, but tracing or imitating anything was completely impossible for me. One aspect of all this was the avoidance of adaptation. I always saw adaptation as an abomination. HUO And then, during this period, you made a series of Super 8 films in which you are the protagonist, the actor, and at the same time the one who realizes the experiment. How did these films come about, and what’s their role in your larger practice? RP Part of it was that I wanted to see for myself what I was doing. For that the f ilms were useful tools—a kind of “semiology of the senses.” Indeed that was the title of a series I made in 1976–79. It was predicated on the fact that my drinking colleagues and I were very uninhibited in our drinking. I could see how their physical condition changed as they drank; they would start to fade, their hair stood up—I can recognize a drunk immediately—but I couldn’t see those changes in myself and for myself. So I bought a very bad wine, thinking I couldn’t drink too much of it. That was the wrong choice, because the wine was so bad I fell ill. I set up the camera and then went through the typical processes, all very banal: lift glass, drink, smoke, look to the left of the window, and so on. Then when I was drunk I painted. A sem iolog ic a l pat ter n emerged t hrough these repetitive colorations; I was seeing an inherent rhythm. HUO The poet Friederike Mayröcker once said that in one way or another artists always have 97

an addressee. The addressee is often only one person. Who would you say this and other works have been addressed to? RP The addressee? That’s a good question. I just didn’t look for an addressee—it was always me, you could say. That’s why I later worked with mirrors. I have a poet friend, Ferdinand Schwarz. He seems to have the real portrait of Dorian Gray at home, he looks like he’s forty—of course you notice things when you get closer. Anyway, we used to meet every day and discuss philosophy, give each other things to read. We were mainly interested in the possibilities that appeared available to us. What’s possible in art? We also read many things skeptical of art: I didn’t become an artist because I had great faith in art’s possibilities, but because the concept of the possible maximization of what we call freedom, by eliminating controls as far as possible, gives me the idea I’m looking for. HUO I n t he ’90s you bega n a ser ies c a l led Reconstr uctions t hat cont inues to t his day. Within Reconstructions there are a lot of sub-

categories, like “Drifting and Sliding Pictures” and “Deformed Symmetries.” RP Yes, I work differently to summon quasi-random elements. “Drifting,” for example— what does that mean? I smear paint on a canvas, then arrange it symmetrically with materials like Plexiglas and aluminum. Then I jump on the Plexiglas and slip on this jellylike substance beneath it. This collides with the paint and aluminum. I do this two or three times, one on top of the other, and that’s why the series is called “Drifting and Sliding,” because of these slides during the procedure. HUO So it doesn’t repeat in the usual sense? RP Exactly. And that leads somewhere else. This is my hope—that I always get somewhere I can’t find otherwise. Always try to find new ways. An unknown landscape. This is a very poetic affront. I think that’s what often happens, that you go into the fog and feel your way through.

Previous spread and this page: Rudolf Polanszky’s studio in Vienna Artwork © Rudolf Polanszky Photos: Ealan Wingate

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THE CENTER OF THE STORM

Carlos Valladares writes on filmmaker and photographer Jerry Schatzbergâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s prolific career.

l Pacino tosses pantyhose in the air as he sprints up and down the aisles of a thrift store, and Gene Hackman has no clue why. The director of the scene, Jerry Schatzberg, laughs himself to tears offscreen, and so do we. Pacino is Lion, a sweet sailor. Hackman is Max, an ex-convict. Lion is a drifter-dreamer, a clown who wants to give a toy to the son he’s never seen and to make amends to the wife he abandoned. Max is prickly, icy, but he has a concrete dream: to open up a car wash in Pittsburgh. Lion wants in. For most of Scarecrow (1973)—the movie in which they drift, Schatzberg’s magnum opus—Lion is levity (a zany softie, “a real pussycat,” as Schatzberg describes Pacino) while Max is gravity (grounded in a grim, relaxed, ornery drabness). At one point Lion, who’s dressed without any explanation in an astronaut suit, tells the soused patrons of a Denver bar what’s in store for them at a car wash they’ll never visit, hundreds of miles away: “There’s gonna be . . . ladies’ night every Monday night of the week! And we will have, uh . . . uh . . . uh . . . (Max: “Free balloons?”) free balloons!! And we will have . . . (Max: “Lollipops?”) lollipops!! And a loaf of bread!” Meanwhile, bartenders and alcoholics and high school 102

dropouts cheer Lion on, forming a spontaneous conga line that snakes through the bar to the worn-out tune of “Pomp and Circumstance” on the bar’s jukebox. It’s joie de vivre of a rare, intoxicating type. The pantyhose sprint comes midway through Scarecrow. Max and Lion are short on money, so when the two enter a thrift store, Max asks Lion to distract the clerk as he shoplifts some clothes off the rack. “Okay,” says Lion. His distraction: sprinting up and down a series of tight aisles, expending as much energy as he can, throwing clothes up in the air, attracting the attention of everyone in the store—including Max himself, who is so baffled he looks back at the clerk in confusion, forgetting his mission. The sheer randomness of Lion’s run has to be seen to be believed; it never fails to fill a movie theater with howls of laughter. Before the scene was filmed, Schatzberg did not tell Hackman what Pacino had planned to do, so Hackman’s reaction is entirely genuine. Spontaneity, candor, the feeling that you’re watching people at a loving, proximate warmth that can turn violent or tragic at the drop of a dime: this is Schatzberg’s territory. At the age of ninety-two, neither Jerry nor his gaze has slowed. I’m in awe of the fact that one of

America’s top fashion photographers of the 1960s has a treasure trove of an archive that he’s getting in order—playful, masterfully composed pictures, most of which have never seen the light of day. I’m delighted that one of the major players of the New Hollywood—that rough group of directors (Martin Scorsese, Elaine May, Robert Altman) who changed the way American films moved in the 1970s—is planning his next movie in 2020. The man whose films launched the careers of Pacino, Morgan Freeman, and Meryl Streep still walks about Manhattan with a lucid spryness. “I’m always photographing,” he tells me as we walk down Amsterdam Avenue on the Upper West Side during a particularly brutal heat wave. Rushing toward us are a boy and a girl who tug at their mother’s dress. She carries a bag of groceries in one hand and a stroller in the other, her face registering a profound tiredness. As they run by, Schatzberg points my attention their passing way. “See, that was a photograph.” Then a few seconds later: “I shoulda brought my camera today.” A beat. “Oh, well. Next time.” Jerry’s gaze—and he insists you call him “Jerry,” none of this “Mr. Schatzberg” business—is that of a drifter who looks people deep in the eyes; his wisecracks, those of a no-bullshit, dyed-in-thewool New Yorker. His humility is staggering: “I

Previous spread: Jerry Schatzberg, Self Portrait in the Mirror, Trinidad, 1964 Opposite, clockwise from left: Jerry Schatzberg, Christian Dior, a Christian Dior window during Paris fashion week, Paris, France, 1962 Jerry Schatzberg, Stones in Drag, the Rolling Stones during a shoot for the album High Tides and Green Grass, New York, 1966 Jerry Schatzberg, Peggy, Buddy, Bentley & Boy, Peggy Moffitt models Rudi Gernreich as she sits on the front bumper of Jerry’s Bentley, New York, 1964 This page: Jerry Schatzberg, Legs, Faye Dunaway during a cover shoot for Newsweek magazine, New York, 1968

found something in Dylan that really appeals to me,” a downplaying way of saying that his photographs of Bob Dylan during his Highway 61– Blonde on Blonde period (Jerry shot the cover for the latter) are by far the most original ones that exist—by far the most playful and relaxed, especially considering Dylan’s reputation for inaccessibility. We enter Jerry’s beautiful apartment, which he’s had for over fifty years. His bookcases betray the cinephile in him, being lined to the nines with DVDs and VHS tapes of the films of Ingmar Bergman, Frank Borzage, Allan Dwan, Abbas Kiarostami, Akira Kurosawa, Elaine May, Jacques Rivette, Wong Kar-Wai, Peter Watkins, and Zhang Yimou. He is still omnivorous in his viewing habits. As we chat, he gets up to show me book upon book of the photographers who have moved him the most: Ara Güler, Martin Munkacsi, Irving Penn, Sebastião Salgado, Vivian Maier. He shows me a Maier image of the back of a woman’s head, snapped in 1958, that is uncannily similar to a photograph he himself took—also in 1958, also of the fuzzy back of a regal woman’s head. This, despite the fact that Maier’s photographs only reached public view in 2009. “Wow,” I say. “You two were really on some kind of secret, same wavelength, eh?”

Jerry nods and smirks. “Yeah. I really relate to her. If I had the guts, I’d just give everything up and do street photography for the rest of my life.” Schatzberg was born on June 26, 1927, in a Manhattan hospital. Until the age of fourteen, he was raised off Grand Concourse, the center of the Bronx, in a lower-middle-class family of Jewish furriers. His childhood best friends were a mix of Italian, Irish, and Jewish second-generation immigrants from whom he acquired his offbeat sense of humor. As a kid near Grand Concourse, Jerry always went to the movie matinees at the Loews Paradise and RKO Fordham theaters, watching everything under the studio sun: Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney musicals, Camille with Greta Garbo, a lot of Alfred Hitchcock. In his twenties, he started off working for his father’s fur business to support his wife and two kids, but hated the job and wanted to leave as soon as possible. His uncle worked for a diaper service that gave people a free picture of their baby when they bought the diapers; Jerry’s uncle hired him as the photographer, at $2 a session. From there he bought his first camera and kept taking photographs, practicing, until he landed at the doorstep of William Helburn, one of the top fashion and advertising photographers of the 1950s and ’60s. During his time with Helburn,

he was introduced by Jack Shannon, Helburn’s studio assistant, to the foreign art house cinema scene on 42nd Street: Bergman, Gillo Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers (1966), the French New Wave films of Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais, and François Truffaut. After working as Helburn’s assistant for two and a half years, Jerry had enough saved up to start his own studio, at 333 Park Avenue South, between 24th and 25th streets. (Today it’s a million-dollar co-op nestled near a bank and an Equinox gym.) Schatzberg honed his eye and his warm sensibility in a course taught on the Upper East Side (later at the New School) by Alexey Brodovitch, the art director of Harper’s Bazaar from 1934 to 1958. “Any photographer worth his salt took Brodovitch’s course,” Jerry says—and indeed, among the students at his Design Laboratory Brodovitch counted not only Schatzberg but also Penn, Richard Avedon, Lillian Bassman, Robert Frank, Hiro, Marvin Israel, and Garry Winogrand. Brodovitch would give his students a subject—Times Square, Halloween, the Brooklyn Bridge—and ask them to shoot it however they saw fit. “He wasn’t interested in technique or style or anything like that,” Jerry says. “He was interested in subject matter and, most especially, what you did with the subject matter. He taught you how to think.” 103

This page, clockwise from left: Model Anne St. Marie in a dress by French couturier Lucien Lelong, New York, 1958. Photo: Jerry Schatzberg

Director Jerry Schatzberg and actor Faye Dunaway on the set of the film Puzzle of a Downfall Child, New York, 1969

Director Jerry Schatzberg with actors Barry Primus and Faye Dunaway on the set of the film Puzzle of a Downfall Child, New York, 1969

From there, Jerry rose at a steady clip. During the six months after he left Helburn, his portfolio starting making its way around town. Modeling agencies began to call. He began shooting for Vogue in February 1958; by June of the same year, his image of Dolores Hawkins was on the cover. He became Our Man in Manhattan, friends with the famed Swingin’ London photographers David Bailey, Terence Donovan, and Brian Duffy. (Their lives were the loose inspiration for Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up [1966], based on the beguiling Julio Cortázar story “Las babas del diablo” [The devil’s drool].) In addition, he opened and owned two swinging nightclubs in New York City, patterned after London’s Ad Lib: uptown, Ondine, and in the West Village, Salvation. Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, and Diana Ross were regulars at these clubs. Looking through his vast thousands of photos, one realizes how centered Jerry was in ’60s culture, quietly shooting the whole chic chaos of the times a-changin’: the Beatles in red Christmas garb, the Rolling Stones in drag, Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate. He has stories galore for all his subjects. Jerry was close friends with Tate five years before she married Polanski; he did a series of photographs of her in a bathtub. After she and Polanski got married, every time Jerry 104

dropped in, Tate would run up to him and ask him frantically, “Have you a cigarette?” Polanski had banned smoking at the house because he was afraid of its effects on her health. To intimidate her out of the habit, he would apparently drive her to the doctor’s to show her pictures of smokers’ and nonsmokers’ lungs. Tate, Jerry says, remained unfazed: “She was a sweetheart. As nice as you can hope anyone to be.” What’s remarkable about Schatzberg’s photographs is their “off,” relaxed details. Jerry had a knack of making his famous subjects look like no big deals, old pals with a streak for impish laughter. He tells me that he’s always going for the “accident” or the “fumble”: the puppy with a slender curving leash (a remarkable punctum) that breaks up a glamour shot of four models in Gramercy Park (1959), or the remarkable moment when a physically small woman stops in front of a gaudy Christian Dior storefront (1962)—an image neither ironic nor condescendingly sympathetic, but simply a record of the bleed between incongruous worlds. Schatzberg’s portraits of figures such as Dylan, Catherine Deneuve, and Carmen de Lavallade have that mysterious element known as rapport, the human connection between artist and subject that brings out the latter’s antisurface soft side.

Note Dylan’s campily oversized smirk to the camera as he holds a just-as-oversized lighter (1965), his face the face of a friend with whom you’re so close that he’ll show you, and only you, his rarely seen goof ball randomness. Schatzbergian rapport—whose hard-to-pin-down elements include ambling, improvisation, extension of the scene past a logical endpoint, getting to know a subject for an hour before the camera is even trained at them, regarding the subject from fantastically askew angles, and a bizarre, punny humor cribbed from a Dictionary of Dad Jokes—refuses to show a person as a cold, objective fact, their existence simplified to Icy Belle, British Invader, or Ballerina. Instead, Schatzberg often lights from the side, darkening and obscuring half of the subject’s head, intensifying the face to bring out the “soul,” as he puts it. Sometimes, in his fumbling way, he reaches for a future beyond the 1960s: a gender-bending Tate in a pre–Annie Hall suit and tie, a steampunk-goggled Peggy Moffitt manspreading her plaid legs on a car bumper as a boy looks at a man looking at the time-traveling woman from the 2010s with confusion (a postmodern chain of looking, years before Don DeLillo came on the scene). Asked how he makes such great films or photographs, Jerry is quick to pivot the glory back to his actors and subjects—a humble man’s move.

This page, clockwise from left: Director Jerry Schatzberg with actors Kitty Winn and Al Pacino on the set of The Panic in Needle Park, New York, 1971 Director Jerry Schatzberg on the Staten Island Ferry during filming of The Panic in Needle Park, New York, 1971 Director Jerry Schatzberg and actor Kitty Winn on the Staten Island Ferry during filming of The Panic in Needle Park, New York, 1971

He lets their energies determine the dimensions and qualities of any given work. He brings out the inner godly Madonna of Deneuve, a side rarely allowed to flourish in her popular image as a frozen killer-beauty (Polanski’s Repulsion [1965]) or bourgeois punching bag (Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour [1967]). During Jerry’s first shoot with Faye Dunaway, he affected her to such a degree that she wrote, in her autobiography, “At one point I began crying because he was being so heartbreakingly kind to me. All my life, I’ve been the sort of person who could shatter easily. . . . Jerry somehow managed to reach me, to let me know that in this I could trust him, that the photos would be wonderful, that it would be okay.” (The two were later briefly engaged.) His love of people—a care that shows in his rhythmic playing-around with light, colors, and facial expressions—shines brightest in his Dunaway portraits. The red of her beret is a funky, tasteful blip that breaks up the overwhelmingly sleek-black force field enveloping her. In the same field, Jerry gets the closest he ever will to abstraction with a famous photograph of Faye, who, with him, dreams herself as a series of hovering slashes that line up to form a pair of legs. She becomes both art and person, existing in a rare zone of adoration and modern grace.

The evenness of vision in tumultuous situations that defines Schatzberg’s photos carries through to his films. In 1968, he sold his photography studio to fund his first film, Puzzle of a Downfall Child (1970), a fractured and disturbing glimpse into the fashion industry and the mental breakdown of a once-in-Vogue model (played by Dunaway). The subject was close to Jerry’s heart: the model was based on Anne St. Marie, a success in her heyday (later a close friend of Jerry’s) who posed for his portfolio when he was just starting out as a fashion photographer. But when St. Marie found herself unable to find modeling work due to “overexposure” and her age (mid-to-late thirties), she had a nervous breakdown. Schatzberg came to her side to help her recuperate, and later taped two and a half hours of her thoughts on life, romance, her burnout, and her withering thoughts on the glamour industry. With the hunch that there was a film in her story, Jerry gave the tapes to the still-grossly-underappreciated screenwriter Carole Eastman (Five Easy Pieces, The Shooting, Model Shop), who took some of St. Marie’s observations and shaped them into a poetic, 300-page, first-draft screenplay. The film’s very framing device involves a director (Barry Primus) who tapes a close modelfriend talking freely about the industry and its men; he hopes that the tape may inspire a film.

