Gagosian Quarterly, Winter 2021 by Gagosian Quarterly

64 Picture Books: Ottessa Moshfegh and Issy Wood

Photo credits:

100

Jenny Saville: A Cyclical Rhythm of Emergent Forms A multisite exhibition curated by Sergio Risaliti, director of the Museo Novecento, Florence, pairs artworks by Jenny Saville with artists of the Italian Renaissance. Here, Risaliti reflects on the resonances and reverberations brought about by these pairings.

This winter Gagosian will inaugurate a new series of publications organized by Emma Cline. Entitled “Picture Books,” the collection will present short novellas alongside artworks created in response to the texts. The first installment pairs Ottessa Moshfegh’s story “My New Novel” with a painting by Issy Wood. In celebration of the publication, we present an introduction by Emma Cline and a conversation between the author and the artist.

Front cover: Jasper Johns, Target with Four Faces, 1955, encaustic and collage on canvas with objects, 29 ¾ × 26 inches (75.6 × 66 cm), The Museum of Modern Art, New York; gift of Mr. and Mrs. Robert C. Scull 8.1958 © 2021 Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Jamie Stukenberg, Professional Graphics, Rockford, Illinois

42 The Art of Biography: Sir John Richardson’s “The Minotaur Years” Pepe Karmel celebrates the release of A Life of Picasso IV: The Minotaur Years, 1933–1943, the final installment of Sir John Richardson’s magisterial biography.

48 Drift of Dots In this second installment of a two-part essay, John Elderfield resumes his investigation of the proliferation of dots in modern and contemporary art.

Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror Carlos Basualdo, the Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Scott Rothkopf, Senior Deputy Director and Nancy and Steve Crown Family Chief Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, speak with the Quarterly’s Alison McDonald on the two museums’ unprecedented collaborative retrospective Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror, discussing the goals and unique structure of the project and the revelations they discovered in curating it.

Top row, left to right: Jenny Saville, Couples study (red chalk), 2019, pencil and chalk on paper, 22 ⅝ × 29 ¾ inches (57.5 × 75.6 cm), Private collection © Jenny Saville. All rights reserved, DACS 2021. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Lee “Scratch” Perry, 1992. Photo: Frans Schellekens/Redferns/ Getty Images Bottom row, left to right: Jasper Johns, Three Flags, 1958, encaustic on canvas; three panels, overall: 30 ⅞ × 45 ¾ inches (78.4 × 116.2 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Gilman Foundation, Inc., The Lauder Foundation, A. Alfred Taubman, Laura-Lee Whittier Woods, Howard Lipman, and Ed Downe in honor of the Museum’s 50th Anniversary 80.32 © 2021 Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

168

Game Changer: Lee “Scratch” Perry Connor Garel celebrates the outsized impact of this legendary musician on the world of music and beyond.

68 Social Works II Antwaun Sargent presents conversations, images, poetry, and prose from a selection of the artists in Social Works II, a sequel to the exhibition presented at Gagosian, New York, this past summer. This new edition, presented at Gagosian, London, foregrounds artists from the African diaspora.

108 Fashion and Art, Part 8: Pierpaolo Piccioli The creative director for Valentino speaks with Derek Blasberg about this year’s Met Gala, the duty of all creatives to honor their moment while dreaming for the future, and his recent collaboration with seventeen contemporary artists for Valentino Des Ateliers.

Dance artists Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener join art and dance historian Megan Metcalf in conversation and share a compilation of text and image, creating a performance of the page and inviting you to participate.

148 Les Femmes d’Alger Phyllis Tuchman visited the exhibition Picasso & Les Femmes d’Alger at the Museum Berggruen, Berlin, this past summer and here considers the roles of Henri Matisse and Eugène Delacroix as inspirations for the artist in a classic suite of paintings from 1954–55.

Rick Lowe, Black Wall Street Journey #8, 2021, acrylic and paper collage on canvas, 108 × 108 inches (274.3 × 274.3 cm) © Rick Lowe Studio

114 Richard Avedon: In the American West On the occasion of an exhibition of works from Richard Avedon’s In the American West (1985) in Los Angeles this winter, we are republishing an introduction to the series by Larry McMurtry.

122 Cannes Film Festival 2021 Carlos Valladares reports from the fabled event, detailing five standout films.

130 Out of the Darkness We are honored to conclude our collaboration with pen America by sharing the work of South African writer Mathapelo Mofokeng, a pen America Dau Prize winner.

Rick Lowe In conversation with Antwaun Sargent, Rick Lowe discusses abstraction, scale, and the concept of social sculpture across his paintings and community-engaged artworks.

TABLE OF CONTENTS WINTER 2021

140 Rashaun Mitchell + Silas Riener

n this issue we celebrate Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror, the most comprehensive retrospective ever presented on the groundbreaking artist—a vast range of iconic works installed across two sites, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. In a dynamic conversation with the exhibitions’ curators, Carlos Basualdo and Scott Rothkopf, we delve into Johns’s legendary career and this unprecedented curatorial collaboration. On the occasion of an exhibition of Jenny Saville’s work in five major museums in Florence, Sergio Risaliti, director of the city’s Museo Novecento, examines the intricacies of the artist’s practice and describes its revealing dialogues with masterworks of the Italian Renaissance. In a special section, Antwaun Sargent brings together conversations, images, poetry, and prose from artists across geography and generation of the African diaspora about the relationship between space and artistic production. Focusing on works by Tyler Mitchell, Amanda Williams, Manuel Mathieu, Sumayya Vally, and Sir David Adjaye, “Social Works II” builds on the writings and dialogues that Sargent brought together in our pages in an earlier section this year. Elsewhere in the issue, Sargent speaks with Rick Lowe about abstraction and scale with regard to Lowe’s paintings, and the two men contemplate Lowe’s renowned Project Row Houses in Houston as a social sculpture. This winter Emma Cline unveils “Picture Books,” a series in which leading visual artists are invited to respond to new novellas by celebrated authors. In anticipation of the launch, we present a conversation between Ottessa Moshfegh and Issy Wood, who speak candidly about their collaboration and about the perspectives and characters that inspired their visions. As we mark the end of our partnership with pen America, we present Dau Prize winner Mathapelo Mofokeng’s “Out of the Darkness.” We are grateful to the pen writers and program leaders for sharing their brilliant voices and tireless advocacy with us over the past year. Alison McDonald, Editor-in-chief

With art and artists, writers and musicians, ideas and conversations, this ongoing video series gives audiences a backstage pass to celebrate exhibitions and performances, even while physically distanced. gagosian.com/premieres

GAGOSIAN PREMIERES

FRANK GEHRY On the occasion of Frank Gehry: Spinning Tales at Gagosian, Beverly Hills, the artist speaks with Julian Rose. This episode also includes a musical performance by esperanza spalding, in addition to one by Gustavo Dudamel and YOLA (Youth Orchestra Los Angeles).

GERHARD RICHTER We mark the opening of Gerhard Richter: Cage Paintings at Gagosian, New York, with a musical performance and reading by Patti Smith, new choreography created and performed by Rashaun Mitchell + Silas Riener, and commentaries by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Richard Calvocoressi.

ED RUSCHA In this episode we celebrate Ed Ruscha: Paintings at Gagosian, New York, with musicians Flea, Missy Mazzoli, Vernon Reid, and Eddie Ruscha.

CHANEL CELEBRATES N°5 In 1921, Gabrielle Chanel has an idea for a perfume which she calls N°5, her lucky number. This vision of creation owes its singularity to the permanence of one perspective: the idea above all else. In 2021, a High Jewellery collection celebrates the House’s emblematic number with a creative act that combines the audacity of a technical challenge with the freedom of an original approach. CHANEL High Jewellery creates the N°5 Collection, with a centrepiece that reveals a unique geometric virtuosity: a necklace whose design reflects all the defining features of the N°5 perfume bottle, composed of more than 700 diamonds set around a diamond specially cut to weigh 55.55 carats. The perfection of the idea has determined the weight in carats. This is an unprecedented approach: to start with a rough diamond, aiming not for the greatest weight but for the perfection of the stone, cut to the exact dimensions of an idea. Diamonds are eternal. To CHANEL, éternité, the French word for “eternity,” is first and foremost an anagram of étreinte, the word for “embrace.” As such, this is how the House defines creation: an embrace between matter and spirit, which alone can give birth to a style. CHANEL reaffirms it today: creation is eternal.

chanel.com

N°5 NECKLACE IN WHITE GOLD AND DIAMONDS, FEATURING A 55.55-CARAT EMERALD-CUT DFL TYPE IIA DIAMOND.

LV Volt Fine Jewelry Collection

6 Place Vendôme

Paris

repossi.com

Gagosian Quarterly, Winter 2021

Editor-in-chief Alison McDonald

Founder Larry Gagosian

Managing Editor Wyatt Allgeier

Published by Gagosian Media

Text Editor David Frankel

Publisher Jorge Garcia

Online Editor Jennifer Knox White Executive Editor Derek Blasberg Associate Editor Gillian Jakab Online Layouts Andie Trainer Design Director Paul Neale Design Alexander Ecob Graphic Thought Facility Website Wolfram Wiedner Studio Cover Jasper Johns

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

Contributors Sir David Adjaye Raymond Antrobus Carlos Basualdo Derek Blasberg Emma Cline John Elderfield Caleb Femi Connor Garel Pepe Karmel Rick Lowe Manuel Mathieu Alison McDonald Larry McMurtry Megan Metcalf Rashaun Mitchell Tyler Mitchell Mathapelo Mofokeng Ottessa Moshfegh Pierpaolo Piccioli Silas Riener Sergio Risaliti Scott Rothkopf Antwaun Sargent Phyllis Tuchman Carlos Valladares Sumayya Vally Amanda Williams Issy Wood

Thanks Karrie Adamany Richard Alwyn Fisher Julia Arena Lisa Ballard Ashleigh Barice Priya Bhatnagar Kel Burchette Michael Cary Serena Cattaneo Adorno Michael Childress Vittoria Ciaraldi Annie Cicco Andie Clarkson Jeanne Collins Cristina Colomar Chrissie Erpf Andrew Fabricant Kate Fernandez-Lupino Hallie Freer Alexandria Galloway Brett Garde Nicole Gervasio Lauren Gioia Marissa Glauberman Darlina Goldak Morgan Hamilton Delphine Huisinga Sarah Isenberg Sarah Jones India Lovejoy Chantelle Lue Lauren Mahony

Pepi Marchetti Franchi Bianca Marks Rob McKeever Olivia Mull Louise Neri Kathy Paciello Michele Palombaro Kelly M. Quinn Stefan Ratibor Virginia Regan Coleman Justin Rubich Jenny Saville Claudia Staccioli Phyllis Stigliano Jess Topping Sara Trombetta Kara Vander Weg Shelley Wanger Eva Wildes Hanako Williams Millicent Wilner Sarah Womble

Opposite: Rick Lowe, Black Wall Street Journey #8, 2021 (detail), acrylic and paper collage on canvas, 108 × 108 inches (274.3 × 274.3 cm) © Rick Lowe Studio

CONTRIBUTORS

Rick Lowe Rick Lowe is a Houston-based artist and professor of art at the University of Houston. He has exhibited and worked with communities nationally and internationally. His work has appeared in the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Neuberger Museum, Purchase, New York; the Phoenix Art Museum; the Gwangju Biennale, Korea; the Kumamoto State Museum, Japan; the Venice Architecture Biennale; and Documenta 14, Kassel, Germany, and Athens, Greece. He is best known for Project Row Houses, a community-based art project that he cofounded in Houston in 1993.

Antwaun Sargent ntwaun Sargent is a writer and A critic. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, and other publications, and he has contributed essays to museum and gallery catalogues. He is a director at Gagosian. Photo: Darius Garvin

Amanda Williams Amanda Williams is a visual artist who trained as an architect at Cornell University. She uses color in her work as a way to draw attention to the complex ways in which race informs the way we assign value to the spaces we occupy. Williams has exhibited in New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, a public commission with Andres L. Hernandez at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in Saint Louis, and elsewhere. She is codesigner of a forthcoming permanent monument to Shirley Chisholm in Brooklyn and is part of the Museum Design Team for the Obama Presidential Center planned for Chicago. Williams has been a Ford Fellow, a Joan Mitchell Painting and Sculpture grantee, and a 3Arts Next Level awardee, and she is the inaugural artist-in-residence at Smith College.

Pepe Karmel Pepe Karmel teaches in the Department of Art History, New York University. His book Picasso and the Invention of Cubism was published by Yale University Press in 2003. He has curated or cocurated many exhibitions and has contributed to numerous exhibition catalogues, as well as to publications including Art in America and the New York Times.

Ottessa Moshfegh Ottessa Moshfegh is the author of four novels, including My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018), and the short-story collection Homesick for Another World. She also writes screenplays. Photo: Andrew Casey

Connor Garel Connor Garel is a writer and editor from Toronto. He is the former Cannonbury Fellow at The Walrus and was previously an associate editor at HuffPost Canada. His writing on arts and culture has appeared in BuzzFeed, Canadian Art, and Vice.

Issy Wood Issy Wood is an artist who lives and works in London. She received her BA in fine art from Goldsmiths, University of London in 2015. Her practice spans painting, music, and writing. Artwork © Issy Wood

Phyllis Tuchman Phyllis Tuchman writes for artnews. com, Artforum, and the New York Times. In summer 2018 she curated the exhibition Ellsworth Kelly in the Hamptons for the Guild Hall, East Hampton, and lectured on Helen Frankenthaler at the Provincetown Art Association. She is currently working on This Is the Land: The Life and Times of Robert Smithson.

Emma Cline Emma Cline is the author of The Girls (2016) and of the story collection Daddy (2020). Cline was the winner of the Plimpton Prize and was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists. The Girls was an international bestseller and was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award, the First Novel Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

John Elderfield John Elderfield is chief curator emeritus of painting and sculpture at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and was formerly the inaugural Allen R. Adler, Class of 1967, Distinguished Curator and Lecturer at the Princeton University Art Museum. He joined Gagosian in 2012 as a senior curator for special exhibitions.

H E L L E N I C M I N I S T R Y O F C U LT U R E A N D S P O R T S - O D A P - T E M P L E O F Z E U S , N E M E A

D I O R .COM

Sumayya Vally Sumayya Vally is the principal of Counterspace, a Johannesburg-based architecture and research studio. She has developed a design, research, and pedagogical practice in which she seeks out modes of expression for hybrid identities and contested territories. In London she designed the Serpentine Pavilion for 2021, the youngest architect ever invited to participate in this twenty-year annual program, and she initiated and developed the Serpentine’s Support Structures for Support Structures program, which supports and connects artists working at the intersections of arts and ecology, arts and social justice, and arts and the archive.

Mathapelo Mofokeng Mathapelo Mofokeng is a screenwriter and author from Johannesburg. In 2018 she completed an MA in scriptwriting at Goldsmiths, University of London, after winning the Chevening Scholarship. Her short films have screened at BFI Soul Connect, Underwire, London Shorts, Aesthetica, and other venues. Her short-story and essay publications include adda, Popshot Quarterly, and Goldsmiths Press. In 2021 she was awarded the pen America Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize and was long-listed for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize.

Sir David Adjaye

Manuel Mathieu

Sir David Adjaye OBE is a Ghanaian-British architect who has received international acclaim. In 2000, he founded Adjaye Associates, which today maintains studios in Accra, London, and New York and runs projects spanning the globe. Born in Tanzania to Ghanaian parents, Adjaye has established himself as an architect with an artist’s sensibility and vision. He is known for his ingenious use of materials and his sculptural ability and his influences range from contemporary art, music, and science to African art forms and the life of cities. His projects range from private houses, bespoke furniture collections, product design, exhibitions, and temporary pavilions to arts centers, civic buildings, and master plans.

The paintings of Haiti-born, Montreal-based multidisciplinary artist Manuel Mathieu investigate themes of historical violence, erasure, and physicality, nature, and religious symbolism in Haitian visual culture. Marrying abstraction and figuration, his compositions carve out space for reflection on Haitian history while inviting us to consider the different futures created by the act of remembering. Drawing from a wide range of subjects, Manuel’s practice combines his Haitian heritage and his formal arts education, which culminated in an MFA Degree from Goldsmiths, University of London. Photo: Marie Anne Letarte

Tyler Mitchell Tyler Mitchell is a photographer and filmmaker who works across many genres to explore and document a new aesthetic of Blackness. In 2018, he made history as the first Black photographer to shoot a cover of American Vogue, introducing Beyoncé’s appearance in the September issue. The following year, a portrait from his Beyoncé series was acquired by the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery for its permanent collection. Mitchell’s first solo exhibition, I Can Make You Feel Good, at Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam in 2019, included photographic and video works including his film Idyllic Space, and traveled to the International Center of Photography, New York, in 2020.

Alison McDonald Alison McDonald has been the director of publications at Gagosian since 2002. During her tenure she has worked closely with Larry Gagosian to shape every aspect of the gallery’s extensive publishing program and has personally overseen more than 500 publications dedicated to the gallery’s artists.

Scott Rothkopf Scott Rothkopf is the Senior Deputy Director and Nancy and Steve Crown Family Chief Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. He joined the Whitney’s staff in 2009 and has served there as curator or cocurator of Glenn Ligon: america (2011), Wade Guyton OS (2012), Sinister Pop (2012), Singular Visions (2010), Jeff Koons: A Retrospective (2014), America Is Hard to See (2015), Open Plan: Andrea Fraser (2016), Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection (2016), Virginia Overton: Sculpture Gardens (2016), and Laura Owens (2017). His latest project is the major retrospective Jasper Johns: Mind/ Mirror, presented in collaboration with the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and on view at both institutions through February 2022.

Caleb Femi Caleb Femi is a poet and director. Using film, photography, and music, Femi pushes the boundaries of poetry on the page, in performance, and in digital mediums. He has written and directed short films commissioned by the BBC and Channel 4 and poems commissioned by Tate Modern, the Royal Society for Literature, Saint Paul’s Cathedral, the BBC, the Guardian, and many more.

Carlos Basualdo As the Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Carlos Basualdo has organized the exhibitions Bruce Nauman: Topological Gardens (2009), Michelangelo Pistoletto: From One to Many (2010), and, with Erica F. Battle, Dancing around the Bride: Cage, Cunningham, Johns, Rauschenberg, and Duchamp (2012). His latest project is the major retrospective Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror, presented in collaboration with the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and on view at both institutions through February 2022.

Raymond Antrobus Raymond Antrobus is a poet and educator. Born in London to an English mother and a Jamaican father, he is a Cave Canem Fellow and the author of To Sweeten Bitter (2017), The Perseverance (2018), and All the Names Given (2021), as well as of the children’s picture book Can Bears Ski? (2020).

Vincent Van Gogh La mer aux Saintes-Maries, detail 1888 Oil on canvas, 44,5 × 54,5 cm The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow

Manet, Monet, Renoir, Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh,Bonnard, Matisse, Picasso…

Fondation Louis Vuitton

In partnership with State Hermitage Museum, Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, State Tretyakov Museum

22 September 2021 > 22 February 2022 Book your tickets: fondationlouisvuitton.fr and fnac.com | 8 av. du Mahatma Gandhi, Bois de Boulogne, Paris | #fondationlouisvuitton

Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener are New York–based dance artists. Their work involves the building of collaborative worlds through improvisational techniques, digital technologies, and material construction. They have been artists-in-residence at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council; Mount Tremper Arts; Pieter Performance Space, Los Angeles; Jacob’s Pillow, Becket, Massachusetts; the New York City Center; the Watermill Center; the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography, Tallahassee; the Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito; BOFFO, Fire Island Pines; The Center for Ballet and the Arts, New York; and the Baryshnikov Arts Center, New York.

Megan Metcalf Megan Metcalf is an art and dance historian currently working on a book about the appearance of dance and performance in art museums. She received her PhD in contemporary art history from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2018 and is a History of Art and Visual Culture fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 2021–22.

Pierpaolo Piccioli Pierpaolo Piccioli has been the creative director for Valentino since 2016. He attended the Istituto Europeo di Design in Rome before joining Fendi in 1990 to work on the brand’s accessory line. After Fendi, Piccioli began working with Valentino’s accessory department, later becoming the co-creative director in 2008. Photo: Inez & Vinoodh

Derek Blasberg Derek Blasberg is a writer, editor, and New York Times best-selling author. In addition to being the executive editor of the Gagosian Quarterly, he is the head of fashion and beauty for YouTube. He has been with Gagosian since 2014. Photo: Pier Guido Grassano

Sergio Risaliti Sergio Risaliti is an art historian, writer, and curator of exhibitions and interdisciplinary events. He founded the Palazzo delle Papesse, Siena, and served as its director until 2002. Since 2014 he has acted as artistic director of projects at the Forte di Belvedere, the Stefano Bardini Museum, the Palazzo Vecchio, and the Piazza della Signoria, Florence. He is currently the director of the Museo Novecento, Florence.

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 and Media Studies at Yale University in the fall of 2019. He has written for the San Francisco Chronicle, Film Comment, and the Criterion Collection. Photo: Jerry Schatzberg

Carlos Basualdo, the Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Scott Rothkopf, Senior Deputy Director and Nancy and Steve Crown Family Chief Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, spoke with the Quarterly’s Alison McDonald ahead of the opening of the unprecedented collaborative retrospective Jasper Johns: Mind/ Mirror to discuss the goals, revelations, and unique structure of the project.

JASPER JOHNS: MIND/MIRROR

ALISON MCDONALD This

is an ambitious exhibition presenting over 500 works of art at two museums in two different cities simultaneously. When did the project begin and how did your conversations and plans evolve along the way? CARLOS BASUALDO I understand that it looks ambitious, but ambition was not our point of departure. We’ve long shared an interest in and admiration of Jasper Johns and his work. And the point of departure was, What shall we do to properly address the work in all its complexity? To do that we needed to represent his work across disciplines, including prints, as well as working proofs, paintings, and sculptures. We wanted the show to appeal to a younger generation and we felt that the structure of the exhibition should echo the logic of the work itself. So while it’s ambitious when you look at the list of works, our motivation was to truly represent Johns’s work as faithfully as we could. SCOTT ROTHKOPF As Carlos mentioned, we’ve both had independent and long relationships with Johns, and so have both of our museums, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, going back many decades. We decided we wanted to embark on this show in early 2016, when there was a lot of renewed interest in Johns’s work: he was making and showing new work in Chelsea, the catalogue raisonné of paintings had been completed, and it was the tail end of the catalogue raisonné of drawings. There was a wonderful show the following year that opened at the Royal Academy, London, and traveled to the Broad, Los Angeles. We were excited to learn from the work that was taking place and to create our own exhibition by joining forces. AMCD The idea to host a single exhibition across two institutions seems to have been informed by Johns’s own history with mirroring and doubling. Can you speak to that history, and to how the artist’s own work inspired the shape the exhibition took? CB When we started thinking in that direction, we were both surprised to realize how deep repetition, mirroring, and doubling run throughout the work. At the beginning, we created a sort of imaginary taxonomy of all the ways in which he uses this device. We laid out all the places where you could see the same work in different mediums or with variations of color, as well as works created with an internal structure of repetition or mirroring, like the Ale Cans [1960], famously. It was fascinating to see how this relatively simple device extends and draws on decades of work, and we had

a lot of fun imagining how we would put it in play in two institutions—two institutions that, as Scott said, have a deep history with Johns but that are fundamentally different. The Whitney focuses on modern and contemporary art, and is devoted to artists who live in the United States and are part of that culture, while Philadelphia is an encyclopedic museum, dealing with different cultures and time periods. We felt that the mirroring would work very well because the context would be so different. SR We didn’t set out to make a show with mirroring as a structuring metaphor or device. When we started, the struggle was to determine how to divide the show into two parts being staged simultaneously—it could have been paintings at one museum and works on paper at the other, or early at one and late at the other, but there was a moment when we’d dug so deep into the work that we saw this frequent and long-standing interest. After that revealed itself to us, it became useful as the structural armature of the show, though not as its theme per se. We seized on the notion that the two sites could echo or reflect one another. AMCD How do you think the exhibition will feel in the different context of each museum? SR Well, as Carlos mentioned, we wanted to make the work accessible and alive to new audiences and to a younger generation of viewers. And at the Whitney we have a relatively young audience compared to other large institutions in New York. Our audience is used to coming to the Whitney to see emerging or mid-career artists, and we wanted the show to have a sense of curiosity, a sense of risk, a sense of drama about it. At the Whitney, in downtown Manhattan, we’ll see the work in that context, while in Philadelphia we’ll have the opportunity to look at the work alongside artists who were inspirational to Johns, such as Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, and Marcel Duchamp, whose galleries won’t be far away. And the extraordinary experience of that context will be different and distinct from the one more focused on young artists and questions of American culture, as Carlos said. AMCD You have some wonderful surprises planned. Would you share a few highlights, or describe a few specific rooms at each venue? SR When we came up with this structure of two shows reflecting or echoing one another, the premise was that we would create pairs of galleries with different articulations of a shared idea. For example, we might focus on how Johns made exhibitions

We wanted to use our show as an opportunity to crack open some of the cemented layers of interpretation and allow people to relate to the work with a sense of spontaneity and rediscovery, or to feel the excitement that must have resonated when the work was first shown. —Carlos Basualdo

Previous spread: Jasper Johns, According to What, 1964, oil, charcoal, and graphite on canvas with objects; six panels, overall: 88 × 191 ¾ inches (223.5 × 487 cm), The Middleton Family Collection © 2021 Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Philadelphia Museum of Art Photo Studio; Joseph Hu This spread: Jasper Johns, Racing Thoughts, 1983, encaustic and collage on canvas, 48 1⁄8 × 75 3⁄8 inches (122.2 × 191.5 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Burroughs Wellcome Purchase Fund; Leo Castelli; the Wilfred P. and Rose J. Cohen Purchase Fund; the Julia B. Engel Purchase Fund; the

Equitable Life Assurance Society of the United States Purchase Fund; The Sondra and Charles Gilman, Jr. Foundation, Inc.; S. Sidney Kahn; The Lauder Foundation, Leonard and Evelyn Lauder Fund; the Sara Roby Foundation; and the Painting and Sculpture Committee 84.6 © 2021 Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Jamie Stukenberg, Professional Graphics, Rockford, Illinois

Above: Jasper Johns, Usuyuki, 1982, encaustic on canvas; three panels, overall: 71 × 113 ¾ inches (180.3 × 288.9 cm), Sezon Museum of Modern Art, Nagano, Japan © 2021 Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Opposite: Ugo Mulas, Jasper Johns, 1964, vintage gelatin silver print, 9 7⁄8 × 14 ½ inches (25 × 37 cm), Ugo Mulas Archive, Milan © Ugo Mulas Heirs

that he installed himself at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York, and a different Castelli exhibition will be re-created at each museum. We also thought, for example, about how Johns has lived and worked in a variety of places throughout his career, and how those places have influenced and affected his art. At Philadelphia you’ ll see Japan, and at the W hitney, South Carolina. So in each venue you’ll have a gallery examining this idea of place, but through totally different examples. CB That’s absolutely right. And Alison, a consequence of that is, there’ll be a moment in which the viewer will be going through these rooms and standing in front of the works, which is of course a truly important moment, but there’ll also be a moment when the viewer goes from one museum to another, or looks at the catalogue and imagines or remembers what was at the other place. That’s an integral part of the exhibition, that process of recalling, and the delicate balance between being present to the work and being absent from it, and that very absence propelling thoughts and the desire to see it. We understand that from a practical point of view there may be people who will only go to one of the venues, but we’re hoping that many people will be encouraged to go from one place to the other and in a way join both museums, connect both cities, and enjoy both experiences. AMCD And what about Johns’s engagement? Many of the works on view are on loan from him. What does it mean to have his support? SR Well, we couldn’t have done the show without his support. He’s the single biggest individual lender to the exhibition and he’s been an incredible abiding presence throughout this process. Carlos and I have met with him often and shared our ideas with him along the way. That said, he’s given us a tremendous amount of freedom to shape the show as we wished. Although he’s been quite curious and interested in our process, he hasn’t been directional, and that’s been liberating, letting us chart our own course through his work. CB That’s absolutely right. He’s very careful not to weigh in on the interpretation of the work. That’s an attitude he’s always maintained. It’s almost like he sees in his restraint the possibility of freedom for the viewer—that’s the way he is in terms both of individual works and of exhibitions. We’ve been given enormous and extraordinary permission to

think freely about the work; it’s a great gift, and it duplicates the gift that he offers to the viewer by not getting in the way of interpreting the work. AMCD You’ve brought together works from the entirety of Johns’s long career, including recent works, and you alluded earlier to building on the existing scholarship. How do you see this exhibition as different from what’s come before? CB A long line of distinguished writers and curators have thought about Johns’s work. We benefited enormously from the scholarship of Roberta Bernstein, the catalogues raisonnés, and so forth. Still, we wanted to use our show as an opportunity to crack open some of the cemented layers of interpretation and allow people to relate to the work with a sense of spontaneity and rediscovery, or to feel the excitement that must have resonated when the work was first shown. To do that, it was important to us to put into question some of the categories that have coalesced around the reading of the work. We see a continuous process of transformation in the work—even on our most recent visit to the studio we saw an entirely new series, deeply connected with the logic of earlier work yet extremely different as well. That happens all the time. There’s certainly a linear timeline to the work, but there’s so much repetition—going back to earlier motifs, exploring them, sometimes twenty years or more after they first appeared. Skulls, for instance, are very present in the recent work and appeared for the first time in 1964. My hope is that our show offers a more complex understanding of how time and development happen internally for Johns. SR I see the show as an extraordinary opportunity to present a living artist who is still making new work after sixty-five years. Very few artists have kept pushing the limits of their own previous practice over such a long career. And I hope it will be interesting for viewers to experience Johns’s continued sense of discovery and the emergence of new ideas, even in his most recent work. One of the things that struck both of us when putting together the final galleries of the show was just how bravely Johns is thinking about mortality in recent works that feature grieving or anguished figures, or the skeleton motif. It’s incredibly compelling to have an artist at this stage in his own life making such honest and complicated work about mortality and the human condition very broadly.

Left: Jasper Johns, 0 through 9, 1960, oil on canvas, 72 ½ × 54 inches (184.2 × 137.2 cm), Private collection © 2021 Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Right: Jasper Johns, Map, 1961, oil on canvas, 78 × 123 ¼ inches (198.1 × 313.1 cm), The Museum of Modern Art, New York; gift of Mr. and Mrs. Robert C. Scull 277.1963 © 2021 Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

AMCD Johns is often described as a hugely inventive

printmaker. How will that prowess be represented in the show? SR From the very beginning we were committed to showing how prints have been generative in Johns’s work. Not only has he broken many boundaries in terms of the craft and technique of printmaking across the twentieth century, but printmaking has also informed the work that he’s done in other mediums. So prints are integrated in the different galleries with paintings, drawings, and sculpture, and there’s also a deep dive into prints at each venue. CB And you know, Alison, one could say that Jasper Johns is one of the most experimental and innovative printmakers of our time, and that would be true. But in fact—and this will be clear in the show—we believe that he thinks through mediums. By that I mean that he uses printmaking to think about painting, and painting to think about sculpture, and sculpture to think about drawing, and so on. As the work progresses over time, it becomes more complex in terms of the interchangeability between mediums. So when you look at a recent 40

drawing, you can’t always figure out how it’s made, and you can spend quite a bit of time simply trying to understand its material complexity. For Johns, materiality offers an immanent feeling that he traverses freely, which is an important aspect of the show. And in the two rooms devoted exclusively to prints, we’re also making a case about how chronology becomes complicated in the work, and how certain motifs repeat over time. We do that in two ways: at the Whitney we show a timeline that punctuates how chronology doesn’t really apply, and then in Philadelphia we’re using chance procedures to disorganize it. AMCD Did you make any personal discoveries during the preparations? You both clearly knew the work very well before you began planning the show, but in working actively with the material for almost five years, probably you encountered something new, or maybe unlocked a new way of seeing the work? CB We discovered so much, Alison. We knew only the tip of the iceberg, and even now we know just a little bit more about the iceberg, because it’s a huge iceberg, right? Jasper Johns is one of the truly

towering artists in art history, period. Once you look at the expressive span of his work, the virtuosity of his craft—both are truly enormous accomplishments. You can’t find many parallels in the history of art. There’s so much more to explore. SR To put a more specific point on it, for me one of the great surprises was an unknown trove of drawings that only came to light, frankly, with the publication of the catalogue raisonné of drawings during the process of making our show. Many works on paper had never been published or exhibited before, and were full of surprises and invention, dating back almost to the beginning of his career. In the studio we were able to dig into what felt like a secret corpus. AMCD You’ve put together an extensive book for the exhibition that includes sixteen authors, in addition to essays by each of you. I can appreciate how complex it must have been to put this publication together and I’m curious to hear how the book expands on the exhibition. SR We knew from the start that we wanted to open things up and let some fresh ideas blow through Jasper’s oeuvre. Of course we included

some of the most distinguished authorities on his work, such as Ruth Fine and Jennifer Roberts, but by and large we chose authors who hadn’t previously written about the work. We felt the experimental nature of the show welcomed bringing a lot of different voices into the book from many generations and fields, whether it was art history, poetry, literature, philosophy, or artists themselves. AMCD I feel like we could have a whole conversation just on the book, I must say [laughs]. What do you think has emerged from it? Is it exactly what you set out to achieve? Was there any voice that resonated in a way that you hadn’t anticipated? CB Certainly, there are so many perspectives— we learned a lot through the authors, absolutely. My hope is that the reader will feel the same. SR Yes, and it’s interesting that the authors approached the work with a sense of respect but not necessarily reverence. Some of them ask hard questions or read the work against the grain, which challenges the established lines on Johns’s work. There’s a freedom in many of the voices in the book that will be surprising and will open up new pathways of conversation.

AMCD In

light of our current moment, how do you think audiences today might read the work, in particular some of the iconography of the early work? For instance, the flags could be thought of as a mirror of ourselves, and audiences today may start to read those works differently than they would have at the time of their making. CB We have an extraordinar y room at the Whitney with two sequences of flags—a series of colorful flags and a series of black, white, and gray monochrome flags, which seem to be the somber counterpart or the critique of those colorful flags. So the symbol is there in all its glorious ambiguity, for all of us to reinterpret. Johns presents so much of the conflict, the strife, the successes and failures of American history in the postwar period, but there’s also the resilience of the work and the sheer joy of invention that speak so loudly today. For me he’s a figure of reconciliation, and I hope many people relate to his work in that way. SR Yes, I think that’s true, and he’s a symbol of staying power, of a long journey. It’s interesting—when we first thought of the flags and maps room, we imagined that the show was going to open

on the eve of the past presidential election, and that it would have a very distinct resonance as a result. But of course to some degree that was naive, because these works will always mean something, at any point in history. He made some of them during the period of the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War, and since then they’ve been exhibited while America was engaged in different conflicts, or in partisan elections. They really are whatever the viewer brings to them at that moment in history. Similarly, a lot of people will connect the images referencing mortality to the covid-19 pandemic. Most of those works were made before the pandemic, but of course, if people have a new sense of mortality or have approached their lives in different ways over the past year, they’re going to bring that to the work, and that will make their experience more meaningful. Once again, Johns’s work becomes a springboard or a mirror for the feelings that the audience brings to it. CB As Scott is saying, the show itself will be a mirror, and nothing will be better for us than to know that we’ve created this possibility for the culture and the time to be reflected in the structure of the show. 41

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY: SIR JOHN RICHARDSON’S “THE MINOTAUR YEARS” Pepe Karmel celebrates the release of A Life of Picasso IV: The Minotaur Years, 1933–1943, the final installment of Sir John Richardson’s magisterial biography.

ohn Richardson was fourteen years old in the fall of 1937 when Pablo Picasso sent his recently completed Guernica to an exhibit ion at London’s New Burlington Galleries. Richardson’s art teachers encouraged him to go to London to see the show, organized to raise money for victims of the Spanish Civil War. Years later he would recall, “I was so struck by the power of Guernica that I decided to find out more about this overwhelmingly exciting artist.” Richardson’s youthful curiosity bore fruit in his multivolume Life of Picasso, the greatest biography of an artist ever written. The Minotaur Years, 1933– 1943, published this month, marks the last installment in this heroic enterprise, which extended over two decades. Richardson published the first volume, covering the years 1881–1906, in 1991. The second volume, The Painter of Modern Life, 1907–1917, appeared in 1996. That year, Richardson turned seventy-two. Perhaps foreseeing that he might not be able to carry the biography to its conclusion, he temporarily set it aside and wrote The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: Picasso, Provence and Douglas Cooper, an enthralling memoir of the postwar art world recounting numerous personal conversations with Picasso and his wife Jacqueline. Richardson then returned to work on the biography. The third volume, The Triumphant Years, 1917–1932, appeared in 2007. Like the first two books, it was written in collaboration with the eminent art historian Marilyn McCully. Richardson was hard at work on The Minotaur Years when he died, on March 12, 2019, at the age of ninety-five. Fortunately, Ross Finocchio and Delphine Huisinga, his research assistants for this volume, together with his editor Shelley Wanger, were able to complete the book. The opening pages of the first volume demonstrated Richardson’s determination to explore Picasso’s life and work in unprecedented depth. While tracing his subject’s growth from talented youth to precocious Symbolist, Richardson drew vivid portraits of the family members, artists, poets, and collectors who fostered his development in Málaga, La Coruña, Barcelona, and Paris. After a prolonged analysis of Picasso’s 1905 masterpiece Les Saltimbanques, Richardson concluded the volume with a review of the 1906 drawings and paintings that would lead, in 1907, to Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. The Painter of Modern Life began, accordingly, with a brilliant discussion of the Demoiselles. Confuting his reputation as a single-minded exponent of biographical interpretation, Richardson argued that Picasso intended to accompany the Demoiselles with a second canvas depicting elegant riders in the Bois de Boulogne, inspired by the nineteenth-century illustrator Constantin Guys. Pairing the high life of the aristocracy with the low life of a brothel, the two canvases would have established Picasso as a consummate “painter of modern life,” the title that Charles Baudelaire had bestowed upon Guys. After this dazzling opening, Richardson traced Picasso’s astonishing evolution from narrative figuration to the hermetic quasi-abstraction of Cubism, a new pictorial syntax that revolutionized twentieth-century art. The outbreak of World War I in 1914 and the death of Picasso’s beloved Eva Gouel in 1915 led to an atypical slowdown in his work. Richardson took this as an occasion to devote most of the final chapters of the book to the network of collectors and art dealers who brought Picasso international recognition, along with the 44

friends and women who provided solace amid the dreariness of wartime Paris. Richardson’s third volume, The Triumphant Years, picked up where the second left off: with Picasso’s participation in the creation of the 1917 ballet Parade. During the rehearsals for the ballet in Rome, he fell in love with the Russian ballerina Olga Khokhlova, whom he married in 1918. Visits to Naples and Pompeii kindled his interest in classical art. The poet Jean Cocteau introduced him to high society. After this opening, Richardson cut back and forth between the married couple’s glamorous life in Paris and on the Riviera and Picasso’s relentless labor in the studio. In the early 1920s, Picasso simultaneously invented a new kind of neoclassicism and a new kind of Cubism, richly colored and monumental. In the second half of the decade, his distorted figures provided an inspiration for Surrealism. Something had gone sour in Picasso’s marriage, however, and in 1927 he launched into a passionate affair with an underage girl, Marie-Thérèse Walter, whom he had met on a Paris boulevard. Richardson’s discussion of their encounter meticulously distinguished fact from fiction. However morally dubious, the ensuing relationship inspired a series of masterworks— both sculptures and paintings—from 1931–32, which Richardson called the “annus mirabilis” of Picasso’s career. The volume concluded with a chapter on the first retrospective of the artist’s work, seen in 1932 in Paris and Zurich.

The Minotaur Years, the long-awaited fourth volume, covers a more difficult decade of Picasso’s life and career. He initiated divorce proceedings from Khokhlova, triggering an uncharacteristic creative block. Public life brought no respite from his private misery: the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 was followed by the German invasion of Poland in 1939 and then of France in 1940. In 1943, when this volume concludes, Picasso is living in occupied Paris, unable to publicly exhibit his work. Nonetheless, the decade 1933–43 includes some of his most important achievements. His drawings and prints on the theme of the Minotaur, the man-bull of Greek legend, bring a new profundity to his neoclassical style of the 1920s. Guernica, his mural-scale canvas of 1937, painted in response to the brutal bombing of a Basque town, is the greatest political painting of the twentieth century—perhaps the greatest painting of the twentieth century, tout court. Richardson explores a kaleidoscopic variety of themes: the emotional fallout from Picasso’s divorce, his ongoing relationship with Walter, his volatile new romance with the artist Dora Maar, his sustaining friendships with the poet Paul Éluard and other members of the Surrealist group, his deepening political engagement—and of course his art, and his new expressive medium, poetry. As in previous volumes, the narrative weaves together a stunning array of sources, from recondite academic tomes to memoirs packed with juicy gossip.

What most clearly distinguishes The Minotaur Years from the earlier volumes of the biography is Richardson’s attention to public events. Picasso’s engagement with politics is usually dated to the spring of 1937, when the bombing of the town of Guernica provoked his historic canvas. Richardson demonstrates that it began several years earlier. Picasso’s drawing The Death of Marat, made on July 7, 1934, is usually interpreted as a dramatization of the conflict between his wife Olga and his mistress Marie-Thérèse; Richardson suggests that it may also have been provoked by the Night of the Long Knives, June 30, 1934, when Hitler ordered the assassination of dozens of his opponents. Tracing the prehistory of Guernica, Richardson notes that the conflict of the Spanish Civil War was anticipated by the right wing’s success in the Spanish elections of 1933, and that the future dictator General Francisco Franco led the bloody suppression of a miner’s strike in October 1934. In the first months of 1936, left-wing popular fronts won elections in both Spain and France. The new French government commissioned Picasso to design a stage curtain for a production of Le Quatorze Juillet, a play by Romain Rolland celebrating the French Revolution of 1789. But these liberal triumphs were rapidly followed by right-wing reaction. In July 1936, Franco launched his rebellion against the new Republican government. Richardson impartially notes that war crimes and acts of cultural vandalism were committed by both sides: anarchists attacked churches and monasteries while Franco’s forces attacked libraries and museums. The destruction of Guernica in April 1937 was prefigured by the aerial bombing of Madrid in November 1936. It was followed in turn by the March 1938 bombing of Barcelona. Fearing for his family there, Picasso gave “immense sums” to Spanish relief agencies and personally supported Spanish refugees in France. Barcelona surrendered in January 1939. Half a million Catalan and Spanish refugees crossed the border into France, where they

were interned in camps, like Syrian refugees in Greece today. In November 1939, when New York’s Museum of Modern Art opened its first Picasso retrospective, the artist was indifferent to its success. His friend and dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler found him “bitter and sarcastic,” preoccupied by the political situation in Spain and by his own fear of being expelled by the French government. Nonetheless, Richardson reports, in the spring of 1940, after Germany invaded France, Picasso spurned invitations to emigrate to the United States or to Mexico. Having moved to the seaside town of Royan in anticipation of the German invasion, he decided in August 1940 to return to Paris, abandoning his elegant apartment on the rue la Boétie and instead holing up in his vast, dusty studio on the rue des Grands-Augustins. When the Germans insisted on examining the bank vaults where he and Henri Matisse had stored their work, Picasso convinced the inspectors that there was nothing valuable there. As the leading exponent of the “degenerate” art condemned by the Nazis, he was in constant danger of arrest. Fortunately, he was protected by a high-ranking French police official, André-Louis Dubois, who visited his studio daily. Despite Picasso’s continued friendship with collaborators such as Jean Cocteau, Richardson leaves the reader in no doubt of the heroism of his behavior. This political drama is just one of the narrative threads running through The Minotaur Years. R ichardson also explores the painf ul drama of Picasso’s collapsing marriage and his long-drawn-out divorce. The book’s photographs of Picasso and Olga with their son, Paulo, on vacations in 1933 and 1934 seem to show a happy bourgeois family, but Olga was apparently prone to rages and irrational behavior; she liked high society while Picasso had lost his taste for it. By the fall of 1933, he told Kahnweiler that he wished he could “be poor again with no more chauffeur or English nannies.” Depressed, he did little painting. Finally, in 1935, he filed for divorce, apparently without realizing that

under French law, this would require a complete inventory of the couple’s possessions, including his art, which was put under court seal. Traumatized, he began writing poetry instead of making visual art. Olga moved out of their apartment in the summer of 1935, and Picasso eventually settled for legal separation rather than a divorce. For Richardson, the “principal victim” of the divorce proceedings was Paulo, the couple’s fourteen-year-old son, who began a slide into drugs and petty crime. Olga sent Picasso a stream of “heartrending” letters begging him to help Paulo, but it was not until November 1937 that father and son climbed aboard a train for Switzerland, where Paulo entered a clinic for treatment. In May 1939, as the world collapsed around them, Picasso paid for Paulo to move to the “posh Swiss sanitarium” where Zelda Fitzgerald had received treatment at the beginning of the decade. Emerging in 1943, Paulo continued to get into trouble. Richardson notes in his epilogue that he eventually developed into “a loyal and lovable man who would serve his father as chauffeur and confidant over twenty years.” I n e a rly 193 5, P ic a s so’s you ng m i s t re s s Marie-Thérèse Walter became pregnant. This may have played some role in his decision to initiate divorce proceedings. In October, Walter gave birth to a daughter, named María de la Concepcíon after Picasso’s beloved sister Conchita, who had died, tragically young, when he was fourteen. Richardson sees the idealized image of Conchita as a concealed presence in much of Picasso’s work. The infant María eventually came to be called Maya. The following spring, Picasso rented a villa in Juan-les-Pins, on the Riviera, planning for his mistress and daughter to join him. Awaiting their arrival, he wrote to Walter, “This 23rd day of May 1936, I love you still more than yesterday and less than tomorrow. I will always love you as they say, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you.” They remained hidden away in the South for six weeks before returning to Paris. Richardson

Previous spread: Pablo Picasso, Étude pour La dépouille du Minotaure en costume d’arlequin (Rideau de scène pour Le quatorze juillet), May 28, 1936, india ink and gouache on paper, 17 ½ × 21 3⁄8 inches (44.5 × 54.5 cm), Musée Picasso, Paris © 2021 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Opposite: Sir John Richardson, New York, 2005. Photo: Janette Beckman/Getty Images This page: Pablo Picasso, Minotaure aveugle guidé par une fillette dans la nuit (Blind Minotaur Guided by a Young Girl at Night), Vollard Suite, plate 97, 4th and last state, January 1, 1935, aquatint, drypoint, and engraving on Montval laid paper, 11 × 13 ¾ inches (27.7 × 34.8 cm), Kunstmuseum Pablo Picasso Münster © 2021 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Kunstmuseum Pablo Picasso Münster

argues that Picasso’s amour fou for Walter evaporated after this experiment in domesticity, but his narrative suggests otherwise. At the end of 1936, Walter and her daughter moved to a villa in Le Tremblay-sur-Mauldre, an hour outside Paris. For the next three years, Picasso came to see them almost every weekend. Even in May–June 1937, as he was rushing to complete the giant canvas of Guernica, he knocked off work on Friday afternoons and spent the weekends in Le Tremblay. In 1939, he moved his unofficial family to a villa in the seaside resort of Royan. Physically separated from Walter, Picasso began a new series of love letters. Richardson quotes one reading “My love, I love you more every day. You mean everything to me . . . if I am sad, it is because I cannot be with you.” Picasso’s passion for Walter did not inhibit him from falling in love with the Surrealist photographer Dora Maar, whom he met at the beginning of 1936. According to the canonical version of their encounter, Maar strategically positioned herself at a table at Les Deux Magots, the famous café frequented by Picasso, and began playing with a knife, stabbing the tabletop between her fingers, which she occasionally nicked, staining her gloves with blood. More prosaically, Richardson reports that the two were introduced at a film opening on January 7. Perhaps, as he implies, the two artists were drawn together by a shared interest in Surrealist S&M, but as he also suggests, at first their link was “primarily photographic.” Maar took several remarkable portraits of Picasso, and Richardson prints a striking photograph of Maar that appears to have been taken by Picasso. Maar participated in the left-wing activities of the Surrealists and seems to have fostered Picasso’s increasing engagement with politics. In the spring of 1937, she assisted in the painting of Guernica and photographed the successive states of its changing composition. Richardson’s detailed account of this relationship suggests that what most attracted Picasso was Maar’s emotional volatility. After a weekend in the country in April 1937, she wrote to Picasso apologizing for “those scenes, do not take them seriously . . . I will try to correct myself . . . I will not cry, I will not scream, that is over now.” Later that year, after a vacation with friends in the South of France, she again wrote, “My fits of jealousy drive me crazy and

stupid with pain. . . . I’m so afraid of losing you that I can’t hold back from making those awful scenes.” In sum, Maar seems to have behaved much like Olga. Apparently, the agitated behavior that drove Picasso away also attracted him. Their relationship lasted for almost a decade and yielded countless paintings and prints, including the famous series of “Weeping Women.” Richardson breaks new ground in emphasizing the importance of Picasso’s relationships with writers such as Michel Leiris, Jaime Sabartés, Roland Penrose (an earlier biographer), and the poet Éluard, who became Picasso’s closest friend among the Surrealists; as Richardson notes, he “was rather more congenial than the arrogantly dogmatic [André] Breton.” From 1936 through 1938, Picasso and Maar vacationed in the South of France with Éluard and his wife, Nusch, accompanied by friends including Penrose, Man Ray, and their various romantic partners, including the gifted photographer Lee Miller. Photographs by Ray, Miller, and Maar give a vivid sense of the artists and writers enjoying a few last carefree days amid the darkening political situation. During World War II, Éluard joined the Resistance and transformed an ode to his wife into a stirring celebration of “Freedom.” As in earlier volumes, Richardson pays close attention to Picasso’s paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints, deftly summarizing previous scholarship and suggesting speculative new interpretations that compel the reader to see the work with a fresh eye. In keeping with the book’s title, the theme of the Minotaur takes center stage. Richardson explains how, after the bankruptcy of earlier Surrealist journals edited by Breton and Georges Bataille, the publisher Albert Skira launched a new journal called Minotaure, which transplanted Surrealism into the world of fashion and the high-end art market. The first issue, published on June 1, 1933, had a cover specially designed by Picasso and contained multiple features on his work. Picasso returned to this theme in 1935, creating two of his greatest etchings, Blind Minotaur Guided by a Young Girl at Night and Minotauromachie. Here he rewrote Greek

mythology, transforming the Minotaur from a brutish freak into a tragic embodiment of desire and aggression wracked by guilt. In both prints, the humbled monster is led by an innocent girl, whom Richardson interprets as an avatar of Picasso’s lost sister Conchita. The creative block induced by the divorce suit of 1935 dissolved by the spring of 1936, but Picasso continued writing poetry throughout the rest of the decade and even, with diminishing frequency, into the 1940s and ’50s. The Paris literary world greeted Picasso’s writing with enthusiasm. Richardson quotes numerous excerpts, such as this text from 1941: “Drop of water hanging on the rampart of flames of the bunch of flowers waving around at the fingertips of the burning lips of the sound of the reeds scratch the night the cries the curses and the bursts of laughter the ribbons of mixed colors exalting the stench of the crabs rotting on the beach of the wing rising from the body abandoned to the will of the waves.” As Richardson notes, Picasso’s writing has “a pictorial vividness that few surrealist poets could equal.” The unedited flow of his words contrasts starkly with the complex structures of his pictures, as if poetry offered him a vacation from the steely discipline of painting. The Minotaur Years reaches a climax with the painting of Guernica in May–June 1937. Richardson sets the stage several chapters earlier by quoting French journalist Louis Delaprée’s description of the aerial bombing of Madrid in November 1936: “The darkness shrouding Madrid is so thick that you could cut it with a knife. . . . Defenseless, we hear above our heads the deep musical vibration that is the herald of Death.” Encountering a young woman dying in the street, Delaprée notes, “The beam from an electric flashlight illuminates the corpse.” An ambulance driver picks up the corpse of an infant and places it atop the dead woman’s breast. “They’ll pick her up tomorrow,” he says, and drives off. The narrative of Guernica seems to unfold in Delaprée’s account, written six months before Picasso began work on the painting. Shifting the scene to Paris, Richardson describes the history of the cavernous space at 7 rue des Grands-Augustins that Picasso rented so that

Opposite, top: Adrienne Fidelin, Lee Miller, Pablo Picasso, and Nusch Éluard, Mougins, France, 1937. Photo: Roland Penrose © Lee Miller Archives, England 2021. All rights reserved Opposite, bottom: Man Ray, Paul Éluard and André Breton, 1930, gelatin silver print, 11 ½ × 8 7⁄8 inches (29.2 × 22.5 cm) © Man Ray 2015 Trust/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Reproduction: CNAC/ MNAM/Dis. RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, New York This page: Dora Maar’s photograph of Picasso’s painting Guernica during its execution in the studio on the rue GrandsAugustins, Paris, May 1937 © 2021 Dora Maar/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Reproduction: Mathieu Rabeau © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, New York

he could work on the huge canvas. As previous scholars have discussed, he was attracted to the address in part because it had served as the setting for Honoré de Balzac’s story “Le Chef d’oeuvre inconnu,” about a seventeenth-century painter who descends into madness and abstraction. Richardson reveals that it had also served as a rehearsal space for a left-wing theater troupe led by the brilliant actor Jean-Louis Barrault. He recounts the machinations of representatives of the Spanish Republic, desperate to persuade Picasso to paint a mural for the Spanish Pavilion at the 1937 World’s Fair. He aptly summarizes the vast scholarship on the painting and adds his own interpretation, involving Picasso’s dead sister Conchita and his fascination with the Roman cult of Mithraism. Drawing on Miriam Basilio’s groundbreaking research, Richardson reconstructs the astonish i ng i nd i f ference, even a ntagon ism, t hat greeted Guernica when it was first exhibited. The French press—including the Communist paper L’Humanité—ignored it. The Spanish officials in charge of the pavilion considered removing it and replacing it with a more conventional painting, Horacio Ferrer’s Madrid 1937 (Black Aeroplanes), showing terrified mothers embracing their children and shaking a fist at the planes that have reduced their city to rubble. (Ferrer’s painting now hangs in the Reina Sofía museum in Madrid along with Guernica.) Picasso offered his painting to the Basque state, but it turned him down. The British art historian Anthony Blunt published a review titled “Picasso Unfrocked,” denouncing Guernica as “not an act of public mourning but the expression of a private brainstorm.” Herbert Read, the leading British proponent of modernism, replied with a

letter praising it as “the modern Calvary.” L o ok i n g a f r e s h a t G u e r n i c a i n l i g ht o f Richardson’s detailed narrative of the years 1933– 36, it seems clear that Blunt was not completely mistaken. Guernica is, as Read insisted, a modern Calvary, but it is also an expression of Picasso’s private season in hell: the misery of his marriage, the grief of his wife and son, and the guilt that stopped him in his tracks as an artist. Somehow he transmuted these private sufferings into an indelible act of public mourning. Carrying his narrative beyond Guernica into the years 1938–43, Richardson tells the story of a second season in hell, this time caused by public events. Picasso’s art of these years becomes the barometer of a pervasive climate of despair. The last few pages of The Minotaur Years record Picasso’s encounter with Françoise Gilot, the brilliant young artist who would become his muse and partner in the postwar years. His 1946 portrait of her as a femme-fleur became a symbol of the spiritual rebirth of Europe after the war. Gilot herself told the story of these years in her extraordinary memoir Life with Picasso (cowritten with Carlton Lake and published in 1964). Reading this book in tandem with Richardson’s own memoir, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, gives a vivid sense of the next chapter of Picasso’s career. No doubt volume 5 of Richardson’s Life of Picasso would have been even richer, packed—like this volume—with improbable characters, astonishing revelations, and striking insights. It was not to be. As it is, The Minotaur Years represents the triumphant conclusion of a great biographer’s career.

In this second installment of a two-part essay, John Elderfield resumes his investigation of the proliferation of dots in modern and contemporary art. Part one addressed how dots have been used to make the surface of a painting disappear. The focus here is on how dots affirm the surface, and on their associations as a result: skin, touch, decoration, disfigurement, or, simply, the labor—or boredom—of producing them.

Dots have long been ubiquitous in non-Western art, famously so in African and Aboriginal Australian cultures. Their appearance in the West has been more recent. In medieval Europe, the technology to create clear, uniformly spaced dots on clothing did not yet exist, and the dotted fabric that was available was considered taboo because its untidy, semirandom blotches resembled the skin rashes caused by contagious diseases. To see, for example, the skin lesions in Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim altarpiece (1512–16) in Colmar, France, makes one understand why nobody wanted to be reminded of them by someone’s clothes. The critic Elaine Scarry has pointed out how the translation of skin into clothing is but one example, although an important one, of how a made object is a projection of the human body, extending its powers and acuity. 1 Medieval Europe was alarmed at the sight of that particular projection. Much later, with the neoclassical aesthetics of the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, visible brushstrokes that called attention to themselves within figure paintings were often taken to be blemishes, signs of ugliness if not of disease, and again associable with disfiguring marks on human skin.2 Even later, a common joke in the reception of Impressionist paintings was to profess similar alarm at the representation of dappled light dotting naked skin. Such a painting by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, exhibited in 1876, led the critic Albert Wolff to remark sarcastically, “Go ahead and try to explain to Renoir that a woman’s torso is not a heap of decomposing flesh covered with the purplish-green splotches that denote the final stage of putrefaction in a corpse.”3 By then, fabric with perfectly round, evenly spaced dots had been in production for some quarter of a century, made possible by sewing machines, invented in 1790, coming into commercial use by clothing manufacturers. The Impressionist painter Frédéric Bazille’s Réunion de famille (Family reunion) of 1867 shows two women wearing fashionable dresses made of such fabrics. Their connotation was utterly opposite to that of skin anxiety, complementing as it did the polka dance craze that swept through Europe in the mid-nineteenth century, giving the dots its name. To my knowledge, no discussion of Georges Seurat’s invention of pointillism in the mid-1880s mentions polka-dot dresses: reasonably so, since the dots on the dresses do not optically dissolve the surface of the fabric, as Seurat’s do the surfaces of his paintings, but mark it, conveying with varying boldness the shape of the body beneath. However, as mentioned in the first part of this essay, pointillism did emerge in a period of ever-increasing mechanical mass-production, and the comparison of pointillist paintings to textiles was common: Félix Fénéon, for example, Seurat’s principal critical supporter, spoke of the artist’s Un Dimanche après-midi à l ’Île de la Grande Jatte (Sunday Afternoon at the Grande Jatte, 1884–86) as “a monotonous and patient tapestry.”4 Fénéon was not speaking disparagingly, but Paul Gauguin probably was when he called the Neo-Impressionist painter Paul Signac a “voyageur en petits points,” meaning that he was at work on a kind of needlework—a remark the more pointed since Signac was married to a milliner.5 Also unmentioned in the context of Neo-Impressionism were the new innovations in printing of the period, but these had to be influential.6 They included the inexpensive halftone mass-printing device known as “Benday dots,” from their invention in 1879 by Benjamin Henry Day, Jr., of West Hoboken, New Jersey. In blown-up form, these dots appear often in

Roy Lichtenstein’s paintings of the 1960s, although his were usually handmade. In any case, surface-accentuating dots on fabrics, on the one hand, and Seurat’s surface-dissolving ones, on the other, are associated in the industrial means of the former and the scientific basis of the latter. And they are linked in the very opposition of how they are perceived to have been applied to the surface: on the one hand mechanically, on the other by hand.