Jerry points out that many of the models he knew went through the same experiences as St. Marie, and as Dunaway’s character: some became drug addicts, some were institutionalized, one became homeless. Initially, Puzzle was conceived as a series of photographs, but Jerry soon realized that that would not be enough: “I tried to photograph [St. Marie] but it didn’t say the story in the way I thought cinema could do it. So I started the move in that direction. I didn’t know too much about cinema, but you learn.” The gray, Andrew Wyeth–infused gloom of Puzzle started the second phase of Schatzberg’s career: film director, New Hollywood auteur, a sharp chronicler of American drift. In this he hangs out in the same universe as Juleen Compton (Stranded [1965], The Plastic Dome of Norma Jean [1966]; a similarly underappreciated great), his contemporary Altman, and an unconscious successor, Jim Jarmusch. What goes into a Schatzberg shot is a Bazinian impulse to record unfettered life transmogrified by the holy everyday— whether in long takes (Streep’s and Alan Alda’s electrifying kiss in The Seduction of Joe Tynan [1979]) or in shards of montage (the memoryrecalling bursts of Puzzle, as in Richard Lester’s Petulia [1968] or in a Resnais film). Puzzle has a noticeably looping rhythm, as a mind tries 105

nervously to pick up the pieces of its broken heart. The sound stutters forward about five beats ahead of the images. The style matches the people, who are volatile, tripwire; Dunaway will say one thing and absolutely mean it (“If a person wants something, he should just take it. That is what I feel, that is my philosophy”—said in the most heartbreaking shattered-china voice since Margaret Sullavan), then she’ll dramatically change direction without warning (trembling, on the verge of tears, her philosophy immediately dissolves into a flurry of doubts). “I write words that translate into pictures,” Jerry says. Which may be why what he and Puzzle cinematographer Adam Holender (also known for his work on John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy [1969]) bring to The Panic in Needle Park (1971), and what Pacino (Bobby, the strung-out boyfriend) and Kitty Winn (Helen, the strung-along girlfriend) bring to their roles, transcends the easy sadism and misery of the script, by Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, who observe the addicts from their usual troubling pedestal—intrigued tourists instead of involved artists. (When asked whether Schatzberg liked her dialogue, Didion quipped, “He doesn’t like any dialogue!”—with which Jerry more or less agrees.) The actors work overtime to bring the film its howling-pain energy. Schatzberg 106

and Holender make us look deep into Winn’s eyes—beady, glassy, mentally not there—as Pacino injects heroin into a big blue vein in her arm. (Panic has the most disturbing shots of needles in cinema history.) We are spectators, yes, and we’re never brought into the inner life of the addict (how fully can witnesses be?), but we are always violently present. There is no score, no cakey makeover to guide our emotions. Watching Panic, I go numb as some unseen supernumerary mumbles what could be an addict’s addendum to Ginsberg’s “Howl,” the heart of the picture: “I seen people kickin’ their habit in the streets, pukin’ in the alleyway.” In Scarecrow, Pacino gives one of the most extraordinary and devastating performances I’ve ever encountered. Whether it’s moving a door in a backyard to cockblock Hackman (Scarecrow will have you weeping with laughter at Schatzberg’s ingeniously framed bits of business) or drinking a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon as he pretends to scrub a car, Pacino draws out his performance with a tenderness that makes poignant the absurdities and traumas faced by his character, Lion. Along the way, he teaches Hackman’s Max that if you’re to get through the madness of life, you have to keep people laughing. That he does, and so does Jerry. Scarecrow’s spectrum of emotion is awe inspiring: from the

most knockabout fun to utter emotional devastation (a nervous breakdown in a fountain has the messy, gripping, underground-opera charge of John Cassavetes’s Woman under the Influence [1974]) in the space of only 110 minutes. Pacino’s and Hackman’s acting prowess in Scarecrow cannot be overpraised: they may have been in countless strong and deservedly well-known films, but they never had roles more open or well- developed. Even established screen presences whom you think you’re sure of (Dunaway, Streep, Pacino) have layers that they’ve only exhibited in Schatzberg’s sensitively felt universe. In Sweet Revenge (1976), Stockard Channing plays an unpredictable, slick eccentric of the kind that the New Hollywood all but ignored in its poststudio pursuit of active-male narratives, which rarely gave female actors the time or the opportunity to develop strong, filigreed women. Sweet Revenge follows a punky car-thief aesthete (Channing) who is hounded by police while pursued by a square city attorney (Sam Waterston), smitten with her and hoping to help her out after she’s been picked up on a bum carjacking rap. But this “female Jimmy Cagney” with the many faces (Jerry’s own words about Channing—and he’s spot-on) doesn’t need any help, in love or in crime. The only man she

Opposite page, clockwise from top left: Director Jerry Schatzberg with actor Al Pacino during the filming of Scarecrow, California, 1972 Actor Gene Hackman and director Jerry Schatzberg on the set of Scarecrow, California, 1972 Actors Al Pacino and Gene Hackman with director Jerry Schatzberg on the set of Scarecrow, California, 1972 Actor Dorothy Tristan and director Jerry Schatzberg on the set of Scarecrow, Colorado, 1972 This page: Jerry Schatzberg, Lyon, France, 2016. Photo: © Nicolas Spiess All images, unless otherwise noted: © Jerry Schatzberg Archive, LLC

wants in her life is Edmund (Franklyn Ajaye), her black best friend, who dreams of starting a key-forging company in the back of his sedan. It’s a nice rhyme to Hackman’s equally goof ball, starry-eyed dream of opening up the car wash with Pacino, but Scarecrow has the beloved reputation that Sweet Revenge sadly lacks. An overlooked gem among Schatzberg’s overlooked gems, it continues at the same languid-zoom pace as Scarecrow (both have the same cinematographer, the legendary Vilmos Zsigmond), which matches its doddering shaggy-dog structure. It starts off in a scampering kook’s tone—a cool throwback to pre-Code Cagney get-rich capers like Hard to Handle (1933) and Blonde Crazy (1931)— before it veers sharply tragic when you least expect it. Schatzberg’s magnum opus, Scarecrow, won the top prize, the Palme d’Or, at Cannes in 1973. But after that win, he was offered a plushy twoyear desk job at Warner Bros developing scripts. “The biggest mistake of my career,” he tells me flatly. Instead of letting projects come to him, he worked on the projects of others—projects that he never personally brought to fruition, such as the 1976 A Star Is Born. By the time Sweet Revenge came along, Jerry felt that he had lost his momentum.

Regardless of any flaws they might have compared to the early-’70s Schatzbergs, his later films have plenty of moments, particularly Honeysuckle Rose (1980; a country song in film form; MVP Dyan Cannon; it gave us Willie Nelson’s “On the Road Again”), Street Smart (1984; a tactile catalogue of grimy 1980s New York, with a star-making, Oscar-nominated turn from Freeman as a sadistic pimp who goes after Christopher Reeve’s naïve white reporter), and especially Reunion (1989; a lovingly detailed, period masterwork, starring Jason Robards and written by Harold Pinter, that confronts the legacy of anti-Semitism through the story of two young boys in prewar Germany, one of whom is Jewish). Jerry defines his practice by his desire to go beyond whatever medium he finds himself working in. His photos want to be films and his films want to be life. He masters photography by an impulse to tell stories, jumping past the stillness inherent to the medium; he masters cinema by jumping past the formulaic plots of Hollywood pictures. His best films are haphazardly organized grace notes that preserve in-between moments, going against the impulse to tell a story whose ending is known from the start. Schatzberg’s films, above all, are an accumulation of punctum

shards, what Manny Farber called “the unheralded ripple of physical experience, the tiny morbidly lifeworn detail which the visitor to a strange city finds springing out at every step.” The films want to be something other than films: a song (Honeysuckle Rose), a memory (Puzzle, Reunion), even the knotty language of reality itself (Scarecrow, Panic). Schatzberg today has no intention of slowing down: he is planning his next movie, his first since The Day the Ponies Come Back (2000). He is also getting his vast archives in order. He believes his legacy will rest more on his photographs than on his films. He’s been hanging out with old friends, including Pacino and Helburn, the photographer who first hired him more than half a century ago. “I saw Bill last week,” Jerry says. “He didn’t have any teeth left. I remember him so lively, running around. Now he’s in a wheelchair. Kind of sad.” A beat. “Oh, well. It’s gonna happen to all of us, one way or another.” As I edge toward his apartment door to leave— we’ve talked for nearly four hours straight—I turn to shake his hand. I see it’s bandaged and bruised; he explains that he hurt it last week trying to open a glass jar. I shake it gently. “I’m glad photography found me,” he says, as he closes the door behind me. 107

Man Ray, Autoportrait, c. 1927–30, vintage gelatin silver print, 3 1⁄8 × 4 1⁄8 inches (8 × 10.5 cm)

In Man Ray’s 1963 autobiography, Self Portrait, he wrote about his time with various denizens of the Paris art world, detailing his meetings, photography sessions, and appreciation for these fellow artists.

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MAN RAY Although in the beginning I complied with demands by artists to photograph their worksâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;I realized that besides being a means of gaining my immediate subsistence it gave me access to their personalities. And, incidentally, by doing their portraits at the same time, my understanding of these creators was considerably aided. I had always wanted to know the human side of creators whose work had interested me, and their biographies were as fascinating for me as their works. Anecdotes of the old masters and their ways of living were important to me. I had never agreed with those who maintained that it was sufficient for them to look at the works.

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CONSTANTIN BRANCUSI The first time I went to see the sculptor Brancusi in his studio, I was more impressed than in any cathedral. I was overwhelmed with its whiteness and lightness. Judging from the airy columns of medieval churches, the interiors may also have been pervaded with light in the beginning, catching the colors of the stained glass windows projected on the white stone in an orgy of chromatics, far from the religious gloom which we accept after centuries of accumulation of dust and grime. Coming into Brancusi’s studio was like entering another world—the whiteness, which, after all, is a synthesis of all the colors of the spectrum, this whiteness extended to the home-built brick stove and long stovepipe—here and there emphasized by a roughhewn piece of oak or the golden metallic gleam of a polished dynamic form on a pedestal. There was nothing in the studio that might have come out of a shop, no chairs or furniture. A solid white plaster cylinder six feet in diameter, cast on the floor of the studio, served as a table, with a couple of hollowed-out logs to sit on. A few small cushions thrown on these made the seats more inviting. Besides the desire to know the man in person whose works interested me, I came to Brancusi with the idea of making a portrait of him to add to my files. When I broached the subject he frowned; he said he did not like to be photographed.

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GEORGES BRAQUE The quiet, self-contained personality of Georges Braque was a relief from the more ostentatious and temperamental qualities of other artists. The studio I first visited, perched on the heights of Montmartre, was filled with his work, which gave one the impression that he had no other life but his work. Tall, wavy-haired, he moved leisurely, but it was hard to imagine him confined to an easel, rather that his activity must be more physical, that he had come into the studio for a short while to check on the progress of his work which was developing by itself as a plant grows. Or he might have been a Normandy farmer who, with a certain amount of guidance, let nature take its course. I knew some of his early Cubist work which at first glance was indistinguishable from that of Picasso, but which in time I was able to identify as easily as their faces, as an expert would handwriting. Although both may have been obsessed with the same idea, their personalities remained intact, branching out in different directions. Braque’s work had now taken on a more arabesque character, while Picasso had launched into a pseudo-classical manner. The early cycle of Cubism had been completed, not abandoned; each painter now sought to renew himself, to give evidence of new enthusiasms. While Picasso’s work became more uncompromising, more mystifying and provocative, Braque’s painting was subtler, seeking new color harmonies. He might be considered the real classic of today’s painting. It was for this reason that his work found less favor with the more advanced group of painters, wary of any new tendencies in the direction of pure aesthetics and good taste. However, since there was a legend that Braque had been the original founder of Cubism, he has been treated with the respect due the innovator of a movement. I came to him with my camera and he posed for me in his shirtsleeves, as he stood in the doorway of his studio without any attempt to verify his appearance. The man had no vanity nor self-consciousness.

KIKI DE MONTPARNASSE Kiki wanted a baby with me, but was disappointed. I never had been a father and wondered if it was my fault. I did not pursue the investigation any further, and am still wondering. Kiki solved her own problem of what to do with her spare time. One day she came into the studio carrying a painting. It represented a little girl, very much like Kiki, of about eight years old, but filling up most of the canvas, seated in a field, with a woman much smaller beside her. She said it was a childhood souvenir of her upbringing in Burgundy. The painting was naïve but boldly brushed in, the drawing heightened by strong pencil lines, the colors bright and fresh. Kiki went to work with a will, producing all kinds of subjects: rural scenes with peasants, circus scenes and strong men at fairs, portraits of painters and girl friends. One day Hans Richter,

the Dada moviemaker, came in with Eisenstein, the Russian director. In a short sitting she made a portrait of the latter, which he bought. Another time Bob Chanler was in town and brought Clem Randolph with her baby to be photographed. I made a picture with the baby feeding at Clem’s naked breast. When Kiki saw the print she melted sentimentally, carried it off and made a painting of it. An exhibition was arranged for Kiki at a local gallery. Robert Desnos, the poet, wrote a preface for the catalogue. All Montparnasse turned out for the opening—it was a great success, both artistically and financially—most of the pictures were sold. But Kiki did not continue; had none of the instincts of a career girl; could never turn her talents to profit.

Opposite, bottom: Man Ray, Constantin Brâncusi, c. 1930, gelatin silver negative on celluloid film, 3 5⁄8 × 2 3⁄8 inches (9 × 6 cm) Opposite, top: Man Ray, Georges Braque in studio, 1925, vintage gelatin silver print, 3 1⁄8 × 2 3⁄8 inches (7.9 × 6 cm) This page: Man Ray, Suicide (Kiki de Montparnasse), 1928, gelatin silver negative on celluloid film, 3 5⁄8 × 2 3⁄8 inches (9 × 6 cm)

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GERTRUDE STEIN My first visit to Gertrude Stein in the rue de Fleurus, shortly after my arrival to France, caused me mixed sensations. Crossing the courtyard, I rang a bell; the door was opened by a small dark woman with long earrings, looking like a gypsy. Inside, I was greeted with a broad warm smile by Gertrude Stein, massive, in a woolen dress and woolen socks with comfortable sandals, which emphasized her bulk. I had brought my camera; it was understood that I was to take some pictures of her in her interior. Miss Stein introduced me to her friend Alice Toklas, whom I had taken for her maid, although, in her print dress trimmed with white lace, she was too carefully groomed. Miss Stein, too, wore a flowered blouse fastened at the neck with a scarf held by a Victorian brooch. Both sat down in chintz-covered armchairs blending with their dresses, while I set up my camera.

My portraits of Gertrude Stein were the first to appear in print, to give her small circle of readers at the time an idea of how she looked. Perhaps I was impressed by the staidness of her personality but it never occurred to me to try any fantasy or acrobatics with her physiognomy. She might have welcomed the notoriety, as in her writing; and she might have thought more of me as a creative artist. I visited often during the next ten years, she came to my studio for other sittings, and invited me to lunch—Alice’s cooking was famous. One of the last sittings, with her hair cropped after an illness, pleased her especially. She looked rather mannish, except for her flowered blouse and the brooch she always wore. In exchange for some prints she did a portrait of me in prose.

This page: Man Ray, Gertrude Stein, Paris, 1929, vintage gelatin silver print, 7 × 5 1⁄8 inches (17.8 × 13 cm) Opposite, top: Man Ray, Picasso, c. 1933, vintage gelatin silver print, 8 7⁄8 × 6 3⁄8 inches (22.5 × 16.2 cm) Opposite, bottom: Man Ray, Henri Matisse, c. 1926, vintage gelatin silver print, 12 ¼ × 8 ½ inches (31 × 21.5 cm)

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HENRI MATISSE

PABLO PICASSO Picasso gave me the impression of a man who was aware of all that was going on about him and in the world in general, a man who reacted violently to all impacts, but had only one outlet to express his feelings: painting. His short epigrammatic or enigmatic phrases which he let drop from time to time only emphasized his impatience with any other form of expression. And these words, almost exclusively concerned with painting, gave a clear indication, if one thought about it, of his philosophy and attitude to life. My first meeting with him was for the purpose of photographing his recent works, in the early Twenties. As usual, when I had an extra plate, I made a portrait of the artist. It was nothing remarkable as a photograph, but showed the intense, intransigent look of the man, his black eyes sizing one up. He was a short stocky man, who never took any exercise, except that he liked to swim and walk with his dog. In town one could only see him right after lunch, before he took his walk—he avoided definite appointments as much as possible. He detested dates and fixed rendezvous. I was invited for lunch, and brought my camera to make some pictures of his Russian wife, Olga, the ex-ballet dancer, and his little son Paulo.

Henri Matisse intrigued me because his personal appearance bore no relation to his works. I knew an early self-portrait, in which he had given himself a green beard, that had aroused a storm in the postimpressionist period. Now he looked like a successful doctor in well-cut tweeds and his carefully trimmed grayish-red beard. Having made an appointment to do his portrait, I arrived at his studio in the suburbs of Paris. When I opened my bag to set up my camera, I found to my horror that I had forgotten the lens which was wrapped separately. I was about to retire with apologies when Matisse produced an old Kodak which he said contained a film that had been left there unused since the previous summer. He also produced a snapshot of himself working in a field, and hoped I could do something with this material. I had known of painters who had used photographs as a basis for painting—why couldn’t a photographer use an amateur’s print and make something new of it? I thought seriously about this and would work on the idea when I got back to my darkroom.

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This page: Man Ray, Joan Miró, c. 1928, gelatin silver negative on celluloid film, 3 5⁄8 × 2 3⁄8 inches (9 × 6 cm) Opposite, bottom: Man Ray, Alberto Giacometti, 1932, gelatin silver negative on celluloid film, 3 5⁄8 × 2 3⁄8 inches (9 × 6 cm) Opposite, top: Man Ray, Meret Oppenheim, 1932, vintage gelatin silver print, 4 1⁄8 × 3 1⁄8 inches (10.5 × 7.9 cm) Artwork © Man Ray Trust/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris 2019 Text excerpted from Self Portrait: Man Ray, 1963 © Man Ray Trust

JOAN MIRÓ Joan Miró brought his first stylized, bucolic scenes from Spain, but very soon entered completely into the Dada and Surrealist spirit. His imagination ran riot covering large surfaces with splashes of color and delicately drawn caricature-like figures, sometimes embellished with irrelevant words and phrases, or with descriptive titles. Gradually, befitting his Spanish origin, his color became more intense, his forms more violent, yet always highly decorative to those who dismissed his drawing as rather infantile. He assembled heterogeneous objects, combining them with his painting. Sometimes a large coil of rope was attached to the composition. It reminded me of an episode when several of us were visiting Ernst’s studio. Miró was very taciturn; it was difficult to get him to talk. A

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violent discussion was going on, he was pressed to give his opinion but remained obstinately mute. Max seized a coil of rope, threw it over a beam, tied a slip knot at the end, and, while the others pinioned his arms, put it around his neck and threatened to hang him if he did not speak. Miró did not struggle but remained silent; he was ravished with being the center of so much attention. When he came to pose for me, I perfidiously hung a rope in back of him as an accessory. He did not comment on this, but the rope theme figured in his later works. At the same time that I did his portrait, Miró gave me a large painting in black, white, and gray which I called Portrait of Man Ray—very fitting for a photographer.

ALBERTO GIACOMETTI Giacometti, the sculptor, gave one the impression of a tortured soul. Always dissatisfied with his work, feeling that he had carried it not far enough, or perhaps too far, he’d abandon it in his heaped-up little studio and start on an entirely new formula. When he turned to painting for a while, his colorless, line-searching figures seemed to express final resignation in a futile search of himself. Whatever the direction he took, the work was always a positive expression—a perfect reflection of the man. He could talk with lucid, voluble brilliance—on many subjects. I liked to sit with him in a café and watch as well as listen to him. His deeply marked face with a grayish complexion, like a medieval sculpture, was a fine subject for my photographic portraiture. During my period of fashion photography I disposed of a budget for backgrounds; I got him to make some bas-reliefs, units of birds and fishes which were repeated over a surface. One motif which he submitted, four legs radiating from a center, reminded me too much of the Nazis’ swastika—when I pointed this out, he destroyed the work. The others were taken up by an interior decorator, and it helped him to attract attention. I did a series of pictures of his more Surrealistic work, for publication in an art magazine. He rewarded me with pieces of sculpture of the period.

MERET OPPENHEIM One day, [Giacometti] introduced me to Meret Oppenheim, a beautiful young girl whose family had escaped from Germany to Switzerland, the country of Giacometti’s origin. Whenever she could get to Paris, it was to sit with the Surrealists. She created a sensation with her furlined cup, saucer, and spoon. Meret was one of the most uninhibited women I have ever met. She posed for me in the nude, her hands and arms smeared with the black ink of an etching press in Marcoussis’s studio. The latter, an early Cubist painter, wore a false beard to hide his identity as he posed with her in one of the pictures. This was a bit too scabrous for the deluxe art magazine for which it was intended; the one of Meret alone, leaning on the press, was used. Still, it was very disturbing, a perfect example of the Surrealist tendency toward scandal.

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This page: Carl Einstein, 1930. Photo: ullstein bild via Getty Images Opposite: Tsesah crest, attributed to the Master of Bamendjo, Bamileke peoples, Bamendjo Chiefdom, Grassdields region, Cameroon, nineteenth century, wood, 28 ¼ inches (72 cm) high. Museum Rietberg, Zurich

A MYTHOLOGY OF FORMS:

A CONVERSATION ABOUT CARL EINSTEIN

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The first English-language anthology of Carl Einstein’s writings on art, comprising fourteen texts written between 1912 and 1935, appears this month.1 Here art historian Luise Mahler discusses the book with its editor and translator, Charles W. Haxthausen.