The Prolonged Repetition of Certain Acts This contrast of means, which remains in play in artistic practices today, was the subject of a reminiscence written by the critic Paul Valéry in 1936. Some twenty or more years earlier, he had visited the Louvre with the then-aged painter Edgar Degas. The two men found themselves standing together before a landscape by the Barbizon artist Théodore Rousseau, who had painted a mass of foliage in very minute detail—“to a degree,” Valéry recalled, “that suggested endless labor.” “How superb,” he said to Degas, “but what a bore, to make all those leaves. . . . it must have been fearfully tedious.” “Rubbish,” replied Degas, “if there were no tedium, there’d be no enjoyment in it.”7 Degas’s response raised the question: does a tedious process necessarily produce a boring result? The lesson that Valéry took from their exchange had two parts. First: “The fact is that it is scarcely possible to enjoy that kind of labor any more; and all I had done was to express naïvely the increasing dislike we generally feel for a work of a monotonous nature, or involving prolonged repetition of certain acts that vary hardly at all. Machinery has put an end to patience.” But second, he acknowledged to himself, “The business of an artist’s life is . . . ceaseless and unremitting labor,” and “the labor of the artist is of a very old-fashioned kind, the artist himself a survival, a craftsman or artisan of a disappearing species, working in his own room, following his own homemade empirical methods.”8 Degas was such an artist, as he (and Valéry) readily acknowledged, and by the mid-1890s he had been making paintings with passages of repetitively, tediously applied, painterly dots—with far from boring results. While not unexpected within the sequence of his continuously adventurous technical methods, these dots may owe something to the science of pointillism and its confining tidiness. Degas’s mark-making effectively returns to the approach, influential on pointillism, that Eugène Delacroix had learned from John Constable: of filling areas not with a uniform tint, but with a multitude of different, related hues—yet not with the pointillist aim of their fusing at a distance, but to give freshness and energy to the surface itself. Also wanting that, Degas favored at this time subdued tones with few or no strong lights and darks to disrupt the effect, which if chromatically dull was very far from pictorially so. And such was his skill, learned from long practice, that the disposition of the marks has a look of inevitability. They appear to have drifted of their own accord within and sometimes across the compositional dividers Degas set down, like flotsam left on a beach by a receding tide—yet at the same time, they are conspicuously the record of the “prolonged repetition of certain acts” performed by this particular artist’s guiding hand. Degas’s painterly dots may well have influenced those that Édouard Vuillard made in his small 49

Right: Edgar Degas, Le Bain (The Bath), c. 1895, oil on canvas, 33 × 45 ¾ inches (83.82 × 116.20 cm), Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; acquired through the generosity of Mrs. Alan M. Scaife Below: Howard Hodgkin, Souvenirs, 1980–84, oil on wood, 60 × 108 inches (152.4 × 274.32 cm), collection of Robert and Jane Meyerhoff, National Gallery of Art, Washington. Artwork © The Estate of Howard Hodgkin Opposite: Pablo Picasso, Portrait of a Young Girl, 1914, oil on canvas, 51 × 37 ½ inches (130 × 96.5 cm), Musée national d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France. Artwork © 2021 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Jean-Claude Planchet © CNAC/MNAM, Dist. RMNGrand Palais/Art Resource, NY

interiors of the last decade of the nineteenth century. Very much later, they made Howard Hodgkin envious when I had the pleasure of taking him to see the great Degas canvas, Le Bain (c.1895), in Pittsburgh showing a female nude climbing into a bath with a randomly dotted wall behind her. He spoke admiringly of Degas’s repetitively marked surfaces, which he described as “the classical wall of expressed feeling that [Degas] has built for us.”9 Hodgkin also said that he wanted to avoid the “autograph mark” and to “be as impersonal as possible,” which I take to mean that he disliked Abstract Expressionist self-signatures yet also acknowledged that his unusually large, patently handmade painterly dots could not but be somewhat personal.10 They are very much so: their materiality presses upon us, and with it a strong sense of the artist’s hand. And because they are handmade, we know that they may be the result of endless monotonous labor, yet we nonetheless sense, and I think do see, that there was enjoyment as well as tedium in it. The same is true of other paintings belonging to the late afterlife of Degas’s painterly and otherwise surface-affirming dots, whose exemplary practitioners include artists different and variously known, including Jennifer Bartlett, Chuck Close, Andrew Forge, Howardena Pindell, Ian Stephenson, Hannah

Wilke, Terry Winters, and Joe Zucker. But rather than follow that long and distinguished line, we need to record an even bolder repudiation of the Neo-Impressionist approach than Degas’s, and a more influential one—one that turned pointillism against itself.

Pointillism Repurposed We know the precise place and moment at which this new pointillism was invented: at Avignon, in the South of France, in the summer of 1914. It was there and then that Pablo Picasso offered yet another example of the philosopher Isaiah Berlin’s conclusion that no idea can ever be implemented without adulteration or distortion: he began to use silhouetted planes of positive color covered with pointillist stippling, not to produce flickering patterns that caused surfaces to dissolve but—ironically, perhaps—to do the very opposite, to flatten these areas as if collaged onto the surface.11 In fact, to do even more. What the German art historian Heinrich Wölfllin called the “linear” painting of the Renaissance had set its drawn compartments as strata parallel to the picture plane, conveying an overall “will to the plane.”12 Paul Cézanne, in his later landscapes,

had reimagined that compositional method, with its geological reference. In 1912, Georges Braque and Picasso literalized this layering technique in what the critic Clement Greenberg rightly called “the pasted-paper revolution” of collage; 13 and the so-called Synthetic Cubism that Picasso created early in 1914 engaged and exaggerated the forward spatial push learned from his use of overlapping pasted papers. As a result, the pointillist stippling of silhouetted planes in Picasso’s Avignon paintings is right up on the surface to an unprecedented extent. And such was the inf luence of surface-defining Sy nt he t ic Cubi s m t h a t s u r fa c e - d i s s olv i n g Neo-Impressionism soon fell almost entirely out of favor. In the later teens, Sophie Taeuber-Arp translated her geometric abstract designs into tapestries, unwittingly, I suppose, literalizing Féneon’s textile analogy with Seurat’s pointillism but in works of a vivid, allover, tactile presence. 14 Her contemporaneous beaded bags may be imagined, more adventurously, as planar pointillist surfaces folded into paraboloid or ellipsoid volumes. But it is fair to say, I believe, that until recent times, the only later pointillist-type paintings of major achievement are the small group of such canvases that Paul Klee made in the early 1930s; and his dots too are coterminous with their surfaces. It was in 1936, we will remember, that Valéry compared the machine-made to the handmade in relation to artists such as Degas. This contrast had long been one of Klee’s thematic interests, and we may reasonably wonder whether it informed these otherwise unexpected works in his oeuvre, a question with a bearing on the future development of our present subject. The answer is: not necessarily, for Klee’s canvases also belong to a broad decline in confidence in the utopian, machinist implications of European geometric abstraction of the 1920s, an undercurrent expanding with the growth of Surrealist tendencies on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1930s. Alfred H. Barr, Jr.’s two famous 1936 exhibitions at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Cubism and Abstract Art and Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, tidily separated the two streams. And while the former seemed more in tune with that decade’s diaspora abstraction in New York, even as it was moving south to Latin America, the latter

would soon become more influential in the north, feeding, of course, the next decade’s development of Abstract Expressionism. By this time a gulf had opened between the perception of an increasing flood of mass-produced objects—often identified as American in origin—as culturally inauthentic and the valorization of art objects as possessing authenticity because visibly handmade.15 And while the “prolonged repetition of certain acts,” producing visibly handmade marks, was central to the Abstract Expressionist aesthetic, identifiably separate marks, even painterly dots, spoke more of the factory than of the artist’s studio. In 1957, at the apogee of that style, the art historian Meyer Shapiro would claim that “paintings and sculptures are the last hand-made, personal objects within our culture. Almost everything else is produced industrially in mass.”16 Five years later, he was proved wrong.

Polka Redux The year 1961 saw Lichtenstein’s Girl with Ball, her exposed flesh a screen of tiny dots. It also saw Walt Disney’s release of the hugely popular animated film One Hundred and One Dalmatians, whose plot revolved around the villainous Cruella de Vil’s attempt to harvest their delightfully dotted fur to make into coats. (This year’s filmic Cruella revival is perfidiously catty, not canine, with very few dots in sight.) Also in 1961, Disney provided a new polka-dot outfit for Minnie Mouse. She had worn her first one in 1928, and soon, in 1934, with Shirley Temple’s help in the film Stand Up and Cheer!, the polka-dot dress had become a symbol of sweet and happy wholesomeness, ideal for American children. In 1949, Little Dot (aka Dorothy Polka) made her appearance in Harvey Comics, obsessively preoccupied with dots and dotty in her behavior as well as in dress. But by then dotted dresses were becoming popular again with adult women, carrying with them into their subjects’ representation of femininity an echo of sweet childishness, which was often, of course, a disguise: in the 1950s, Marilyn Monroe and Lucille

Ball; in the 1960s, Twiggy, Goldie Hawn, and others wearing clothes at once girly and groovy, with dotted designs copied from paintings by Bridget Riley. In that decade, Riley’s canvases were using what do in fact look somewhat like the polka dots used in fashion. So were works by other artists represented in the Museum of Modern Art’s 1965 Op art exhibition The Responsive Eye, notably Larry Poons, as well as by artists not so represented, notably Lichtenstein and Yayoi Kusama. All inevitably carried the association of fashion, whether or not the artists desired it: Riley, certainly not; Kusama, not yet, but Louis Vuitton was waiting. T he c r it ic B a r ba r a Rose , re v iew i ng T h e Responsive Eye for Artforum, did not make the connection with fashion, but did say that Op art, like Pop art, was bound to be fashionable because “it satisfies the same appetites as . . . forms of popular entertainment.” Effectively, Rose was asserting that Shapiro had been wrong, and that these kinds of paintings affect us no differently from “almost anything else . . . produced industrially in mass”: Our affluence, leisure, and rising literacy will call for more and more art of this kind, which should be colorful, decorative, and easily experienced. . . . So, though we will not have folk art in our mass society, we will surely have art low in content and high in technique, which appropriately enough to the terms of modern life deals with sensations and not with feeling. Op art, however, goes Pop art one better by being considerably more mindless. . . . And here is the crux of the matter: Op art has no expressive content. It is expressively neutral, having to do with sensation alone.17 To u g h w o r d s , a c c o m p a n i e d b y s o m e MoMA-shaming for having presented, Rose said, an “irresponsible and dangerous” exhibition of “art that is sensational, hip, swinging, kicks, far-out;” not “steady and enduring.” There were, of course, novelty items produced at that time under the cover of both Op and Pop art, as well as boring, far-from-enduring ones within the steady

framework of contemporaneous abstraction. As we are continually reminded, there will always be art with a short shelf-life. Still, categorical critical statements have a short shelf-life, too, and while Rose’s reference to art like folk art now reads very differently—indeed, presciently—compared to how it did in 1965, her talk of encroaching mindlessness soon turned out to be misjudged. For a start, not polka dots but Polke dots had already begun to appear, namely the Rasterbilder of the German artist Sigmar Polke, paintings titled after the raster-dot technique of halftone printing. 18 These were far from expressively neutral works, as evidenced by the first of them, which was based on a 1963 newspaper photograph of Lee Harvey Oswald; and Polke’s subsequent works are sardonically critical of the “sensational, hip, swinging, kicks, far-out” sources that he frequently used. The dots of Polke’s earlier Rasterbilder, made with an eraser at the end of a pencil dipped into what looks like printer’s ink, are without much substance; later ones sit on the surface like blobs of plastic. Many constitute layered matrices of dots set down over mottled backgrounds that together manage to be both pointillist transparent and of artisanal materiality, and are both high in content and extraordinarily laborious in technique. Rather than satisfying the same appetites as do forms of popular entertainment, they have been said to embrace the boredom of their creation in escape from the incessant stimulation of external attractions in modern life.19 Jumping to the late 1980s, when dotted outfits continued to be popular (Prince, Princess Diana, soon Julia Roberts), Damien Hirst’s assistants began making his more-than-a-thousand so-called Spot paintings of perfectly regular, evenly spaced dots, their titles based on the names of chemical compounds. The name of the first and most prolific set of them, the Pharmaceutical paintings, associated them with medicinal pills, while the uniformity of the size and spacing of the dots placed them within the context of dotted fabrics and other objects “produced industrially in mass”—which they, in turn, have shaped. “These paintings have entered This page: Paul Klee, Ad Parnassum, 1932, oil on casein on canvas, 39 3⁄8 × 49 5⁄8 inches (100 × 126 cm), Kunstmuseum Bern, Association of Friends Opposite: Roy Lichtenstein, Girl with Ball, 1961, oil on canvas, 60 ¼ × 36 ¼ inches (153 × 91.9 cm), The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Gift of Philip Johnson. Artwork © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein. Photo: © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY

This page: Damien Hirst, Moxisylyte, 2008–11, household gloss on canvas, 81 × 51 inches (205.7 × 129.5 cm) © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved, DACS 2021 Opposite: Damien Hirst, Process Green, 2016, household gloss on canvas, 66 × 77 inches (167.6 × 195.6 cm) © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved, DACS 2021

popular culture,” Larry Gagosian told the critic and journalist Carol Vogel. “You see them in advertisements, on clothes, on cars. They’ve become part of our visual vocabulary.”20 And while they were handmade, the anonymity of those who painted them— Hirst made only five of them himself—also places them in the context of the machine-made.21 For better or worse, they negate everything particular to painting in the work of the artists I have discussed here, except setting down dots on a plane surface and the “ceaseless and unremitting labor,” to recall Valéry’s words, that that can take. “You gasp at the labour, if little else,” wrote the British critic Adrian Searle in January of 2012, informing us that Hirst’s assistants were working on a painting with a million spots that was going to take over nine years to complete.22 What would Valéry have had to say about that? Well, perhaps a little more: he would likely have thought of the ceaseless and unremitting labor that had gone into them, as well as of their anonymous creation, neither of the “very old-fashioned kind” of which he had spoken. And it is fair to say that Valéry would have been dismayed by Hirst’s subject, the ceaseless and unremitting pharmaceutical industry.

Pleasure and Pain Unlike Hirst’s Spot paintings, his faux-pointillist, so-called Colour Space paintings, begun some five years ago, do engage the pictorial history I have described here. In an online feature for the Quarterly, the critic Blake Gopnik sketched a provenance for them: he effectively proposed that their dense fields of jostling, sometimes overlapping, sometimes messily painted dots of varying size 54

allude to, only to negate, everything in the history of representation. And when he says, rightly I believe, “They are portraits of noise, not of communication,” he adds that their failure to communicate associates them with much of modern art “from Picasso on down” that “likes to set up grand schemes and goals that it can never fulfill, and to revel in the ambition and especially the absurdity of its failure.”23 If he is thinking of Guernica, this may seem a reach. Nonetheless, his argument speaks to what Greenberg, writing in 1948, called “the optimistic positivism” of early modernism, “its trusting and self-confident indifference to politics and ideology, its faith in the powers of reason and its certainty of the ultimate comfort of existence,” all of which “were becoming exhausted in the middle thirties.”24 More recent authors have proposed that the failure of this utopian promise, collapsing under the weight of mechanization and regulation, is what led to the continuous call for the stimulation of novelty and innovation of which Rose had complained; and, at the same time, to a new concept of leisure in finding peace and quiet enough to escape and be bored. 25 Greenberg was in fact writing of the compensatory, decorative hedonism of Joan Miró’s art, a pessimistic escape into the playful. This description may also seem apt for Hirst’s Colour Space paintings, as may escape into the pleasures of boredom. The same applies to Kusama’s crowd-pleasing installations, which have been cited by the promotional website Japanese Inside as being just as stress-reducing as a visit to the great Santuario di Vicoforte in northern Italy. This is the gist of an encouraging report described there on how before-and-after saliva samples taken at the Santuario by a Professor Enzo Grossi, Professor

of Quality of Life and Promotion of Health at the University of Bologna, show them to lower cortisol levels and sharply decrease anxiety.26 It seems hard to believe that a visit to the largest elliptical cupola in the world is going to replace medical marijuana; and even harder that being surrounded by Kusama’s dots might do the same. However, Japanese Inside tells us that while at first these dots may seem “like measles spots infecting everyday objects and even people,” visitors will soon be “catapulted into her obsessive world, experiencing her feelings, anxieties and at the same time her relief.” A less-strenuous, healthy alternative would be to associate Kusama’s dots with the traditional Mameshibori (“bean-squeeze”) dot patterns on Japanese tenugi (hand towels), whose lines of little indigo beans symbolize vigorousness and longevity. But are wearers of Vuitton’s Kusama line of clothes going to benefit similarly? Yes, according to Japan Inside, because purchasers can take home a pattern of dots “and feel it on their skin every day.” The question, then: is there room in the world of dots not only for pleasure—or boredom, for that matter—but also for what Greenberg called the “cold, resolute, static and complete” hedonism of early modernism?27 Probably not, but perhaps there is for something that trades a part of their inherent decorativeness as the price for making more demands on the viewer. This is an issue much larger than can be confined to this or indeed any discussion of paintings with dots. Looking back on Hirst’s Spot paintings, though, we are invited to wonder why he chose that generic name for them. After all, the word “spot” means a blemish or flaw, unlike the more neutral “dot.” “Hitting the spot,” meanwhile, means satisfying a need, and perhaps Hirst needed

an ironic term for what were extremely carefully painted canvases. Still, the connotation of damage or disfigurement sticks to their title. Earlier, we learned that dotted clothing was considered taboo in medieval Europe because its semirandom dots evoked rashes caused by contagious diseases; and, recently, that Kusama’s dots may at first seem like the spots of measles. When Hirst began his Spot paintings, polka dots—which is what these are—were appearing fairly often in queer culture as a signifier that put “aids in Plain Sight,” as the title of critic Ted Kerr’s discussion of the phenomenon has it. Among his examples is how, in the 1980s, British performance artist Leigh Bowery often posed in polka-dotted suits and hoods in “an aestheticizing of Kaposi Sarcoma, a cancer associated with HIV/aids,” that causes visible blotches of abnormal tissue to grow under the skin. Kerr also cites works with constellations of dots reminiscent of the Center for Disease Control’s attempts to map the spread of HIV/aids by tracking sexual encounters.28 Such mappings are now familiar to us, of course, in tracking the progress of the plague from which we continue to suffer; and it is fair to say that the spike-adorned globes of the covid-19 virus will be the dots—innumerable, infinite—that we will likely remember most from our present moment. 1. See Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain. The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 282, within a discussion of other objects, 281–86. 2. See Barbara Maria Stafford, “Characters in Stone, Marks on Paper: Enlightenment Discourse on Natural and Artificial Taches,” Art Journal 44, no. 3 (1984): 233–40, and Stafford, “‘Peculiar Marks’: Lavater and the Countenance of Blemished Thought,” Art Journal 46, no. 3 (Autumn 1987): 185–92. 3. Albert Wolff, Le Figaro, April, 3, 1876, quoted in Charles C. Moffett, The New Painting: Impressionism 1874–1886, exh. cat. (San

Francisco: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1986), 184. 4. Félix Féneon, “The Impressionists in 1886,” quoted in Norma Broude, ed., Seurat in Perspective (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1978), 38. The passage from which this comes is given in Øystein Sjåstad, A Theory of the Tache in Nineteenth-Century Painting (London and New York: Routledge, 2017), 119 n. 22, and discussed on 108. 5. See Sjåstad, A Theory of the Tache, 108–10. 6. In the first installment of this essay I referred to chromotypogravure, unique to France in this period, on which see Broude, “New Light on Seurat’s ‘Dot’: Its Relation to PhotoMechanical Color Printing in France in the 1880’s,” Art Bulletin 56, no. 4 (December 1974): 581–89. On the increasing use of dot-based halftone printing processes for newspapers and lithography in the 1880s see Dusan C. Stulik and Art Kaplan, Halftone: The Atlas of Analytical Signatures of Photographic Processes (Los Angeles: Getty Conservation Institute, 2013), 4–5. 7. Paul Valéry, “Degas, Dance, Drawing,” 1936, repr. in Valéry, Degas Manet Morisot, vol. 12 of The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, Bollingen Series 45 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 50. I refer to this passage, and to those cited in notes 15 and 16 below, in discussion of another dot-maker, “Three Sides of Joe Zucker, and His Homemade Aesthetics,” in Joe Zucker (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2019), 11–13. Earlier, in 1924, Siegfried Kracauer spoke of boredom as a consequence of the Protestant work ethic, only to imagine a “radical boredom” into which we might escape from the noisy world of attractions. See Kracauer, “Boredom,” The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 331–32. I was alerted to this essay by discussion of it in Lanka Tattersall, “Eight Days a Week,” in Kathy Halbreich, Alibis: Sigmar Polke 1963–2010, exh. cat. (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2014), 101–2. 8. Valéry, “Degas, Dance, Drawing,” 50. 9. Howard Hodgkin, in “John Elderfield and Howard Hodgkin: An Exchange,” in Howard Hodgkin Paintings, exh. cat. (Fort Worth: Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, 1995), 75. 10. Ibid., 67. 11. John Gray, “Foreword: Children of Two Worlds,” in Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism, 1965 (2nd ed. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013), xiii. I refer to an earlier proof of Berlin’s principle in the first installment of this essay. 12. Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art, 1915, Eng. trans. M. D. Hottinger (New York: Dover Publications, 1950), 73. 13. Clement Greenberg, “The Pasted-Paper Revolution,” 1958, repr. in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John O’Brian, vol. 4., Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957–1969 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 61–66.

14. See Anne Umland and Walburga Krupp, Sophie Taeuber-Arp: Living Abstraction, exh. cat. (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, and Basel; Kunstmuseum, 2021), illustrations on 43–49, 70–89. The pointillist associations of these works go unmentioned, either here or in T’ai Smith’s fine short essay, 35–38, on the artist’s beaded bags, with additional illustrations of them on 68–69, 73. 15. This is a major theme of Philip Fisher, Making and Effacing Art: Modern American Art in a Culture of Museums (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), esp. 146–48, 161–68. 16. Meyer Schapiro, “The Liberating Quality of Avant-Garde Art: The Vital Role that Painting and Sculpture Play in Modern Culture,” Artnews 56, no. 4 (Summer 1957). 17. Barbara Rose, “Beyond Vertigo: Optical Art at the Modern,” Artforum 3, no. 7 (April 1965). 18. The earliest of the Rasterbilder were entirely handmade, but Polke soon began to use a stencil to lay down an overall pattern of dots and then to fill in the spaces between them by hand. See Tattersall, “Eight Days a Week,” 98, in a fine essay on these works, 94–116. 19. See ibid., 101–2, for such an argument. 20. Larry Gagosian, quoted in Carol Vogel, “Damien Hirst’s Spots Return to fill 11 Galleries,” New York Times, December 13, 2011. 21. Vogel reports that Hirst painted only five canvases himself in ibid. 22. Adrian Searle, “Full Circle: The Endless Attraction of Damien Hirst’s Spot Paintings,” Guardian, January 11, 2012. 23. Blake Gopnik, “Damien Hirst: Colour Space Paintings,” Gagosian Quarterly, June 22, 2020. Available online at https:// gagosian.com/quarterly/2020/06/22/essay-damien-hirst-colourspace-paintings/ (accessed September 6, 2021). 24. Greenberg, Joan Miró (New York: The Quadrangle Press, 1948), 41. 25. See Tattersall, “Eight Days a Week,” 101–2, for reference to Barbara Dalle Pezze and Carlo Salzani, eds., Essays of Boredom and Modernity (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), and Elizabeth Goodstein, Experience without Qualities; Boredom and Modernity (Stanford, CA.: Stanford University Press, 2005). 26. See “Dots Obsession. A portrait of Yayoi Kusama,” Japan Inside. https://Japaninsides.com/-dots-obsession-a-portrait-ofyayoi-kusama/. The quotations that follow come from this source. The same article also appears on the website Platform, where it is attributed to at Cristina Bigliatti and dated December 15, 2016. See https://www.platformarchitecture.it/yayoi-kusama-dots-obsession/ (accessed September 6, 2021). 27. Greenberg, Joan Miró, 41. 28. Ted Kerr, “Connecting the Polka Dots. AIDS in plain sight,” Bomb, February 7, 2017. Available online at https://bombmagazine. org/articles/connecting-the-polka-dots/ (accessed September 6, 2021).

In conversation with Antwaun Sargent, Rick Lowe discusses abstraction, scale, and the concept of social sculpture across his paintings and communityengaged artworks.

RICK LOWE

How did you come to work in abstraction? RICK LOWE My journey as an artist has gone through many, many stages. At this point I’m squarely in the midst of exploring painting in a way that deeply considers its formal aspects, but when I was first learning art, it was in a very traditional, conservative approach. I was always drawn to the making of things, because I was learning that I could do something that I really didn’t know that I could do. The thing I was attracted to was the notion that art could transform lives, that it had this deeper value than just what was on the surface, and I started to realize that painting landscapes wasn’t going to do it. So early on in college I started to rebel and to do things that were more figurative and reflective of what was happening in current affairs. That led me—because I was trying to have a direct impact—into social and community-engaged work, which I started to explore through Joseph Beuys’s concept of social sculpture. Then over time I realized that there was another part of me that I wasn’t accessing, and that was the formal act of painting. AS Your recent work is sited in geography or location. What we see isn’t figurative representation, it’s maplike grids that draw on collage and on aspects of both figuration and abstraction. RL These works come out of my drawings of dominoes, a cultural activity I’ve been deeply involved with for the past thirty years. The way dominoes is played in our neighborhood, and most Southern neighborhoods, there’s a certain aggression about it. It’s not just a game, it’s a place—a place where you can sit down with colleagues or community members and work things out, a space in which people learn, grow, educate, get frustrated, get humbled. All kinds of things happen at the domino table. For me it’s been a great way to get to know people and to find those deep levels of feelings and understanding of the world. It’s been an integral part of shaping me as a person and as an artist. Sitting there and playing those games, often I find myself drifting, looking at the patterns: “Wow, look at that. Why didn’t they turn this way? They turned the domino that way to make it come back around but it wasn’t even at the end of the table. That was a decision. Why was that decision made?” There are these design decisions that nobody’s really conscious of, I guess. So I just started taking photographs of them, because it’s fascinating to see how choices are made even when people aren’t necessarily conscious of the choices they’re making. And you know, that’s so much like neighborhood development: people make choices all the time without necessarily knowing that those choices will have a huge impact on how their community grows. Little did I know that if you layer the drawings of dominoes I started making, they turn into maplike images, which was a curious thing for me because during the early years of developing Project Row Houses [1993–2018] I was looking at maps all the time—maps about land use, home ownership, commerce, all of it. AS Why did you start Project Row Houses? RL Basically because there was a yearning for me and other artists [James Bettison, Bert Long Jr., Jesse Lott, Floyd Newsum, Bert Samples, and George Smith] to figure out how we could establish a presence and leverage the resources that we had as artists to support the communities that we came ANTWAUN SARGENT

from. So we decided to pool our efforts and try to do that. I was doing volunteer work in this community in Houston and saw these houses and thought this would be a great opportunity to try to explore social sculpture. That opened up this possibility and process of collaborative work. AS How is Project Row Houses a social sculpture? RL Beuys coined the term in the 1970s and defined it as the way we shape and mold the world. I was really excited about that concept—about thinking of the world as Beuys said, as a big piece of sculpture that we’re all sculpting all the time. Maybe I don’t have the capacity to think about the world as a whole, but maybe I can think about a community. So the process of building community within the context of these little shotgun houses was my way of trying to manifest what I was aspiring to in terms of social sculpture. AS Part of your practice has been about uplifting and being in community with other artists through projects such as Project Row Houses. I was wondering if you could talk about those relationships and their importance to your practice and your development as an artist. RL I’ve always been connected with other artists, and of course social and community-engaged

art is about building community. One of the aims of Project Row Houses was to create a platform for artists from all walks of life, at all levels of their careers, to engage within the Third Ward community, where Project Row Houses was being developed. Over the years, loads of people came through and produced different kinds of work and built different relationships there. I have all these little things in my archive—drawings by Otobong Nkanga, a little cassette box by Shahzia Sikander— and not just by artists but by community folks, people involved in these community movements and efforts. One of my favorites is a yard sign that came out of an antigentrification movement. It says “Third Ward Is Our Home and It’s Not For Sale.” We had these yard signs all over the place, and what was cool about it was finding people in the community who were performing acts with the work. I remember one guy very specifically—we were sitting playing dominoes one day and we saw him walking down the sidewalk. He had one of our signs held up in his hand, almost in protest, and Jesse Lott, one of the artists playing dominoes, took off his belt and made a harness for this guy so that he could carry it, one on the front and one on the back. 59

Project Row Houses was a big community effort, and I started seeing these individuals who I thought had an interesting quality. I started thinking about how the twenty-two houses of Project Row Houses had been relegated to meaningless, right? People were saying, They don’t have any value, might as well tear ’em up, get rid of them. Then I started seeing that there were individuals who fit that same description. You know, people who had been incarcerated—they get out, people are like, Oh, they don’t have any value. But I started finding these things that people were doing that were interesting. There was a guy named Benjamin who played dominoes with us. Most people thought of him as a nutty guy, he would just walk along playing his saxophone, but we’d be playing dominoes and Benjamin would jump up and get on his bicycle with his saxophone when he heard a fire engine. He would ride to where the fire was happening and all of sudden he’d just play his saxophone. It was kind of like he was playing a requiem for these burning houses. So I made a photomontage of him playing the saxophone in front of the burning house and placed them around the neighborhood as posters and billboards. It turned out to be an interesting way to get people to look at this person differently. AS I wonder if you could talk about what it means to work on those varying scales—why it’s important to work both at the communal level and at the individual level. RL Over the years, I found myself working on a lot of different scales. Project Row Houses was this neighborhood-scale project, working with large groups of artists to try to effect change in a broad sense. But then there’s also the side of working at a more intimate scale. And folks often talk about that in the community, about how if you can just change one person, or you can provide opportunity for one person, that’s to be celebrated. We always want to look at how we can do things at a large scale, but it’s important to look at those small-scale situations as well. I like large-scale stuff, I like large-scale paintings, community projects, but one of the things about scale that’s important, and probably most artists have this experience too, is that you have to scale down sometimes to learn stuff. So you work on drawings, you work on things at a smaller scale, to kind of work things out and get to understand things that you’re going to be doing on this larger scale. I’ve always had a deep level of interest in multiple scales of work because all scales provide a particular kind of energy that’s needed to move forward. When I started to do the drawings of dominoes, it all kind of made sense: I could have these imaginary maps that if you looked at them deeply would pose more questions than answers. I started to build these things up with collage, making domino drawings almost like wallpaper—I paint them and then cut them apart and reassemble them. They often look as if they’re creating land-use designations. Sometimes they look like they’re creating a kind of a language. AS In these more abstract works, you’re also sort of abstracting figurative symbols. In the Black Wall Street Journey paintings [2020–] you see that with the money, where you use a sanding technique to the point that some of it just ends up white; the white sort of happened, and that evokes white violence in my mind. Then with Victoria Square Project #1 [2021], you have these monuments built in there that help root it into the location or bring up this idea of a map. 60

Opening spread: Rick Lowe in front of Black Wall Street Journey #6 (2021). Photo: Brent Reaney Second spread, left: Rick Lowe, Untitled, 2020, acrylic and paper collage on canvas, 72 × 60 inches (182.9 × 152.4 cm), Menil Collection, Houston. Photo: Thomas Dubrock Second spread, right: Rick Lowe, Project Row Houses, Houston, 1993–2018, communitybased project co-founded with James Bettison, Bert Long, Jr., Jesse Lott, Floyd Newsum, Bert Samples, and George Smith. Top: Artists and community members at Project Row Houses, 1996. Photo: courtesy Rick Lowe Studio. Bottom: Installation view, Round 46: Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matter at Project Row Houses, March 24–June 4, 2017

These paintings are informed by so many of the experiences I’ve had or am having. I want these experiences in the work, and it takes a certain level of discipline for me not to let them overtake it—I have to figure out ways to layer them in so that they don’t usurp the whole focus. If you look at the Black Wall Street Journey paintings, in some of them you only see hints of these fake hundred-dollar bills that have been sanded and manipulated in; in others you can see it more obviously. It’s just a matter of how I feel about the composition. I’m also doing these archival pieces, like Victoria Square Project #1, where I’m referencing dif ferent projects that I’ve worked on in the past. Because one of the things about the community-based projects I’ve been working on is that they’re time-based; some of them don’t exist any longer. I’m interested in using painting as a way of archiving them and bringing a consciousness of those projects into the world. AS You’ve spent so much time in the community—organizing the community, thinking about how art works in the community, how art can have real-life consequences in the community—and I see that show up in the way the collage elements are connected throughout the work. You have this strong visualization of that connection. RL What’s interesting is how many different ways RL

the domino pattern can have meaning and value. Sometimes it’s about creating density, but a lot of times it’s about connecting hubs and different kinds of things. So much community-based work is about how you connect things, and it’s intuitive. Now I can sit back and look at it in the paintings: in building the composition, it’s interesting to see how the flow and the movement of the work is about connecting different parts of the painting to other parts, so it’s almost like building a community in a sense. A lot of that is geographic; it has a geographic feel. But a lot of it is psychological or social. It’s about the movement of consciousness from one place to the next. I get excited looking at them because I’m thinking about how they’re articulating something in my head—all these things I’m trying to connect. You know, there’s no clear set answer to issues like gentrification or issues around Black economic investment; there are many different ways to do it, but it’s never quite that clear. So when I’m working on these paintings it helps settle me a little bit; it reminds me that sometimes things are about questions and they’re not about answers. In the social and political context, you’re really looking for answers, and that’s what we should be doing. But we also have to ask questions, and I can’t think of a better way to ask the questions than in the paintings that I’m making.

Previous spread: Rick Lowe, Untitled #071421, 2021, acrylic and paper collage on canvas, 60 × 84 inches (152.4 × 213.4 cm). Photo: Thomas Dubrock This page: Rick Lowe, Victoria Square Project #1, 2021, acrylic, photo paper, and paper collage on canvas, 96 × 72 inches (243.8 × 182.9 cm). Photo: Thomas Dubrock Artwork by Rick Lowe © Rick Lowe Studio

PICTURE BOOKS ORGANIZED BY EMMA CLINE

OTTESSA MOSHFEGH & ISSY WOOD

As a writer, I’ve often been tasked with writing about art. It’s a lovely task, to be sure, and always an interesting challenge—how can I interpret a visual medium through words? How can I conjure the magic of an artwork with an entirely different set of tools? Opportunities abound for writers to respond to the work of artists—the catalogue essay is a classic example—but I’ve often wished for a reciprocal space where artists might respond to a work of literature. My desire is partly selfish: the great fortune of having your work interpreted by another artist is a way of giving it a second life. But I also think it can be an incredibly valuable exercise for the one doing the interpretation. Like a Rorschach inkblot, a not her person’s work can serve as a kind of tinder through which your own ideas and viewpoints become manifest. The artist and the writer are both revealed anew through the exchange. And so we started “Picture Books,” a new impr int t hat pairs contemporary fiction writers with contemporary artists. There are no limits or conditions or requirements. The artist is given a text and has total freedom to create an image that is, in whatever way, in conversation with the writer’s work. I’m so exc ited for the first book in the series, br i n g i n g toge t her t he writer Ottessa Moshfegh and the painter Issy Wood. Moshfegh’s work is always fearless, funny, and brilliant. It made perfect sense, t hen , to pa i r her w it h Wood, whose own work is alive with visual contradictions and a spiky intelligence. Both share a gothic humor and an attunement to t he da rker c u r rent s of the world, the hidden realms where shame and desire intersect. —Emma Cline

they’re not native to the UK. It was a real Google Images situation. [Your main character] Jerome Littlefield’s involvement with the chipmunk felt like the most directly surreal part of the story; it was the telltale sign that the young woman, Stacy, had lived more than he could dream of. OM In your painting generally, how much do you use the Internet to research images? IW A lot. I’ve gotten rid of all of the hang-ups that older male art-school teachers put on doing so. It’s the best library I could ask for. I particularly like auction websites: all these sales of people who’ve

really understand them because I don’t want to know exactly what the truth is. I’m just looking for a direction or my own idea. IW If you’re looking for the whole truth, either way, you probably shouldn’t look on the Internet. I find it fun all the same. Right now I’ve been delving through a lot of things that men would like, especially cars. I could spend hours on these forums where men are really horny for their cars, which made me think about what it is to try on a male perspective in writing, which you’ve done in this story. Is that something you’ve done before? OM My very first book was a novella that was written in the perspective of a man, a young, ver y alcoholic man in the mid-nineteenth c ent u r y. I ac t ua l ly felt really close to him and admired that character, whereas with Jerome, in this new story, he’s like a perversion of a male version of myself. He’s what would happen if I allowed myself to exploit my most pathetic insecurities. IW Whether those insecurities are yours or his, they’re always going to se em to me a lot more pathetic coming from a man. The casualness with which Jerome says “Maybe I’ll just write a couple of screenplays,” for instance, is really extraordinar y. I’ve heard this casualness from a man recently and meanwhile, I’m thinking about whether having an extra piece of fruit is just too decadent. This idea of talking up one’s own project before getting it off the ground—is that something that happens with you or is that reserved specially for the man? OM I don’t think it’s just for men; it’s anyone with an inf lated sense of self, which a writer usually has. I totally have that hang-up, too. What I think is funny about the male factor of this story is that I wrote it a few months before I met my husband, who is also a writer. And when he read this story, he saw himself in it too and I think maybe thought that I was making fun of him. I was like, Oh, no, no, I wrote that before I met you, and this story is more about me than anyone else I actually know. The maleness of it is like an old cliché, but making fun of female insecurity is too complicated for me. I can’t be as scathing and funny for some reason. My own sexism. Maybe because of all of the ways I feel tortured with having been born female, when I pick a voice to speak in that’s male, I can ignore the depths of my neuroses and look at them as something to be made fun of. IW You’d have to be a glutton for punishment

THIS WINTER GAGOSIAN WILL INAUGURATE A NEW SERIES OF PUBLICATIONS ORGANIZED BY EMMA CLINE. ENTITLED “PICTURE BOOKS,” THE COLLECTION WILL PRESENT SHORT NOVELLAS ALONGSIDE ARTWORKS CREATED IN RESPONSE TO THE TEXTS. THE FIRST INSTALLMENT PAIRS OTTESSA MOSHFEGH’S STORY “MY NEW NOVEL” WITH A PAINTING BY ISSY WOOD. IN CELEBRATION OF THE PUBLICATION, WE PRESENT AN INTRODUCTION BY EMMA CLINE AND A CONVERSATION BETWEEN THE AUTHOR AND ARTIST.

I loved your story so much. OTTESSA MOSHFEGH I loved your painting. IW Well, then we’re good. I’ve never made a painting in response to a story before. It was completely a new process; I didn’t want to be dismissive of any part of the story that you felt was important, but I developed a preoccupation with the chipmunk and it took over in a powerful way [laughs]. OM I love the chipmunks in the painting. Did you think of it as the same chipmunk repeated or different chipmunks? IW In my head it was the same chipmunk. Chipmunks are exotic animals to me because ISSY WOOD

died, or people who’ve gotten divorced and someone needed cash, and these big auction houses log every single object that’s been through there and that have gone under the hammer. I make a lot of work pretty fast and it seems to suit the process. I refuse to beat myself up for using the Internet to work in the oldest medium in the world. I can beat myself up for a bunch of other things, but it won’t be that. How much does the Internet factor into your writing? OM I definitely use it for research. And I tend to be a really bad researcher. I’ll skim things and not

to want to see yourself in this story. I was trying to work out where the line between the delicious schadenfreude of watching this man fumble—calling his mom and trying to have her convince him that he’s a genius—ends and where pity begins. Do you pity Jerome? If this man is a part of yourself, do you have any sympathy with that? OM I have sympathy, but I’m really unkind about it. I’m pretty tough on myself. I’m curious how you feel and how you respond to praise. IW Terribly. I’m always going and looking for it and shunning it when it appears. It’s still quite new for me. I could absorb praise when it came from a teacher at my school, when I was a kid being praised for something that had very clear, delineated rules—good grammar, good language, good answers to math questions—versus someone praising my paintings, which I don’t know what to do with. I feel like what happens when you’re that hard on yourself is you think everyone who compliments you is a fool. And so not only do you not just sit there and take the compliment, the person who just complimented you has just gone down in your estimation, and then the lonely cycle begins. OM Yeah, I’m glad you said it and I didn’t [laughs]. But that’s exactly how I feel too. There are certain people I see as peers. The people I admire the most are people whose practices are completely mysterious to me and praise from them is usually different because it’s somehow within an appreciation of the subtlety of the work. But yeah, everything else is just kind of bullshit feeling. In your painting, I assumed that the face was a portrait of Jerome in a way. I’m curious about your experience of imagining his face—did you imagine his physicality? Or just the image. IW Just the image. I wanted to find a sad man. I could have gone into the few details you provide in the story and built from there, but I didn’t want to open up that can of worms. I was asking myself to paint a portrait of this man without knowledge of his physicality. In the story, you learn what he eats and how he might look while staring at someone’s breasts in a cafe, but I wanted mainly to go for sadness. OM I think he’s perfect. IW I think it would have been a lot easier to make the painting if I’d hated the story, honestly. OM Why? IW It would be low stakes, but with this, because I like the story, I was trying to work out who I was trying to please aside from myself always. I wanted to do it justice. OM Do you find that that’s true all the time with your painting, or was there more of that because this was like an assignment? IW It was an assignment. It stirred a school feeling in me. And I go around claiming to want some kind of assignment, almost wishing the structures of school could be put back on me, but I’m in completely the wrong job for that. And then when it comes, the need to please is so ingrained that it’s crippling. But not so crippling that I don’t get the job done. OM People come to me with things—Will you write an essay about this or that—and I find that I always fail and back out if it’s something I’m not actually interested in enough to push myself to do it. But the desire to have some kind of pressure or discipline or authority is really present for me too. Not necessarily in a school way, but it’s a lot to have to organize your own ambition and then still do the job of the creator, unbridled and manic and insane. Looking back at Jerome and his therapist, there is

that dynamic of the authority I need to please. IW Outsourcing the authority helps; I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to do something just for myself. Passion to me is a very corny word by itself. And since what I do doesn’t feel like the traditional idea of work, I have to engage in as many trappings of work as I possibly can so that, I don’t know, some entity will be pleased with how I’m doing. How was your pandemic? OM Well, I didn’t get sick. I wrote a novel, and I’d moved into a house three or four months before it started. Before that I was in an apartment—a lot like Jerome Littlefield’s, actually—so it was cool to have a house with more room. It’s been completely crazy overall, though, and when things started to, quote unquote, Open up, I was like, I don’t want to go back. IW Oh yeah. OM Part of me as a writer is like, Oh, I need to stay and observe society and respond to it, and then the other part of me is like, Fuck other people, right? I just want to be with the land and the birds and the wind and fresh water and die in peace, but [laughs]— IW You’re not allowed both. You’re not allowed to observe society close up and also have the land and the birds and the peace. As soon as people enter the equation, you’ve lost your peace. OM That’s so true. IW I was thinking of this painter Lee Lozano, who’s one of my favorites. For a show, she decided to stop communicating with women entirely. This was for a specific project, but it turned out that she really loved not speaking to women so she never spoke to a woman again. I think she wrote a whole book explaining her motives, but I don’t really want to know any more. I just like the idea of something befalling you and then finding out that it suits you, and I wonder whether you feel like you’ve been in training for a pandemic with certain levels of solitude for a while, or whether it was as much of a shock as it was to most other people? OM I think it was still a shock. Maybe because I’m really good at being alone and at home, it wasn’t as hard for me. I rarely go anywhere anyway. I missed my family, weirdly; family became very important. I say “weirdly” because I’m not the kind of person to miss people. I miss dogs but not people. How about you? Were you in London the whole time? IW Yes. Just before the pandemic, I was starting to think about how much time I was beginning to spend alone and whether that was good for me and whether I’m more of a people person than I give myself credit for. A lot of my worst demons thrive in solitude, as much as I wish that wasn’t true. But all I wanted to do was live alone and work alone and not have to deal with people, and the pandemic just tripled it. I think the parts of me that were relieved by the pandemic, the solitude, were very unhealthy parts of me. I made a lot of work, but I took several steps back in recovery in all forms. And bouncing back is obviously a lot harder to do than to slip into it in the first place. But I have a lot of good work to show for it. I don’t know, it’s a double-edged sword. And, like you, as soon as things were open again, I’d pretend that I was still scared of covid, there were still cases floating around, but it wasn’t covid at all. It was just the idea of having to be presentable, or having to be on form, or— OM I really don’t want to have to go back to the way things were. I’m hoping that all this experience of the pandemic will actually make us wiser in some way. We started out talking about the Internet, and I want to get off the Internet in the

same way I want to leave society, but I’m not off the Internet, you know? [Laughs] I could be. I just am not. IW Have you ever tried making visual art? OM Yeah. IW How did it go? OM I was always studying art while I was in school, and out of school too. I really liked taking painting classes and life drawing. I wished that I could have been a better photographer. I’m a really bad painter. IW Some people like that. People try actively to become bad painters now, so. OM Maybe it’s my moment. Actually, I took this test once online that was supposed to tell you how sophisticated your color palette is visually, like what colors you can recognize. And it turns out I’m really stupid when it comes to colors. IW Really? A color moron. OM Yeah. Apparently other people experience color more subtly than I do—I can’t even imagine what that must look like. That’s what this test told me, that I’m just unimaginably stupid about color. Apparently things are way more complicated than I perceive them. IW [Laughs] That’s a nice thing to be told by an online test: things are far more complicated than you think. I like being told that with some authority from an algorithm, that’s amazing. So what’s your next novel about? OM Well, the next book that comes out, it comes out in the spring and it’s called Lapvona, which is the name of a fictional village from the late Middle Ages, and it’s the story of the stuff that happens in this village over a year and a half. And the novel I need to get back to work on, which is hopefully the next one I’ll finish, is narrated by a ghost on the occasion of her resuming consciousness, and she recounts her life and death. She was born in Shanghai and ended up emigrating to San Francisco in drag, assuming her brother’s identity. That’s as far as I’ve gotten. I’ve just been stuck on a ship. IW I know, it’s hard to proceed from being stuck on a ship in drag. I don’t know. OM It is. IW I mean, that’s limbo if ever I’ve heard of it. OM Yeah. IW I’m going to order them when they’re— OM Oh no, I’ll send them to you. IW I’d like that. Maybe it can get me back into reading, rather than just scanning essays about suicide in Harper’s.

Previous spread: Issy Wood, the down payment, 2021, oil on linen, 15 ¾ × 11 ¾ inches (40 × 30 cm) © Issy Wood “My New Novel” by Ottessa Moshfegh will be published by Gagosian this winter.

Tyler Mitchell, Family Forever (Cherokee Rose), 2021 © Tyler Mitchell. Courtesy the artist

Social Works II is a sequel to Social Works, an exhibition presented at Gagosian, New York, this past summer. This new edition, presented at Gagosian, London, foregrounds artists from the African diaspora and offers timely, innovative perspectives on the relationship between space—personal, public, institutional, and psychic—and social and artistic practice. Social Works II features an intergenerational group of artists working in multiple mediums and practices, including painting, photography, sculpture, ceramics, and installation. Its aim is to think across geography to explore how identity is created and experienced through the making and unmaking of communities and spaces. All of the participating artists have used their own dynamic practices in a myriad of instrumental ways to consider how new communal, social, material, and spatial practices can be generated throughout the African diaspora. Rooted in a rich history and futurity, their work explores humanity’s enduring nature and the liberatory potential of self-empowerment. The work on view is united by a conscious engagement with today’s cultural moment—and the histories and legacies that have produced it—where numerous social factors have converged to produce a heightened urgency for artists of the African diaspora to utilize space as a communitybuilding tool and a means of creating visionary possibilities within their work. —Antwaun Sargent

Tyler Mitchell, Untitled (Lunarlander), 2021 © Tyler Mitchell. Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Antwaun Sargent: Your 2020 series I Can Make You Feel Good was about utopia and the ways in which a Black utopia could be imaged through your aesthetic lens. Here, with the new work, you’re engaging with landscape, the idea and the genre. What led you to explore this notion of landscape? Tyler Mitchell: I Can Make You Feel Good was a response to the idea of representation. A lot of the images in that body of work are a cross between personal work and commissioned work in the fashion space, so all of those works think more in terms of portraiture, the history of representation, and how I’d like to photograph or imagine young Black folks existing in a fashion context. It was also a response to the work of photographers like Ryan McGinley and Larry Clark. With I Can Make You Feel Good I envisioned new protagonists inhabiting this idea of free youth or utopia— namely, young Black men and women relaxing and enjoying one another. With my new project Dreaming in Real Time, several questions arose: What spaces do these protagonists inhabit? In what spaces do they interact? What is our historical and contemporary relationship to physical land? 74

I think a lot of that started coming to life for me over the last year, when, due to covid, I wasn’t able to visit Georgia, the land I’m from. I spent a lot of time dreaming about that land in a nostalgic way. The images came from that longing, the yearning to depict groups of Black folks simply existing, enjoying, and belonging to land. AS: In works such as Georgia Hillside (Redlining) and Riverside Scene, you situate these young figures in the landscapes of Georgia. In Georgia Hillside (Redlining) you have a juxtaposition between the idyllic scene and these red lines you’ve painted onto the hillside. That juxtaposition creates a tension between the past and the present. How are you speaking about the past in the contemporary moment through these images? TM: I think a part of those images, and of that project in general, is being in direct conversation with the history of the “pastoral.” The impetus being, How do I photograph Black folks enjoying or being on Southern land? You can’t really talk about Georgian land, American land, or Southern land without talking about redlining and the systemic racial division of Black folks. It’s a systemic denial of mobility. When you

think about the ways Black folks have been told they are or aren’t allowed to move around on the land, that’s what those lines are calling into question or bringing to the fore. Another reading of those images that I thought was interesting, and that came up through conversations with friends, was that they also become lines for the eye to follow through the frame. So not only do the lines bring to the fore this not-so-subtle history of systemic racial division and prevention of mobility on land, but they also become potential pathways for connection between the figures in the images. The lines actually allow the viewer’s eye to travel playfully through the composition of the photograph. All those devices work on multiple levels in this new work. AS: In contrast to the racial histories that have Black populations arriving in cities, in the Great Migration et cetera, these images are asking, What does it look like when Black folks are in rural landscapes? The work explores how histories of sharecropping, histories of redlining, have shaped our relationships to the land and how we operate and live on the land. TM: Another goal of these images is to ask,

How do we socialize and interact and exist in the face of historical divisions? And how do we flourish in spite of those things? AS: You have three very different topographies in this series. In Georgia Hillside you have a hillside of course, in the Albany, Georgia image you have the sand dune scene, and then in Riverside Scene you’re on the bank of a river. I was wondering if you could talk about moving among those landscapes and why it was important to show that variation. TM: I thought it was a beautiful task to show the sheer diversity of the landscapes of Georgia. I mean, nothing about any of those landscapes tells you exactly where we are, right? There’s no “Welcome to Georgia” sign or Atlanta skyline. But you do feel a certain history of Southern landscape in the images. The way Riverside Scene is framed makes you wonder if it’s in Mississippi, maybe, or Tennessee— there’s a loose allusion to the area of the American South. By showing the region’s sheer diversity, the series suggests both that the way Black folks exist on land can’t be pinned down and that the land of the South itself can’t be pinned down. There’s a vastness and a variety to both aspects.

AS: In terms of commercial versus conceptual art, do you view them as two different practices or do you think of them all as being after the same sort of feeling? TM: There’s definitely a difference between a Vogue cover or an i-D magazine spread and a personal project, but I certainly hope that all of my works, whether they’re commercial or personal or in the fine-art context, are in dialogue with one another. Aesthetically, structurally, conceptually, I hope together they show a growth and a continuum over time. Even if you think about my images of Beyoncé, or some of the images from I Can Make You Feel Good, in relation to this new work, I would hope you would find an aesthetic continuation, whether it’s Black folks’ relationship to nature or a reference to the historical lineages of the ways we’ve been photographed. In the Beyoncé images there are floral crowns and custom scenic painted backdrops that refer to a number of things, including African portraiture of the 1960s. I hope that my work across both commercial and fine-art contexts continues this reference to the historical and is in conversation with the ways Black folks have portrayed themselves in images with a sense

of dignity and beauty over time. I also have my own conceptual concerns, like life in the South. AS: You had a Gordon Parks Foundation fellowship in 2020, and you’re presenting a different body of work concerned with notions of family and the histories that produce, say, a Black middle class or upper middle class as part of that initiative. These images explore interiorities and the materiality of the interior. You’ve concentrated in a lot of ways on this idea of the family photograph. TM: The work for the Gordon Parks Foundation reemphasizes the importance of the family photograph. There’s a significant history behind the way Black folks dress themselves for a portrait, and I argue that that process has become a central site where identity and a sense of self-determination are formed. I photographed real families in staged settings, or in domestic settings that are their own, and I emphasized the importance of these settings as sites of formation of identity. We see fatherson dynamics, we see mother-daughter dynamics, and we see how these dynamics put together through images are a huge part of the formation of Black folks 75

Previous spread, left to right: Tyler Mitchell, Albany, Georgia, 2021 © Tyler Mitchell. Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York Tyler Mitchell, Georgia Hillside (Redlining), 2021 © Tyler Mitchell. Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York Opposite: Tyler Mitchell, Chad and Dad, 2021 © Tyler Mitchell. Courtesy the artist Above: Tyler Mitchell, Ancestors, 2021 © Tyler Mitchell. Courtesy the artist

themselves. The family portrait is central. AS: In viewing this new body of work, I’m struck by images like Ancestors, in which you have a mother and daughter looking at their own reflection in the mirror, and in front of that mirror there’s sort of this rephotography happening of these older images of family members in frames. It makes me think about Elizabeth Alexander’s book The Black Interior [2004], in which she argues that the Black living room was one of the first sites of freedom for us. How important is a sense of play in your work? If you think about the work you’ve produced thus far, there are always these moments of play interwoven into the scenes. I’m thinking about the gummy-bear scene from your film, or the boys riding the tricycles. Or even in Albany, Georgia, you have a father and son playing together, you have a sister and brother throwing a football, and you have another young child in the background driving a toy truck. Can you talk about the sense of play and why that’s important to represent in your images?