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LUISE MAHLER Carl Einstein has figured extensively

in your scholarship and teaching over the past decades. How did translating him into English come to be your project? I’m curious about the story behind your new book. CHARLES HAXTHAUSEN This project grew out of my research on early-twentieth-century German art criticism, an interest of mine that dates back to the mid-1980s. I came to see the most interesting criticism of that period as virtually an art form in itself, at times driven by its own paradigms as much as or more than by the art that was its object. Einstein is arguably the most trenchant example of this. His art criticism goes well beyond mere commentary or judgment, it offers a version of the world, a decidedly utopian version that invests visual art with an extraordinary power to fundamentally transform human subjectivity and our construction of the real. LM And yet, despite the radicalism of his thinking, in the Anglophone world Einstein remains underexplored as both an eyewitness to and a participant in the European avant-garde. After the end of the First World War, he joined the leftist faction of Berlin Dada; later, in Paris, with Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris, he launched the short-lived but transformative monthly journal Documents [1929–30]. Although he’s one of the foremost early interpreters of African art, Cubism, Expressionism, and Surrealism, his criticism has been primarily addressed, as you point out, by literary scholars rather than art historians; with a few exceptions, his theoretical project is uninvestigated in relation to the art that he wrote about. Negerplastik [Negro sculpture], from 1915, is the most widely known of his books; his texts on Cubism and Pablo Picasso, both published in varying versions in the three successive editions of his book The Art of the 20th Century, first issued in 1926, on the other hand, are much less studied. Finally, Einstein’s prescient late works— Georges Braque [1934], The Fabrication of Fictions [1935], and the unfinished “Handbook of Art” project [mid-to-late 1930s]—offer insight into his mature art theory and are especially relevant today. CH As a critic, Einstein is somewhat of a paradox. He was a formalist—he believed that a “revolutionary utopia” could be achieved by “a change in artistic form”—but a formalist of a different ilk than, say, Roger Fry or Clement Greenberg. As a critic he had little to say about art’s aesthetic dimension—he thought such pleasures had a pernicious, numbing effect. What he demanded of art was nothing less than a radical transformation of human visuality, of human subjectivity. Language for him was merely a fixed system of signs; visual art could be truer to the flux of reality and therefore harbored the potential for a continual refiguration of our image of the real. In the third edition of The Art of the 20th Century Einstein succinctly summed up this position: “In the act of looking one changes people and the world.”2 He began to articulate this idea as early as 1914, in his theoretical essay “Totality,” which is included in my book. “Art determines seeing (‘Sehen’) in general,” he wrote; “the artist determines our common mental images of the visual world. Hence it is art’s task to organize them.”3 Einstein’s strict distinction between the German gerund “Sehen,” seeing, and “Wahrnehmung,” perception, is fundamental to this principle. “Wahrnehmung,” literally “to take to be true,” implies a passive acceptance of optical sensation, of the visual world as given, ossified by visual habit, while “Sehen” suggests an active encounter with visual phenomena. Einstein insisted that seeing should be proactive, a creative act. He wrote that

Picasso’s art “proves that man and the world are being daily invented by human beings.” But a major impediment to this freedom, this continual reinvention of the world, Einstein argued, was the rigidity of language. LM An aspect of language that fascinates me is the creation of meaning in different cultural systems. The terminology established and used by German-speaking critics to explain Cubism and Picasso to their audiences is something I address in my own research. In his writings on both subjects, Einstein cultivated a prose style marked by constant rephrasing, which can seem repetitive. But these redundancies or “variations” in Einstein’s texts, as you explain succinctly in chapter seven of your book, are indicative of his deep-seated conviction about the inadequacy of language in rendering descriptions of artworks or, for that matter, of any visual phenomenon. CH This is a second paradox in Einstein’s writing: he is an art critic who is skeptical about language’s capacity to describe art. He saw a “hopeless chasm between discourse and image,” a position that certainly poses a challenge to someone writing art criticism! 4 This is why he rarely attempted to describe or analyze a work of art. Especially in his writing on Cubism and Picasso, I see him using repetition and variation to relativize any verbal account. LM Bringing Einstein into the conversation about Cubism and Picasso also relativizes the dominant Anglophone discourse on both subjects. The terms—we could call them key words—chosen by different critics in Europe and elsewhere can give us clues as to what was at stake in discussions of Cubism, and those stakes can vary enormously. The contrasts between Einstein’s and, for example, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler’s or Maurice Raynal’s vocabularies allow for diverse Cubisms to emerge from their respective writings. This in turn raises important questions about the historiography of Cubism. CH Einstein’s most important writing on Cubism—his chapter in The Art of the 20th Century, which he revised and expanded in each successive edition—has been completely ignored by Anglophone scholars of Cubism, I assume because it has not been translated into English and only recently into French. Given his friendship with Kahnweiler, Picasso, Juan Gris, Fernand Léger, and Georges Braque (to whom he was especially close), this is a serious omission. I believe that most early critics, whatever their merits and differences, could be said to have “tamed” Cubism, making it less daunting by arguing that ultimately it was a “realist” art, that it could be reconciled with the familiar images in our minds—Kahnweiler called them “memory images.” Einstein, on the other hand, argued that Cubism’s greatest achievement was that it destroyed our memory images. Although his interpretation has its blind spots and may be ﬂawed as an explanatory model, it is arguably the only early writing on this art that does justice to the radical implications of Cubism as painting that has the potential to alter not only our conception of art but our intuition of the visual world. He fervently believed that Cubism could be a model for refiguring our own seeing by impressing upon us that it can be an open process, a creative act. LM Besides being a major early interpreter of Cubism and Picasso, Einstein is rightly considered a groundbreaking author on African art. As one of the first European critics to address African art, he afforded it a central place in art criticism and history. Your book includes the full texts of both of his books on African sculpture.

Pablo Picasso, Le Poète (The Poet), 1911, oil on linen, 51 5⁄8 × 35 ¼ inches (131.2 × 89.5 cm). Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Artwork © 2019 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS)/Art Resource, New York. Photo: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

Yes, I consider these texts essential within Einstein’s corpus. Negerplastik was the first book in any language devoted to African sculpture as art. Einstein knew little about African art when he wrote it; he knew a great deal more when he wrote his second book on the subject, Afrikanische Plastik [African sculpture], which followed six years later and is much less well known. In the intervening years Einstein had immersed himself in the ethnographic literature and in the museum collections in Berlin, as well as in Tervuren, Belgium, where he was stationed during the First World War. Consequently it is a very different book. His aim, he wrote, was to introduce the art of Africa into art-historical discourse—a “revolutionary project,” as one Africanist art historian has characterized it.5 One of the fascinating things about Einstein is how his study of African art and culture began, in the late 1920s, to shape his interpretation of contemporary European art, notably that of Picasso, Braque, Paul Klee, and the Surrealists. He believed that the gap between the European avant-garde art he championed and the art practices of indigenous and archaic cultures had narrowed. The most vivid example of this shift is the text on Picasso from the third edition of The Art of the 20th Century, in which Einstein “surrealized” Picasso. With the chapter on Cubism, of which it formed the largest component, this text had undergone major revisions. Picasso’s art, even in its Cubist phase, Einstein now interpreted as generated by visions and hallucinations, a form of possession against which Picasso sought to protect himself by means of what Einstein called “tectonic forms.” He described the grotesque figures in certain paintings of 1928, such as the Painter CH

and Model in The Museum of Modern Art, New York, as “creatures of a mythology of forms.” Art was now partaking of a process he called the “primitivization of existence,” a phenomenon he identified with a return to a collective, mythic worldview. This was his most passionate hope, that modern art could create a collective visuality out of which a collective politics would emerge; he called modern art “a prophecy of what is to come.” Needless to say, this did not end well. LM Einstein became disillusioned with art and art history as a discipline around the time his last publication on art appeared, the book on Braque, of which your book includes two chapters. CH Yes, it was while Einstein was at work on that book that his faith in the European avant-garde and his critical project collapsed. He gave vent to that disillusionment in his long, rambling book manuscript The Fabrication of Fictions, unpublished in his lifetime—excerpts from it make up the final chapter of my book. It is a searing critique of the avant-garde, himself included, which he saw as a privileged, solipsistic elite striving to set itself above the masses. LM It’s quite an abrupt break! Of the modern experience he now wrote that “modernity strips art history of all meaning.” CH Einstein’s rejection of the avant-garde in which he had placed utopian hopes is one of the things that makes his life such a poignant narrative, even a tragedy. In the summer of 1936 he set aside art criticism and left Paris to take up arms with an anarcho-syndicalist militia in the Spanish Civil War. He wrote to Kahnweiler at the time, “Nowadays the rifle is necessary to make up for the cowardice of the pen.”6 In Spain, ﬁghting alongside

workers and peasants, he finally achieved the experience of the collective that he had sought through art, but now art had no role in it. In a late interview he dismissed art’s relevance in such a time of crisis: “To make art today is basically a pretext for avoiding danger.”7 LM The breadth of his intellectual interests, his assertive split from the conventions of art history, and the dramatic arc of his personal life all attest to the extraordinary figure he was. I want to end by asking what can be gained by reading Einstein today? CH The first thing I would say is that Einstein was arguably the most brilliant and original thinker among European art critics of his generation, and in a time of particular ferment. Reading him fills a gap in our knowledge of this remarkable era and opens up alternative ways of looking at modernism. But there’s more. In the 1930s his work took a radical turn, already evident in Georges Braque. There he mounts an acerbic critique of the practice of art history, charging art historians with aestheticizing, domesticating, and normalizing the artwork, reducing art’s history to a formalist narrative of technical progress. As a corrective he calls for a “sociology or ethnology of art,” approaching it as “a living and magical medium.”8 He built and expanded on this vision in his notes for the “Handbook of Art.” Even in its fragmentary existing form, the “Handbook” is a radical reimagining of art history. Intended to comprise five volumes, it was a massive project, for which he left hundreds of pages of notes, including an extended prospectus for a history of world art that I have translated elsewhere.9 Yet the “Handbook” remains largely unknown to all but Einstein specialists. His focus was the evolving and shifting functions of art in human culture throughout history. The concept was not only global and panhistorical in scope, it encompassed the full range of human image-making, including, for example, children’s drawings, “the poetic activity of dreams,” and “the mass of so-called worthless artworks.” Western art, with its exaltation of the individual creator and of formal progress, was to be but a blip in this vast narrative; throughout most of history, image production had been an anonymous, collective enterprise. For that reason an art history centered on masterpieces and individual genius, Einstein argued, was an “idealizing falsification of historical events,” a “sociological fraud.”10 Truly to know art one must know it in the totality of its social and historical manifestations. For me Einstein’s late writings are among his most exciting and most topical for today. His radical remapping of the history of art forms is an exhilarating coda to the life of this extraordinary twentieth-century intellectual. 1. Carl Einstein, A Mythology of Forms: Selected Writings on Art, ed., trans., and introduced by Charles W. Haxthausen (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2019). 2. Einstein, Die Kunst des 20.Jahrhunderts, 3rd ed., 1931, quoted in ibid., p. 15. 3. Einstein, “Totality,” 1914/16, trans. in ibid., p. 26. 4. Einstein, Georges Braque, 1934, trans. in ibid., p. 297. 5. Zoë S. Strother, “Looking for Africa in Carl Einstein’s Negerplastik,” African Arts 46, no. 4 (2013):14. 6. Einstein, letter to Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, January 6, 1939, quoted by Haxthausen in A Mythology of Forms, p. 11. 7. Einstein, in Sebastiá Gasch, “Einige sensationelle Erklärungen von Carl Einstein: Miró und Dalí—Revolutionäre Kunst—die Rolle der Intellektuellen,” in Einstein, Werke Band 3: 1929–1940, ed. Hermann Haarmann and Klaus Siebenhaar (Berlin: Fannei & Walz, 1996), 643, trans. and quoted by Haxthausen in A Mythology of Forms, p. 3. 8. Einstein, Georges Braque, trans. in A Mythology of Forms, p. 299. 9. Einstein, “Handbook of Art,” trans. Haxthausen, in Anselm Franke and Tom Holert, Neolithic Childhood: Art in a False Present, c. 1930, exh. cat. (Berlin: Haus der Kulturen der Welt, and Zurich: Diaphanes, 2018), pp. 22–33, with commentary on pp. 129–32. 10. Ibid., pp. 23, 25.

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Surrounding spread: Couples dancing the mambo at the Palladium Ballroom, New York, 1954. Photo: Yale Joel/ Life Magazine/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images In order of appearance: Tito Puente, 1954. Photo: Bob Parent/Hulton Archive/Getty Images Bandleader and comedian Spike Jones with bandleader Dámaso Pérez Prado. Photo: Bettman– UPI via Getty Images Professional Cuban dancer at the Palladium Ballroom, New York, 1954. Photo: Yale Joel/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images

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Desire can be crushed by so-called revolutionary ideology, focusing only on what they think is uplifting but never paying attention to the ecstatic. —Robin D. C. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, 2002 Mambo is ecstasy. More than dance hall motion, it is backed by the spirit, for it reflects, to a partial but critical degree, the classical faith of the ancient African kingdom of Kongo, this music’s birthplace. It also refers to other black Cuban faiths like Abakuá, Dahomean vodun, and the worship of Yoruba orisha. Mambo reveals black faiths as world religions and does so with love and dignity. Starting around 1907, artists in Paris—Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani, Georges Braque, André Derain, and others—stole fire from African sculpture, having little or no idea of its metaphysical foundations. Modigliani creatively rephrased the long-nosed Baoulé masks of Ivory Coast and, even more impressively, the masks of the Ngil judges society among the Fang of Gabon. There was no way for him to know the codes written into the exaggerated length of the Fang line, an anatomic dramatization that K. Kia Bunseki Fu-Kiau suggests may imply the “length,” the depth, the seriousness, of the matters of law that the mask’s wearer would survey and resolve. White porcelain clay covered the mask with the color of the other world; this meant that the wearer’s insight and power stemmed from the ancestors. The image was more than a mask: it was a meditation on the ancestral sources of justice. But to Modigliani it was “style.” To strengthen his orchestral palette, Darius Milhaud incorporated African and Afro-Cuban percussion in works such as Concerto for Percussion (1930), whose instrumentation includes the Afro-Cuban guagua, a wooden tube played on its side. No more than Modigliani did he surmise that some of these instruments, especially the drums, excited possession by the spirit. But some modernists knew. Witness the overlap between

black women’s religious dancing in Georgia and aspects of Martha Graham’s choreography: white robes, elbows out, knees deeply bent. Brenda Gottschild similarly traces “innovations” in the work of George Balanchine to high-affect moves borrowed from the lindy and other black vernacular dances. Her book Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance includes a telling photograph of Balanchine cavorting with Katherine Dunham and other members of the royalty of black choreography.1 John Cage is on record denying black influence on his work. But the person for whom he first “prepared” a piano, setting objects between its strings to change its sound, was none other than the African-American choreographer Syvilla Fort, disciple of Dunham and dancer of everything from quadrille to samba to mambo. Fort kept badgering the composer until finally, adding pieces of wood and metal to the piano’s strings, he came up with something that sounded right to her.2 Mambo emerged in the middle of all this, between white appropriation and black control, between Picasso and hip-hop. It was a phase of strong beauty. There were many founding fathers: Orestes López and his brother Israel “Cachao” López, Arsenio Rodríguez, Dámaso Pérez Prado, Chano Pozo, Bebo Valdés, and René Hernández. All were black. No one could “cover” them. López and Rodríguez absorbed special strengths through knowledge of Palo, the Cuban version of the classical religion of Kongo. They saw how Palo practitioners would summon spirits by shouting out jei, jei, jei. López, in around 1938–39, would summon musical excitement from his fellow musicians by shouting out Mambo! Mambo! Mambo! (Say it! Say it! Say it! in creole Ki-Kongo). This named a new music and a new dance. In his live performances Rodríguez similarly cued the swing of his music by shouting Diablo! (Make it devilishly hot, make it swing).3 Calling on the devil and his fiery domain related to other hot cries to make things happen,

like “Echale salsita” (Put pepper sauce on it) and “Anda cocinando” (Get out there and cook), both echoing the Kongo cry “Twisa ndungu” (Heat it up with pepper) when music lacks power or taste.4 Across the Atlantic blacks praised rhythms that were strong and swinging by calling them “hot, the more exciting the hotter.”5 Early mambo cries to make the music hot inspired a particularly aggressive and talented composer named Dámaso Pérez Prado. To show independence from his colleagues, he didn’t shout Mambo! or Diablo! Instead, in his 1949 Havana recordings he can be heard activating sidemen with a signature shout that fuses the Palo cry jei with u, becoming je-u! (pronounced “hey-oo”). Some misheard it as a grunt—so, on Broadway in 1954 in Damn Yankees, Gwen Verdon chanted “Who’s got the pain when they do the mambo, who’s got the pain when they go unnh.” But Prado’s cry wasn’t a grunt, it was pure admonition: give us mambo, make it cook, bring down enabling fire and act! Thus did the masters of mambo deepen their art by summoning spirit. I grew up in El Paso, Texas, an early training center for a globalized world. In around 1944, at El Paso’s Dudley Grammar School, I saw a Mexican-American girl lead the entire school in a mass conga line. She was clearly calling us to somewhere else. I came closer to that somewhere else when I got my first record, a 78 of “Canto karabalí,” by the great Cuban composer Ernesto Lecuona. At the time I had no idea what “Canto karabalí” meant—actually “Song of Calabar,” a city in southern Nigeria—but the melody got to me. It was an acoustical tarot card that said “This is your future.” Growing up in a Latino/Anglo city, I heard on the local radio station both country numbers like Cowboy Copas’s “Signed, Sealed, Delivered” and, from a station broadcasting from Juárez, Mexican hits like Duo Michoacan’s “Amor Chiquito.” In the fall of 1948 I started to study Spanish. I prepared for my first test to the beat of AfroCuban records. When I sat down to write my exam, the 123

verbs and vocabulary came tumbling down while music played in my mind. From that moment on, Spanish language and Afro-Cuban music took command of my soul. Mambo is a blend: Afro-Cuban, jazz, and classical. It took me from calm to excitement, like a jump from blackand-white into Technicolor. Mambo’s hard-swinging minimalism gave me access to a style that challenged me to my very essence. I moved to the East Coast in 1947 and in the 1950s spent a lot of time at the Palladium Ballroom, a dance hall at Broadway and 53rd Street that was the epicenter of New York mambo. Mambo in that city made you realize that one of the luckiest things that happened to American popular culture was the Jones Act of 1917, which bestowed American citizenship on Puerto Ricans. Two of New York’s major mambo kings, Tito Puente and Tito Rodríguez, were Puerto Rican, and songs of theirs such as Rodríguez’s “La Familia” (The family) documented lives in transition from the island to New York. I would go on to believe that mambo was dancing us all toward genuine being, toward becoming ourselves through awareness of others. To proclaim this rich cross-cultural achievement became the goal of my teaching at Yale from the moment I started there, in 1964. Contexts in Kongo civilization have a bearing on mambo: the king’s court of judgment, where jurisprudence was leavened with interludes of dance and the playing of drums and royal ivory horns of the spirit; the Kongo belief that life can’t be lived unless danced; and the resolution of conflicts and problems (mambu) by ritual experts (banganga) versed in strong songs and proverbs that helped to restore order and harmony. In Kongo, problems whether serious or minor are seen as a cycle. In the ancient capital, Mbanza Kongo, serious matters were taken to the king (ntinu) for judgment, smaller ones to an herbalist-diviner (nganga). When a solution was found, when judgment was achieved, jubilation took place. In the northern city of Lwangu, men danced waving flags 124

to celebrate winning a lawsuit. They were ecstatically “waving the words” (minika mambu) of justice, vindication, and victory. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, slavers captured Bakongo people and brought them to Cuba, where their religion took root. Re-creating the social order they had known, black Cubans elected kings and queens by popular vote. Even where there was no king or queen, they honored banganga as leaders, healers, and judges. The banganga worked, as in the old kingdom, with charms and medicines imbued with indestructible protective spirit (minkisi), which they inserted in iron cauldrons called prendas, “pledges” in Spanish—the pledge being to heal, to resolve conflict, to obey the sanctions of Palo. Songs sung to the prendas, stating a problem and

asking for resolution, directly called on the spirit in the cauldron. These songs were called “mambos,” a creolization of the Kongo mambu. In the ancient Kongo kingdom in Africa, mambu—problems or legal actions—could be symbolized visually on scepters, the carved lids of ceremonial containers, and other objects. In Cuba such messages were verbal, sung to the prenda and the listening congregation and studded with proverbs and popular images. When a person complained about the arrogance of someone young, for example, a song might run, “Who knows more, Isabel or Isabelita [the seasoned woman or the immature child]?” The contemporary Cuban artist José Bedia, painter and Palo initiate, has restored such mambos to visual imagery. He was in effect reestablishing a link between visual mambu in Africa and mambos in Cuba. Various forms of dance music prepared the way for mambo. Four are Afro-Cuban: rumba, conga, son montuno, and danzón. Three stem from black North American, Andalusian Moorish, and black Puerto Rican sources: lindy, flamenco, and bomba. Rumba, dancing to Kongoderived drums and song, and conga, parading in rhythm down carnival streets to an ecstatic pattern of one-twothree-kick, were early examples of Central African impact on Cuba. Son montuno was orchestral, reflecting the cosmopolitanism of its city of origin, Santiago de Cuba. Its guitar licks, transposed to piano, became part of the rise of the mambo. Danzón, emerging in the western coastal city of Matanzas in around 1875, subtly Africanized the playing of European orchestral instruments—flute, violins, piano, double bass, and timpani. Danzón composers fused their melodies and rhythms with themes from opera and other classical music, showing erudition in the midst of good times. Their ultimate innovation was the peremptory chanting of the word “mambo,” retaining its Kongo meaning of “words,”“problems,”“issues.” Shouted out, this word challenged musicians to express what they really meant.