TM: Amy Sherald and I were talking about the sense of play in both of our bodies of work and she said she’s had conversations with artists who feel as if they’ve had to create teaching moments with their work about history and about our struggle, both of which are very important. But we both started to wonder throughout that conversation, When do we breathe? There has to be room for a range of experiences. Because if there isn’t, how do we evolve? I really like that notion and I think that question is where a lot of my work stems from. How do I offer narratives of play, of repose, of rest, of solace and belonging? Because those are images that we need to see as well. And it’s not to diminish the importance of work about history or about our struggle, which is equally real, but when you consider the history of photography, the overwhelming narrative or stereotypical image made of us really doesn’t show us at play. So where’s the radicality of just imaging two young Black men enjoying a pack of gummy bears together? I think it’s there. 77

What black is this you say?—

You must have me confused with someone else —black What black is this you say?—

You can recite the names of more unarmed black people killed by police violence, than you can the names of black people holding U.S. Patents for innovation —black What black is this you say?—

Your favorite part of ‘Miss Mary Mack’ was when they called the 4th a lie-lie-lie —black

Previous spread: Amanda Williams, What black is this you say?—Although rarely recognized as such, ‘The Candy Lady’ and her ‘Candy Store’ provided one of your earliest examples of black enterprise, cooperative economics, black women CEOs and good customer service”—black (07.24.20), 2021 (detail), oil and mixed media on canvas, 60 × 60 inches (152.4 × 152.4 cm) Opposite: Amanda Williams, What black is this you say?—“You must have me confused with someone else”—black, (09.03.20), 2021 (detail), oil, raw pigment, and mixed media on wood panel, 20 × 20 inches (50.8 × 50.8 cm)

What black is this you say?—

Although rarely recognized as such, ‘The Candy Lady’ and her ‘Candy Store’ provided one of your earliest examples of black enterprise, cooperative economics, black women CEOs and good customer service —black What black is this you say?—

You have to survive through alternative economic systems and are often met with extra-legal consequences —black What black is this you say?—

You still wanna cop that Gordon Gartrelle knockoff Denise made for Theo; twotone flap in the back—black Opposite: Amanda Williams, What black is this you say?—“You have to survive through alternative economic systems and are often met with extra-legal consequences”—black (06.25.20), 2021 (detail), oil and mixed media on wood panel, 60 × 60 inches (152.4 × 152.4 cm) Artworks and Text © Amanda Williams

Previous spread: Manuel Mathieu, Siblings 2, 2021 (detail), mixed media, 70 × 62 inches (117.8 × 157.5 cm) Above, left to right: Manuel Mathieu, toofarfromhome1, 2021, mixed media, 96 × 84 inches (243.8 × 213.4 cm) Manuel Mathieu, toofarfromhome2, 2021, mixed media on canvas, 96 × 84 inches (243.8 × 213.4 cm)

In the last few years, the phrases “I can’t breathe” and “Nou bouke” (Creole for “We are tired”) have been used by African Americans and Haitians to express frustration, fatigue, and anger over our ongoing struggles for equality and the right to live safely with dignity. These sayings inspired different ideas in me about the politics of power, about how these politics can bend reality. I am not interested in academically theorizing this issue, but it does come to mind that inside the belly of any power dynamic there is a pushing and pulling, a sort of dance of resistance. My work usually presents certain concepts dancing with their contradictions. Whether in one painting, a group of paintings, or an entire show, I came to understand this as part of the internal dynamic of my work because that’s the only way I know how to create a world of infinite possibilities for myself. This is what I call getting us to the other side of the mirror. My painting Siblings (2021), for instance, was realized some time ago, before this deeper interest around power became more important to me, but somehow the two are still linked, since Siblings plays an important part in that dance of resistance. My sensibility helps me to connect and define myself through art. One image that always comes back to me is Goya’s painting of Saturn eating his son. I first saw it when I was fifteen years old, and my early mentor in Haiti introduced it to me. I still use that painting as a trampoline to bounce off, even for certain ideas in some of my works in this show at the gallery. 86

This dance of resistance also relates to my feelings about belonging and what belonging means to me. I feel I belong to Haiti, but not necessarily to the land, the atmosphere, or the food. What makes me feel I belong is the connection with the people. I find myself exactly fitting a particular shape in their hearts, and vice versa. Regardless of the challenges that we face as people, the sense of the sisterhood and brotherhood of the Haitian people is so strong that it can ignite a revolution, a profound shift of paradigm. My experience of brotherhood and sisterhood resides in my capacity to deeply see myself in the other. This capacity implies that the other will never hit the ground when they fall, because someone close enough will always be there to catch them before they crash. That’s how I understand a sense of unity and what it means to be whole. You might have heard of the recent killing of Jovenel Moïse, the former president of Haiti, or of the even more recent earthquake there. These are very afflicting realities that if you are Haitian you carry like a bag of stones. Even if you follow the news, you might have missed the killings and massacres that happened during the several weeks before the president’s assassination. I am not mentioning this to ask for a certain response; these are just facts that I need you to be aware of to get my point. Haiti’s brother- and sisterhood is altered by the need to survive profound challenges from both politics and acts of God. The deepest cut for me is the incapacity to project yourself into the future because every day your hope for a better life and for dignity is questioned and shaken,

Above, left to right: Manuel Mathieu, Siblings 1, 2021, mixed media, 70 × 62 inches (117.8 × 157.5 cm) Manuel Mathieu, Siblings 2, 2021, mixed media, 70 × 62 inches (117.8 × 157.5 cm) Artwork © Manuel Mathieu. Photos: Guy L’Heureux

sometimes by your own people. This underlines that it’s not only a matter of Black or white, since unfortunately we are all ultimately facing the same demons. This situation intensifies the present in a way that can be detrimental, especially since that present is existentially complex. The process of creating an object that has a spiritual value is the only thing that intensifies my presence, and at the same time reminds me of my ephemerality. It is complex how power can shape the destiny of a nation and its people. Those massacres and abuses of power become part of my imagination. W. E. B. Du Bois famously suggested a double consciousness; I experience maybe even a triple or quadruple consciousness, because no matter where I land, my Blackness is never perceived as an unchangeable monolith. Saturn, while eating his son, is presented in a position of overt strength, but what he is really trying to deal with is his fear and fragility. It was that same fear of losing power that led François Duvalier, president from 1957 to 1971, to arm the Tonton Macoute, an unhappy and desperate category of people, at a pivotal moment in my country’s racial history. What can explain someone becoming completely oblivious to the value of life? From a more global point of view, Duvalier would never have had the capacity to do so if his instruments of power hadn‘t been fueled by the ascension of the economic system that we are all part of today. As with many dictatorships at the time, Duvalier’s power was collateral damage of the Cold War. Is it enough to say today that history repeats itself, or is it time to admit that we simply never learn?

These moments, challenges, and realizations are at the core of how I understand my place in the world. Exploring the complexity of my own subconscious as a Haitian and a Black person in this world is the work of a lifetime. Deciding to bring that subconscious into the immaculate space of the white cube, a space that is arguably not yet fully adapted for it, is my ambivalent but purposeful way to create room for it and preserve it in the light. In that same journey of putting forward the sacred burden tied to my existence, I decided with Portal (2021) to make a work whose only relevance resides in the spiritual value that I myself find in it. By creating what I think of as a “false” mythology, I call on the viewer’s understanding to consider that the positioning of the objects refers to something that we have in common and that viewers can take away with them. Understanding that I can create a spiritual value through my actions undeniably forces society to acknowledge my humanity, especially considering that humanity was denied to me by many people for centuries. Accepting this today occupies a space in the viewer that initiates a social awareness. This seems banal and obvious, but it’s important. The spiritual contribution and the sacred connection we Black people have and make to the world isn’t something that comes from the conscious or subconscious of white people or anyone else. No matter how small and personal the new form of awareness I am trying to reveal is, it is to me fundamentally there to remind us that we are all dancing to the same drums. —Manuel Mathieu 87

[ G ] R AV E D A N C E

I dance beside your grave, trap mashing to the synths of grass blades bending. Of course with the little twist I added to the bounce cos my ting has always got to lean different: bad man nuh dance like next man. Your words still sit on my shoulder and I have not shrugged since they took you—that morning I ate cereal with cooking oil but I suspect you already know that. My G, what light is there brighter than my sorrow? I know you see it. Quit fucking about and come back to me. I’ve got beef you need to back. Lies I need you to tell for me. Who’s gonna gas me to whine with a sweetwun? I am a brook, my G, I am a brook spilling a current of bile and if only you would let go of Death’s roots, your corpse will wash up onto the shores of your gravestone anew: jaw, liver, spine, nerves attached to your buoyant soul. Today is a good day for resurrection, my G. Shirley is keeping a shoobs later on. The whole endz is gonna be there. Imagine the looks on their faces. Us, crossing the threshold. You, onyx-faced dripped in white. Me, your protector, shooing sticky hands away: ’llow it, he just land road, touch him easy touch him easy.

Caleb Femi

A L L B O D I E S H AV E TO G O SOM EW H ER E

T H E D AY I PA C K M Y S T U F F A N D L E AV E H O M E

There is so much happening in the cemetery. Two men on trampolines bounce between the family tombs; a woman throws a rubber chew toy and her dog chases it past the tattooed man sitting cross-legged on the bench, smoking. His cloud of weed wafts overhead, strong as weather in a new country. A woman pushes a man in a wheelchair and stops by the path to let him take it all in. A homeless woman with a pink duvet draping her whole body grumbles on the grass, rocks back and forth as a younger woman in leggings lets go of her son’s hand and watches him stumble towards the graves.

my mother sits on the step looking out at her garden. My mother is named for a herb and likes to talk and talk about everything and nothing— from which poets read The Golden Bough to that man in Covent Garden who collects golliwogs. Everything is a piece of some larger and endless subject. My mother volunteers in charity shops and delivers food to people who live alone. My mother lives alone and won’t talk about herself. She points at one flower in a pot, says “That’s from Gran’s garden. I took the seeds after she died. She’d taken them from her gran’s garden.” I have lived in her house most of my life and she’d never told me that. She says it quietly and quickly changes the subject as if to tuck this small detail away, between politics and neighborhood gossip, as if trying to bury it among the life of everything else.

W E A R E F I N A L LY A L L O W E D T O WA N D E R

T H E H I S T O RY T E A C H E R I R EM EMBER, M R. H ENSON

The city throws us obvious images— discarded bird wings tree stumps sculptures of legs—but we shake our fists at the sky! Nice try Rotterdam! We’re too vigilant for clichés! We are careful in the rose garden and the sun lowers and half the street is in shade so we push the table into the sun and joke of course the black poets have found each other on the corner, of course it’s easy, what Jay Wright called the passage of feeling, as we brush by the Dutch designs of parks, docks and bridges and bright jagged buildings, we laugh and tease each other. Without words, of course, the city poem arrives!

always had his top button done up, hair gelled slick, and seemed too young for the attitude of his stiff suits. Black marker in his hand like a sixth finger. I remember him leaning back in his chair, beginning a sentence with England has . . . and hesitating. His eyes glazed over half his (black and brown) class of millennial Brits. He inhaled deeply, as if his sentence needed to be said in a single runaway breath. It was near the end of term and we’d covered the Black Death, Tudors, Battle of Hastings and both World Wars. Yet, with some thought and time to round out his view from the front of his classroom, Mr. Henson could have asked us (children of former colonies) anything or told us about, say, the Koh-i-Noor Diamond, the largest of Victoria’s crown and a jewel that brought bad luck to any man who wore it because of the blood spilled mining and claiming it. I have an English mother, who taught me When it comes to wealth, follow the money but what I keep thinking of is what sparkled in that momentary pause—what opposing ideas ran through him before he said England has the greatest history in the world. What could have held us together in that lesson if he was an English-history teacher who wasn’t prepared to fail any of us?

Raymond Antrobus 91

Sumayya Vally David, I believe our first real connection was when I came to London to interview you and we had a very discursive conversation about the future of architectural practice in Johannesburg and in Africa, which was very meaningful for me. I feel lucky that we were able to reconnect two years later through the Serpentine Pavilion, where the firm I direct, Counterspace, presented earlier this year. David Adjaye Yes, I remember that interview; it felt like twenty minutes but it was actually like fifty. That’s usually how it works when you find somebody whom you have a kindred relationship to. It was obvious to me then that you were somebody who was just waiting to arrive on the world stage. I didn’t feel like you were my mentee at that time, because I knew you were already at the next level. SV Thank you, David. I think I was young and in a very different space at that time, but I felt very grateful for those conversations. It was a special energy, particularly because we spoke so seriously about the future of architectural practice on the African continent. DA Yes, that’s something that was immediately binding. As you know, it’s an important issue for me. Hopefully we’re now starting to accelerate toward putting into place a serious piece of infrastructure that could start to add to that idea of education and practice on the continent. But here we are again, the universe collides, and now we’re doing a show, Social Works II, with Antwaun [Sargent] at Gagosian, London. It’s really an opportunity to look toward new practices. We’re the odd ones out in the sense that we’re architects—or, as I like to say, we’re form-makers in the world, whatever manner that takes on. In the context 94

of this show, we’re working with what I call “fragments,” ideas not necessarily about things that are going into the built environment. Social Works II is a fascinating space that allows experimentation to happen in a way that traditional architectural practice can’t afford, since the business of architecture necessitates something rather closed, don’t you think? SV Yes, but I think that’s the business of architecture as we know it now. I’ve found it interesting that you don’t care to define yourself as an architect per se. I really consider myself an architect and always introduce myself as such, because I believe so much in starting to rethink and expand what the definition of an architect can be, particularly for our context. So many of the traditions of form-making that we have fall short of what architecture could be or needs to be for the continent and for our context. DA That makes a lot of sense. We’re in very different places: for you that’s a critical definition because you’re becoming, and I’m not in that space. Both things are relevant and it’s really about time. I wouldn’t have engaged in this way in an exhibition like this early in my career. Your interest in doing it early on speaks to what you just said about wanting to define how you see architectural practice. I’d love to hear about the work you’ll be showing in Social Works II. SV It’s changing and evolving as we speak. To describe it generally, the piece is a set of ritual fragments that form a solid wall, but each of the fragments can be unpacked into the space and I see each of them as a catalyst for creating rituals, not only in the gallery but also, I hope, outside of it. The idea

Previous spread: Rendering for Sumayya Vally’s project for Social Works II, Gagosian, Grosvenor Hill, London, October 7–December 18, 2021. Image: Sumayya Vally, Counterspace Opposite: Rendering for Sumayya Vally’s project for Social Works II, Gagosian, Grosvenor Hill, London, October 7–December 18, 2021. Image: Sumayya Vally, Counterspace Above: David Adjaye, Asaase, 2021, rammed earth, overall dimensions variable © David Adjaye. Photo: Dror Baldinger

Following spread, left: Sketch for David Adjaye’s project for Social Works II, Gagosian, Grosvenor Hill, London, October 7– December 18, 2021. Image: David Adjaye Following spread, right: Serpentine Pavilion 2021, designed by Counterspace © Counterspace. Photo: Iwan Baan

is that they will move outside the gallery, pick up resonance from other places, and then potentially return for a series of gatherings within the gallery as well. All of the fragments are abstractions of ritual objects, which I see as a continuation of the Serpentine Pavilion. They come from traditions of faith, and all of them, despite being very small, by implication have very large gestures. The idea is to create this wall in the gallery that starts out as solid but becomes more porous over time. DA So these fragments are to be used? SV Yes, we’ll be holding a series of gatherings around each object. The forms are pieces of ritual architectures that will then host and hold rituals. Does that make sense? DA It makes a lot of sense. SV I’m thinking about first launching one piece, then constructing the remaining parts over time. I think it will be better if it’s periodic as opposed to starting out whole. It also works with the logic of how the pieces move that they accrete over time and involve a process of exchange. DA The work is part of an evolution. There’s something about the uniqueness of a work like that that I think is powerful. SV Yes, I think maybe we also then use this first opportunity with the work to be able to attest to its use, and let the ritual functions grow and develop, and have a conversation with what the form needs to be, so that it really does become a platform for research and experimentation. It’s an opportunity that’s so generous, especially for our profession. DA Exactly. After the first iteration of Social Works in New York, Antwaun asked me to also take part in London because of my relationship to the city. I wanted to continue the research that I began with the large-scale sculpture, Asaase, that I made for 95

New York. My current preoccupation is a rethinking of earth and/or our relationship to earth, and what that means. For me, how to return the artifice of architecture to the geology of the planet, and to create less industrialization and more craft in the process of making buildings, is a key inquiry, a constant questioning and search. With Social Works I also wanted to discuss memory and the physical matter of place. If Asaase was romantic in the sense that it was about the United States and the memory of Africa, a transatlantic dialogue, in London I’m interested in the phenomena of the island of the United Kingdom and this very specific place. It’s a much more reduced piece that really almost extracts out of the earth, as if you could syringe out of the earth a sort of core of earth and remix it into something newly solid. It started off as a single column, but I decided to bisect it and to create a composition. And as it’s evolved, it’s become a column that’s divided into five pieces, and the five pieces create a new arrangement as a kind of new column that’s no longer really behaving like a column but as a kind of composition. It allows viewers to see the soil and its nature in different geometric compressions and expansions, and to see it as a sort of artifact of the idea of form. In this way, it’s almost a diametrically opposite game to the first installation, which isn’t surprising since it’s speaking to a different context, which is: What is England, and where are we, and what is making? SV I really like this critical, and also playful, take on the politics of land and earth. And I enjoy very much that it’s so different from the first one, which had a kind of longing. This is beautiful and critical in a very different way. I often talk about my project being tied to earth and place, but I think I often imagine that as

being about grounding practices and how architecture gives form to them. You’re talking very directly about earth and matter and the material of a place, which is so interesting in London, especially because of how densely centered it is as the heart of a once-industrial empire. It also means that there’s earth there from everywhere else, in a way, because of how the colonies functioned. DA I hope it provokes that dialogue, absolutely. Also, in any city that becomes metropolitan, there’s a widespread forgetting of the earth. Even though there are many parks, they’re ultimately filled with the artifice of grass; it’s not the grass of the earth, which is the most abundant plant on the earth, it’s a species that we’ve edited and created as a singular monoculture. So we actually still don’t really see the earth. I’m less interested in this idea of controlling nature and more interested in our corelationship with nature. Even though the geometries can be abstract, the visceral emotion is very direct. In fact that duality is important to me—it’s not a pile of earth, it’s a form of earth. SV I think land is an archive of place, the way it’s been shifted and what it contains, how toxic it is. All of these layers tell us something about the story of movement on that land, which also speaks to the fact that we’re so deeply connected to land in our bodies and in our DNA. That’s something we keep returning to in South Africa. DA On the African continent, the presence of land is much more clear, because the development of the cities has simply not created a complete art, or an Anthropocene sort of erasure and pure control of nature. So the disruption that some people call underdevelopment I now realize is actually profound beauty. 97

Jenny Saville: A cyclical rhythm of emergent forms

What you have inherited from your fathers Earn over again for yourselves or it will not be yours. Goethe, Faust, 1808 One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. Friedrich Nietszche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, 1883–85 In an era when the avant-garde seems to have lost the propulsive power it had in the previous century, as if the limits of progress had been reached, while tradition offers the possibility of reopening paths previously abandoned, the paintings of Jenny Saville both recognize known types of beauty and at the same time are able to subvert them. Her nudes, her portraits, her studies of motherhood, her “sorrows,” are so contemporary yet so classic that we feel pulled in opposite directions and cannot remain indifferent; they overwhelm us. We realize we have to confront her painting with all our senses, profoundly involved and tested in the face of what we cannot help but experience as a mysterious visual shock. Since Saville’s early career, her paintings have seemed both sumptuous and aggressive, both poignant and serene, both abject and moral. Immune from vulgarity and obscenity, they are tragic at heart but overflowing with grace and tenderness. Having calmly moved beyond the conflict between modernism and the figurative tradition, her art is the perfect synthesis of the ambition for universality and a realistic passion for what is contingent and present. Hers is its own program, particularly when it looks for comparisons with masters from the past and with themes or subjects from art history. Never satisfied with her achievements and always thirsty for experiment, Saville celebrates life beyond suffering and nihilism, life in the knowledge of death, that inevitable destiny that makes us human, anguished, heroic in despair and generous in compassion. We see in her paintings the incarnation of the past, with all its battles won and lost, its traumas and fragilities. We recognize our humanity, civilized and at the same time still primitive, emancipated and at the same time still subservient. It is pointless to ask whether the epiphanies in her

An exhibition curated by Sergio Risaliti, director of the Museo Novecento, Florence, pairs artworks by Jenny Saville with artists of the Italian Renaissance. On view across that city at the Museo Novecento, the Museo di Palazzo Vecchio, the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, the Museo degli Innocenti, and the Museo di Casa Buonarroti through February 20, 2022, the presentation features paintings and drawings by Saville from the 1990s through to work made especially for the occasion. Here, Risaliti reflects on the resonances and reverberations brought about by these pairings.

102

Previous spread: Jenny Saville, Odysseus I, 2020–21, oil, oil bar, and acrylic on canvas, 59 × 47 ¼ inches (150 × 120 cm), Forman Family Collection. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Opposite, top: Jenny Saville, Study for Pentimenti III (sinopia), 2011, charcoal and pastel on paper, 78 ¼ × 59 7⁄8 inches (200 × 152 cm), Private collection. Photo: Mike Bruce

Left: Jenny Saville, Pietà I, 2019– 21, charcoal and pastel on canvas, 110 ¼ × 63 inches (280 × 160 cm), Private collection. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Below: Michelangelo Buonarroti, Bandini Pietà (The Deposition), c. 1547–55, Seravezza marble, 109 × 54 3⁄8 × 49 ¼ inches (277 × 138 × 125 cm), Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Florence

Opposite, bottom: Michelangelo Buonarroti, Madonna and Child, c. 1525, black chalk, red chalk, traces of brush and brown wash, with lead-white gouache on paper, 21 ¼ × 15 5⁄8 inches (54.1 × 39.6 cm), Casa Buonarroti, Florence

work lie in her always powerful and recognizable images or if they occur through a paint application that is often dense, oily, now angry, now sweet, as careful in the definition of detail as it is aggressive in sketching out contours over and over again, as if searching for a fixity and completion belied by the mobility and blurring of the subject. In recent years Saville has grappled with a primordial subject: motherhood. She has experienced the transformation elicited by the “movement of one body toward two,” as she has described childbirth, in her own body. That growth within her left its mark on her work: “I continued to think about the formation of flesh and limbs within my body, about regeneration. . . . My various drawings one upon another are a way to communicate these feelings. You are literally reproducing when you are pregnant, like the way in which lines reproduce.” When I think about works such as Generation (2012–14), Study for Isis and Horus (2011), and The Mothers (2011), I cannot help but remember the countless appearances of the mother-and-child theme in art, and not only in the figurative art in the museums but in other symbolic systems of human communication: photographs, movies, poetry, literature, theater. Saville positions her work amidst all such depictions, whether

ancient or modern, archaic or Renaissance. Her art is absolutely new, presenting the subject with a completely original truth and passion. She puts us inside everything we can imagine, whether as men or as mothers: heart and mind, blood and flesh, pain and ecstasy, instinct and sensation, archetype and idealism, trauma and pleasure. Finding its place among both the votive statues of the primordial era, which had a magical, apotropaic relationship with birth, growth, and death, and the idealized forms of Renaissance madonnas, pregnant with religious feeling, her work offers a female perspective that previously has rarely been taken into account. In a series of drawings from 2010 and 2011, Saville returned to Leonardo’s cartoon The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and the Infant Saint John the Baptist (c. 1499–1500), in the National Gallery, London, and Michelangelo’s Madonna and Child (c. 1525), a perfectly executed autonomous work, in white lead, black and red pencil, and ink, in the Casa Buonarotti museum in Florence. The Michelangelo drawing is almost a challenge in graphic form to earlier sculptures of the artist’s such as the Madonna of the Stairs (c. 1490) and the Madonna of Bruges (c. 1501–4), youthful works, or the Medici Madonna, 103

begun around 1526 and perhaps completed in 1534, when Michelangelo was forced to leave his hometown of Florence, never to return. In the Medici Madonna, in the Basilica di San Lorenzo, Florence, the Christ Child, in Giorgio Vasari’s words, “twists” like a sturdy young athlete, “straddling his thighs” on the body of the Virgin. He makes this contortion to hide from our gaze, perhaps clutching his mother out of fear, as if we were his executioners, while she, preoccupied with her own, prescient thoughts, looks in a completely different direction, away from both us and her son. This type of athleticism was one of the ways in which Michelangelo handled contrapposto, using it, as he also did in his sublime poems, as a way to interpret and communicate, whether through three-dimensional or graphic forms, the complexity of the movements of the soul, setting the animallike, disturbing dimension of physicality and sexuality in dialogue with our divine nature, as called for in Neoplatonic thought. In the end, this was also the goal of Michelangelo’s well-known non-finito or unfinished work: to create a dynamic contrast between matter and spirit, earth and heaven. These interests have clearly been central to Saville, and she has returned to them recently in confronting the Renaissance art of Florence for this exhibition in five museums in the city, the Museo Novecento, the Palazzo Vecchio, the Casa Buonarroti, the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, and the Museo degli Innocenti. No living artist has ever been given such an opportunity. 104

During a visit to the Casa Buonarroti shortly before the pandemic halted all movement between countries and cities, Saville was for the first time able to view Michelangelo’s Madonna and Child in person, a strongly emotional experience for her. I was present that day, and have rarely witnessed such deep and respectful concentration. After a meeting with members of the museum’s administration, the decision was made to exhibit a group of Saville’s works, including Study for Pentimenti III (sinopia) and Study for Pentimenti IV (after Michelangelo’s Virgin and Child) (both 2011), in a single space with the world-famous Madonna and Child. The collection of this small museum, of course, is laden with history and with masterpieces by Michelangelo, including the Madonna della Scala (Madonna of the stairs, c. 1490), the Battaglia dei centauri (Battle of the centaurs, 1490–92), the wooden Modello per la facciata di San Lorenzo (Model for the facade of San Lorenzo, c. 1518), and hundreds of drawings, letters, and poetry manuscripts. There is also an Etruscan funerary urn, which Saville considered showing near one of her more complex and I would say atemporal paintings, Compass (2013). This work depicts a naked couple (although four figures can be recognized) stretched out, although not completely, as if for conversation before or after sex. Their warm and luminous beauty exudes both concupiscence and something higher, otherworldly, and belonging to no one gender. Saville is constantly drawn to formal and conceptual ambiguity, to hybrid and superimposed

Opposite: Jenny Saville, Couples study, 2019–21, pastel, pencil, and charcoal on paper, 22 5⁄8 × 29 ¼ inches (57.5 × 75.8 cm), Private collection. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates This page: Jenny Saville, Fulcrum, 1999, oil on canvas, 103 × 192 inches (261.6 × 487.7 cm), Private collection

forms and to blurred and tangled contours, as, for example, in a drawing by Leonardo that she especially loves, a study for the Saint Anne cartoon in the British Museum (1505–8). In this work that is almost a scribble, the figures are so confused and overlaid that it is impossible to distinguish them from one another. Saville preserves the same ambiguity when she deals with the definition of gender or the boundary of human emotions and feelings, excavating the recesses of the psyche. Florence, that cradle of the Renaissance, offered Saville another surprise: the possibility of exhibiting a work in the room holding Michelangelo’s Bandini Pietà (c. 1547–55) in the newly renovated Museo dell’Opera del Duomo. That museum also houses other masterpieces of Renaissance sculpture, including the doors of the San Giovanni baptistry and Donatello’s several Prophets and Penitent Magdalene (1453–55). Saville was able to study the Bandini Pietà twice on site. During one visit, she spoke with restorers cleaning the marble and was able to see new details, close up, that inspired and moved her. This resulted in Study for Pietà, a large drawing, over six feet high, in charcoal on raw canvas, almost an attempt to maintain a formal relationship with the roughness of the stone sculpted by her great colleague over four centuries ago. The Bandini Pietà, also called The Deposition, is one of Michelangelo’s last works: when he began working on this enormous block of white Seravezza marble, more than six feet high, in his studio in Rome, he was about seventy-five. Needing to obtain a group of four figures, and wanting to depict different moments in the passion of Christ, from the deposition from the cross to the entombment, he had to compress the figures’ bodies, resorting to expedients familiar in painting but unusual in sculpture—effects of distortion and foreshortening of the limbs and of the multiplication of viewpoints, valuable in dynamizing the telling of the story. Saville understood this strategy perfectly and her drawing too compresses her group of five figures. She has studied their positions as if for a passage

of choreography, and certain elements—arms and hands—are left to the imagination, while the feet do not seem to correspond to the bodies. Like these works by Michelangelo, Leonardo’s Virgin and Child with Saint Anne . . . holds particular interest for Saville. This figural group—the Virgin, the Child, Saint Anne, and Saint John the Baptist, the Messiah’s cousin of the same age—is complex in its pyramidal structure. Like Michelangelo, Leonardo seems to constitute a sort of experimental laboratory for Saville, who, between 2009 and 2010, created a series of drawings, Study for Pentiment and Reproduction for Drawing, whose multiple jumbled, nervously and rapidly sketched silhouettes convey the tension of her research. The body of a newborn appears many times, almost in conf lict with its mother, as if it were becoming physically and psychologically aware of their bond and of the urgent need for detachment. The images transmit the animal energy that flows between mother and baby. One of these drawings, in pastel and oily charcoal, with oleaginous stains and fine, subtle traces, is titled Componimento inculto (Uncultivated or wild composition), a phrase of Leonardo’s that Ernst Gombrich used to explain certain tangled drawings that the artist seems to have created in one rush, in a spur-of-the-moment observation or experiment. Saville’s interest in earlier art shouldn’t surprise us; she has always looked at the old masters, seeking ways to embody the spiritual in the material, to leave behind the superficial flatness of the photograph, which she, like Francis Bacon and Edgar Degas before him, uses as a point of departure from which to reach a far distant place. In the halls of museums and other sacred places of art, she knows just what to look at and how to look at it. Take, for example, her tendency toward the monumental: was it not perhaps Tintoretto or Rubens, Géricault or Delacroix, that guided her here? Her response to the challenge was the eight-by-sixteen-foot canvas Fulcrum, with which she staked her claim, while still very young, in an exhibition at Gagosian, New York, in 1999. The first thing we see in that painting is an

105

106

Opposite: Jenny Saville, Chasah, 2020, oil on linen, 78 ¾ × 63 inches (200 × 160 cm), Private collection. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates This page: Jenny Saville, Aleppo, 2017–18, pastel and charcoal on canvas, 78 ¾ × 63 inches (200 × 160 cm), Private collection. Photo: Lucy Dawkins Artwork by Jenny Saville © Jenny Saville. All rights reserved, DACS 2021

enormous lump of flesh, in which, with difficulty, we eventually make out three figures. Heads and faces, feet and limbs, gradually come into focus, seemingly weighed down by the fatter body parts. Although the canvas is grandly large, the surface seems small, so filled is it with flesh, which seems forced into a space insufficient to contain it. Fulcrum will be exhibited at the Palazzo Vecchio, in the Salone dei Cinquecento, decorated by Vasari after the 1550s. All the paintings there are battle scenes celebrating the wartime power of Florence and the supposedly divine mission of Duke Cosimo I de Medici. Masses of armed figures engaged in combat—there are obviously no women. The Salone is further embellished with sculpture, including Vincenzo de Rossi’s several Fatiche di Ercole (Labors of Hercules, 1562–84) and Michelangelo’s Genio della Vittoria (Genius of victory, 1532–34), an extraordinary example of anatomical contrapposto, left unfinished. From a formal standpoint, Saville’s work seems to ask for direct comparison with the language of sculpture, given the monumental size of her images and the strong plasticity of their figures. In a retrospective of at least 100 of Saville’s works installed in these various museums, portraits— always large scale, always frontal—reign supreme. There are faces of young men and women of archaic beauty, an Olympus of European and other divinities, with profound, intense gazes that look at us

from the height of their incorruptible morality. As undistracted as the portraits of Fayum, in ancient Egypt, they remain totally concentrated within the bounds of their unattainable intimacy, as in Messenger (2020–21), or Arcadia, Prisme, Circe, Ligea, and Iris from 2020, where the gaze is directed elsewhere, upward and far away, toward a distance equal to the infinity that each of them contemplates and perceives within themselves. T he t it les refer to t he g reat my t hs of t he Mediterranean, as well as to metamorphoses, the nature of light and color, and feelings of panic. They remind us that gods and men once clashed on cliffs or in battle, in forests or on beaches. The faces all have aura, that unbridgeable distance that Walter Benjamin invokes to explain the spiritual resonance of art before the age of mechanical reproduction. We know that life can work on faces, scarring them, crushing them, stripping away their flesh, ruining them, to the point of rendering the sitter unrecognizable. Yet if it is true that each of us bears the mark of a higher provenance, a cosmic energy that neutralizes evil and nothingness, the beauty of every face is then the reflection of an inner beauty; and sometimes life is generous, and reveals to us what true beauty is in people’s faces, illuminating their immensity. Those faces radiate a pure solar energy, convincing us of the idea that we are infinite. Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore. 107

108

FASHION AND ART The creative director for Valentino speaks with Derek Blasberg about this year’s Met Gala, the duty of all creatives to honor their moment while dreaming for the future, and his recent collaboration with seventeen contemporary artists for Valentino Des Ateliers.