“Mambo” had been a part of black Cuban speech since the late eighteenth century.6 A hundred years later came a further attestation, a person shouting “Mambo, caballero!,” meaning “Say it, sir!”7 Since music is viewed as a form of argument the Afro-Atlantic world over—compare Jamaican reggae (from rege-rege, argument or dispute) and Cuban rumba yambu (argument rumba)—it seems inevitable that a musician would have called for an ultimate “argument” in music, challenging his colleagues to speak up and share their convictions. When Orestes López did just that, in around 1938, he got the whole band playing time. The new sound was born: mambo. The new music gave us distilled democracy in sound. Each musician contributed a riff (golpe, literally “hit”) to the whole. Arias and egocentric crooning dissolved in shared instrumental ecstasy. This hocketing marvel had a clear-cut demand: become yourself through others. Mambo never lost the Kongo taste for solving or challenging issues with hard-driving beats to accelerate a search for justice. Julio Cueva, for example, composed a strange song, “Desintegrando” (Disintegrating, in the album of the same name, with songs from 1944–47), alluding indirectly to the invention of the atomic bomb and by extension the threat of nuclear annihilation. As Ned Sublette noted drily in his book on the music of Cuba, this was “unusual party fare.”8 And in 1950 Justi Barreto composed the striking mambo “La Camisa de Papel” (The shirt made of newspaper), again implying the nuclear threat by weaving an air raid siren into the exposition of the song. On June 25, 1950, North Korea invaded South Korea. In the week Barreto read about the invasion, he was impressed by a man sauntering down San Juan de Letrán in Mexico City, dressed in a sport shirt emblazoned with newpaper headlines.9 Inspired by these two events, Barreto repaired to his room in the Hotel Meave and composed a strong mambo. Later he went into the RCA-Victor studio and recorded it, with Prado orchestrating and Kiko Mendive singing. The lyrics: 125

Vaya padrino La camisa de papel, negro Ha! Tremendo copete! Hey, parece buena Ya no tengo pena, hey! Y me la voy a poner. Hey! Me gusta mucho Y lo dice todo hey! Mi camisa de papel. En la primera plana, hey! Dice cosas que asustan, hey! Pero lo que no me gusta, hey! Que esta ilusion. Dice que si la guerra hey! De susto no tengo gana, hey! Pero lo que es jarana, hey! Yo voy a brindar. Vaya rotatira! Ay, mi camisita ay, Yo me la pienso poner Me gusta mucho Esta diciendo que en Korea Se ha formado beem bam bom boom beem bam bom boom

La tecla, negro [Prado piano solo] Ultimas noticias, negro? [air raid siren sounds] !vaya! candela! [The song breaks into a miniature montuno, with call-and-response: La camisa de papel!] Ay, pero mira Cosa rica La camisa de papel Me gusta mucho La camisa de papel Me la pienso poner La camisa de papel !Dimelo! 126

Hey, best buddy [i.e., Prado] Dig the newspaper shirt, negro Wow, what a pompadour [Kiko Mendive’s coiffure] Hey, it’s looking good And I’m no longer afraid, hey! And I’m going to put it on. Hey! I like it a lot. And it talks about everything, hey! My shirt made of newspaper. On the front page, hey! It says things that frighten you, hey! But what’s not pleasing, hey! Treat as illusion. It certainly says war, hey! Afraid, I want no part of it, hey! But whatever’s festive, hey! That’s what I’ll offer. Start rolling, printing press! My beloved little shirt I think I’ll put it on I like it a lot. It’s saying that in Korea There has started beem bam bom boom beem bam bom boom

Hit the keyboard, negro [Prado piano solo] Want the latest news, negro? [air raid siren sounds] Run for it! Fire! [The song breaks into a miniature montuno, with call-and-response: “The shirt made of newspaper”] Ay, but look It feels good The shirt made of newspaper. I like it a lot The shirt made of newspaper. I think I’ll put it on The shirt made of newspaper. Spell it out for me!

Where Medea’s dress in Euripides’s play is poisoned totally, Barreto’s garment mixes terror with decorum, pain with pleasure. In saying he’ll wear the shirt, the singer accepts life’s blend of good and evil. He sidesteps doom with pleasure. In this regard he recalls Lucretius, who wrote that fear of death interrupts the flow of life, destroying value and meaning. It sets us up for demise.10 I remember what the novelist Robert Penn Warren told me in a seminar at Yale in 1955, when I confided to him my fear of nuclear annihilation: “Then you might as well contemplate your own inevitable death, young man,” he replied. In other words: Get on with it. Lucretius asks us to consider Epicurus, who argued that if we free ourselves from anxiety about death, “then death is nothing to us.” Thus liberated, we live out our days in relative peace and pleasure. Legitimate pleasures—a glass of wine, an evening with friends, a trip with a lover, the birth of a child—insulate us from fear of the inevitable. Barreto says the same thing in his fast-moving

lyric. He flaunts his bravery, asking a printing press to roll out more challenges. He asks the world to play it back, to bring it on—just as, in wearing news stories about the hard realities of life, the owner of the newspaper shirt cuts them down to size and turns them into signs of power. He reminds me of the Mande hunters in West Africa who wear shirts bristling with animal horns, medicines, and amulets to insulate them from forest dangers. Prado deals with anxieties in his own aggressive way, striking the keyboard with return to the life force. Danger is at the door. An air raid siren sounds. At that precise moment, Afro-Cuban percussionists take over. They back us up with iron gong and drums. Call-and-response bursts briefly into action, the chorus chanting, three times, “The shirt made of newspaper.” This is a mambo that recalls the original mambu, in Kongo: the voicing of problems or legal actions in order to work toward possible solutions. When I first met Barreto in person, in New York in 1994, I learned that he was a fully initiated member of the Kongo-derived Cuban religious group called Palo Mayombe. A number of his songs reflect Kongo influence, including “La camisa de papel.” Barreto cites a Kongo word of spiritual intensification: “Hey!” Kongo priests in Cuba use this animating shout to bring people to spiritual attention. Priests can surround a novitiate, chanting “Hey, hey, hey” into his ear. This blasts him into the other world. There is a relationship between Kongo-Cuban praise poetry for the powerful spirit Sarabanda—lord of iron and deity of the mountain, famous for protecting and guarding his followers—and Barreto’s lyric.11 Sarabanda’s presence is intuited wherever a line ends with a strong stress, he lives in these accents in this song for him: Sarabanda me da Mi Sarabanda para cura Mi Sarabanda me vera Mi Sarabanda para cura 127

future-tense blessings ideally wrestle on your behalf with destiny itself. So “La camisa de papel” embodies a trace of Kongo literary tradition: “Hey! ” helps out wherever a line might have ended weak. “Hey” drops out where the strong final accent of the future tense takes over. All this builds to a climax when the singer offers a miniature percussion-led festival, as an antidote to fear. We march straight through perturbations and come out stronger. We strive ultimately for a basic blessing of the Kongo religion: keeping the circle of your life complete (lunda lukongolo lunga). Mambo as dance is self-transcendence. Talent and confidence step out in the world. The finest mamboists absorbed and recast the steps of world dances—rumba, jazz, flamenco, and ballet. They found potency in these idioms. Mambo women and mambo men saluted traditions with love and respect. The world opened up for them. Sarabanda will give me what I need Sarabanda will cure me Sarabanda will look after me Sarabanda will cure me All lines end with an accented final syllable. They promise continuity in the use of the future tense. The scholar of Afro-Cuban culture Fernando Ortiz Fernández talks about this tradition: Observe the sharp endings of the lines of these [mambos]. They are generally phrased with Spanish verbs. [Paleros] take advantage of strong endings in third-person-singular formations, particularly as to the future tense.12 Thus ver, “to see,” is more or less neutral, but vera, “will see,” with the accent on the final “a,” adds strength to the end of a line. Accents declare the potency of Sarabanda. At the same time, the line “Sarabanda will look after me” (Sarabanda me vera) shows us, one more time, how

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1. Brenda D. Gottschild, Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996), after p. 79. 2. The story of Syvilla Fort badgering John Cage was shared with me by the art historian Judith Wilson at Yale in the 1970s. 3. See David F. García, Arsenio Rodríguez and the Transnational Flows of Latin Popular Music (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), p. 50. 4. For an early study of this concept see Richard Alan Waterman, “Hot Rhythm in Negro Music,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 1, no. 1 (Spring 1948):14–37. 5. Ibid., p. 24. 6. Ramón Guirao, Orbita de la poesía afrocubana, 1928-37: Antología (Havana: Ucar, García y Cía, 1938). 7. Odilio Urfe, interview with the author, Havana, April 3, 1960. 8. Ned Sublette, Cuba and Its Music (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2004), pp. 509, 510. 9. Justi Barreto, letter to the author, March 4, 1958, and interview with the author, New York, fall 1994. 10. Lucretius, The Nature of Things, c. 50 b.c. (New York: Penguin Books, 2007), pp. vii–x. 11. On Sarabanda’s connection with the mountain see Harold Courlander, “Musical Instruments of Cuba,” The Musical Quarterly 28, no. 2 (April 1942), 237. 12. Fernando Ortiz Fernández, Los bailes y el teatro de los negros en el folclor de Cuba (Havana: Ciencias Sociales, 1951).

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Opposite: Installation view, Huma Bhabha: The Company, Gagosian, Rome, September 19–December 14, 2019

WORK IN PROGRESS

HUMA BHABHA The artist tells Negar Azimi about her rooftop commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, her interest in the monstrous, and the influence of science fiction on her practice. 130

NEGAR AZIMI Dear

Huma, for starters, your rooftop sculptures last year at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, presented under the rubric We Come in Peace, shook me as few sculptures have. They took my breath away with their crookedness and their monstrosity. The word “monster” derives from the Latin root monstrum, which means “divine omen” but also, according to the Old French into which it was adapted, an animal of multiple origins. I use the word with tenderness, the way the monster loved Dr. Frankenstein, or the way Diane Arbus considered her subjects, askew as they were, “aristocrats.” I don’t necessarily want to embed your sculptures in these particular lineages as much as to say I found them incongruously lovely. Can you tell me a bit about what was going on in your head and heart when you concocted these works? HUMA BHABHA It’s the monster I connect with, not Dr. Frankenstein. Dr. Frankenstein is arrogant, he’s not ready to accept his failure, which is why he can’t accept the monster’s otherness. The monster, and other forms of the monstrous and grotesque, inspire me. I had already imagined the prostrate garbage-bag figure as a potential monumental sculpture some time ago and stored the idea away. Then came the commission from the Met, which inspired the companion sculpture. The connection between the two figures was very theatrical; it was as if the roof were a stage or a landing pad on which they had arrived, with the skyline very much a background. Think The Burghers of Calais meets a Marvel comics movie. NA That’s a remarkable image. I’m equally drawn to your figures because of their striking ambiguity. In the case of the standing figure on the Met roof, they’re intersex, both human and alien, both firmly contemporary in their use of materials and ancient in their evocation of a long history of figurative sculpture, both coming into being and en route to dissolution. It’s all marvelously unclear. The prostrate one, covered in a plastic-bag tarpaulin that to my eyes evokes the fragility of the homeless, is called Benaam, which I understand means “no name” in Urdu. Its hands are cartoonish and it sports a tail concocted from clay and electrical parts. In a way, the work seems to betray your spiritual commitments. Is that fair? HB Benaam, “without name,” was always for me a monument to the unnamed victims of ongoing conflict. The black covering is literally a plastic bag covering a body that has expired. The hands stretching out from under the plastic signal a last movement, as does the refuse or tail of rubble—a final expulsion. We Come in Peace, which is also the title of the standing five-headed intersex figure, is responding to being summoned by Benaam. They obviously don’t look human in scale or presence, so the scenario between them is open to the imagination. For me, it’s an antiwar statement, but I don’t want to limit the work to one interpretation. NA “We Come in Peace” is a line plucked from the 1951 film The Day the Earth Stood Still, about alien invaders who come bearing an alarming message for inhabitants of Earth. The film is a fascinating relic of the Cold War. I’ve used the stock phrase “alien invader” but I feel like your art is at odds with the standard images one associates with that phrase: it channels empathy and warmth rather than marauding malevolence. Again, you feel closer to the monster than to his creator. What does science fiction offer us anyway?

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Science fiction lets me feel less alone in my paranoia. Philip K. Dick’s writings are a big influence on my psyche and my work. One of his most compelling themes is that the Roman Empire never ended. Christianity was absorbed into it and today America is the new Empire. NA He was not wrong. Dick was an uncommon seer, a Cassandra who lived a tormented life and didn’t live long enough to see the impact his works had. And the truths they held: I guess one of the basic truths of Blade Runner [1982], the f ilmic version of his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? [1968], is that no matter how “advanced” people may think they are, they revert to their most basic, even malicious instincts. Do you feel that? Do you have a favorite work by Dick? HB Philip K. Dick was fortunate not to have seen what he predicted. There has been no evolution; we still strive for the same ego-driven bullshit. My interest in P.K.D. is in not only the visionary aspect of his writings but also his writing style, which offers an amazing fusion of unpretentiousness, humor, and imagination that I hope to attain in my own work. I like almost all of his books and short stories, but Martian TimeSlip [1964], The Penultimate Truth [1964], and Valis [1981] are special favorites. NA You grew up in the 1960s and ’70s in Karachi, often referred to as Pakistan’s largest and most cosmopolitan city. The city’s population swelled after partition, in 1948, as millions of Indian Muslims streamed in. Can you tell me a bit about your experience of the city, but also your family and perhaps, even, your visual universe growing up? What were you looking at as a young person? HB My work is strongly shaped by where I grew up. Karachi’s population has swelled to 20 million in the last thirty-five or so years. After the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, in 1979, and the Iranian revolution around the same time, Pakistan started to change and the atmosphere became more openly feudal, corrupt, and ganglike. In the 1960s and ’70s Karachi was less built up, there was none of the hideous Third World pop-up architecture that is prevalent now. There was desert on either side of the roads . . . beautiful sandy stretches with the most resilient bushes and mangroves that only grow in the most arid, salty conditions. My mother was born in northern India and my father was born in South Africa. I was exposed to art by my mother, who was a very talented amateur artist. My father grew up during apartheid and left South Africa when he was twenty-four. He traveled around quite a bit, I can tell from old photos, and settled in Karachi in the mid-’50s. Karachi has a rawness that has seeped into my work—the landscape, the crumbling construction, the histories of the region. One fond memory is a class field trip at age fifteen to Mohenjo Daro, the ancient city of the Indus Valley Civilization, and later seeing the art of Gandhara, which shed light on the hybrid nature of my work. NA It seems to me that your background is riven with lines. The line of apartheid. The line of partition, which tore India apart and gave birth to a new country, Pakistan. Lines divide, they fragment, they exercise a violence of their own. I see this in your work. At the same time, your art, fashioned from vernacular bric-a-brac drawn from motley sources, gives lie to the myth of purity, of being from one side of the line. It HB

Opposite, both images: Installation view, Huma Bhabha: The Company, Gagosian, Rome, September 19–December 14, 2019 This page: Huma Bhabha, Untitled, 2019, ink, pastel, and acrylic on paper, 34 5⁄8 × 23 ½ inches (87.9 × 59.7 cm)

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Huma Bhabha, Untitled, 2019, ink, oil stick, and acrylic on black-and-white print, 80 × 50 inches (203.2 × 127 cm) Artwork © Huma Bhabha Photos: Matteo D’Eletto, M3 Studio

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makes sense that you were deeply affected by the art of Gandhara, itself Buddhist but inflected with Greco-Roman influence. I am trying to conjure a Buddha with Apollo’s face. HB The lines in my art are absolutely about combining my emotions with a highly sophisticated approach to materiality. I believe there’s no such thing as one side of the line. Notions of purity, nationalism, and patriotism are extremely disturbing and heinous to me. NA I read a piece in the Times recently—maybe you saw it too—about how Karachi’s old Empress Market, named after Queen Victoria, was soon to be razed for beautification. The article included a crucial detail: the market had once been the stage for executing dozens of South Asians who had risen in mutiny against the occupying British. After independence, the market drew people from all over the city. It was a hybrid space, not unlike your own work—a mishmash of histories, textures, instincts. HB I used to shop for groceries at Empress Market with my mother when I was young. One of my favorite sections was where the butchers sold fresh meat. I was fascinated by how they carved up the animal in the most beautiful way, with knives only. The market was a place full of flies and stray cats, dogs waiting for a scrap. And yes, gentrification is a domestic form of colonialism. NA You were taken by the scrap market: that seems apropos. Your use of material is idiosyncratic, collagistic. The materials themselves have the quality of evoking refuse, detritus, the leftover and discarded. Can you tell me a bit more about the materials you use, where you source them and when and how this tendency began? Were you always working in this way? HB I started using found wood and cutting up printing proofs to make assemblages when I was an undergrad at the Rhode Island School of Design. I was interested in painting on hard surfaces so I scavenged from the garbage. If I liked something I’d use it. Later, when I moved to New York, I furnished my apartment with things other people had thrown away. I had no money so I adapted my work to include found and cheap objects for both the armature and the surface. One thing led to another. So I guess you can say I always liked working in this way. NA Your works are often bruised, for lack of a better word, betraying the marks of their making. There’s no commitment to bravura artifice. Can you tell me about this mark-making, these tattoos of time and place? HB The hand is consciously very present in my work. Showing my skill, or lack of, is very much part of my process. The carving, scratching, and painting on the sculptures has evolved a lot over the past few years. My interest in expressionistic mark-making in the work of painters like JeanMichel Basquiat and Georg Baselitz has merged with the use of found materials and combines that you might see in Robert Rauschenberg and David Hammons. I should add that African art is the one consistent genre that I return to again and again. NA There’s something of African funerary sculpture in your work, too. And like Rauschenberg and Hammons, there’s a humbleness to the materials you use. Like them, your imprimatur, or fingerprint, is ever present. The marks you make almost feel like hieroglyphics to decode. HB Or let’s say a private language—made-up messages to keep evil at bay.