PART 8: PIERPAOLO PICCIOLI

of art because it felt like the best way to represent my culture. I started with [ Hieronymus Bosch’s] Garden of Earthly Delights, because it was from the Renaissance, but actually it could be like a psychedelic Renaissance, or something not really in the canons of the Renaissance. Those independent minds were very free minds. DB: It wasn’t easy for Americans to travel last summer, and one of the things I was sad to miss was the epic Valentino couture show in Venice, which was a mix of art references from both the old world—this is Venice!—and the new world in your collaborations with contemporary artists.

Derek Blasberg: We’re supposed to talk about fashion and art today, which makes sense since the first time I’d seen you in eighteen months was at the Met Gala, which is essentially a fashion extravaganza in one of the world’s most important art museums. Pierpaolo Piccioli: I had so much fun that night! I was happy to have Whoopi [Goldberg] and Carey Mulligan with me, and Normani and Janet Mock too. All of them were adding something to the whole experience. To me, it’s important when you go to this kind of event to set a table that reflects the values of what you want to stand for. If not, they’re just people sitting around. The big idea is that you can see the quality that I want to deliver with my collections. I feel that I’m giving them glamour and dignity. DB: The incredible thing about that night, and the exhibition that it celebrates, is that you see fashion in a context of art. Yes, they’re dresses, but how incredible to see them among paintings and sculptures and other forms of artistic expression. PP: There’s an incredible moment when you walk from the entrance to the dinner, and you’re going through the corridors full of Egyptian artifacts. I love to see this contrast between all these people and what they’re wearing and these incredible pieces of history. The museum feels alive and there’s a buzz in the air. DB: A few years ago, the theme was partly inspired by the vestments of the Catholic church, and one of your designs for Valentino was positioned among these incredible religious artifacts. PP: It was beautiful because it was kind of alive, no? Like a new perspective, a new way to see both art and fashion. DB: When you were young, did you go to a lot of museums? What was your childhood exposure to the art world? PP: I grew up more inspired by the big churches, which are all over Rome. More than, say, art museums or galleries. When you walk into Santa Maria del Popolo, right there are these beautiful Caravaggios, The Crucifixion of Saint Peter and the Conversion of Saint Paul—true master paintings. You don’t have to buy a ticket or wait in line, you just walk in from the street. It’s like this all over Italy: I saw a lot of master paintings in many churches, like in Florence, Assisi. That’s probably why I feel that my culture and my identity are so closely linked to the master paintings from the early Renaissance and the late Middle Ages. DB: When you began to work in fashion, did you intentionally reference these influences? Or was it something more subconscious? PP: I didn’t deliberately think about it. However, for my first solo collection, when I had to reflect on my own aesthetic identity, I went back to that moment 110

PP: It was totally different. When you talk about that kind of moment of art, the Renaissance and the late Middle Ages, you don’t think about beauty, you think about grace. Grace is not something close to the surface, it comes from inside, it’s a kind of light, a color of the skin, something radiant. When I was thinking about the show in Venice, I was thinking about how the collection could be graceful and radiant, especially in a city like that.

Previous spread: Pierpaolo Piccioli, 2021. Photo: Michael Bailey Gates This page: Valentino Des Ateliers, Haute Couture Fall/Winter 2021–22 collection, Venice Opposite: Valentino Haute Couture Spring 2019 collection, Paris

DB: And then you were also inspired by contemporary artists. In total, you worked with seventeen artists on speciality commissions that informed garments that you created, right? PP: The reason I wanted to be inspired by contemporary artists, as opposed to someone who created works 400 years ago, was this desire to connect with someone who was looking at this world in the same moment as I was. I didn’t want to go back to the past and translate a vision of past painters. I feel that fashion is not art. DB: Is that right? PP: Sometimes someone will say fashion is art. Or, when something is beautiful, they will say, “This is art.” I don’t believe so. I feel that fashion is fashion and art is something different, because art exists for art’s sake.

important in her artwork, but it was even important in her personal life, especially at that moment. So when I started, I was going to translate these big strokes in a big epic pose. But then after meeting her, I thought it was more significant to do a very female dress, very feminine, with drama, with a cape. At the end, as a partnership, it was both professional and personal and much more meaningful. Francis Offman, who is an African artist from Rwanda, feels that art has a social responsibility. He doesn’t buy his colors; his works take years to finish because he uses only natural elements. I said that I couldn’t do something that elaborate, so I wanted to reuse upcycled materials and I did a kind of jumpsuit, a worker uniform, which was close to the spirit of Francis’s work. Alessandro Teoldi is an Italian who works in New York. He does beautiful artworks that meld materials together. That’s why I decided to do the big red dress with old red materials from previous projects at Valentino. DB: That was the one with the big hands on it?

DB: Whereas fashion has a specific purpose? PP: Yes, fashion has a purpose. It has to be related to the body, always. That said, I don’t think that bad art is better than good fashion. DB: Ha, good point! PP: It’s like having two different languages. The painter uses his or her own language, and fashion is my own language through which I can witness the moment I’m living. That’s the reason for art, fashion, writing, whatever. When you do creative work, you’re witnessing your moment. But you have to do it in your language. Mine is fashion. But I wanted to talk, so that’s what I did with these artists, trying to translate the same purpose into fashion, to synthesize their art into fashion. Most of them were painters, so we’re talking about two-dimensional artworks; I had to make them three-dimensional, which was like wrapping the body in some way. And then I also had to put in the couture way, applying the painting on top of the most beautiful couture coat. My issue was to concentrate with the same spirit as the artist, which is why I had a deep relationship with each of them, and tried to get not only to the surface and the colors and the techniques but also the spirit. I didn’t say, Paint anything on fashion. I worked with my own language instruments, which included embroideries and fabrics and accessories. DB: Was that the first time you were inspired by or collaborated with contemporary artists? PP: Yes, because I don’t like when fashion and art work together in a way that’s only about surface. I didn’t want to have artwork for the set of the show. It’s like when you make music, you have different instruments, but together they have to create a harmony. That’s what I wanted to create, a harmony between all these voices together, that could become one collection of fashion. DB: Was it difficult to work with living artists? If you’re inspired by the Renaissance, all of those folks are dead. PP: Ha! The process was relatively simple. Some of them I already knew. Some of them had been chosen by Gianluigi Ricuperati, a curator we worked with. When they came together, they were ready. They all had aesthetics from different countries, different identities, different cultures, and they all worked well together for some reason. The final dress came from a conversation with Jamie Nares. She’s kind of an action painter, because she uses her body, the strength of her body, to do these big strokes with big brushes. When I met Jamie, who is sixty-seven years old, I understood that her body was very

PP: Yes, so it was about mixing the elements. In another look, I put the most expensive cashmere with the most humble cotton for the toiles. It was a way to give dignity to the humble material of everyday. It demonstrated that couture is not about the expensiveness of the fabrics but about the humans behind the work. Alessandro’s work was in a way very close to that kind of humanity that you see every day in couture. DB: You can say the same thing about art: it’s not about the materials, it’s

about what the artist does with them. Otherwise it’s just paint on a canvas. PP: Exactly! DB: Beyond art, you’ve also been a huge fan of poetry. In 2019, the inspirations for your spring collection were four poets. PP: In a way, it’s similar to the approach with the paintings. I’ve always been interested in the idea of language. Through language you can express your identity, your values, your ideas. Fashion is mine, but I feel that everyone has to have their own language. When you work together and keep the differences, melting together the different languages but keeping identities as they are, that can create a new perspective. It’s like having a new language we talk through and then we deliver the same idea. It’s the way of all ideas: you have to deliver your values, your style, your ideas, through different stories, but the message has to be more or less consistent and current, collection by collection, painting by painting. DB: I think the secret of your success at Valentino is how you take something precious, like old master paintings, and treat them casually, as if they were 111

112

contemporary. One of my favorite Valentino shows was when you re-created all of these incredible artworks and photographs, but reimagined the heroines in them as Black women. That to me was such a major fashion moment. PP: I deliberately wanted to do a classic couture collection but worn by Black women because that was an idea that to me reflects the times. I wanted to ask, What if couture was born to celebrate these Black women? In the ’70s, magazines like Jet and Ebony were not allowed to borrow clothes from the fashion houses, so they had to buy them if they wanted to photograph the couture. So what if that imagery of couture, like Cecil Beaton’s beautiful swans, were repositioned, and we were celebrating the equality of beauty? I didn’t want to do any kind of exotic couture because sometimes that was the way designers used Black beauty. My idea was to shift the imagery of couture, the salon de couture with the flowers, ruffles, bows, all the clichés of couture, into modern Black women. I had the finale in my mind and then I went back and built a couture collection around it. When I had that feature very clear in my mind, it was actually the day after my previous couture, and it took almost four months to do the casting, to do everything. DB: That show was a sensation. Everyone was so moved. Afterward I came backstage and Naomi Campbell was in tears. PP: Because I’m very aware that fashion’s my language, I don’t think I have to add words to what I do. Fashion can be much stronger and much deeper than words. When you read a book, you imagine the characters, the landscape, the fiction of the book. When you see a movie, it’s impossible to go back to the book and have your own image because the image is already there. I feel that that image can be stronger than any words. You don’t have to add the word “equality,” the word “uniqueness,” the word “inclusion.” You don’t have to add the word when you have that kind of image. DB: I know you don’t think fashion is art, but will you agree that, like art, fashion can reflect what’s going on in the world? PP: Yes, I feel that. If you’re an author, you have to witness your time. If your language is fashion, art, writing, poetry, whatever it is, you have to reflect your time and you have to witness your time. And you have to lead your time to change. Hopefully you have to lead the world to change. When you see the Black beauty salon or men and women sharing the same wardrobe, perhaps that’s not what it is right now, but that’s what it will be one day. You have to give the hope that it will be. You have to lead that change. I dream of a world without any barriers, any boxes where you fit people. I like fluidity of culture, of genders. You don’t need to be Black to say Black lives matter. You don’t need to be non-binary to stand for gender fluidity. You don’t need to be a woman to stand for women’s rights. I think if you stand for civil rights, you stand for all Opposite and above: Valentino Haute Couture atelier, Paris, featuring pieces from the Valentino Des Ateliers project. Photos: Gregory Copitet Below: Valentino Des Ateliers, Haute Couture Fall/Winter 2021–22 collection, Venice Photos: courtesy Valentino

civil rights, and you stand for equality and freedom and humanity. Your work has to be a witness and to lead this change. DB: That’s something that fashion and art have the power to do. PP: Fashion has a power. As a designer, I want to deliver the values I stand for. I don’t want to deliver . . . a color. Or say how many ruffles are on this jacket. I’m not like that. I use beauty to make everything effortless, everything more direct and more emotional. Beauty is important to lead change. It’s like having two layers, one aesthetic, one emotional, and they have to collide together. It becomes superficial if you use only beauty. My job at Valentino is about making this brand consistent and relevant for today’s generation, which means that it has to be relevant for a younger generation embracing values like my values of inclusivity, freedom, and equality without killing the values of the house, a sort of a craftsmanship mind, which is in the DNA of the brand. Lifestyle is about sharing surfaces, community is about sharing values. And that’s what I want to do.

113

RICHARD AVEDON

IN THE AMERICAN WEST

Previous spread, left: Richard Avedon, Danny Lane, fourteen year old, and Christine Coil, seventeen year old, Calhan, Colorado, July 31, 1981, 1984–85, gelatin silver print, 81 ¾ × 66 ½ inches (207.6 × 168.9 cm) Previous spread, right: Richard Avedon, Roger Skaarland and Jim Bingham, coal miners, Reliance, Wyoming, August 29, 1979, 1984–85, gelatin silver print, 81 ¾ × 66 ½ inches (207.6 × 168.9 cm) Above: Richard Avedon, Sandra Bennett, twelve year old, Rocky Ford, Colorado, August 23, 1980, 1984–85, gelatin silver print, 81 ¾ × 66 ½ inches (207.6 × 168.9 cm)

116

Between 1979 and 1984, Richard Avedon traveled through the American West, documenting the faces of more than 1,000 people from over twenty-one states. This series of portraits, collectively entitled In the American West, was celebrated in the September 1985 edition of Texas Monthly with an essay by the legendary Larry McMurtry. On the occasion of a presentation of ten original exhibition prints from the series in Los Angeles this autumn, we are republishing McMurtry’s original text.

FACES OF THE WEST This is a fictional West. I don’t think the West of these portraits is any more conclusive than the West of John Wayne. –Richard Avedon In the spring of 1979 Richard Avedon came to Texas and began to make a sequence of portraits. He did not stop in Highland Park or River Oaks, to revisit any of the clothes he had photographed for fashion magazines over the years, but went instead to the Sweetwater Jaycees’ Rattlesnake Round-up, where he took a picture of a young man named Boyd Fortin holding a gutted diamondback. For the next five and a half years, in the summers particularly, Avedon returned to the West. He visited truck stops, rodeos, ranches, mines, and stockyards. He made two remarkable portraits in the San Antonio jail, two more in a mental hospital in New Mexico, several in a Hutterite community in Montana, and four—of extraordinary power—in slaughterhouses. He photographed miners, drifters, cowhands, roughnecks, couples, teenagers, old folks, and many, many people who would probably be content to be described as just folks. By late October 1984 he had traveled in seventeen states, photographed 752 people, and created, very much on his own terms, his fictional West. All his Westerners were shot against a sheet of white paper and in natural light because Avedon wanted the “source of light to be invisible so as to neutralize its role in the appearance of things.” Whether such lighting plays a neutral role may be questioned, but certainly it is consistent, as the Western sun is not; if a fiction is being made, then the fictionist, whether writer or photographer, has a right to the style of his choice. Avedon stood beside the camera, close to the person or persons being photographed, seeing them but not the image the camera was about to give him. In a lucid and interesting introduction to In the American West, the soon-to-be-published book of these portraits, he has this to say about the highly specialized involvement of photographer and subject: “A portrait photographer depends upon another person to complete his picture. The subject imagined, which in a sense is me, must be discovered in someone willing to become implicated in a fiction he cannot possibly know about. My concerns are not his. We have separate ambitions for the image. His need to plead his case probably goes as deep as my need to plead mine, but the control is with me. “A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph, it is no longer fact but opinion.” It is important to read Avedon on his own method and theory in order to appreciate fully what a deliberated achievement the Western portraits are. Seven hundred and fifty-two Westerners were selected from the many thousands Avedon and his staff observed during those five and a half years; of those roughly a tenth yielded images that answered the needs of the fiction the artist was producing. The force and impact of this fiction—which is to say, these portraits—is great; crucial to the impact is the white background. Though there is plenty of precedent in photography for this strategy, it has rarely been applied in the American West. Avedon is no doubt well educated in the tradition he breaches, a tradition in which landscape has 117

Richard Avedon, Juan Patricio Lobato, carney, Rocky Ford, Colorado, August 23, 1980, 1984–85, gelatin silver print, 81 ¾ × 66 ½ inches (207.6 × 168.9 cm)

118

Richard Avedon, Charlene Van Tighem, physical therapist, Augusta, Montana, June 26, 1983, 1984–85, gelatin silver print, 81 ¾ × 66 ½ inches (207.6 × 168.9 cm)

119

Richard Avedon, Allen Silvy, drifter, Route 93, Chloride, Nevada, December 14, 1980, 1984–85, gelatin silver print, 81 ¾ × 66 ½ inches (207.6 × 168.9 cm) Artwork © The Richard Avedon Foundation

120

been overwhelmingly dominant. From Alexander Gardner and the railroad surveys through William Henry Jackson and Edward S. Curtis and more workaday pioneer photographers such as L. A. Huffman, the landscape is always there, dwarfing the people, as Western landscapes tend to. Curtis muted his landscapes, refusing to let them overwhelm his portraits, but few of his contemporaries were so skilled or so sensitive. Avedon’s choice is a smart one, mainly because in photography dealing with the West, landscape has been dominant for so long that Western landscape has become trite. John Wayne’s West is one of the things that made it trite, though photography, as opposed to cinematography, has certainly helped. The popularity of certain lyric pastoral images suggests that many people wish to retain a hopeful idealism when thinking about the West. If it has to have people in it at all, they should behave like John Wayne, Matt Dillon, or Miss Kitty; their backdrop, whenever possible, should be Monument Valley, a striking valley to be sure but one that for too long has been made to serve visually for the whole West, most of which doesn’t resemble it. But there is a level of idealism that wants pure pastoral from photographers when they use the West; that idealism is so nostalgic that it seeks, essentially, an unpeopled West, and there have been plenty of gifted photographers to give it to them. Perhaps the power and beauty of the land at its cleanest call forth that need, in photographer and viewer alike. The photograph that answers the need best is undoubtedly Ansel Adams’s Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, made in 1944. The people are there only by implication, in those little houses, in front of the dark mountains, and under the lovely moon. In the American West is a complex work; it does many things, and one of the things it does is comment on that photograph. Avedon shows us the people who might be living in those little houses, beside those mountains, beneath that moon. They are not idealized, and seldom beautiful. Indeed, by his complete rejection of the pastoral as it is usually understood, Avedon comments on all photography using the American West. In a sense his work is an antipastoral. He banishes the landscape of seventeen states, some of which, as millions of photographs from the family-scrapbook level on up indicate, is as visually irresistible as any on the planet. Yet Avedon resists it, rejects it. In his West the people are all that’s there. The landscape is what’s implied. We know it only through its effects, the marks it has left on people who must confront it every day. Some of these marks, made by wind and sun, are canyon deep and so similar as to seem ritualistic, tribal. These people all belong to the Tribe of the West and look the way they do because of too much wind and not enough shade. When I first looked at these portraits, the book they called to mind was Claude Lévi-Strauss’s early masterpiece, Tristes Tropiques (The Sad Tropics). Avedon’s book could just as accurately be called The Sad West. The pictures show people who have been brutalized by a land almost too powerful to live on. The land may be shown only by implication, but the implication is that it’s cruel and the struggle for survival on it still intense. Civilization—with all its niceties—waits. Among its niceties are the fashion magazines for which Richard Avedon has worked so successfully and inventively. It was he who photographed

Nastassja Kinski draped in a snake. Would the photograph have happened if he had not attended the Jaycees’ rattlesnake round-up and seen the children of Sweetwater handling decapitated rattlers as if they were fettuccine? In this work his capacity for the exotic is restrained by the nature of the fiction; it surfaces only in a wonderful photograph of a beekeeper in Davis, California—a picture to make Robert Mapplethorpe eat his heart out. Beauty has its own brutality, as Richard Avedon must know as well as anyone. That is true of Western landscape and frequently true of beautiful humans, whether Western or not. It is interesting that a man who has worked so long at fashion photography would be led now, as he has been in the past, to photograph so many people whose contact with fashion is practically nonexistent. Was it one too many sessions with Brooke Shields that prompted his visit to that San Antonio jail or the hospital in New Mexico or the slaughterhouse in Amarillo? Whatever prompted them, the pictures provide a strong, complex, and variably fascinating set of comments on the photographer, photography, and the hard life of the American West. Instead of romantic images of the vanishing cowboy—we’ve had at least four books filled with those recently—Avedon gives us the skinned heads of two steers and three sheep, a succinct comment on the Western livestock industry. It would be interesting to know how many of his subjects—just folks, except for the criminals and the crazies—would now consider that they made a good bargain when they stepped up to do something that turned out to be a good deal more complicated than just getting their pictures snapped. Will they like the fiction they allowed themselves to become implicated in? Avedon’s ambitions for these images easily prevailed; if the subjects were pleading a case for their view of their lives, they lost it. Many of them will probably never see this fiction, but if they do, my guess is they will be startled by the sadness in it. The emotion most often captured in these portraits is disappointment; the West that caught these peoples’ hearts also stole their dreams. Disappointment is there even in the youngest people photographed. It is as if they sense that a promise will soon be broken, that life will never be for them as advertised in People magazine, in the Marlboro ads, on TV. As for life as advertised in Vogue, well, that is a world away. The man who has shown us a life that is all ornament now shows us one that is without ornament and full of holes to boot. His famous subject Marianne Moore once wrote that poetry’s duty was to give us “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” In Avedon’s portraits the imaginary garden that has been the West for so long finally vanishes. What remains is—in a sense—imaginary people with real holes in them. Avedon’s art at its finest makes the holes seem like ornaments.

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2021 122

123

124

Carlos Valladares reports from the fabled event, detailing five standout films. I remember everything. So I try to limit what I see. That’s why I never watch movies or TV. There are already too many histories in this world. Like this rock. . . . Experiences are harmful. They leave a violent flurry in my memory. —Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Memoria, 2021 At the 2021 Cannes Film Festival, indignant European tourists were turned away from the Palais des Festivals et des Congrès before a screening of François Ozon’s Tout s’est bien passé (Everything Went Fine) because their covid tests had expired. They got red in the cheeks and raised hell in three languages, but the bilingual grad-student guards, pretending not to hear, refused to budge. Later, a young woman was breaking up with her sullen, droopy-eyed boyfriend outside a Cannes disco, her crying fits broken up by the pulse of the dull sounds inside. It was like a slapstick outtake of Éric Rohmer’s Conte d’été (A Summer’s Tale, 1996). She would raise her voice over the din to explain why he was a prick, but the club door kept swinging open and her diatribe kept getting swallowed, so she constantly had to repeat what she had just said. He looked bored to be just standing there, feigning attention, being berated, existing. The overriding sensation at Cannes was akin to these scenes: a film industry and its confused audience in crisis, caught in the frantic grips of a transition that no one important was prepared to tackle. Many of the films shown were first stutters toward grappling with the pandemic and with the latest mutations of capitalism it had produced. But the beaches were open; the water, gorgeous; skinny-dipping college students, floppy-necked dads and their loud children, and Parisian heiresses were in abundance. There was a good amount of high-prestige dreck, of course, but there were also films that went beyond topicality and an insular politics. Here are five festival debuts that shattered through the herd, beacons for burgeoning filmmakers and cinema lovers alike.

ANNETTE Those who go to movies for digestible stories, lessons, or moral uplift will be sorely disappointed, hopefully even left furious, by Leos Carax’s Annette. It is not the kind of movie that encourages disciples; its sobering, savage clarity can only be handled in select doses. To make an emotionally unpleasant musical on Amazon’s dime, then to make only one or two songs genuine earworms (and repetitive ones at that)—the rest of the score cold Brechtian Sprechgesang—is a daft coup on the part not only of Carax but also of Ron and Russell Mael, the duo behind the weirdo-electro ’70s pop band Sparks, who composed the score for the film (their first). Adam Driver plays Henry McHenry, aka the Ape of God, a “mildly offensive” stand-up comic in the Lenny Bruce tradition. Amazingly, he can still shock the excitable gentrifiers of Silver Lake, Los Angeles, with his green bathrobes, his bananas that double as ashtrays, and his cataclysmically unfunny, nasty spasms of rage: “Trying to be funny here is like trying to enjoy a blow-job in a

Previous spread: Still from Paul Verhoeven’s Benedetta (2021). Photo: Guy Ferrandis/SBS Productions, courtesy Festival de Cannes Opposite: Still from Leos Carax’s Annette (2021). Photo: GG Cinéma International, courtesy Festival de Cannes Above: Still from Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car (2021). Photo: courtesy Festival de Cannes

gas chamber.” Later: “Oh dear public, you fuckin’ headless beasts! You make me sick—you ruthless, unpredictable beasts!” An egomaniacal monster whom you want toppled and smashed, Driver’s Henry prowls in long-take tableaux as he wavers in and out of sing-songy screeches, howling in desperation and a too-intense rage at the audience that catapulted him to fame: “Yes, yes, yes, laugh, laugh, laugh. What’s your fucking problem?” Henry dates Ann (Marion Cotillard), a doe-eyed soprano with a sweet demeanor and a redhead pixie cut à la Jean Seberg. They shock the press and their intimates: “What does she see in him?” To save the relationship, they conceive a child, Baby Annette: a petit guignol played by a literal puppet. After a series of tragedies that must be seen to be believed, Henry and Ann’s relationship sinks, and under the tutelage of an increasingly psychotic Driver, their puppet baby becomes a global superstar. The Los Angeles of Annette is filled with daily horrors. Uncontrollable yearly wildfires and serial male abusers are a regular fact in its expressionist sprawl. In Carax’s LA, forests still grow gnarly, Grimm-like branches beneath which lovers can glacially trudge, like the fairy-tale people in F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise (1927). But this is also a city of enchanting dream textures, reminiscent of the LA of Jacques Demy’s Model Shop (1969). One throwaway shot of the cityscape jams together the pointillists, the noir writers, and Paul Leni: a foregrounded fern at night blows at the head of a sea of red-blue-green electric lights, which, by way of a delicious rack focus, blur into a formless splotch. Carax thanks Edgar Allan Poe in the credits, which made me wonder whether he was aiming for his own entry in that long heritage of the grotesque that has gripped the romantic imagination of French modernists going back to Baudelaire. If so, he aimed well. Driver’s performance oscillates between two irreconcilable animals: a sulking orangutan (beefy arms swinging in abandon during fits of rage, a desire to smother his intimates’ attention through a fatherly loathe-love) and a sedate zoo-leopard (cute, regal, and inexplicably detached and dissociated from every outrageous situation, whether a rave with hot Euro girls, a prison cell, or the morbidly green swimming pool where he drowns an opera conductor). Like the movie through which he

drags his feet and beats his chest, Driver’s Henry McHenry is incoherent to the max. When two of the film’s protagonists drown because of him, he can only respond in half-drunken slurs: “There’s so little I can do. . . . ” Responsibility for the crimes is diverted. Driver’s body becomes the site upon which movie star beauty unspools and is canceled by its morbid, sputtering underbellies: voyeurism, possession, an inflated sense of self-worth based on idealized images that bear no relation to the real. Beyond its unabashed weirdness, Annette is blatant about the process by which parents mold their children into extensions of themselves to be adulated and loved by a network of fans. Henry turns Annette into a pop-star spectacle for most of her puppet life. But once she grows up—though still a child, played in the film’s final scene by five-year-old Devyn McDowell, who ranks with Beatrice Straight in Network (1976) and Penelope Allen in Scarecrow (1973) in terms of walk-on roles that establish a movie’s emotional core—Annette, in a sudden, five-minute burst of fury, begins to doubt everything she’s been taught. No longer a puppet but flesh and blood, she begins the long, tragic process that takes up most of our adult lives: killing the masters that formed us. When people, especially Americans, hear the word “musical,” they usually expect “upbeat.” “Pretty.” “Clean.” “Virtuosic.” Carax and Sparks reject these expectations. It takes gumption to make an object like this that will only appeal to perverts, broken-hearted loners in big cities, morbid romantics who obsessively rewatch Nick Ray’s On Dangerous Ground (1951), and people whose ideas of a flirty Friday night is curdled pop Brecht. That’s not many. But the freaks are loud. They adore Carax’s curiously disengaged camera, whose only trick up its sleeve is a bombastic 360-degree twirl around the dude from Big Bang Theory. One such freak: a twenty-three-year-old Ukranian bloke I met on the Croisette on the last day of the festival. He said he was passing through the city for a couple days but managed to snag a free ticket to Annette. He was so visibly fired from it I thought his throbbing blood vessel was going to burst. He says it will revolutionize the genre of musicals. He wants to make musicals. I wish souls like his all the mad best; the future is theirs. 125

DRIVE MY CAR My favorite film at Cannes is the latest from one of the most profound and sensitive working directors today, Ryusuke Hamaguchi. Drive My Car, which won the Best Screenplay award, qualifies as Hamaguchi’s most moving, finely tuned work to date. It is an unconventional melodrama that, like the Chekhov plays that are woven into the movie’s plot, preserves the mystery of human experience with elegance and anguish. More than in any previous Hamaguchi film (he has also made the major works Asako I and II of 2018 and Happy Hour of 2015), the palette of emotions expands dramatically as the filmmaker and his actors face the voids of quiet lives endured in the shadow of loss. The three-hour Drive My Car (it earns every single minute of its runtime) is a loose riff on the 2015 Haruki Murakami short story of the same name, the lead story in his collection Men Without Women. Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima) is an actor, director, and widower putting together a theatrical adaptation of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya (1898), whose title role he has played dozens of times to great acclaim. One of the clever conceits of Kafuku’s Vanya is that he purposely casts actors who speak different languages and encourages them to speak in whatever language they prefer: Mandarin Chinese, English, Japanese, even Korean sign language. But when Kafuku gets into a car accident that slightly damages his eyes, the theater company hires Misaki, a young driver played with brilliant understatement by Toko Miura, to drive him around Hiroshima. Soon, driver and director begin to open up to each other about their buried pasts. Like Murakami’s story, most of the film is confined to these conversations inside the car and the vivid recollections they evoke: of Misaki and her abusive parents; the sudden passing of Kafuku’s wife, Oto (Reika Kirishima), a screenwriter, and the early death of their daughter; the affairs Oto carried out discreetly. As the narrative unfolds, the lives of the characters play out within a theater of unrepresented, vivid memories—unreliable yet open to revision. For t he cr it ic Ja mes Lat t imer, “ hera lding Hamaguchi as the future of cinema might be premature.” 1 Without playing this tiresome game of Predictions—hailing the most Radical or Out There—we can say that Hamaguchi offers one path forward into yet-unforged cinematic grace. One need not be a card-carrying revolutionary like Chantal Akerman, Abbas Kiarostami, or Jacques Rivette; one can also choose to follow Hamaguchi, whose termitelike studies of women and their battles with chance and destiny reach a grave apotheosis with Drive My Car. He and his screenwriter, Takamasa Oe, have extended a twenty-page short story into a devastating 180-minute adagio of longing, absence, performance, and communication breakdown. To watch Drive My Car is to slowly come to terms with life as little more than ghosts, transferences, gaps, and silences. In a discussion of psychoanalysis, Janet Malcolm had perfect words for what Kafuku’s actors enact in their strange multilingual Uncle Vanya: “Even (or especially) romantic love is fundamentally solitary, and has at its core a profound impersonality. The concept of transference at once destroys faith in personal relations and explains why they are tragic: We cannot know each other. We must grope around for each other through a dense thicket of absent others. We cannot see each other plain. A horrible kind of 126

This spread: Stills from Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria (2021). Photos: Kick the Machine Films, Burning, Anna Sanders Films, Match Factory Productions, ZDF-Arte, and Piano 2021, courtesy Festival de Cannes

predestination hovers over each new attachment we form.”2 The most anguished moment in recent cinema is exactly such a moment of transference, where Misaki leans in gently, with quick-thinking moral professionalism, into Kafuku’s arms and, in an effort to stop his choked stream of tears, hugs him tightly, letting him pretend that her body is the body of everyone he’s loved and lost in his life.3 Whom she herself might be thinking of we never learn. After three hours of observation, we don’t expect any such outburst from these coiled characters, but when it comes, the salon is hushed, gutted. With this moment, and with all the unconventionally shot conversations that form the core of Hamaguchi’s neo-Rohmerian talkies, Malcolm’s theory is given concrete form. Who better to accomplish this task than Hamaguchi, a voracious cinephile who has his feet in all the films he’s seen, the rest of himself in the substance of life we barely pay attention to as the real. To fumble with the nuances of this film on paper is almost to destroy its delicate, surging sadness. It’s better to recall fragments and lines that stick with you: 1. Misaki and Kafuku visit a Hiroshima waste factory where pieces of garbage are burned into tiny white strips that look like shredded diary pages. “Isn’t it a bit like snow?” she asks, to no response. 2. “The foreign language parts put me to sleep.” 3. “She betrayed me so nat ura lly when she loved me.” 4. “I wanted to learn her language. So I learned it.” The speech in question: Korean sign language. 5. “People not understanding my words is normal to me. But I can see, I can hear. Sometimes I can understand a lot more than words. That’s what matters most in rehearsal, no? Right now, each day brings so much fun. Chekhov’s text: it moves my body, which seemed stuck before.” 6. Kafuku has his cast repeat their lines over and over until the rhythm is right. Meanwhile, he rehearses his iconic role—Uncle Vanya—by listening and responding to an audiotape that his screenwriter wife, Oto, made for him to help him memorize lines while driving. She plays all the characters in the play, he responds when it’s Vanya’s turn. No gaps. It’s perfect. He keeps using her tape long after she leaves the film as suddenly as Janet Leigh evacuates Psycho, with all of the horror kept underneath the table.

7. “Chekhov is terrifying. When you say his lines, it drags out the real you.” 8. “When you speak to me of love and romance, I’m in a daze. And don’t know what to say.” 9. “Those who sur vive keep thinking about the dead.” 10. “Respond to the text. It’s questioning you.”

MEMORIA As Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966) was for the 1960s, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria will be for the 2020s: a profound visual and sonic challenge to empirical knowledge. An alternative title could have been Tilda and Joey Go Boating. 4 In other words, Weerasethakul’s latest film is a Rivettean odyssey into the nature of dreams under the thumb of colonialism. It has something to do with a f lower-selling English insomniac named Jessica Holland (Tilda Swinton) who is kept awake by a recurring booming noise, source unknown. We wait with the insomniac as she waits for news of her sick sister in Colombia. And we see the insomniac visit various professionals—a sound engineer, a doctor, a fisherman who may or may not be a ghost from some forgotten ancient-Colombian past—in order to find answers for the incessant booming. For most of Memoria, Weerasethakul chooses to confuse the lines between waking and dreaming, central plot and marginal detail, life and death— even as, simultaneously, he sharpens the viewers’ sense of their own bodies, their limitations. With each new film, he has inched farther and farther from the structures of both Hollywood entertainment and safer arthouse fare such as Emmanuel Carrère’s Between Two Worlds (2020; the opening film of Cannes’s Director’s Fortnight), or the hits of Todd Haynes and Wes Anderson. With Memoria we get only poetic grace notes that are closer to dreaming: a midnight sextet of car alarms that lull a Latin American city in and out of restless sleep, like an inverted Love Me Tonight (1932); traces of Colombian and jazz symphonies; and the banging thuds from another dimension that haunt Swinton throughout the picture. Weerasethakul even inserts “sleep breaks” into the film; we see people sleeping on screen, allowing us viewers to doze off too (we’re near Andy Warhol territory). We nap for a few moments, entering a state of both heightened

127

128

Opposite: Still from Andrea Arnold’s Cow (2021). Photo: Kate Kirkwood, courtesy Festival de Cannes Above: Still from Paul Verhoeven’s Benedetta (2021). Photo: Guy Ferrandis/SBS Productions, courtesy Festival de Cannes

attention and relaxed imagination that is simply gorgeous to experience. This film of and for the Global South does what Glauber Rocha’s Black God, White Devil (1964) once did at Cannes: it joins a strange, tough, fresh way of looking with hitherto unimagined waves of mystic wonder. Weerasethakul and Swinton invite us to dream visions, unfinished films, and histories of intense surreality—that is to say, realities more real than what we think is real. We submit to the hypnotic flow of this collective dream, which keeps adding stranger and stranger layers with each new scene, evading rational summation. This dream, these memories of a strange landscape not at all ours, continues long after the credits have rolled. What else can you ask of a masterpiece that seems imported from another world yet looks disturbingly similar to ours?

BENEDETTA No one does sleaze with quite the casual berserk fury of Paul Verhoeven, who proves with Benedetta that the sublime and sacred go hand in hand with the heretical and profane. This lesbian-nun melodrama is peopled with oddballs left over from the musicals of Ken Russell, the allegories of Paolo Pasolini, the wet dreams of Luis Buñuel, all lovers of feverishly religious kinkfests that the Church wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot cross. An audacious holy moment: the titular nun, who might be the resurrected Jesus (Virginie Efira), is praying to a statue of the Virgin Mary, its left tit unfrocked, when the statue topples from the pedestal and pins her to the floor. From the bottom, she kisses the cheap-painted nipple of her holy top, caressing the Virgin’s sides. Benedetta is based on the uproar that occurred when one Sister Benedetta Carlini started a relationship with another nun, Sister Bartolemea, in a convent in seventeenth-century Pescia. As the relationship deepens, it emerges that Benedetta may be the second coming of Christ—which upsets

the hierarchy of power on top of which lies the steely, battle-ready Mother Superior (an excellent Charlotte Rampling). What’s historically accurate and what’s not is largely a moot question; Benedetta is more interested in poking holes (with Sister Benedetta’s wooden-dildo Jesus, no less) into a puritanical yet money-driven society of the kind that Christ fought at the dawn of the millennium, and that Verhoeven has been expertly skewering from Turkish Delight (1973) into his bonkers Hollywood period (1985–2000). Who cares if Benedetta’s fantasies never consisted of her licking out the stigmata? Or that a plague never wiped out a spiteful town that refused to believe in either a woman or an intersex Christ caught at a funeral parade of roses? If they screened this movie at midnight mass, the time of Revelation would be upon us and everyone would sit up straight through the Sunday sermon.

COW “A chicken is alone in the world,” Clarice Lispector once wrote.5 The cow goes one step further: it is never alone; it is as cognizant as we are. Therein lies its even more brutal fate. Loud walkouts and angry complaints galore greeted this wordless, violently unwatchable ninety-minute study of the grim life and death of a cow on an English farm. Andrea Arnold, the director of Fish Tank (2009) and American Honey (2016), pushes people to the edges in order to create a work of such unsentimental steel that when the old, sagging cow with a monstrously enlarged udder is finally mercy-killed with a bullet in the brain in the last reel, the Cannes salon filled with the bitterest applause I’ve ever heard. People hate being reminded of their own mortality—still less, the mortality of cows whose language remains a mystery to us, their butchers. The cow in question is Luma, according to the farmers, or 504481 as we get to know her via her dangling ear tag. 504481 has to learn how to drink milk from a gorgon of a techno-bottle all by herself.

Early in the film, we see 504481 give birth to a calf; then we see the traumatic separation of mother and child. 504481 moos after the calf as the latter is tagged swiftly by a man farmer, then caged in a small crate of her own. Soon after, the new calf is branded; all the while, a woman farmer mothers it, stroking its thrashing legs and cooing “Good girl, good girl” throughout the operation. Any understanding of an animal in art must inevitably be placed in juxtaposition with the suffering of humans. This is the inherent selfishness of our lives and our art; not even Robert Bresson, who made f ilms of even more distilled purity than Cow, escapes it. Certainly he wouldn’t have conceived of a scene as wildly clichéd as the sex between 504481 and a bull. Here, human standards are grafted onto a moment with the old-fashioned obviousness—and none of the charm—of the fireworks fuck of Cary Grant and Grace Kelly in Alfred Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief (1955): we’re shown the bull’s penis, 504481’s eyes Want It, fireworks soar over the farm and we hear the sounds of sexy rub-me-down R&B. All that’s missing is a speech bubble out of a Tex Avery cartoon from the cow’s eyelashes: “Hubba-hubba.” Arnold’s American Honey tendency to water down a radically unexciting scene with topical pop and hip English irony rears its head every now and then, conceding that a viewer exists. Luckily, these interruptions don’t last too long, and she mostly maintains a ghastly flatness to breaking point. Certain passages—some scenes of 504481 passing across wet paddies and mud puddles with maddeningly emotion-clogged expressions on her face—approach the poetic discomfort of Au hasard Balthazar (1966) when Bresson films the donkey, or of Clarice’s story about a hen. The point, overall, is not to craft a peta tract— look how we treat animals, stop eating meat, cows are people, too—but rather to paint the pointless suffering that unites creatures who have the capacity to love. Fated to protect and lose, reminded rudely of this fact by Cow, I could only stumble out of the cinema and into remembering Clarice’s wise words about the life of a puny hen: “Not even at these moments did the expression of her empty head change. In flight, at rest, giving birth, or pecking corn—it was the head of a hen, the same that was designed at the beginning of the centuries. “Until one day they killed her and ate her and the years went by.”6 1. James Lattimer, “Cannes 2021: Tomorrow Now and Then,” The Brooklyn Rail, September 2021. Available online at https:// brooklynrail.org/2021/09/film/Cannes-2021-Tomorrow-Now-andThen (accessed September 25, 2021). 2. Janet Malcolm, Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), 6. 3. The moment, and all of Drive My Car, is also worthy of Henry James in morbid-poltergeist mode (his best). See “The Friends of the Friends” in particular. 4. “Joe” is Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s nickname; Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974) is Jacques Rivette’s radical 190-minute comedy about a magician and a librarian (Juliet Berto and Dominique Labourier) who meet on the street, become best friends, and discover a mysterious plot (a movie, one could say) unfolding inside a haunted Victorian house down the street from them. Céline and Julie . . . is one of the most wildly sophisticated films about dreams, cinema, friendship, and the boundary-breaking potential of playfulness ever conceived. The film critic David Thomson once told me he considered it “the most innovative narrative film since Citizen Kane.” The Criterion Collection and Janus Films released a restoration of the film on DVD and Blu-Ray in January 2021. Memoria swirls in Rivettian openness and surrealism, constructing a similarly vast allegory about the strange nature of movie-watching and how the viewer can turn from a passive to an active subject. 5. Clarice Lispector, “A Tale of So Much Love,” trans. Katrina Dodson, in The Complete Stories of Clarice Lispector, ed. Benjamin Moser (New York: New Directions, 2018), 404. 6. Lispector, “A Hen,” trans. Elizabeth Bishop, in Bishop: Poems, Prose, and Letters, ed. Robert Giroux and Lloyd Schwartz (New York: Library of America, 2008), 310.

129

The day had progressed in its usual disappointing way. It was evening, and Sesi’s bedroom was dimly lit before Palesa entered and switched on the bedside lamp. Palesa could tell that her mother felt disappointed that it was not Mosela, her youngest daughter, whom the light revealed. As Palesa gently laid the night’s meal on her mother’s lap, she noticed just how small Sesi had become on the queen-sized bed she once filled. Without looking at the chicken broth before her, Sesi strapped the oxygen mask over her face until it fit snugly over her nose and mouth, then turned her head to the wall. Turning her head to the wall had become Sesi’s way of refusing most things: calls from the family, changing her nightclothes, visitations from the church, and even suggested walks around the garden to which she had devoted countless years. Sesi had moved the family to an agricultural town to start a poultry business when Palesa was only a toddler. Kroonstad’s open fields offered endless possibilities compared to her home city, Johannesburg, which was filled with steel skyscrapers but offered no job advancements. The six-feet-tall sunflowers that decorated the garden were what had caught Sesi’s eye that summer, forty or so years ago, when she was scouting the area for a home. She had made the purchase at once, using up the savings she had made from her receptionist salary. It had been three nights since Mosela had returned to her university in America and three nights since her mother had stopped eating. When Palesa asked Sesi whether her loss of appetite was linked to Mosela’s departure, she claimed that it had nothing to do with her youngest daughter’s going away, but rather with a fear of exposing her ulcer-lined stomach to the new food Palesa served. Of course Palesa understood her mother’s growing reluctance to eat in the changing face of her ulcers, but the chicken broth wasn’t anything new or fancy. Chickens had roamed the yard since long before she worked to earn her mother’s love, and her culinary abilities had only ever extended as far as boiling. “Are you in any pain right now, Ma?” Sesi’s gaze remained firmly fixed on the wall, though she faintly shook her head. Palesa noticed the dandruff on the back of her mother’s shoulders. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it, but the house had been unusually quiet that day. So quiet that she could hear herself pulling in the air that had been dried out by the heater. “Do you think you could at least try tonight?” she asked. Sesi merely studied a moth floating in the small bowl of water placed next to the heater. Palesa wondered what her mother was thinking about. Sesi hadn’t seemed to care for the moth earlier when it circled the lightbulb above her head, but now she seemed very preoccupied by its death. “Fine,” Palesa said, with barely concealed defeat. She lifted the tray from her mother’s lap, switched off the light, and began to shut the door behind her but paused and turned back. “It’s just that when you refuse to eat, I don’t know what to do and it leaves me feeling bad,” Palesa said into the darkness, “and stressed.” She imagined her mother’s head still turned to the wall, unconcerned. “If you continue like this, I’m going to have to call Mosela to let her know.” “No, don’t. Don’t do that,” Sesi ordered. “It will only worry her.” “It worries me!” “Yes, but what use is it worrying someone thousands of kilometers away?” Palesa wondered why she couldn’t be afforded the same regard. She had moved back to her childhood home seven months ago and reduced her work days to care for her mother. Mama, you ungrateful bitch. Then, out of the darkness, casually and clear as a bell, “Kea ho rata,” Palesa heard.

131

It could be that Sesi surprised herself too, because following her words, she chuckled. Love or laughter, Mama? Games. Palesa shut the door, confused. Palesa walked on the outer edges of her feet to avoid the cold of the kitchen tiles. Most of them were either cracked or missing. The upkeep of the house had stopped when the market for live chickens declined—sixteen years ago. Above her the ceiling was stained and sagging, and around her the paint was peeling, though she had given the walls a dust earlier. Palesa created space in the fridge for the broth her mother had refused. She moved the plate of pap and morogo that Sesi had declined for lunch to the upper shelf, shoved the bowl of motogo that she had turned down for breakfast to the back, and as she combined that evening’s broth with that of the previous night, it struck her that the reason the house had felt strangely quiet was because her mother’s persistent cough had grown silent. The cough had initially invaded their home to condemn Sesi when she smoked, but soon it persecuted her for the simplest of things: a sip of water, a change in sleeping position, a breath, a word, a stretch, a yawn—until it intimidated Sesi into doing nothing. How long had she failed to notice the absence of her mother’s chronic cough? She shut the fridge door but it bounced back open from all the food Sesi had turned away. Lying in her bed, Palesa told herself that she’d done her best for the day. She thought about tomorrow and the little battles it held; how she would broach the subject of bathing, whether she would be allowed to refill the oxygen tank without a prescription, and what time she ought to wake up to repack the fridge. Her thoughts wandered back to the events of the day. Repeating her mother’s unexpected “I love you” in her head, she quietly laughed. It had been a long time since she had laughed. Even longer since her mother had said those words. Palesa felt guilty for not noticing the absence of her mother’s cough sooner. Her fatigue hadn’t kept her from paying attention to the slightest change in Sesi’s condition before. It was embarrassing that she hadn’t noted the departure of what had been the loudest symptom of them all. She concluded that the cough must have left on the same night and in the same manner as her sister had: three nights ago, tiptoeing out with minimal luggage to another place it called home. Defeat from her mother’s refusal to eat engulfed her again, but before she could remind herself that she could only do so much, Palesa was back in the kitchen. She pulled the container of broth from the fridge and dug a fork into the savory liquid, scooping up the chicken pieces that still clung to the bone. She laid the pieces on a paper towel for the liquid to drain, then cracked four eggs into a bowl and poured flour onto a plate. Palesa opened the cupboard where the spices were stored. The shelf was rough from spices that had spilled onto the surface, and in the cupboard lay a horde of pantry bugs that had died and dried up. She ignored the dirt, leaving it for tomorrow, and reached for the fried-chicken spice mix. She picked up a greasy peanut butter jar full of dark, murky oil with food particles floating in it. She opened the jar and smelt the leftover cooking oil before pouring it into a deep frying pan. The smell of warm reused oil filled the kitchen, and she wondered whether her mother could smell it through the silicone of her oxygen mask. Whether the smell reminded her of a time when her hands were strong enough to loosen the lid of a jar of oil. Whether memories of fried chicken would turn her gaze away from the wall. Palesa opened the kitchen door to let in some fresh air. She admired how under the moonlight, the sunflowers resembled a gold blanket hanging over the fence that enclosed the yard. Suddenly, a wave of panic swept over her. Summer was concluding and the sunflowers would soon die. She decided that she would not concern herself with the fridge, or Sesi’s dandruff,

132

or any of the other tasks she had set out to do. Tomorrow she would accomplish only one thing: convince her mother to join her in the garden for a warm pot of coffee, fried chicken, and a view of the sunflowers that had lured her into choosing the small quaint house as their home in the first place. She returned to the stove, but could not remember whether one coated the chicken in flour or in egg first, so she would have to alternate. She dipped the first batch of chicken in the egg, rolled it in the flour mixture, and placed it in the hot oil. She found pleasure in watching the chicken rise to the surface, and seeing its skin turn a crusty golden brown. The undertaker tried to reassure Palesa that it didn’t matter that Sesi had died on an empty stomach, but she was neither convinced nor consoled by his words. She searched for Sesi’s death file in the bedroom cupboard. Mama, journeying to the unknown on an empty stomach. She moved her mother’s unpaired shoes and boxes of old receipts and found the file at the very back, where Sesi had said it would be. The file was larger than it needed to be and most of the information was outdated. It held paperwork of bank accounts Palesa knew her mother had closed, policies that had long lapsed, and a contact list made up of home rather than mobile numbers. Only on a few occasions, in passing, had Sesi mentioned the file to Palesa, saying little more than that it held all the information they would need in the event of her death. This was years ago, long before she fell ill. After the diagnosis of her lung condition, there had been no mention of death again, but a month before Sesi passed away, she had asked to be driven to the shopping center on the corner of Kliprivier and Dingaan Road. Palesa was reluctant to take her mother to the shopping complex; the drive to the remote industrial area was two hours long, the roads were bad, and the center was frankly useless—supplying things that households needed once off or never, like instant lawn and concrete blocks. Still, Sesi had insisted that they go. On arrival, Palesa had watched her mother climb out of the car and then had followed her past the shop where they had once bought wire mesh for the chicken fence, just next to where the boerewors sausage stall used to be. Sesi had stopped and stood quietly at the doorway of a shop called Granite Tombstones CC. She had stared into the shop for what felt like an eternity to Palesa, but moved no farther than the entrance. Palesa would always remember the way her mother staggered back to the car that day. There was no letter in the file describing Sesi’s desired funeral arrangements, so the order of the grieving process was largely shaped by traditional customs imposed by Mosela. “The process will follow a decolonized, no-shortcuts approach. Going back to how burials took place for BaSotho.” That was how she described it to Palesa shortly after she returned home for their mother’s burial. Flimsy, superficial, irrelevant were Palesa’s quiet opinions of these out-of-nowhere customs her sister was dictating. Though they did come from somewhere: Mosela was completing her PhD in African Languages, Cultures, and Customs at university and had an ancestry of textbooks to pull these customs from—customs that she would now introduce to Palesa since their mother had failed to, or forgotten to, or had never known. One of the customs Mosela set in motion after the burial was the ceremonial washing of clothes, a ritual where their mother’s clothes were to be spread across her bedroom floor beside a candle. On the tenth sunset after their mother’s funeral, her clothes would be thoroughly washed, prayed over, and passed down to relatives. You could just lay the clothes on the bed. But Palesa did not dare to say this out loud as she watched Mosela spread their mother’s clothing on the floor. Looking at the bed, Palesa remembered how small her mother’s body looked against it. Mama, now resting in the ground with a casket as your nightgown.

133

During the first night of the custom, Palesa blew out the candles and an artificial light shone from the ceiling over their mother’s clothes. “Lazy at tradition!” Mosela responded, “A victim of internalized racism is what you are.” “Candles are a fire hazard, Mosela.” “The lighting is cold. It’s brutal, and it’s not how the custom is practiced.” “I’ll replace it with a warmer light bulb.” “That in itself is a refusal to do the work.” What work? Palesa thought. She was the one who had done the work of caring for their mother. Mama. No longer here to resolve our fights. “Ignorant, unbothered, oppressed!” Mosela continued. Practical. Busy. Too tired. This is how their disputes unfolded each night. On the sixth night, Mosela’s university colleague in Washington DC called regarding what Mosela said was “something of high priority.” There would be a slight change to the custom and an earlier departure. Three months passed and Palesa remained at her mother’s house for no reason other than to clear it in preparation for its sale, or so she told herself. She had taken extended unpaid bereavement leave because she needed the time to heal, but the hands of the wall clocks spun only in the direction of sorrow. Nights were kinder, offering her a temporary reprieve from her loss, but after the brief disorientation of the first seconds of each morning, memory would descend and she would open her eyes, obligated to remember. She spent her days lost in the past as her fingers combed through her mother’s possessions, sorting through the fabrics of curtains, digging through boxes of jewelry, and disposing of years of unused and expired medication. She refused to throw out the bouquet of dead flowers that sat in her mother’s room. They had retained a rare pink that Palesa cherished and released a light fragrance that disguised the lingering tobacco smell of Peter Stuyvesant, the murderous lover her mother could not walk away from. One morning, soon after she had moved back in to take care of her mother, Palesa had been cleaning Sesi’s room and while emptying the bin, she opened a tissue her mother had coughed into and found blood-streaked phlegm. Palesa didn’t dare raise the issue of a beaten lung with her mother, or tell her to leave the cigarette—not when she, too, had been covering the blows on her face from her own abusive lover at the time, Tau. She picked up her mother’s floral devotional notebook, which Sesi had used for as long as Palesa could remember. It had Wisdom of Women proclaimed in cursive across the cover, and inscribed on each page were inspirational readings and scripture verses. Palesa paged through it. The few entries her mother had made related to her sobriety. She suspected that the book was bought during the time her mother gave up drinking, when Palesa was just an infant. As she continued flipping through the pages, she stumbled across an old lottery ticket and remembered a time when her mother believed the odds of winning the lotto seemed greater than acquiring government support to keep the poultry business afloat. Despite the need for money, Sesi’s gambling days were short-lived, something about it not aligning with sobriety, cross-addiction, and it “not being worth it.” Mama, now without the worries of money. Her mother’s chosen numbers, 1, 3, 6, 7, 10, and 89, appeared faintly on the worn-out ticket. Palesa guessed that the number 3 stood for three daughters, one deceased or miscarried. 7, because Sesi liked that it rhymes with heaven (she had even started the business off with seven chickens). 6 and 10, unquestionably for the 10th of June, her sobriety

134

date. But the 1 and 89 were a mystery to Palesa, who now felt unsettled at not being able to guess what the other two numbers might have meant to her mother. She didn’t know why she cared to uncover what each number represented, nor what she was hoping to find in the journal. What could her mother’s journal of grocery lists and contact numbers reveal? A miracle letter, perhaps; one that described a painless, peaceful death. A letter that would assure her that Sesi had not been afraid, that she preferred to be alone, with no one beside her to hold her hand during the moment of her death. One that confirmed the exact time of her death to rule out a thought that had troubled Palesa since the morning she had found her mother dead: the evening before, once Palesa had returned to bed after frying the chicken, she had struggled to fall asleep and turned to the remedy of pornography to relax her mind. She had worn earphones to prevent Sesi from hearing the filthy sounds, but now wondered if the two or three minutes of high humming and the drawn out “fuck” from the actress may have drowned out the sounds of her mother calling for help in her dying moments. Palesa wanted a letter that would beg her to have no regrets, to feel no guilt, with the confession “I was only pulling your leg about your cooking” tucked between her words. One that would assure Palesa that on that final evening when her mother said “I love you” out of the darkness, she had meant it. Palesa had spent every day since her mother’s death reliving that final evening. She would replay the memory in a variety of hues and at varying speeds. When a moment felt like it was getting lost, she would squeeze her eyes, freeze the moment, fill it with neon colors and boost the volume so that it wouldn’t get lost again. On some days, she would remember details that she had initially paid little attention to. A coffee ring on the side table that she had planned to wipe down the following day. The sounds of an argument coming from the neighbors whose dairy farm stayed afloat while their marriage went under. A unique lethargy to Sesi’s movements that evening. All of that now formed part of the fabric of the story. She would turn over every detail, squeezing her eyes until they hurt, but each time, the invasive and unwelcome sound of her mother’s laugh would vibrate in her ears and haunt her. Palesa wished that she could erase it from her mind. The simple chuckle that had robbed her of the certainty of her mother’s love. Palesa picked up a pen and on an empty page in the journal began drawing absentmindedly. Smooth curved lines ran along the page, and when an emotion felt heavy, she pressed her pen down hard on the page so that it tore. When it felt bearable again, soft strokes and lines crossed the page until the figure of her mother’s sickly body formed. She remembered how the skin on Sesi’s buttocks had sagged in her last days, but she drew them firm. Drawing them any other way would have felt disrespectful. Palesa tore the page out of the notebook and crumpled it in her hand. A notification pinged on her phone. Oh fuck off, Palesa thought when she saw that it was an Instagram DM from Mosela. A rush of shame surfaced. Since her mother was now dead, Palesa knew that Sesi was omnipresent and could hear all her harsh thoughts. A guardian angel. Hers—though she did have her doubts. Sesi would have had to have chosen Palesa over Mosela when asked which daughter she would guide and protect, and that felt beyond the bounds of possibility. But who knew? The ways of guardian angels were a mystery. At the funeral, relatives dressed in black—charcoal black, navy black, every shade of black—had expressed their admiration for the care Palesa had shown her mother during her final days. “Not many people could do what you did,” a distant cousin, who wore raisin black, said. “She looks down on you with pride and gratitude, and says she’ll be your guardian angel. Well, at least for now,” she concluded, her head bowed and hands placed on her heart.