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RAIN UNRAVELED TALES In November of this year, City Lights Publishers, San Francisco, is releasing Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman, the first comprehensive collection of the poet’s work. Here Raymond Foye, the book’s coeditor, reminisces about his long-standing friendship with Kaufman and reflects on the enduring power of the poems.

first encountered that remarkable face on the cover of a battered paperback, Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness (New Directions, 1965), in a used-book store in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1972. If you want to know about Bob Kaufman, just look at the many remarkable photographs of him, as they really tell it all: the power of one man, small in stature, staring into you with dignity and defiance, tenderness and humor. His face is a map: of Africa, of the West Indies and the Caribbean, of his beloved New Orleans and the birth of jazz. It is the face of a holy man on Earth as a hero and martyr in the guise of a hipster and flaneur. From this photograph I first sensed what in the Hindu tradition is calle darshan: the transformation felt in a master’s presence, communicated through the gaze. At any rate, I did judge a book by its cover . . . and quickly purchased it. As I read the first poem, “Private Sadness,” I immediately fell under the spell of its gentle yet vivid imagery. Bob’s lofty language drew a straight line from Shakespeare to the Harlem Renaissance, while his stately cadence, always so rhythmic and dignified, carried me along like the steps of a funeral jazz band following a hearse through the French Quarter. A few months later I found his second book, Golden Sardine (City Lights, 1967). Once again the cover photograph of that same wise face gazed at me with understanding. His books were slim and I essentially memorized them. I intuitively understood these poems were oral/ aural: they sprang not from the written word but from Orpheus’s lyre. I carried these two books with me as I traveled, always placing them on the shelf with their photographs facing out. Seeking adventure at the age of nineteen, I arrived in San Francisco on January 1, 1977, and checked into a North Beach hotel near the City Lights bookstore. The Tevere Hotel was located in the narrow triangle of land formed by the intersection of Grant and Columbus Avenues and bounded on the north side by Vallejo Street. My room was above the Caffe Trieste and overlooked the Saloon. As I walked down the narrow flight of stairs to the street one morning, a familiar face passed me by. Stunned, I turned to ask, “Are you Bob Kaufman?” Without stopping, and without turning around, he replied, “Sometimes.” In those days Bob was more an apparition than someone real. He was an otherworldly but not unnoticed specter of the bohemian quarter known as North Beach. I have never known anyone whose presence was so defined by absence. By then he had already retreated into silence and isolation, so for months I watched him from afar as he haunted the streets and alleys like Edgar Allan Poe’s “man of the crowd,” never speaking, never stopping, until one evening when he suddenly walked into Specs’ Bar and began booming out poetry at the top of his voice: “Let us go then, you and I, / When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table.” He recited T. S. Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in its entirety and then somebody bought him a beer. More poetry followed: Charles Olson’s “Kingfishers,” with the line “What does not change / is the will to change,” and Wallace Stevens’s “Peter Quince at the Clavier,” with the line “Music is feeling, then, not sound.” Soon I learned that Bob alternated between silent periods when he did not drink and boisterous periods when he did. Each period lasted six or eight months. We all waited for those boisterous periods, because otherwise he was entirely unreachable. Bob was forever walking around with great determination, which always made me wonder just where he was going. One day I spied him through the window of City Lights and decided to follow him, trailing far enough behind that he wouldn’t see me. He walked down Columbus to Kearny, then on through South of Market for another dozen blocks until he reached China Basin. These were the docks of old San Francisco Bay, for him a kind of home. Pressed up against a chain-link fence for over an hour, he watched the ships come and go, the loading and the unloading. It was then that I saw the old merchant seaman in him—the young boy who went to the sea in his teens and stayed on the ships for seven years, traveling around the world and spending his shore leave in exotic ports like Calcutta, where he spent five weeks. I came to learn a lot about this part of his life from a fellow seaman and veteran of the Spanish Civil War, a rough character named Henry Thomas, who drank 151-proof rum at the Savoy Tivoli bar on Grant Avenue. He was notorious for singing “The Internationale” and other communist anthems when he was drunk. Henry told me that Bob was known for taking on the toughest jobs, like climbing the mast during a storm to tie down rigging.1 In the North Beach days Bob was living off a paltry check from state assistance. Around the first of the month I would often see him having breakfast, his one meal of the day, at a lunch counter he liked called Curley’s on Green and Columbus. By the middle of the month the regular meals would end and he would have to get by on what he could bum from friends. One day he came up to me and said, “Hey Raymond, can I have a dollar?” It was very early in our acquaintance and I was surprised that he even knew my name. I remember thinking to myself in astonishment as I handed him the money, “Bob Kaufman just said my name.” A week later he approached me and said, “Hey Raymond, can I have five dollars?” And I handed it over. A week later he walked up to me and asked for ten—the following week, twenty. The next time I saw him he casually approached and asked, “Hey

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Raymond, can I have a hundred dollars?” I laughed, then he did too, and after that the amount he would ask for went back down to five. In those days I made it my mission to collect as many stray poems of Bob’s as I could, from early mimeo zines like Beatitude or from friends of his who had preserved the poems he’d scribbled on napkins and scraps of paper. My mentor in this regard was his wife, Eileen Kaufman. She had been responsible for preserving most of the poems in Solitudes. The two were estranged at the time: she could not control his behavior and he would not accept control. I preserved these poems in a folio, hoping one day to publish a book that would add to the legacy of Solitudes and Golden Sardine. After the Tevere Hotel, I moved to 28 Harwood Alley (since renamed Bob Kaufman Alley), into the very room Bob had briefly occupied, an apartment I shared with the poet Neeli Cherkovski. That kitchen was the center of social life for the poets of North Beach, and it was crowded from morning till night with the likes of Gregory Corso, Kirby Doyle, Howard Hart, Kaye McDonough, Tisa Walden, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and dozens of others. Philip Lamantia lived across the alley and our kitchen windows looked directly into each other’s. When Philip was in a social mood he would open his window and say hello, a discussion would ensue, and eventually (sometimes after an hour) he would come over for coffee and stay several hours more. Bob was also a regular. I had tacked photographs of him on the kitchen door along with broadsides and fliers for bygone readings. “What am I, the local hero?” he said with a smile one day looking at the photos. On one occasion he even picked up a broadside of his poem “Second April” and gave an impromptu reading. “I feel at home in this neighborhood,” he told me one day. “When I’m lost and alone, and Paul Robeson is singing the Soviet national anthem in my head, and I can’t sleep, I go out and walk these streets, and I feel at home.” I was in my room listening to a Dizzy Gillespie record one day when Bob stopped by. He walked in singing scat along with the solo—singing on key and note for note, with absolute precision, as if he had a transcription of the music in his head (which clearly he did). It was then that I realized the depth of his involvement with bebop, how this music was at the core of his work. I never read his work again without hearing those complex rhythms, with their streaming melodies and switchback

Previous spread: Bob Kaufman, Coffee Gallery, Grant Avenue, San Francisco, 1978. Photo: Ira Nowinski Above: Bob Kaufman, Harwood Alley, San Francisco, 1983. Photo: Raymond Foye

changes: he had stolen their essence with his ears. But the same can be said for many other influences that he absorbed in their totality and then made his own— Federico García Lorca, for instance. There is still so much like this to be unpacked from his poetry. Sometimes if Bob was in the mood I would visit him at the Dante Hotel. His room was just upstairs from a strip joint, the Condor. We would share a joint and look at art books, of which he had quite a nice collection stacked in piles on the floor. He would buy them from a used bookstore directly downstairs on Broadway. (This was the only extravagance I ever really knew him to indulge in.) He loved Picasso, Miró, Klee, Van Gogh, and the Impressionists. I remember him staring silently for a very long time at a reproduction of Van Gogh’s Night Café, at last remarking, gesturing to the cosmos, “Van Gogh is out there, really out there. I mean, he’s not coming back.” Bob’s favorite book was The Image of the Black in Western Art, a multivolume history first published by the Menil Foundation beginning in the mid1970s (and later revised and expanded by David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.). At one point he found a full-page reproduction of a carved wooden mask from Benin that bore a remarkable resemblance to him, a point he silently underscored by holding the book up directly beside his face while staring back at me. After not seeing him for a few months during a silent period, I ran into him and asked if he wanted to hang out in his room. “I threw my marijuana out the window,” he replied, and walked away. Bob had a lot of personal quirks, some of which could be quite annoying. If he turned on the faucet, he never turned it off: he just walked away and left the water running. Once I drove him to a barbecue at his brother George’s house in Oakland, and both times when he left the car he didn’t close the door behind him. Eventually I just chalked these things up to his “living in the moment.” One of the more eventful aspects of encountering him was his wardrobe. I never knew anyone with a better sense of style: fabrics, colors, hats. I often wondered how he managed this on his budget. One day he was walking toward me and I noticed he was particularly well-dressed in a white dinner jacket and a green-striped silk scarf. Suddenly I realized it was my jacket and scarf—he’d just raided my closet on Harwood Alley. He smiled and gave me a big hello and kept moving. Although Kaufman’s personal biography reads quite tragically, full of police beatings, jails, and enforced asylums, he could be light-hearted and a lot of fun to be around. The way his humor came through in his body language reminded me of the silent-film comedians: like Buster Keaton or Harold Lloyd he was small in stature but extremely strong. He had a great sense of physical comedy and a sharp sense of timing, full of double takes and mock surprise. Once he entered City Lights just as a car backfired in the street, and without missing a beat he clutched his heart and staggered through the door exclaiming, “They’ve shot Bob Kaufman!” His remarks were always terse and often charged with a strong sense of the absurd. I remember him sitting silently at a café table with Ginsberg for nearly an hour when he suddenly looked up and announced with astonishment, “Mars is a red planet!” When I first got to know him I mustered the courage to ask if he was still writing. “Sometimes I want to sing, but I get laryngitis of the soul.” In 1979, Neeli and I edited a special twentieth-anniversary issue of Beatitude dedicated to Kaufman, whom we both felt was criminally neglected. Bob had cofounded the magazine in 1959, but by 1979 it had languished. Kaufman’s copublisher, Pierre Delattre, referred to it as “a floating crap game,” meaning anyone who wanted to edit an issue could. Publishing this anniversary issue was more or less the beginning of a small renaissance of interest in Bob, the point when the next generation picked up on his work and a dozen or more young poets gathered around him. Indeed, a short while after the issue was published and promoted with various readings in which he participated, I ran into him in a bar one afternoon. He took me by the arm and presented me to a friend, announcing proudly (and quite uncharacteristically), “This thing we started in the ’50s, this Beat Generation, it didn’t end back then, it continues.” This was exactly as I had quoted from Ezra Pound in my Beatitude essay on Kaufman: “To have gathered a live tradition from the air, or from a fine old eye the unconquered flame.” Early one morning as I made my way down to the Caffe Trieste, I encountered Bob shuffling around on the sidewalk outside, mumbling something about having survived Dante’s Inferno. I assumed it was his usual way of speaking in metaphors. An hour later someone told me that the Dante Hotel, where he lived, had burned. And indeed it had. First I thought of his small room, the art books lost, and so on, and then I wondered about his poems. I had no idea whether he had been writing in those years because he would never say, but the possibility was there. An instinct told me to make some moves. I waited for the fire crew to depart a few days later, after the building had stopped smoldering, and I crossed the police lines. It was a vast hotel full of cubicles, but fortunately I knew exactly where his room was. It was in the most charred part of the building; in fact the fire may have actually started in his room. His chest of drawers was reduced to a small pile of charcoal. I dug through the things that didn’t burn, the coins and religious medallions. At the bottom of the pile was a thick Moroccan-leather binder, soaked with water. I looked inside and glimpsed pages bearing his distinctive handwriting, lettered in

Page from Bob Kaufman’s manuscript for The Ancient Rain, 1981

both small and large capitals. I took the binder and walked across the street to City Lights, where I’d been working as an editorial assistant for a few months. I carefully peeled off the manuscript pages and laid them out all around the upstairs office. I can still recall Ferlinghetti’s look of amazement when he came in to work around 10 a.m. To those few of us for whom Kaufman was a true poetic genius, it was like a door opening into King Tut’s tomb. He had been writing all those years, and the poems bore the mark of that unmistakable mind and imagination: i am a camera

the poet nailed on the hard bone of this world his soul dedicated to silence is a fish with frog’s eyes, the blood of a poet flows out with his poems, back to the pyramid of bones from which he is thrust his death is a saving grace

creation is perfect

As the poems dried out, I typed them up. Soon I realized that I had enough material to bring out the book I’d been hoping for. These new poems, when added to the ones I’d already collected, formed the second half of what would become Bob’s last book, The Ancient Rain (New Directions, 1981). But the more difficult part was that first, Bob would need to be convinced they should be published. He steadfastly refused every time I broached the subject. I enlisted Eileen to help out; she had breakfast with him and asked him why. “Because I don’t think it’s going to happen,” he replied. I understood he was protecting himself from disappointment, so I sent the manuscript to Fred Martin and Griselda Ohannessian at New Directions; they accepted it immediately. Shortly thereafter, I cornered Bob on the street one morning to show him the galleys and a contract, which to my relief he quickly signed. I also had his burnt manuscripts, which I tried to return. “I don’t want them,” he said, and abruptly walked away. The book came out with Ira Nowinski’s

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magnificent portrait of Bob on the cover, showing him in a Mexican poncho, holding court at the Coffee Gallery. Having a recent publication made Bob eligible for poetry grants, so I filled out an application for the National Endowment for the Humanities, included the required poems, and got him to sign it. About six months later he came up to me on the street. “Raymond, this check is no good.” It was a U.S. Treasury check for $12,500 made out to Bob Kaufman. The bank had refused to cash it because he didn’t have a bank account. We returned to the bank and I explained it was part of their charter as a bank to cash U.S. Treasury checks, regardless of the payee’s relation to the bank. Phone calls were made and Bob became increasingly impatient, insisting that we just leave—it was obvious how much he hated any interaction with authority. Finally they agreed to cash the check. “How do you want it?” the teller asked. Bob was deaf in one ear and hard of hearing in the other, and it made him shout somewhat when he spoke. “What?” “How do you want it?” “I don’t care!” he yelled. The teller quickly counted out a stack of hundred-dollar bills and Bob stuffed them in his pocket and left. For the next several weeks every poet in North Beach was a recipient of his largesse. His wardrobe—never at a loss for stylishness—stepped up a few notches. In a month, he was broke again, but he seemed very happy. In those days North Beach had a bar on every block, sometimes two or three, each with a different character and clientele. Bob was pretty much a regular at all of them: there was the Saloon on Grant Avenue, a tough biker bar with live blues bands where he spent many hours with the poet Janice Blue, his girlfriend of the time;2 there was the Coffee Gallery, another blues bar where guitarist Michael Bloomfield would occasionally drop by; there was Gino and Carlo’s, with a pool table and drug dealers in the backroom; there was the Columbus Café, the San Remo, Specs’, and the pricey outdoor Enrico’s on Broadway; and next to City Lights on Columbus there was Vesuvio, where Bob would often take a morning Irish coffee. But his favorite bars seemed to be those with exotic decor: the Hawaiian-themed bar on the corner of Grant and Green; the Swiss Bar on Broadway, done up like a cozy chalet in the Alps; or the Li Po in Chinatown, a masterpiece of nostalgic chinoiserie, named after the Tang-dynasty poet who reputedly drowned while drunkenly trying to embrace the reflection of the full moon in the Yangtze River. The large number of neighborhood bars came in handy for poets like Kaufman or Corso, who

could become boisterous after a few drinks and were occasionally 86’d from one establishment or another. In fact on one visit back to San Francisco from New York, when I bumped into Kaufman on the street and suggested that we have a beer, I had to name three different bars before I hit on one he was allowed in at that moment. In later years Bob took up with a kind and gentle companion, Lynne Wildey, and his life took on a semblance of domesticity—to the extent that such a thing was possible.3 The day before he died, Kaufman meticulously cleaned his room, dressed all in white, and carefully placed his favorite D. T. Suzuki book on Zen on his bedside table, before he peacefully slipped out of existence. As a writer Kaufman often relies on seemingly fanciful or extravagant metaphors, but directly behind each of those images lie real-life experiences, these often quite dire. As a result of a beating during his days as a labor organizer in the deep South, Kaufman lost several teeth, lost all hearing in one ear, and suffered tinnitus in the other. These facts are gently masked in a simple seven-line poem: “MICHELANGELO” THE ELDER I live alone, like pith in a tree, My teeth rattle, like musical instruments. In one ear a spider spins its web of eyes, In the other a cricket chirps all night, This is the end, Which art, that proves my glory has brought me. I would die for Poetry. Embedded in other poems you will find references to the attempted suicide of William Margolis, who jumped out a window in Harwood Alley, to the deaths of friends and to various suicides he’d known. The poem “Rue Miro” is his description of the street by that name that he grew up on in New Orleans. Each stanza in “Unhistorical Events” is about a specific friend or shipmate—Rock Gut Charlie, Cinder Bottom Blue, Riff Raff Rolfe, Lady Choppy Wine—while the final stanza describes a horrible scene from his childhood when he was chased by a lynch mob and hung by his thumbs in an ice house in Louisiana, remaining locked inside alone in agony until he was discovered the next day. The reality behind the metaphor is the glue that holds it together; the transformation of that reality is the magic of the poem. While I enjoy recalling Bob’s exuberance and warmth, I have to circle back to his solitude. For most of the years I knew him he was determined to maintain his distance from the social, material world; one felt his solitude when one was with him, it was palpable, and almost all his remarks to me down through the years were about this place: “I live in a well of loneliness.” “I don’t know how you get involved with uninvolvement, but I don’t want to be involved.” “Wallace Stevens wrote a poem about the motives for metaphor. I want to discover my motives for metaphor.” For Kaufman, solitude was not just a metaphor, nor was it a clinical condition. His silence was a witness to an eternal truth. It was a self-imposed isolation, his need for the innermost cave where his sentience might be itself. It is where his poetry came alive without ego or worldly attachment. Fortunately, at times he emerged from that cave to speak to us through his poems.

Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman contains the first three books of poetry the poet published in his lifetime, books respectively edited by his wife, Eileen Kaufman; Claude Pelieu and Mary Beach; and myself. It also includes a generous selection of poems newly unearthed from various public and private collections and small magazines, appearing through the diligent work of Tate Swindel, who also compiled for the book a biographical chronology containing much new information. As both writer and editor, Neeli Cherkovski has supported and honored Bob Kaufman’s work for over forty years, and, perhaps more important, gave Bob a place to live when he was homeless, proving the exception to “all those people who gave me thick books to read when what I really needed was a warm meal.” John Geluardi, like his mother Alix, was and is a lifelong friend to Bob, Eileen, and Parker Kaufman. Text © 2019 by Raymond Foye. Reprinted with the permission of City Lights Books, San Francisco

Bob Kaufman, City Lights Books, San Francisco, 1978. Photo: Ira Nowinski

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1. This might have been the least dangerous of Bob Kaufman’s tasks given that he spent virtually the entirety of World War II on Liberty ships, part of the U.S. Merchant Marine fleet. The Merchant Marines suffered the highest rate of casualties of any service in the war, with over 1,500 ships sunk at great loss of life. The important story of these ships is still not widely known. 2. Bob and Janice Blue shared writing credit on a book called Closing Time till Dawn (The Bob Kaufman Collective, 1986), transcribed from their spontaneous poetry sessions, although Bob was often unhappy when people tried this approach because they didn’t understand that when he riffed he was interspersing lines by other poets along with his own—and he didn’t want to appear to be plagiarizing. For Bob, all poetry was one. 3. For a touching profile of Kaufman’s life during this period see Eric Walker’s prose account “The Ancient Rain,” in Eric Walker: Selected Poems (New York: Raymond Foye Books, 2019). Also available on line at https://brooklynrail.org/2014/12/criticspage/the-ancient-ruin (yes, the last word in the link is not “rain” but “ruin.”) A brilliant but doomed poet who was found hanging in prison at age twentynine, Walker was Kaufman’s most direct protégé, and Kaufman even took him in for a time.

I M M E R S I V E P H OTO G R A P H Y A N D V I D EO BY A G R O U N D B R E A K I N G A R T I S T

On view until February 16, 2020 Get tickets at thebroad.org Shirin Neshat, Untitled (Women of Allah), 1996. ÂŠ Shirin Neshat/Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels

ALAN YENTOB I want to ask you about your early life

and the influence of your family—you have a Jewish father and a Catholic mother, and when you went to university you chose to study art and religion. RACHEL FEINSTEIN Yes. My family is really the source of my whole vision. My father was a classic second-generation immigrant; his family came from Vilnius, he grew up in Brooklyn, and his grandfather only spoke Yiddish and would go to shul every day. My father was remarkably intelligent and worked hard, even from a young age, cleaning sheets and doing laundry. His father never finished sixth grade and he decided he wanted something better for his life. So he worked hard and went to Brooklyn College. After that he went on to SUNY Syracuse for medical school, and it was there that he met my mother, who was this eighteen-year-old freshman from upstate New York—five-foot-ten-inch blonde Irish German Catholic girl [laughter]. They completely fell in love at first sight and that love affair has continued throughout my whole life. They’re total opposites, but through these different backgrounds they each almost became the other person

after fifty years of marriage. My mother makes the best matzo ball soup—I mean, really incredible—and my sister ended up marrying a practicing Jew and her daughter had her bat mitzvah in Israel. I was always curious about these two backgrounds I grew up in the middle of. I went to Temple Beth Am for elementary school and I was baptized Catholic, secretly, by my mom. Later, in Miami, I didn’t know what was going on [laughter]. And now, according to Claudia Gould, the director of the Jewish Museum in New York, my mom told her that she converted and she’s actually Jewish. That was the first I’d ever heard of this. I still don’t know what the real story is, to tell you the truth. AY This is fascinating. That thing about opposites, your parents Catholic and Jewish, reminds me of your own interest in the paradox of fairy tales and fantasy, where there’s a dark side to these genres. RF Yes, yes. You need darkness to show light. All fairy tales originated from much more gruesome and sinister stories than we know now.

Your grandmother was an artist as well, correct? RF Yes, a painter. She was my mother’s mother. Her husband died when she was in her forties, and she stayed single the rest of her life; she was the unusual creative spirit in my life. She had an orange VW bug and she drove it till she was ninety-five years old. AY Wow, just like Mel Brooks, ninety-three and he’s still driving a car. RF Exactly [laughter]. She’d drive me around Miami, and at that time, in the 1970s and ’80s, it was nothing like it is now. There was no culture whatsoever. There was no ballet and almost zero art museums. There was the Bass art museum, and this old art theater on Collins Avenue. They would play old movies, experimental films, as well as more mainstream stuff. My father brought me to see Koyaanisqatsi [1983], the Philip Glass/Godfrey Reggio film, when I was like twelve years old. I’m still amazed—I don’t know how he learned about the film, or thought to take me, because he had really no art education whatsoever. It was definitely one of those key moments. I truly believe that every AY

RACHEL FEINSTEIN The artist discusses her life and work with Alan Yentob.

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Previous spread: Rachel Feinstein in her West 15th Street studio, New York, 2002 This page: Rachel Feinstein, Spring and Winter, 1994–96 (detail), Super 8 film, 9 minutes 22 seconds Opposite, top: Rachel Feinstein, Ballerina, 2018, hand-applied color resin over foam with wooden base, 85 ½ × 31 × 27 inches (217.2 × 78.7 × 68.6 cm) Opposite, bottom: Installation and performance Rachel Feinstein: Let the Artist Live, Exit Art, New York, 1994 Artwork © Rachel Feinstein

artist, writer, and filmmaker—it all stems from those pivotal years when you’re a child and you’re soaking it in. AY I absolutely agree. I’d love to talk about your abiding interest in materials. From even your earliest artworks, there’s a concern for the history and specifics of whatever material you’re using. In your work with ceramics and plaster, the hands-on dimension of using those materials also seems, to me at least, to be an important part of your process. RF There are a lot of films of me and my sister when we’re really young, and I saw them for the first time since childhood maybe ten or fifteen years ago. In one of them my sister’s in the pool with all of these neighborhood kids and they’re jumping and they’re playing, and then I’m in the corner cutting up a box; I’m just trying to dismantle it and then restack it together to make a sculpture. And I remember there were some old shoes being thrown out, and my father being a doctor would have really cool, weird plaster bandages and alginate, a dental-mold material. I have no idea why they were around the house, but I’d mix it all up, and I covered it all on this shoe, and then I painted the shoe in all these colors. I brought it to school and they thought it was so amazing that they submitted it to the Miami-Dade county fair, which is a really Southern thing where people bring livestock in and get prizes. I won an award for that shoe! [laughter] AY This element of play is still very much part of your work today, wouldn’t you say? RF Very much so. And also the influence from Disney World. I’ve tried to count how many times I’ve been to Disney World in Orlando, and I honestly got to fifty and gave up trying to remember. I’ve been there so many times that I know where all the secret doors are that all the characters go into. If you graduate from high school in Florida, they have something called “grad night” where every single graduating senior in the state gets to go to Disney World from 9 p.m. till 6 a.m. It’s an extraordinarily weird and amazing experience, totally surrealistic. I heard that this person was on acid and really freaked out—the staff took him into a holding cell that you don’t even know exists underneath one of the rides. They went down a 144

little hole and then disappeared until the next day. I mean, imagine having that happen to you when you’re seventeen. It informed my worldview. That’s why I think life is big and full of surprises—you can try to have everything and do everything and not limit yourself, but you never know what will happen. And I think life is out there for the taking and you might as well just try. You only live once, you know? AY The other thing that drives you, and I think it’s the big C in creativity, is curiosity. You were obviously a child who just got immersed in all these things; now there’s another side to this—the Disney World angle, Grimms’ fairy tales, where you’ve got the dark side and the light side. These are things that obviously preoccupied you. Where did you get your interest and curiosity about baroque and rococo art from? RF Growing up, I didn’t have the huge love and knowledge of art history that I do now. Even as an art student, my initial belief was in making art from an unconscious place deep inside. When I attended Skowhegan, in Maine, I had Kiki Smith as a teacher, and earlier Ursula von Rydingsvard and Judy Pfaff as my teachers at Columbia. They were huge influences on me, and at that moment in the early 1990s, Kiki was showing a sculpture of a woman on all fours with this big turd coming out of her—I mean, I could not believe it. That visceral, nasty side of making art, that was where my first real energy came from. I had never seen that in art before, especially coming from a woman. I think it appealed to me, in part, because of my dad’s background in medicine. My dad would have this dermatological magazine called Cutis lying around the house while I was growing up. There were always intense pictures of people with syphilis or various other ailments, it was literally a skin magazine [laughter]. So Kiki’s art showing the visceral quality of being human, instead of glossing over everything, really spoke to me. I followed suit and was making work that was more physical and female oriented. I’d make alginate casts of my vagina and my anus and I’d wear it as jewelry out for the night. AY And there was your Sleeping Beauty performance, right? You slept in Exit Art, a public gallery, for a week.

Yes. I was working at a bar in those days, the early ’90s—I had bleached white hair and I’d wear this pink ’50s underwear with this big black pubic hair coming out, and I’d walk around the bar like this. It was so incredible. It was right next to the New School. I enjoyed being a spectacle. At Exit Art I made a gingerbread house and I staged my performance through a window in the sculpture, sleeping under a humping castle. I’d sleep in the gingerbread house every night after the bar job, so I’d come in probably around 5 in the morning. I’d have to close the bar up at 4, count the money, count the bottles, sneak into this gallery, and go to sleep, but I couldn’t sleep because it was so weird, so I’d have to take sleeping pills. And people would look through this frosted-glass window to see me sleeping. The very first night, a man came up to me and said, “You look like John Currin’s paintings.” This was 1994 and I’d never heard of John Currin, didn’t know who he was, and I said, “Well, whatever,” and went on my way. And he kept calling me on the pay phone at the gallery to try to get me to meet him. It was so bizarre. So I finally stopped taking his phone calls. AY The word is “stalking.” RF Yeah. And the other thing about this man was, this was early September when all the galleries had just opened up, and September in New York can be very hot, and he was wearing full leather: a leather vest, a long leather jacket, leather pants, and high leather elevator shoes. And unbeknownst to me, he got John’s number from the White Pages, called him up, and said, “There’s this girl and she looks like she stepped out of these paintings that you’re making right now.” So John being John walked right over to SoHo. He was very close by. He was still wearing his painting clothes. He walked into the gallery and our eyes locked, and there’s about fifty people, and I walked over to him and I kissed him on the lips. Really, it’s really strange, and I don’t know why. We went out that very night and we’ve been together ever since. AY That is a great love story. So you get together with John and he’s an artist and you’re an artist. You have different approaches but you’re often interested in similar themes. RF Yes, you asked me earlier about baroque and rococo influences and how they found their way RF

into my work, but I got sidetracked. So basically I was making this more subconscious type of work, and then I felt like I got all of that out of me, and it was gone, and I didn’t know what to do anymore. I was a little bit empty. When I kept finding myself lost, John would say, “Let’s go to the Strand bookstore together.” I remember focusing on the first image I saw in a rococo-period book, which was a Mars and Venus porcelain by Royal Derbyshire. After seeing that I made a small sculpture called Waterfall [2001]. I included it in a show and my dear friends Tobias Meyer and Mark Fletcher said, “You have to let us take you to see all the German rococo.” So we did a trip in November 2000 to see Würtzburg and Wieskirche and Nymphenburg, and that’s when everything kind of clicked into gear. AY There’s another side we should talk about before we finish, which is being a mother and also being an artist. How did you make these things work? RF Fitting into my belief in a world of dualities, I think that’s the greatest and strongest duality for me. They work against each other and they work

with each other. I don’t think I would be capable of the scheduling and arranging what’s needed to make the work I make now if I didn’t have three children. I was a person who used to sleep until 12:30 in the afternoon, and everything does change overnight when you have children. To be a parent you have to grow up. There’s been a history of allowing artists to get away with very bad behavior, because of this belief that the egocentric need to put forth your own vision into the world is so strong that you’re allowed to be a horrible human being and act like a spoiled child as a grown-up. But that’s the opposite of being a good mother. I’m in my studio, I have three young men working for me and I have to tell them what to do, but I want to take care of them too. It’s completely conflicting at every moment of my life; so now I’m trying to use that as my strength.

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CASA MALAPARTE: A HOUSE LIKE OURSELVES

Wyatt Allgeier explores the legacy of Curzio Malaparte and corresponds with the avantgarde authorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s youngest descendant, Tommaso Rositani Suckert, on the subject of his decision to reproduce select pieces of furniture from the iconic Casa Malaparte in Capri, Italy.

Previous spread, left: Casa Malaparte, Capri, Italy, 2019. Photo: Sebastiano Pellion di Persano Previous spread, right: Curzio Malaparte, c. 1920. Photo: Mondadori Portfolio by Getty Images

ou’d be hard pressed to find a more complex, singular, and, frankly, difficult figure to address in the year 2019 than Curzio Malaparte. With a life and an artistic output—collapsed categories for the Italian vanguardist—that consistently defied any systematic ideological or moral program, this novelist, editor, journalist, filmmaker, architect, composer, and general provocateur is a highly knotted subject to try to engage with gracefully—as true in his time as now. His worldview was not made for any type of binary thinking; “paradox” is the most consistent motif in his work. Whether in words, in novels like Kaputt (1944) or La Pelle (The Skin, 1949), or in the singular architecture of his self-designed Casa Malaparte in Capri, the Tuscan visionary had little time for comfortable or safe creations—everything from his hands was a challenge to the preexisting order, a bold offering that succeeds, then and now, in forcing its audiences to reconsider what it means to live in the world. Born in 1898, as Kurt Erich Suckert (the father of this Italian was German), Malaparte arrived in a world shuttling toward a catastrophic and 148

tumultuous series of wars, revolutions, and technological transformations. Like many artists and writers of the first half of the twentieth century, he served in World War I, left the fighting embittered, and spent the rest of his life questioning what could be responsible for such atrocity. His work after the war as a journalist, novelist, and memoirist— these genres all blurring into one for Malaparte— captures his generation’s distrust of neat demarcations between winning and losing, love and hate, sublimity and horror, loyalty and betrayal. Written in a prose as rich and decadent as anything by J. K. Huysmans, these texts hit you with humor and shock in their amoralism and their raw, unblinking stare at reality. Malaparte’s personal and political lives were equally paradoxical. In his fifty-nine years, he ricocheted from joining Benito Mussolini’s Fascist party to aligning himself squarely with various Communist parties in Italy and abroad. For a while, he was an atheist; later, he converted back to Catholicism. He deplored Hitler. He was exiled and imprisoned on the island of Lipari by the same Fascists he had supported during his tenure at La Stampa. He worked with the Americans in World War II. He adored Chairman Mao. In La Pelle, he

This spread and following: Interior of Casa Malaparte, featuring bench, console, and table. Photo: Thomas Lannes

wrote the tenderest possible portrait of the homosexual culture of 1930s and ’40s Europe. He was a womanizer. He started one of Italy’s most prestigious literary and art journals, Prospettive, which featured writing by Søren Kierkegaard, the Comte de Lautréamont, Pablo Picasso, Ezra Pound, and many other top-tier writers, philosophers, and artists of the avant-garde. His allegiances, enemies, and accomplishments go on, but the point is that Malaparte always keeps one at a loss for stable ground from which to judge; he is impossible to sum up, to box in, to label. In this independence of spirit, as well as in a more formal sense, a modernist interest in juxtaposition runs throughout his life, his novels, and his Casa Malaparte: his work is a cubist collage of references, classical, pagan, statist, mechanical, progressive, pastoral, regressive, with no hierarchy made, or at least none kept. Malaparte may be a towering figure in Italian and wider European canons of literature and architecture, both for his own work and for his ability to bring together the creators of the time in magazines like 900 and Prospettive, but for most Americans he remains off the standard radars. I admit that I had little knowledge of him until recently, my appreciation for him taking root after I saw photographs

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of an exhibition staged in the living room of Casa Malaparte. The views of the house left me breathless. Competing with the terrifying beauty of the cliffs of Capri, the satin ocean, and the charm of the local flora, the house maintained a most unlikely presence. It looked classical and modernist all at once. It seemed like a place built for respite, a freedom from civilization, but it had bars on the windows like a prison. The outside stairs led not to the front door but to the roof. It is unlike any other building ever created. Malaparte called it “Casa come me,” a house like me. The land on which it stands, a majestic cliff face, was purchased by Malaparte in 1937, after his exile at the hands of the fascist state had ended. He originally planned to work with Adalberto Libera, the renowned architect responsible for the rationalization of an Italian fascist architecture, but the relationship faltered. For someone with Malaparte’s disposition, the work could really only be done by himself. And the result, as the architect Michael McDonough wrote in his ode to the house, is “ultimately a surrealist object, an architecture-poem hybrid, embodying at once the characteristics of a profoundly intelligent, iconic building and a densely literary work.” This character is evident in 150

every square inch of the house and its furniture, all designed and orchestrated by Malaparte himself. An edition of three of the most iconic furniture pieces from the house will soon be produced by Malaparte’s youngest descendant, Tommaso Rositani Suckert. I met Rositani Suckert soon after seeing the exhibition photographs and began corresponding with him to find out more. Who in your family first told you about Curzio Malaparte, and in what context? TOMMASO ROSITANI SUCKERT I’ve been aware of Curzio Malaparte for as long as I can remember. As a child, our house was full of writers, translators, publishers, artists, and architects; the name “Malaparte” was often in the air. I was there, in the middle of the living room, crawling around. When I was eleven, during a summer at Casa Malaparte, my parents had me read “Febo cane metafisico” (Febo, metaphysical dog), a short story about the relationship between Curzio and his dog Febo during his exile in Lipari. My dog at the time was a golden retriever also called Febo. Reading the way Malaparte described his relationship with and love for this animal, and nature more broadly, imprinted on me, even at this young age; I could WYATT ALLGEIER

perceive the intensity of his poetry and the richness of his language. WA Did this idea of re-creating the three pieces of furniture begin while you were at Casa Malaparte? TRS Yes, it was while I was there that I became engaged with the general notion that I wanted to do something that continued the Malaparte legacy. I’ve been going to the house every summer and I used to spend time there in the winters, as well. The winters in particular, when the nature around Capri is wild and tumultuous, were important for my growing appreciation and devotion to the house and legacy. I think being an only child, combined with my parents’ utter devotion to communicating Curzio’s cultural weight, made me want to develop something new relating to my family history. I specifically chose not to just rest on my surname or family history, I wanted to be an active part of it— respecting it and hopefully contributing to a new chapter of it. WA How did you decide on these three particular pieces? You’re remaking the bench, the table, and the console, correct? TRS Correct. I decided to start with those three pieces from the living room of Casa Malaparte because they’re the most recognizable. They’ve

For more information on Tommaso Rositani Suckert’s project: info@malaparte.us www.malaparte.us

been featured in several publications, as well as in iconic scenes from Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt, filmed at the house in 1963 with Brigitte Bardot, Jack Palance, Michel Piccoli, and Fritz Lang. The pieces also appear in Karl Lagerfeld’s photo book about the house, and have been cited by François Halard and Mario Sorrenti as inspirational. Lastly, I’ve had the pleasure of seeing the furniture exist alongside artworks by Mark Grotjahn, Brice Marden, Ed Ruscha, Rudolf Stingel, and Cy Twombly; that these three furniture pieces were able to exist in dialogue with all of these singular artists convinced me of their poetry. WA Is this project chiefly your initiative, or do you have partners? TRS I started on it alone. Then one day my dear friends Henry and Nicholas Burch came for a visit in Florence and we started talking about the house and my idea for the project. It developed casually and we were able to generate great ideas for future developments, so we decided to become partners. What began as a conversation between friends led us into a great team and an amazing synergy motivated by a passion for art and a will to create something timeless. As young entrepreneurs, our challenge is to intertwine Curzio’s historical world and

the world of today, keeping his avant-garde vision alive in the future development of our company. WA Could you tell me about the materials? For these three pieces alone, you had to source walnut, Carrara marble, travertine stone, and pine. TRS The pine, Carrara white marble, and travertine are 100 percent from Italy. The walnut, because of the thickness of the cut we needed for the table, had to be sourced from around Europe, mostly Italy and Greece. WA Where are the pieces being crafted? How did you find the artisan craftspeople to take on such a unique project? TRS I’ve been looking for the best cabinetmakers in the north of Italy. Malaparte worked with local people in Capri, particularly the master mason Adolfo Amitrano and his sons, to build the house. I felt it was important to maintain that aspect of the legacy—the reproductions had to fall in the tradition of classic Italian handcraft. But at the same time, we wanted to work with people who had the technology and knowledge to guarantee a top-quality product and an exact reproduction of the original unique pieces. They are, therefore, objects in which the natural processes of wood are consciously taken to the extreme. In the processing

and assembly of the furniture, as well as in the finish, we must balance the organic nature of the materials with the required manipulation of them. For each piece, we are producing an edition of sixteen, plus two artist’s proofs. Rositani Suckert’s commitment to upholding the legacy of Malaparte’s prodigious vision, paired with the political, ethical, and aesthetic complexities of the novels, the biography, and the designs, drew me in even further. I couldn’t help thinking that the man and the work offer critical lessons for the present—perhaps 2019 is in fact a great moment to consider this mischievous, bold renegade known as Malaparte. Exposure to Malaparte’s books, home, furniture, and life provides guideposts for us to think about the limits of art, the danger of intermixing beauty and politics, the messiness of our own histories and lives, and the wonder of new temporal configurations. That we are able to explore these lines of thought is not just a privilege, but increasingly an ethical necessity. A “house like him” contains many doors, windows, fireplaces, steps, tables, benches, consoles, and beds that may serve us well to build a more honest house for and like ourselves. 151

LOVE is not a Flame Part IV Yet have no art to sayâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;

â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Emily Dickinson

r s a t e i

pe t!

Lo ve

tr um

pet!

Mark Z. Danielewski

Petro the Peacock knows that hiss, heart battering, wings beating faster, hurling him not high but low, fast as any fall.

Toward the mountain lion.

Toward Randal the Raccoon.

Randal the Raccoon is no match for a mountain lion. Petro the Peacock is no match for a mountain lion.

Night unfolds even darker shadows below as Petro the Peacock wheels around the trunk, only in the last pass catching sight of Randal the Raccoon scrambling up for safety, as Petro the Peacock lands where there is no safety.

Between a coyote and mountain lion.

The mountain lion readying his lunge.

Randal the Raccoon’s heart hasn’t slowed since glimpsing the mountain lion, what Randal the Raccoon had been too late to understand, nearly struck from the trunk, pounced upon, disemboweled, had a coyote not leapt right then, redirecting the mountain lion who with one swipe swatted the coyote from the air, tumbling him backwards, bleeding, smacked into a black picket fence, stunned, as Randal the Raccoon raced higher, where he’d have found calm had he not then caught sight of Petro the Peacock flying down for him, too fast to slow, too fast to change course. Randal the Raccoon twists back around, scrambling after his friend, down to where the mountain lion crouches, compacting into a shape made for flight. But Randal the Raccoon flies first, launching himself off the tree, outstretched, slashing at the back of the golden cat, claws never reaching the thick hide, just parting the hair, as this crescent of sun shrugs Randal the Raccoon from his aim, whipping around at the same time too, as Randal the Raccoon rolls past Petro the Peacock, smacking hard into the fence, stunned like the coyote, motionless beside the coyote.

On one side pain insists on the importance of a wound. On the other side lies the fat raccoon. And yet neither side matters compared to what lies ahead, recircling into a readied spring. Forget the big bird in between, actually cocking his head back and forth, left and right. All of them are caught just the same before this raging coordination of muscle and jaw, declaring them at most now brief congregations of dust. Cody the Coyote should react. But the mountain lion’s flaming eyes defeat instinct, an eclipse of widening black set on eating. Dust devours dust.

Randal the Raccoon’s leap onto the back of the mountain lion beats Petro the Peacock’s heart faster than wings could ever beat, farther than wings could ever carry him, and suddenly nothing life loses to can matter.

— Bwraaaaaaah!

Randal the Raccoon answers at once, meeting Petro the Peacock with his own call, past bared teeth, what only comes to mean itself not because it answers but because it joins.

— Squeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Cody the Coyote isn’t even sure why this least-that-he-can-do becomes the only-thing-he-willdo but it fills his chest with something strange and defiant, definitions meaningless upon the face of any future. — Yip! Yip!

— It was over so fast. I threw open the front door because what kind of ruckus was that?! Frank, your coyotes had erupted on the far ridge. I even heard raccoons nearby. And right beside your Trident Tree, Tony, right in the middle of all this, what?, animal commotion, stood that big stupid bird. I still don’t know what to make of it. — Emily, if you think you’ve just made any sense, you’re seriously mistaken. — Hush, Frank. Just listen. It’s something. — There was a mountain lion. — You’re joking. — Frank, right in my front yard! — I checked later and there were several sightings in the canyon that night. Some officials wanted to close down the school the following morning for the morning, though by the time it was agreed to shut down the school for the morning the morning was over. — Congratulations, Tony. You had a mountain lion in your yard. — That’s not the best part. Let Emily finish. — From what I saw, the mountain lion was about to pounce on either the raccoon or the coyote or maybe both. — What do you mean coyote?

— I think the mountain lion had gotten into it with the coyote before I got outside. It was wounded and huddled against Tony’s fence. — I don’t understand. Where was Randal the Raccoon? — Next to him. — Now I really don’t understand. They were together? — Both against the fence with the mountain lion ready to pounce. — Except for Petro the Peacock who stood between them. — Shut up, Tony. Let Emily finish. — Tony’s right. Petro the Peacock was between them, facing off against the mountain lion. — Well, that’s no match. — You’re right. The mountain lion knew it too, though I don’t think he knew well enough what he was up against. I opened the door just as the mountain lion was jumping. — Can you imagine that, Frank, opening your door and not only catching sight of a mountain lion but a mountain lion about to pounce? — That’s what you saw, Emily? — Frank, it was way more than that. — What? — Tony, I didn’t want to tell you everything, not until Frank got over here. — Ha! — Tell! Tell! — Did I hear a rumor of cake? — She’s wicked, Frank. — Why do you think we enjoy her company so much? — First off, I came armed with your aerosol horn and was already pressing it when I opened the door but it was spent. Nothing. Not even a squeak. But the thing was I didn’t need it. — Go on. — Like I said, the injured coyote was yipping and that got his whole pack going, and Randal was doing his raccoon sound and I swear that got some neighborhood raccoons going. It was this whole canyon menagerie jam. Plus Petro the Peacock was trumpeting. — But wait, that stopped the mountain lion? — Nothing was going to stop that mountain lion. — Well, what happened? — Petro the Peacock did something I know neither one of you has ever seen and if I hadn’t seen it myself I would have sworn it was a dream. He fanned his train. And it was . . . wow. Not just huge, and it was fucking huge, but unlike anything I could have imagined. Not iridescent green like they usually are. Your Peacock was a thing of fire, bright oranges and reds, with ocelli of . . . — And the mountain lion? — The mountain lion must have seen fire too. The mountain lion jumped over the fan. Cleared the fence too. And that was it. Landed in the street and disappeared up between two homes. — Huh? — Peacocks don’t have tails like sunrises do they? — Google your heart out. I never found one. — You know, yesterday, I did catch sight of a coyote. In silhouette. Limping. Not bad enough to keep it out of the coyote game, but I remember wondering about it. — That leaves you, Tony, to tell us the end of the story of Petro the Peacock and Randal the Raccoon. — And here I thought you came over just for the cake. — What is cake compared to a story? And I have my own story to share: I’m getting married. — Hey now! — That is news! — Congrats! — He lives in Seattle, so I’m moving too. I’d love to leave with at least some news of our odd pair. — Sorry, Emily. I do keep an eye out. — I haven’t even heard Petro. I miss them a lot. I’m not even sure why. — But Tony and I are working together. — Oh? — There’s a show. We’d like you to come. — Of course! A painter and a poet. Like two sides of a brain. What does that look like?

Cody the Coyote still crosses over to limp along that fence line, looking for them, where they once lived together, in an alliance so strange it was almost beyond appetite, which Cody the Coyote feels as longing. Cody the Coyote moves slowly up the steep to settle beneath an overhang of jade. Except for crows, the Trident Tree stays empty. Later, another shadow finds this slope. Far bigger than the raccoon, stretching out beside the blackberries, a shadow of teeth far sharper than any big birdâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s beak. Like Cody the Coyote, the mountain lion also gazes up at the tree. A fire had come to earth and protected them as if a fire born only by wings could bear a message in a voice that was meant for only them.

Randal the Raccoon will do anything for Petro the Peacock, follow him anywhere, and though Petro the Peacock can fly beyond the sky, Petro the Peacock does not abandon Randal the Raccoon, no matter that Petro the Peacock is still gone this day, gone this dusk, gone even in this thickening night, distant choral Yips! sounding now the salt-haloed fog, distant Squeeeeees! announcing more bin-rummaging, Randal the Raccoon not close to sleep, yet cozy in a new burrow, this new tree, leaning mighty against the coming days, what Petro the Peacock found for them, beyond the canyon divide, these greater heights, greater branches, so far up they might as well be of clouds, where natureâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s feuds are vanquished without violence, predations unmasked, a new fire having burned a new logic across the hillside, old reasons collapsing into ash, even as all sides remain unscarred, as the oldest call reasserts itself for all except the twoleggers still oblivious to the unburning flame that need not speak a name because it bears within itself the burden of all names. Randal the Raccoon shambles from his burrow, along the high branch, already squeeeeeeeeeeeeing the canyon, the valley, scanning the sky, the light splashes below. Petro the Peacock is nowhere to be seen but Randal the Raccoon will wait and wait and wait.

dom ree s f ve’ Lo

—Bwraaaaaaah! —Bwraaaaaaah! —Bwraaaaaaah!

Lo ve’s

! et trump

a Love is

ays

the

freedom

one

enduring

pow er —

Love is a trumpet.

Love cannot help but call. Love cannot help but answer.

Love is not a flame. Love is a song.

stays

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one end ur in g

po w

—

Thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Honey in the Hollows.

Piero di Cosimoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Form-of-Life

Daniel Spaulding, prompted by an encounter with Piero di Cosimo’s ‘‘Discovery of Honey by Bacchus’’ (c. 1499), investigates the potential philosophical and political power embedded within the figure of the satyr. 164

There are no circumstances under which the encounter between one human body and another can be an uncomplicated affair. Bodies are strange because people are strange, to their counterparts and to themselves. The occupation of a fleshly vessel is the work of everyone’s lifetime. It ought to be expected, then, that artists—more or less transhistorically, and everywhere—would be concerned with this fact. Of course, they have been, in their own ways: the ductus of a classical Chinese landscape painting has everything to do with the reach of hand and wrist, bone and sinew, and thus is bodily, too, even in the absence of depicted figures. A Chinese painter’s hand channels qi from one part of the cosmos to another, specifically from flesh to silk or paper. But only in the European tradition did unclothed skin become the matter of a centuries-long obsession. That obsession was on full display in The Renaissance Nude, a show that opened in October 2018 at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles (it then traveled to the Royal Academy, London, from March to June of 2019). The artworks were Italian, German, French, and Netherlandish, all dating from 1400 to 1530. Renaissance nudes pop up in a range of guises: Christian martyr, antique god, allegorical personification, object of desire (or fear), anatomical specimen—or more than one such identity at the same time. To tally up the roles is to generate a matrix of possible meanings for “the nude,” meanings that, in the Getty’s galleries, came to look both richer and more bewildering through their juxtaposition. The show’s great achievement, then, was to have amassed a corpus of evidence on a scale unlikely to be repeated for generations. To my mind, however, neither the exhibition nor its catalogue answered the most basic question that one can put to the theme.1 Namely: why is it that over the course of the fifteenth century the unclothed body, after a millennium of relative neglect, again became a fixed symbolic form in Western culture (a position it would maintain for nearly half a millennium to come)? Strangely few art historians have attempted an answer. Kenneth Clark’s book The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form, from 1956, is still the paramount reference.2 His distinction between the “naked” and the “nude”— between raw corporeality and its idealized form—has survived his own reputation’s (partial) eclipse.3 Following Clark, it has for many decades been taken for granted that the genre of the nude exists to sublimate flesh and to control the anxieties attendant on sex. The nude is the form in which the body can be made available for respectable aesthetic delectation; pleasures otherwise taboo survive beneath classicist drag. It’s a thesis convenient to Freudians, feminists, and classical aesthetes alike, thus seemingly unassailable.4 One remarkable thing about The Renaissance Nude is that it lent very little credence to this opposition. Bodies here were shot through with nonideality. Or, rather, they showed how malleable the “ideal” has always been. What’s more, negotiation with idiosyncratic flesh seems to have been the stuff of the ideal right from the start, that is, from the early years of the fifteenth century. Where was the sublimated nude to come from, after all? “Classical statuary” is the obvious response. Yet the classical relics were colorless, incomplete. A great deal was left to fill in. Nudity was not a fact of everyday life for late medieval Europeans, as it had been for ancient Greeks—or Greek males, anyway. The project of normalizing the unclothed body in art was curiously speculative. Some sincere Renaissance reconstructions are accordingly more bizarre than any Surrealist contrivance. Just look to the early-sixteenth-century Netherlandish painter Jan Gossart (well-represented in the Getty show) for evidence that strident classicism is no barrier to Eros gone wild.5 Gossart’s strangeness stems not from ignorance of Renaissance corporeal canons but rather from their hypertrophy. Every muscle, every breast, every toe and finger is extruded as if to concentrate its barely sublimated sexual charge; lest we miss the point, oversize accessories pick up the theme (consider the hectoringly phallic club in his Hercules and Deianira of 1517). If John Currin has a lineage, it is here. Gossart is admittedly an extreme point in a many-sided dialectic. Now take another: the Florentine painter Piero di Cosimo, who

Previous spread: Piero di Cosimo, The Discovery of Honey by Bacchus, c. 1499, oil on panel, 31 ½ × 50 ⅝ inches (80 × 128.5 cm). Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts. Photo: Worcester Art Museum, MA/Bridgeman Images This page: Albrecht Dürer, Satyr Family, 1505, engraving, 4 ½ × 2 ⅞ inches (11.4 × 7.1 cm). Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Fletcher Fund, 1919

lived from 1462 to 1522. His Discovery of Honey by Bacchus was in the Getty exhibition. Dating from around 1499, the work is one of a series of mythological spalliere—horizontal paintings made to hang above furniture in the palaces of Renaissance Florence— that the artist produced from the 1480s to close to his death. It was probably commissioned for the bedroom of the Florentine courtier Giovanni Vespucci, a younger relative of Amerigo, the explorer, together with the singularly unpleasant pendant known as The Misfortunes of Silenus.6 Like most of Piero’s spalliere, these panels fantasize primal scenes of culture set in a remote, unspecifiable past. The subject of Discovery derives from Ovid’s Fasti, a compendium of early Roman lore; the followers of the wine god Bacchus make noise to draw bees into a tree.7 Honey will be their reward. Piero’s mythologies are truly, deeply weird pictures. They are, to begin with, weird in the straightforward sense that there is nothing else that looks much like them. He has no close peers in the Renaissance. (In an important 2006 monograph, Dennis Geronimus aimed to “de-stigmatise Piero” without “over-normalising” him. That’s about as much as can be done.) 8 It isn’t, of course, that other artists were unconcerned with the primitive, let alone with myth. But there is no other Renaissance painter who went so far in the imagining of an unfamiliar lifeworld. In Piero’s art, classical learning is estranged via its materialization. He was a realist of the bizarre; whereas most of his peers looked to the classical past for models of ideal form, he preferred to poke around in obscure legends, which he then painted as plausibly as he could. Erwin Panofsky, the artist’s most influential interpreter, writes that Piero “felt the tangible epidermis of things, rather than their abstract form.”9 His work’s power has more to do with unmotivated reality-effects than with his paintings’ nominal iconography. The latter is in any event often inscrutable. Some of his iconography is less abstruse, though. We can be sure that satyrs dominate Discovery of Honey. The satyr was one of the great creaturely forms the Renaissance had inherited from classical antiquity and then reimagined as suddenly, differently alive. Around 1500 it was the subject of widely distributed prints by Albrecht Dürer and Jacopo de’ Barbari, which are distinguished from antique models by focusing more on the creature’s domestic life than its monstrosity; the theme pops up in other mediums as well, such as sculpture. Satyrs populate an imaginary universe alongside nereids, nymphs, maenads, and other energetic women. (The early-twentieth-century art historian Aby Warburg used the term nympha to refer to such figures.) Piero himself stage-managed civic festivals at which performers dressed up as satyrs and cavorted on stilts. Satyrs were not quite imaginary creatures around 1500, then. Most citizens of Florence would have seen them in the flesh on the great religious feast days, in a mingling of the Christian and the pagan. Bacchus is the smiling figure at lower right. His thyrsus staff is blown up to the proportions of a Herculean club (shades of Gossart) and his consort Ariadne is beside him. Their entourage has come upon a swarm of bees, which they are coaxing to a hive in the branches of a barren yet anthropomorphic tree, using noisemakers to guide their path. An adult satyr and his infantile companion have scaled the tree’s left branch. What exactly the older satyr is doing is hard to say; evidently some fussing with a ladleturned-bell, either as a last bee-herding maneuver or as preliminary to extracting the honey itself. This is tricky work: he is busy correlating means to ends. If he fails, the whole project may turn out to have been pointless. The climbing satyr is the painting’s key figure, then. But his meaning emerges only in contrast to the action below. What’s moving about the painting is the detail with which Piero imagines this larger collectivity. Even if his figures are outlandish and often inhuman, they all the same invite identification; simply put, they do things with their bodies that we viewers can imagine ourselves doing too. Some satyrs are filing in at left.

They hold makeshift noisemakers. Two human women—specifically maenads, female followers of Bacchus—are in the mix as well. This apparently easy commerce between beast and Homo sapiens helps domesticate the former. Other satyrs lounge about, or shadow Bacchus and his fat friend Silenus (a rare satyr with a name), who is seated on a donkey at right. The squatting individual (maybe Pan) in the lower right foreground holds three onions, which were considered an aphrodisiac at the time. A further babyish satyr is taking a nap in the tree’s hollow. I am reminded here of the richness of the term “form-of-life” in the writings of the philosopher Giorgio Agamben and of the French collective Tiqqun. “Form-of-life” is contrary to “bare life,” Agamben’s more famous concept. Where bare life is stripped to mere unqualified persistence, a form-of-life is “a life that can never be separated from its form,” one that exists only insofar as it takes on a style, a pattern or inflection. We only live richly in the stylization of collective habits, which are potentialities rather than limits. As Agamben puts it, his term “defines a life—human life—in which the single ways, acts, and processes of living are never simply facts but always and above all possibilities of life, always and above all power (potenza).”10 In Discovery of Honey, however, this life is not human—or, rather, it slips in and out of humanness. Not only that, but the slippage happens in the most irreducibly specific of the painting’s moments. Take the dark, discursive satyr at lower left. He turns to his female companion, who is an epitome of worried care. What he says to her can’t be guessed. It may be trivial: even as she listens to whatever the dark satyr has to say, she goes on suckling her satyr baby. Instinct and speech modulate each other. The condition of the male partner’s talkative indolence is his interlocutor’s state of concern. The latter sums up the labor of what certain feminists call “social reproduction”: the often invisible work that goes into the maintenance of sociality tout court—taking care of babies, for example. And that work is difficult, constant, a balancing act in the midst of other things. To lounge on a blanket (do satyrs make blankets? Odd that they have blankets but no clothes); to do so, 165

and to prop oneself up, turn, recognize speech, and in the surprise of hearing that speech attend to it, on the off chance that it might be important, and unthinkingly to allow one’s limbs to sprawl and deform, even while maintaining contact with a needy child: these are achievements of nature and culture at once, of a culture founded on nature’s necessities and a nature bent to the needs of a social universe. For all the Virgin Marys in Renaissance painting, there are few images of nursing mothers quite like this. Of course the picture is comic. Piero doesn’t mean us to take satyr life too seriously, though perhaps a little more seriously than his cutout Bacchus. But life is comedy, after all, so it doesn’t seem out of place to detect serious thought on the artist’s part about what it means to live with others in a shared lifeworld, exposed to each other’s strangeness (as with Pieter Bruegel the Elder, whose peasant paintings magnify Piero’s note of weird, specific ordinariness—weird, in part, precisely in attending to ordinariness, in an age before the full bloom of secular genre painting).11 Satyrs are useful because they defamiliarize the background noise of (human) sociality. Walter Pater once wrote that in the figure of Adam in the Sistine Chapel “there is something rude and satyr-like, something akin to the rugged hillside on which it lies.”12 Piero’s climbing satyr is evidently the inverse: not the human dragging nature into consciousness but the animal scrabbling toward humanity. I may be projecting too much teleology, though. This is the picture’s conceptual problem. If Discovery of Honey is an image of the primeval, what does this say about Piero di Cosimo’s, or his culture’s, idea of it? Piero’s mythologies are almost exactly contemporaneous with the European discovery of the Americas. Rumors of this New World almost certainly would have reached him by the time the Vespucci panels were in the studio.13 Whether or not he was directly inspired by Columbus, what is certain is that his visualizations of early human history drew upon a late-medieval stock of legend and literature from which Europe’s (calamitous) imagining of the “Indies” would soon enough take sustenance. The painting is direct about this contrast of civilization with its other. At top left is a neatly ordered city, while at right still-savage satyrs clamber up trees. There may be smoke at the top right corner, too. Another of Piero’s spalliere, in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, depicts a forest fire: animals f lee from primordial wood to manicured pasture.

The presumed progress from the earlier to the later state is the keynote of Panofsky’s reading of the work. He assigns Bacchus the role of civilizer, since this god brings knowledge of viticulture. Satyrs are a rung in a ladder that leads to civilization; their tree-dwelling cousins demonstrate the alternative. Yet in Panofsky’s reading, Piero was “sadly aware” of lost innocence: “He joyfully sympathized with the rise of humanity beyond the bestial hardships of the stone age, but he regretted any step beyond the unsophisticated phase which he would have termed the reign of Vulcan and Dionysos. To him civilization meant a realm of beauty and happiness as long as man kept in close contact with nature, but a nightmare of oppression, ugliness and distress as soon as man became estranged from her.”14 Panofsky also remarkably surmises that Piero’s primitivism is, as it were, sincere rather than affected: “In his pictures, we are faced, not with the polite nostalgia of a civilized man who longs, or pretends to long, for the happiness of a primitive age, but with the subconscious recollection of a primitive who happened to live in a period of sophisticated civilization.”15 Satyrs might as well be post- as precivilizational. This is a more telling admission than it seems. Panofsky mistakes Piero for too much a dialectician of enlightenment. The artist’s melancholy is the melancholy of history itself: knowledge of what is lost. However, in countenancing the “subconscious recollection of a primitive” Panofsky also suggests the real persistence of the primitive in the modern, its contemporaneity with civilization. The next step, which he does not take, would be to recognize the viability of a form-of-life that (happily) fails to conform to the European mode of the human. Panofsky is unwilling to admit that Discovery of Honey might in some fugitive way elude Europe’s civilized/savage binary altogether; he is unwilling to grant autonomy to the “semicivilized” itself. It is certainly true that the tree-dwelling satyrs are unenviable, but the pathos of the composition’s central and largest figures has little to do with one’s impression that they are on the path to the completed acculturation semaphored by the parapets at upper left. It is rather that Piero fixes his sentient beings at a moment prior to the fulfillment of that destiny—a moment in which satyrdom is nonetheless evidently self-sufficient and complete as a form-of-life. This is one exit from the West’s drastically limited idea of the human. If Bacchus is a culture hero, as Panofsky argues, then he is a pointedly ineffective one. His stupid grin gives it away. Better to linger with the climbing satyr not quite finding his civilized feet.

1. Thomas Kren, Jill Burke, and Stephen J. Campbell, eds., assisted by Andrea Herrera and Thomas DePasquale, The Renaissance Nude, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2018). 2. Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (London: John Murray, 1956). Jill Burke’s The Italian Renaissance Nude (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018) promises to become a new standard text, however. Burke was involved in planning the Getty exhibition. 3. Clark is the only art historian singled out for criticism in John Berger’s television series Ways of Seeing and in the book of the same name (London: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books, 1972). Yet Berger fundamentally accepts the naked/nude distinction, even as he dismantles Clark’s patrician presumptions. Subsequent feminist art historians, some making use of the concept of the “male gaze” that was developed in 1970s film theory, have even more thoroughly deconstructed Clark’s heteronormative framework, while likewise often reiterating the quasi-structuralist dyad of raw nakedness and culturally coded nudity. At the conference “The Global Nude in the Pre-Modern World,” held at the Getty Museum in conjunction with the Renaissance Nude exhibition, Clark was the object of a heated debate, not to say a pile-on: nearly the entire body of scholars was ranged against him, with precious

the Getty. Even accounting for its much worse state of preservation, Misfortunes could never have been as rich a painting as Discovery: it has a rougher and less sympathetic sense of humor, approaching the merely grotesque. It also mostly lacks satyrs, which are my object of interest here. The work’s iconography, though, helps to confirm the pendant’s provenance. The name “Vespucci” is related to the Italian word for wasps (vespe), which feature on the family coat of arms. In the Fogg painting, wasps attack an upended Silenus, in sharp contrast to the benign bees in The Discovery of Honey. 7. Erwin Panofsky, “The Early History of Man in Two Cycles of Paintings by Piero di Cosimo,” in Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (New York, Evanstown, and San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1972), pp. 62–63. 8. Dennis Geronimus, Piero di Cosimo: Visions Beautiful and Strange (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 3. 9. Panofsky, “The Early History of Man,” p. 33. 10. Giorgio Agamben, “Form-of-Life,” trans. Cesare Casarino, in Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt, eds., Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 151. The phrase “form-of-life” was originally Ludwig Wittgenstein’s.

166

few defenders holding out. Negative as his reception may have been over the past forty years, the degree to which he remains an inevitable point of reference is all the same remarkable. 4. A particularly good study of classicism’s psychosexual travails can be found in Alex Potts, Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994). In the 1980s, another Clark—the art historian T. J.; no relation— published an influential reading of Édouard Manet’s 1863 painting Olympia, which scandalized the bourgeoisie by delivering a proletarian (“naked”) female body to the Paris Salon, the realm of the classicizing (“nude”) courtesan. In T. J. Clark’s remarkable phrase, “the sign of class in Olympia was nakedness.” Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 146. Though more sophisticated than Kenneth’s, T. J.’s account trades on a similar duality. 5. Jan Gossart is the subject of an important recent monograph that argues for his role in the imagining of a specifically Northern (that is, non-Italian) classical style: Marisa Anne Bass, Jan Gossart and the Invention of Netherlandish Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016). 6. This panel, in the Fogg Museum at Harvard, unfortunately did not travel to

11. Compare these observations to Joseph Leo Koerner’s recent book Bosch and Bruegel: From Enemy Painting to Everyday Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, and Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2016). Koerner points out that what we know as genre painting (images of everyday life, without religious or mythological pretext) first emerged in the interstices of monstrous, infernal scenes such as Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights (1490–1500). Visualizations of life in this world thus originally pertained to the “enemy,” Satan. 12. Walter Pater, The Renaissance, 1873 (reprint ed. New York: The Modern Library, n.d.), p. 62. 13. As Carlo Ginzburg points out. Ginzburg, “Hybrids: Learning from a Gilded Silver Beaker (Antwerp, c. 1530),” in Andreas Höfele and Werner von Koppenfels, eds., Renaissance Go-Betweens: Cultural Exchange in Early Modern Europe (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2005), pp. 125–127. 14. Panofsky, “The Early History of Man,” p. 65. Some years later Thomas F. Mathews contested Panofsky’s reading, stressing love symbolism over the evolutionary theme: Mathews, “Piero di Cosimo’s Discovery of Honey,” The Art Bulletin 45, no. 4 (December 1963):357–60. 15. Panofsky, “The Early History of Man,” p. 67.

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

FROM THE SHOP

SOMETHING SPECIAL 1

168

In 1971, Abrams, New York, published this copiously illustrated monograph on Roy Lichtenstein. The hardcover publication features an interview with the artist, as well as an essay by then curator of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Diane Waldman. The book includes eighty-six color plates among its 183 illustrations.

A tribute to the renowned biographer Sir John Richardson (1924–2019), Picasso’s Women: Fernande to Jacqueline traces the artist’s depictions of eight women who served as catalysts for vital experiments in color and form over the course of his career. Reproductions of paintings and sculptures are accompanied by a two-part newspaper article by Richardson, “Picasso in Private,” written in 1962.

Urs Fischer: Paintings 1998–2017 offers an intimate look at every painting produced by the artist from the beginning of his career through 2017. This three-volume retrospective, housed in a slipcase and published by Kiito-San in 2019, includes fresh documentation of early collage works by Fischer, many of which have not been exhibited for years.

Like his cult films, Harmony Korine’s paintings often combine subconscious impulses with objects from everyday life. Bolivar Viking Wig (2019) is one of a new series of hand-painted, one-of-a-kind cigar boxes by the artist, featuring depictions of “Twitchy,” a recurring figure in Korine’s art. Other variations are also available.

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Brice Marden reproduces forty-eight works on paper by the artist, printed at actual size. Originally composed in a workbook that accompanied Marden on his travels for over a decade, the works include a wide range of styles, from monochromatic, grid-like compositions to drawings in which geometric substructure is connected and recomposed via looping skeins of colored inks. The volume is published by Gagosian.

Takashi Murakami and Virgil Abloh have collaborated on a collection of handbags featuring the signature arrows of Abloh’s label Off-White and an image of Mr. DOB, the whimsical character that became Murakami’s first signature creation inspired by anime and manga figures. Each cotton canvas bag is unique and signed by both artists.

Andy Warhol’s Children’s Book was published by Bruno Bischofberger in 1983. Housed in a green slipcase, the twelve-page book merges Warhol’s aesthetic with standard motifs from children’s books: the apple, the monkey, the toy robot, and more. Printed on stiff cardstock with a cloth spine.

Katharina Grosse’s Colorless with a hint of blue (2019) is one of a series of twenty unique surfboards by the artist, each painted in acrylic on laminated Paulownia wood and signed on the back.

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11 Pop Artists: The New Image, published by Galerie Friedrich + Dahlem, Munich, in 1966, captured the nascent art movement and some of its key practitioners at a crucial moment. Introduced by art historian Max Kozloff, the thirty-two-page book considers the works of Andy Warhol, Allan D’Arcangelo, Jim Dine, Allen Jones, Gerald Laing, Roy Lichtenstein, Peter Phillips, Mel Ramos, James Rosenquist, John Wesley, and Tom Wesselmann.

This catalogue was published in 1966 to accompany Andy Warhol’s second ever museum exhibition, at the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art. It features an essay by curator Alan Solomon and reproductions of works that would soon become touchstones of twentieth-century art.

Published in 1989 by Thea Westreich and Kent Fine Art in an edition of 250, this deluxe slipcased edition of Richard Prince’s Inside World includes a signed print featuring a “joke” by the artist. Making use of found imagery from mass culture and works by artists as diverse as Francis Picabia and Gerhard Richter, the publication offers a unique glance into Prince’s influences and obsessions.

Pierre de feu (2005) is a ceramic plate by the Chinese-born French artist Zao Wou-Ki (1920–2013). Throughout his career, Zao Wou-Ki merged Eastern and Western aesthetic traditions, retaining technical elements of Chinese styles while embracing European Modernism. His compositions present a delicate balance, harboring moments of risk within an exploration of abstraction. Pierre de feu is produced in a limited edition of 150 by Bernardaud.

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dallas contemporary

JOHN CURRIN My Life as a Man

ALICJA KWADE Moving in Glances

JESSICA VAUGHN In Polite English One First Disagrees by Agreeing

YELENA YEMCHUK Mabel, Betty & Bette

15 SEPTEMBER - 22 DECEMBER 2019 161 Glass Street Dallas Texas 75207 United States of America

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Douglas Gordon In My Shadow September 7th 2019 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; February 16th 2020

Douglas Gordon, Phantom, 2011. Production still ÂŠ Studio lost but found / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, VISDA, 2019. Photo: Studio lost but found / Michael McDonough. Courtesy: Studio lost but found, Berlin.

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GAME CHANGER: GRACE MCCANN MORLEY Berit Potter pays homage to the ardent museum leader who transformed midcentury San Francisco’s relationship to modern art. In 1960, twenty-five years after taking the helm at the San Francisco Museum of Art—“Modern” had yet to be added to its name—Grace McCann Morley summed up her vision of the art museum, describing a dynamic space that offered “the revelation of a new experience, a new kind of world, a new way of living, really.”1 Of the staggering seventy to one hundred exhibitions that Morley staged in each of the museum’s earliest years, perhaps none bore this out more than Picasso: Forty Years of His Art. Morley brought the exhibition to San Francisco from New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1940. Such was the show’s intensity for the 1,300 visitors who attended on the last day that many sat down in the galleries and refused to leave when the museum tried to close its doors at 10 p.m.2 Morley had been raised in rural St. Helena, California, and attended the University of California, Berkeley, before her passion for languages, literature, and, above all, art inspired her to migrate to the Sorbonne, where she earned a doctorate in literature and art in 1926. After returning to the United States, she served as the first general curator of the Cincinnati Art Museum, then in 1933 made her way back to the West Coast. Two years later she established the San Francisco Museum of Art (SFMA) in its first permanent home, on the top floor of a beaux arts edifice across the road from City Hall. As founding director of the fledgling museum, Morley’s first order of business was to broaden San Francisco’s experience of modern art. The city’s de Young and Legion of Honor museums—which respectively opened in 1895 and 1924—were what Morley called “general art museums,” not exclusively dedicated to modern art. Noting the city’s cultural isolation, particularly that “artists were ten or fifteen years behind the movements of their time, simply because they didn’t see enough of what was going on in art,” Morley was eager not only to build on local interests but also to collaborate with institutions across the country.3 Immediately noting the region’s passion for Diego Rivera, who had created his first murals in the United States in San Francisco in 1930 and 1931, Morley worked to expand the public’s interest in Latin American art beyond Mexico. In 1942 she organized the first survey exhibition ever dedicated to modern Latin American art, a show that traveled throughout the country in various forms for the better part of the decade, and she ultimately developed an important early collection of modern Latin American art at SFMA, including works by Eduardo Kingman, Amelia Peláez, Emilio Pettoruti, and Joaquín Torres-García. 4 Prior to the Picasso show, Morley had challenged the museum’s audiences with other groundbreaking exhibitions from The Museum of Modern Art in New York, including the pivotal Cubism and Abstract Art (1936) and Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism (1937). Indicative of the critical reception of her daring program is the San Francisco Chronicle’s 186

description of the latter as “a cross between a threering circus and a chamber of horrors.”5 Morley’s relative historical obscurity today—she is far less known than her East Coast colleague and friend Alfred H. Barr, Jr., MoMA’s founding director—is particularly paradoxical given that she brought regional, national, and global recognition to many formerly obscure artists. At a time when many East Coast institutions still had their eyes trained on Europe, Morley gave numerous Abstract Expressionists some of their earliest museum exhibitions. Presentations of work by Arshile Gorky,

Grace McCann Morley, c. 1950s. Photo: courtesy SFMOMA Archives

Clyfford Still, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Robert Motherwell all took place at SFMA between 1941 and 1946. Under Morley’s direction, the museum also acquired significant early paintings by Pollock and Rothko. Many of these exhibitions and acquisitions came about through Morley’s close collaborations with figures including gallerist Peggy Guggenheim and mosaicist Jeanne Reynal. (It was Reynal who encouraged Morley to borrow Guggenheim’s Pollock show in 1945.)6 Indeed, Morley’s enthusiasm for collaborating with artists, collectors, gallerists, and museum colleagues—many of them women—helped her to build a diverse collection and exhibition schedule at SFMA. Her position as a female museum director working on the West Coast undeniably gave her a curatorial perspective different from that of many of her male colleagues to the east.7 While MoMA organized its first onewoman exhibition in 1942, SFMA had presented

more than forty solo shows dedicated to women by 1940, during its first five years. Morley’s ardent support for young American artists included highlighting individuals from the West Coast at a time when the region was largely overlooked. This dedication is best exemplified by her traveling exhibition Pacific Coast Art, which debuted at the third São Paulo Bienal in 1955 and brought international recognition to Ruth Asawa, Richard Diebenkorn, David Park, and many others. Morley also encouraged museum colleagues to visit California. As she wrote to Barr, “I have a feeling that until one knows the ‘backyard’ of the United States, west of Chicago, one does not know the whole picture.”8 Morley was a tireless evangelist not only for art and artists but for the role of the museum, especially as a powerful tool for social and political change. From 1947 to 1949 she took a leave of absence from SFMA to serve as the first head of unesco’s Museums Division (later ICOM, the International Council of Museums) and founded the international journal Museum. After leaving SFMA, in 1958, she worked brief ly at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York before accepting a position as the director of the National Museum of India in 1960 and later leading ICOM’s Regional Agency for South and Southeast Asia. All this, though, came after she had left an indelible mark on California. Despite criticism and pushback, Morley had persevered, by 1955 transforming San Francisco into what Time magazine called “one of the nation’s most enthusiastic strongholds of modern art.”9 “And that’s what art is, you see,” Morley explained, “it’s a broadening of experience.”10 1. Grace McCann Morley, quoted in Suzanne B. Riess, “Grace L. McCann Morley: Art, Artists, Museums, and the San Francisco Museum of Art: An Interview,” 1960, University of California, General Library/Berkeley, Regional Cultural History Project, p. 178. The museum was renamed the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1975. 2. Susan Landauer, The San Francisco School of Abstract Expressionism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 30. 3. Morley, quoted in Riess, “Grace L. McCann Morley,” pp. 36, 106. 4. See Berit Potter, “Building a Model of Diversity: Grace McCann Morley and Collecting Modern Latin American Art in San Francisco,” in Edward J. Sullivan, ed., The Americas Revealed: Collecting Colonial and Modern Latin American Art in the United States (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2018). 5. Alfred Frankenstein, “Comments and Cautions Evoked by the Year’s Most Sensational Show,” San Francisco Chronicle, August 8, 1937, p. 4D. 6. Jeanne Reynal had just purchased Jackson Pollock’s 1941 painting The Magic Mirror from Peggy Guggenheim. See Potter, “Gathered Another Way: Early Surrealist Exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,” in The Space Between: Literature and Culture 1914–1945 14 (2018). Available online at http://scalar.usc.edu/works/the-space-between-literature-andculture-1914-1945/vol14_2018_contents (accessed September 24, 2019). 7. Megan Martenyi explores the possibility of Morley identifying as queer in her essay “Wide Open Publics: Tracing Grace McCann Morley’s San Francisco” (SFMOMA, August 2017). Available online at https://sfmoma.org/essay/wide-open-publics-tracinggrace-mccann-morleys-san-francisco/ (accessed September 24, 2019). 8. Morley, letter to Barr, January 23, 1952. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Papers, 1.124. 9. “Art: Twenty Years of Grace,” Time, February 28, 1955. 10. Morley, quoted in Riess, “Grace L. McCann Morley,” p. 178.

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