135

How long “now” would be became a question Palesa dwelled on. She fixated on the terms and conditions of “now,” and how much time would need to lapse until “now” was no longer. She worried that “now” was bound to space. Her mother’s house, perhaps? And if she left and returned to work, would “now” conclude? For all she knew, “now” could be bound to a feeling, relevant only when a heaviness in her heart persisted. But what if “now” was jealous? Petty? Would “now” resolve when pleasurable feelings surfaced in her grieving heart? What about the unwelcome thoughts of Tau? Tau. Tau with the broad shoulders. Would her guardian angel and mother leave her due to her recent longings for the woman-beater? Lover. Bastard. Would she abandon her for the nerve of feeling something other than grief ? As Palesa scrolled through Mosela’s Instagram page—the only contact she’d had with her sister since her departure—she contemplated the presence of her guardian angel. After the exchange at the funeral with her distant cousin who wore raisin black, trivial things had beamed with meaning and Palesa had found herself consumed by the everyday messages that she thought were being sent by her mother. A coin she had found in a magazine as she was paging through signified permission to take an unpaid extended bereavement leave from work, a promise that she would be provided for. A forgotten love song on the radio was an assurance that hers, too, would soon come if only she were patient. The scent of the cheap perfume Sesi had used to mask the smell of her own incontinence (the illness had reduced her to a child) had been proof to Palesa that Sesi was in the room with her. But of late, her mother’s presence had quietened, as if she had turned her gaze away, much as she was prone to when she was still alive. Palesa didn’t know why she continued scrolling through her sister’s unappealing life. The cold weather, the protests, the always-on-the-go, the needing-to-prove-a-point and the standing-for-something, were everything she didn’t desire. Palesa believed her mother had shared the same feelings. After Mosela had completed her MA, she had purchased a ticket for her mother to visit the US for a couple of weeks. “It will be a chance for you to see my life here,” Mosela said to Sesi, who had agreed, then later refused, claiming that she had no one to tend to her garden. Palesa asked herself if her mother had now yielded to the invite. She read Mosela’s message. [Been thinking about you. Sending you love.] [hey, how r u?] Palesa responded. [I’m good. Thanks for asking. I’ve been meaning to reach out to you actually.] Typing. . . . Palesa already regretted the exchange. Mosela’s refusal to use textspeak was one of the behaviors she had adopted since moving to America to further her education. This came along with her decision to explore dating both men and women, which also bothered her older sister. [Something wild happened last week.] [mhm?] Typing. . . . [So Veronique and I decided to head out for a walk. It was freezing, but I needed to step away from my thesis and catch some air. Remember the brooch Mama used to wear?] [Da floral 1?] [No, her favorite one. The one I hated. It had a portrait of a white man from some centuries ago, and each time Mama would wear it I’d scold her for pinning a white man to her breast.] [Oh ja, I rememba.] [Right. So while out on our walk, Veronique brings my attention to an oddly shaped cloud in the sky. I look up to see, and Palesa, I kid you not, it’s him! The man from the brooch!]

136

Typing. . . . [Every detail! Right down to the scarf around his neck.] Typing. . . . [I just knew it.] Typing. . . . [I just knew it was her! LOL. I’ve never been happier to celebrate a white man than at that moment.] [Kwl.] [Just cool?] [I mean it’s just insulting dat she wld send signals 2 a daughta dat suggested she be placed in a hospice.] [There you go again.] Typing. . . . [Mama was open to being placed in a hospice. You chose to be a martyr.] Typing. . . . [Besides, wasn’t it you that said you felt some relief at not having to care for her any longer?] [No! I wld neva say dat. I said dat I was sleeping beta, but I ddn’t say anythin abt relief.] [My bad. Veronique says hi, by the way.] She imagined the tone of Veronique’s “hi” to be smug. All-knowing and patronizing. The tone of a girlfriend who thinks she knows the full story, a story that began in ’89, when Palesa gave up her mother’s breast to Mosela, “the tail in the family,” as her name meant. Many sacrifices had followed after the birth of her younger sister, and Palesa had quickly advanced from daughter to peer to coparent. From a young age, she had been exposed to the stresses of her mother, watching her emotionally crumble while facing bankruptcy. Between bouncing from one toxic love interest to another, her mother would sob profusely in her arms and during one of her meltdowns, she remarked on Palesa’s maturity when her daughter didn’t wipe her snot off her collarbone. By the time Sesi died, she had long forgotten just how young Palesa was in relation to her. Palesa wished that her mother could have spared her from experiencing just one thing, though: discovering her stiffened dead body that morning. Something threechinned Veronique could never understand. [Tell her I say hi bck] [Are you back at your place yet, by the way?] [No. Keepin an eye on da house. I’ve been thinkin bout those boys who hang out around da corner. Dey hav 2 much time on their hands, and I’m afraid dey goin to take advantage of da situation.] [And that’s not something the agents can attend to?] [Havn’t askd. Question, did u talk 2 Dikeledi durin da funeral?] [No, why?] [Well I had a convo with her durin da funeral. Long story short, she approached me, told me Mama had spoken to her, and dat Mama wld be my guardian angel.] [Surprised face emoji, Wow.] [And I just can’t help but b annoyd at ur story abt da cloud. It’s so typical of Mama to break a promise, or take pity on u. Even in death.] [Hold on. You don’t think she’d watch over us both?] Typing. . . . [LOL. Palesa.] Typing. . . . [This is ridiculous.]

137

Typing. . . . [Look. I can’t tell you much about guardians and angels. But if I were you, I wouldn’t depend on the spiritual insights from a cultural slut.] The cultural slut was Dikeledi, who, much to Mosela’s disapproval over the years, had dabbled in Hinduism, Celtic spirituality, Yoruba beliefs, and was now following astrology and psychic practice. [And furthermore, I definitely wouldn’t allow her words to create a fight between us.] Typing. . . . [All I know is that since that day, I have felt Mama’s presence. It’s strong and undeniable and I will not be made to feel bad for that.] Typing. . . . [She loved us both.] Typing. . . . [Loves us both. In life and death.] Lying on her mother’s bed, Palesa turned her head toward the wall Sesi had looked at and pulled in slow deep breaths as her mother had. “Kea ho rata,” Palesa said. She repeated the words to herself over and over until she mastered the lisp her mother had spoken the words with. She so wished she’d stayed in the room longer to know more. Dammit. She should have. The room was dark and had offered them both the chance to stand in the discomfort of being bare without being exposed. [Equally tho?] Palesa responded. Typing. . . . [Yes, equally. She split her possessions in half. Right down to the flowerbed.] Typing. . . . [Your perception has always been skewed. At some point, you are going to have to let go of this narrative. It’s getting old and boring, Palesa. And I’m no longer willing to listen to it.] Typing. . . . [You should strongly consider grief counseling.] Typing. . . . [And therapy for the other stuff.] Typing. . . . Palesa switched off her phone and tucked it under the pillow. It was clear “now” had concluded and her mother would be with her sister. She shut her mother’s devotional journal and headed out of the house for some air. Lightheaded, Palesa sat on the stoep of her mother’s yard and facing her were the sunflowers, which remained in full bloom. Her mother had left too soon and the flowers had lingered too long. It was autumn; they ought to have died by now. Stupid flowers. Palesa watched the children from the house next door prepare a goat for slaughter. She lit and inhaled her mother’s favorite brand of cigarette. Exhaling, she felt furious that the smoke could still rise up at a time like this. She watched the children swiftly slice a sharp knife across the animal’s throat. Must be nice, she thought, as the goat convulsed violently, its blood spraying on the faces of the children, to be denied of tomorrow. She put out the cigarette, and went back inside.

138

For the 2021 fiction section of the Gagosian Quarterly we have teamed up with pen America to highlight a selection of writers from pen’s advocacy and literary programs. Founded in 1922, pen America is part of an international network dedicated to fostering freedom of expression through numerous initiatives at the intersection of literature and human rights. This final installment of this series presents pen America Dau Prize– winner Mathapelo Mofokeng. The pen/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers recognizes twelve emerging writers each year for their debut short story published in a literary magazine, journal, or cultural website, and aims to support the launch of their careers as fiction writers. To learn more about pen America Literary Awards and the rest of pen’s work, please visit pen.org. Text © Mathapelo Mofokeng

139

140

RASHAUN MITCHELL + SILAS RIENER

Dance artists Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener join art and dance historian Megan Metcalf in a conversation about dancing with Gerhard Richter paintings, their evolving relationship to language, and hidden “Easter eggs” in their work. The two share a compilation of text and image, creating a performance of the page and inviting you to participate through tactile engagement. The removal of the pages echoes the way a dance disappears.

This is fun—it’s rare for me to talk to people who have a shared set of strong reference points while also being supercurious about the possibilities beyond those points: you’re both concerned with how your work fits into the real world. RASHAUN MITCHELL And there are often references we’re not even aware of. It’s helpful to have things pointed out, which happens in conversations like this. MM I’m interested in how you work through conscious, overdetermined references—the teachers you’ve had, the companies you’ve danced with—in order to engage with the hidden . . . what’s it called when you encounter a little treasure? SILAS RIENER Easter eggs? Treasure hunt? MM Easter eggs, yeah [laughs]. SR I love building the work out of the fabric of secrets. Rashaun and I have different relationships to the amount that’s concealed or revealed. After the last show we did in New York, which was in 2019, called Switch, we had a curator say, “I just don’t understand process work.” It was the first moment of realizing, Oh, well, different people want really different things from this one form we’re deciding to call dance. The idea of “understanding” is always a big part of that. RM We’re working on this impossible task of trying to have people understand what we’re doing and how we’re doing it. These questions are really important to us now, in a way that I think our earlier work doesn’t necessarily ref lect. I like that you brought up the whole secret Easter egg thing, because I feel like that connects to secrets in our earlier work. They were a big part of our work, in terms of—I hate using the word “abstraction,” but like a more abstracted language or way of communicating that somehow maybe relates back to being gay. SR It’s probably all related to being gay. RM And we don’t have to go into a psychotherapy session right now, but— MM No, let’s psychoanalyze the work just a little bit. Can you provide an example of one of the Easter eggs in your earlier works? SR The way I’d describe it is that nothing was named and everything was buried. That might be related to an experience of the closet, or a fear or unwillingness to disclose a specific constellation of reference points, because I think that dance language loses something as soon as you pin it to a web of words. When words enter the conversation, the work becomes fixed. This was always a concern, especially with the early works. I think I’m more relaxed about that now, or I feel like the stakes are different, but when there was a verbal reference point early on, we were like, Oh no, this has become the only word in relation to the dance, it’s in neon lights and it’s flashing. MM That’s interesting because ultimately language becomes important for what you’re doing now, in terms of making scores and communicating with each other. But it sounds like early on you didn’t want that kind of language, otherwise it would have pinned things down too far. RM Sometimes language feels like it forecloses possibilities of experience. When you asked about Easter eggs, I was thinking about this piece Light Years that I made in 2015. That was me trying to deal with race in some way, and what it means to be a Black choreographer working with non-Black performers. My question for myself was, Is it a Black dance? And I didn’t talk about that explicitly for fear it would eclipse other topics, because that’s what identity does, I think. MEGAN METCALF

141

If you know where to look in the process of that piece, you find that hidden question and subject matter. We learned a lot of Zulu dances off the Internet as part of that process. We used a lot of James Baldwin language to generate movements. But again, all of that’s buried. It’s not in the liner notes. I think this separation of reference points or subject matter from the presentation is part of our lineage, as it relates back to Merce Cunningham and modernism. I feel it like a kind of inheritance, or baggage. The doing is more important than the talking. MM I just watched the video of your performance for Gagosian’s Gerhard Richter Premiere [part of a livestreaming series to celebrate new exhibitions]. I’m curious about the nuts and bolts of the experience, how it came about, what the process was like. How much time did you have with those Richter paintings? Did you guys choose the music and your costumes and so on? RM I prefer outfits, Megan, to costumes [laughter]. T he init ia l inv itat ion ca me to us at an extended moment of the pandemic, when we were feeling like there wasn’t going to be much going on. In some ways we’d set the ground for that ourselves by taking a hiatus and moving out of the city. The invitation to do this was wonderful because it gave us a foothold, but was also immediately complicated for us because it’s the medium of film and the challenge of the work being contextualized inside of someone else’s work. Knowing that it was going to be a short dance, five minutes or so, was another challenge as it’s a hard length of time to do a complete work in. We knew we couldn’t really rely on improvisation or on our “Desire Lines” practice. SR All of that is true; it was different from our expanded processes, in which things form themselves by evolving or adapting over time. But we did have some time with the paintings. We had several rehearsals in the gallery, which was amazing because the scale was something we really wanted to come through. Contained in the invitation was the idea of responding or reacting or interacting. RM And because we’d danced in the Merce Cunningham Dance Company—where the music, set, and choreography would come together for the first time at the premiere—we’re very used to dancing in front of visual art and not necessarily having to have an obvious conversation with the work we’re dancing in front of. In this situation, we were interested in some of the narrative connections—like Richter listening to [John] Cage pieces while making these paintings and knowing that Cage was a collaborator of Cunningham’s. Bringing dance into the room made a lot of sense. Rather than restaging Cunningham material, we felt it would be stronger to perform an original piece and to have the reference of Cunningham be an Easter egg, or something subterranean. SR The text in the recording is a Cage treatment of an E. E. Cummings poem from the collection Tulips and Chimneys [1923]. Cummings messed around with the order and repetition of things. Cage used chance procedures—the rhythms keep sort of shifting around. RM Something about that trajectory of the composition was interesting to us. Luckily, the curators, and all the people working on the Premiere, were also interested in this conversation. MM Those paintings don’t have much silence in them at all. SR Yeah, they’re superintricate and dense. There’s so much information in each tiny little place. But a lot of it is also erased or obscured. SR

142

Richter took photos of them at different points in his process and you can see they’ve been layered so many times. In the end there’s an element of being buried, I think. MM They, too, contain Easter eggs in a certain way. I know you’re very familiar with dance on camera. The ending of this performance is especially incredible, when you’re engaged with the act of looking. How much were you able to choreograph with the filmmaker? RM Because we’d worked with film before, and because we were going to be shooting this in a matter of a few hours, we knew we had to be really prepared. We had specific framing suggestions: ways of entering and exiting the camera frame, what paintings we wanted to be in front of for which parts, what the sequence was. So we gave them all of that information prior to showing up. But we did this with the idea that we’re not filmmakers; we also wanted input from the videographers and to be open to what came up organically. They were great to work with, supertalented, clear, and quick. And then the editing process was really nice because we had a few back-and-forths and we could say, Oh, that one clip isn’t our favorite take, or could you switch to the next camera like two seconds earlier, et cetera. MM Clearly, the moments of unison had to be choreographed, and I was wondering what role improvisation had in generating material or in the actual performance, as opposed to predetermined movement. Were your solos all completely choreographed? RM T hey bec a me more a nd more choreographed through the creation, as the movement was repeated over and over. Even if you want to try for indeterminacy, it’s hard for the cameraperson to know how to frame you if you aren’t consistent. There’s tension because there are always a thousand questions you have to answer about every single movement: Why this movement, why put it in front of that movement and behind that other movement? Why would you choose to do it again? SR It’s a different idea if what you’re watching is a process of discovery, like improvisation, or a set narrative, like choreography. MM It strikes me that the Richter Premiere, a short, contained filmic project, stands in stark relief to your sprawling “Desire Lines” practice, which (as I understand it) underlies everything you’re doing right now. The Richter Premiere is a formed object, and then your broader practice is a way to unravel those types of formed pieces. SR I think that’s a great way of describing it. The Richter piece is like a pie that comes out of the oven— RM He’s going to continue with the cooking metaphors throughout the conversation—[laughter] SR And in order to make it, we need to know where everything goes in the kitchen and how to use everything. We have to be stocked and prepared with a body of work, a methodology, systems and principles, before baking the pie. “Desire Lines” is that kitchen, and Rashaun and I use it to store and organize all the accumulated knowledge and information that we communicate to each other. We’ve been making work together for a long enough time that we recognize patterns, we rely on certain practices to produce certain kinds of experiences or outcomes, and so we’re creating the recipe and the toolkit as we go. RM I also think, for teachers or dancers or choreographers in the traditional sense, the roles are

Previous spread: Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener in Gerhard Richter: Cage Paintings at Gagosian, 541 West 24th Street, New York, 2021. Artwork © Gerhard Richter. Photo: Still from Gagosian Premieres, Little Dot Studios Opposite and following spread: Portraits of Rashaun and Silas at their home in the Catskills, New York, taken by the artists and Hannah Nielsen-Jones, 2021

143

145

much more clearly defined and there’s a lot more control inside the execution of those roles. “Desire Lines” has allowed us to have a different relationship to control and to power dynamics, whether we’re doing staged performances or more experimental workshops. We’ve worked with nondance students, curators, and other people who may not consider themselves to be performers, which has been really fun for us. Our roles as artists are more expansive within this framework—we can shift in and out of different tasks, behaviors, and ways of relating to each other and to the world. MM With “Desire Lines”—as much as you can map it out—how do you know where it begins and ends? Do you have a clear sense of its origins, or have threads of it been continuing for a long time? RM I think yes/no, both/and. In some ways it was already in existence as a path we stumbled upon, etched out by other people, and once we started going down that path, we found our own path. It does feel expansive in terms of being able to connect to something before us, but also to a kind of hope of what is possible in the future. But the specific idea of “Desire Lines” was put on a fast track when we were invited to do the “Marfa Sounding: Anna Halprin” festival in Marfa, Texas, in 2017. That was, again, one of these things where you go where the opportunities take you and suddenly we were in conversation with Anna Halprin, who we’d never really worked with. That jump-started a new way of thinking about how we could make dances and where they could live and who they could be for. SR From the very beginning of working together, there were little moments in all of the dances we were making—we didn’t invent this idea—when you had to do something repeatable, but not a dance step. It was like a tiny little bubble of improvisation that had to look the same but didn’t have any steps associated with it. Those I can trace back to the very beginning of our “Desire Lines” practice. All of the works we’ve made, separately or together, have those in them. And as more beads got added to the necklace, it started to approach a pattern and we came to call those beads or bubbles “modalities.” I think the modalities were the first building blocks when we approached the question, How do we make a show without teaching anybody any steps? Well, if modalities are like steps, they’re these little bubbles of time. How do we do that on a time-based, structural level? How do we engage with the ways each dancer navigates a group or a site or the public? So we started to build out different avenues for answering these questions. RM Also, we disagree about a lot of things—in a healthy way, I’d say—and I think we were looking for a container that could hold all of our different interests, including the basic tenet that we don’t have to agree. We can be doing the same thing, even, and disagree about what it is, and it felt really important to have that space to coexist. SR Now that we live full-time up here in the Catskills, and a lot of what we do is being in the house, working on the house, we’ve talked a lot about time with no quality, or “anarchic time.” One of my favorite things to do is wake up and not really know what’s going to occupy my time, especially here at the house, because you can go down to the creek or you can pick weeds or you can pile sticks or you can renovate the bathroom or you can go through all your sweaters. That feels like a manifestation of the idea that my artwork and life and relationship and house are all actually entangled. One moment I’m working on the house, or moving

two-by-fours, and I stack too many of them and it becomes a clown routine. Or another moment I’m doing construction and then suddenly I’m dancing, or I’m dancing and suddenly I’m rearranging the furniture. MM In the article Claudia [La Rocco] did with you for Artforum, Silas narrated “Desire Lines” as an act of refusal, refusing the repetition of having a company, doing pieces and then doing more pieces and then doing that every year. Since that was published, in 2018, you’ve done more and more with the project. Is there a way in which “Desire Lines” becomes its own brand? SR I immediately start thinking about the merch. You know, is a “Desire Lines” T-shirt one where there’s like no holes? Or only holes. I don’t know. MM [Laughs] It definitely doesn’t say “Desire Lines” on it. RM “Desire Lines” only really exists in moments like this, when we’re talking about it with people like you. It’s not part of the language of the performance. For me, it’s the underpinning of what we’re doing: something emerges and gets erected for a specific time and space. So I think it’s inherently resistant to branding, and maybe we are too. MM G i v e n i t s c o m m i t m e n t t o c h a n g e and transformation. SR Yeah, it’s always going to take new information into itself. The idea that it has to change in order to live is something that feels really cool about it to me, as well as the idea of having to teach people these concepts in order to bring them into the work. We always come back to this idea that you’re doing something and you change and then you change the way you change. So “Change your change” is the slogan on the first “Desire Lines” T-shirt. RM I think we’re saying everyone should follow their desire and see where that takes them and search for spaces where they feel like they can do that. Create your own spaces. And that’s what we have to do now. We have to take matters into our own hands. SR And to find a way to interact creatively with where you are, with what you have already. RM So maybe as you’re packing up the rest of your house, Megan, in preparation for your move to New York, you can be thinking about that. You might try to do all the packing with your shoulder or with only your left hand, or, I don’t know, make it fun for yourself, basically, because you have to do it. There’s no way out [laughs]. MM How to change my change. Oh my God, if I change my change at this point, I’m never going to make it to New York [laughter]. RM We didn’t say it would be efficient [laughter].

147

LES FEMMES D’ALGER

This past summer, the Museum Berggruen at the Nationalgalerie— Staatliche Museen zu Berlin presented Picasso & Les Femmes d’Alger, an exhibition that reunited the artist’s paintings and studies from this transformative series. Phyllis Tuchman visited the exhibition and here considers the role of both Henri Matisse and Eugène Delacroix as inspirations for the suite of paintings.

For more than half a century, Pablo Picasso memorialized recently deceased friends and colleagues by making artworks. 1 Most were paintings but he also executed sculptures as well as many drawings. He commemorated struggling artists and contemporary masters, writers and art dealers, fellow Spaniards and Frenchmen, the young and the old. Picasso was only nineteen when his best friend Carlos Casagemas committed suicide, in 1901. Besides portraying his countryman in a coffin, his face lit by a candle, Picasso also pictured Casagemas at his burial, ascending to heaven in the clouds above his grave. The scenes were a tad maudlin. That wasn’t the case about twenty years later when Picasso paid homage to Pierre-Auguste Renoir after the artist’s death. Working from a photograph, he drew a sharp, incisive portrait of the elderly Impressionist, whom he had long admired; he also made a pencil-on-paper copy of Renoir’s depiction of an elegant couple. Then there was the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who survived an injury during World War I only to succumb to influenza during the epidemic of 1918. Picasso eventually remembered his dear friend with a set of drawings that were transformed into two-foot-tall wire constructions. Now revered, these maquettes were intended for a monument that was never erected. Ambroise Vollard, who sponsored the Spanish master’s first solo show, tragically lost his life in an auto accident in 1939. Picasso painted his haunting Night Fishing at Antibes upon returning to the Riviera from the gallerist’s funeral in Paris. And soon after the sculptor Julio González passed away, in 1942, Picasso executed an astounding still life of a steer’s skull on a table in front of black windows. 148

149

Previous spread: Pablo Picasso, Les Femmes d’Alger (Version O), February 14, 1955, oil on canvas, 44 7⁄8 × 57 5⁄8 inches (114 × 146.4 cm), Private collection © 2021 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: courtesy Museum Berggruen This page, top: Eugène Delacroix, Femmes d’Alger dans leur intérieur, 1849, oil on canvas, 33 3⁄8 × 44 inches (85 × 112 cm), Musée Fabre de Montpellier Méditerranée Métropole. Photo: Musée Fabre de Montpellier Méditerranée Métropole/Frédérix Jaulmes

When Henri Matisse died, in 1954, at the age of eighty-four, Picasso briefly stopped working. Then, in slightly less than two months, he executed a group of fifteen paintings, the Femmes d’Alger (Women of Algiers), along with drawings and prints. Besides honoring his longtime colleague— the two men had first met in 1906—this series also referenced a third master, Eugène Delacroix.2 There were periods when Picasso and Matisse saw one another often and periods when they kept their distance.3 After being introduced to one another by the collector Leo Stein, they would meet at his Paris flat on Friday evenings and elsewhere on other nights. When World War I began, many of their colleagues mobilized into the army, but Matisse, at forty-four, was too old to serve, and Picasso, twelve years younger, was a Spanish national. The two artists accordingly resumed their dormant friendship. Later, with lives returning to more normal rhythms, Matisse and Picasso became the subjects of a joint exhibition held at the Paul Guillaume gallery in 1918. Apollinaire wrote a short preface for the catalogue as well as a press release filled with hyperbole: “The brilliant work of [Matisse],” the poet declared, “opens new routes from impressionism, and we are well aware that this vein of great French painting is far from being exhausted.” Meanwhile Picasso, he also noted, “shows that this rich perspective is not the only one open to the artist or the collector and that the concentrated art that produced the curiously contemporary aesthetic of cubism is connected via Degas, via Ingres, to the highest traditions of Art.”4 At that point Matisse was living in Nice, but Picasso saw the show and seems, years later, to have remembered it. By 1926 their relationship had cooled. That June, Matisse wrote to his daughter, “I have not seen Picasso for years. . . . I don’t care to see him again . . . he is a bandit waiting in ambush.”5 But even when they were on the outs, the two artists kept tabs on one another. Scholar Yve-Alain Bois writes that they shared “a dialogue,” and further likens their relationship to “a complicated tango danced by Matisse and Picasso throughout their careers.”6 Picasso once told the writer Pierre Daix, “No one has ever looked at Matisse’s paintings more carefully than I; and no one has looked at mine more carefully than he.”7 After World War II, when both titans were living on the Riviera, they would visit each other as often as every other week. Matisse would have seen Picasso’s latest ceramics in Vallauris because he used the same workshop 150

to fabricate the tiles for his chapel in Vence. When Picasso visited Matisse at the Régina hotel in Nice, he would have been surrounded by his colleague’s latest cut-outs. The Femmes d ’Alger ushered in Picasso’s late period. Then seventy-three years old, he would live to be ninety-one. Gabriel Montua, the chief curator at the Museum Berggruen and the coorganizer of Picasso & Les Femmes d’Alger, observes in the exhibition catalogue, “Marking a watershed moment in the artist’s oeuvre, [this group of works] addresses many earlier issues in his painting; at the same time, the qualities that will become characteristic of Picasso’s final creative period are apparent in his free adaptation of an Old Master as a series of several, sometimes very rapidly executed paintings.”8 With this in mind, you might call Picasso’s Femmes d’Alger Janus-headed. Yet the series is more complex than this image suggests, and past commentators may not have delved as deeply as they might have. In 1940, Picasso had sketched copies of drawings of Algerian women in one of Delacroix’s notebooks

from c. 1832–34.9 Françoise Gilot, Picasso’s partner for ten years beginning in 1943, records that in 1946, when the artist had the opportunity to view some of his paintings alongside masterpieces hanging in the Louvre, one of the pairings he chose was with Delacroix’s Femmes d’Alger of 1834, and he lingered in front of it.10 She also notes that Picasso “had often spoken to me of making his own version of the Women of Algiers and had taken me to the Louvre on an average of once a month to study it.”11 But why should his beginning this project, so long in gestation, have been triggered by the death of Matisse? Gilot’s recollections are often cited and because they pertain to the Louvre version of Delacroix’s Femmes d’Alger, this is seen as the painting that generated Picasso’s own compelling series, populated by members of a harem accompanied by a servant. In the Berlin show—which included Delacroix’s second, 1849 version of the Femmes d ’Alger, on loan from the Musée Fabre in Montpellier—it was clear that both the figures and the setting of this painting were more consequential to Picasso than the earlier work was. Look again at Delacroix’s second interpretation of the theme: the room is furnished with the sorts of tables, carpets, and textiles that Matisse owned and collected. The former Fauve had purchased these items when he twice visited Morocco in 1912–13, and over the years he had depicted them in his paintings. 12 He owned four such tables, known as taborets; 13 one of them appears several times in works featuring a model named Lorette (or Laurette), who often posed for him in 1917. These two low-lying tables have geometric patterns on their polygonal tops and their legs add other decorative effects. The former Cubist would have been familiar with both his colleague’s individual furnishings and their appearance in his art. He would probably also have been aware that Delacroix depicted a similar table in the Montpellier version of his Algerian masterpiece. Can aspects of Matisse, not just Delacroix, be discerned in Picasso’s Femmes d ’Alger of 1954– 55? Yes, indeed. There is much more Matisse in these pictures than has generally been surmised. 14

Picasso has imagined Matisse updating Delacroix’s exotic paintings while he, Picasso, looked over Matisse’s shoulder and offered friendly critiques. On Monday, December 13, 1954, Picasso painted two canvases that feature a pair of Algerian women with a servant. Version A has primary colors (red, yellow, and blue, plus green) while Version B is in grisaille. Curves dominate the pictures: breasts, buttocks, limbs, a curtain, a cushion, a screened doorway. The bare-breasted members of a harem sit on the ground. One is asleep; the other holds a hookah (will she, too, soon close her eyes?). Behind them, drawing aside a curtain, a buxom servant carries a pot of coffee. A tall polygonal table appearing in one picture is replaced by a low-lying one in the other. Picasso took his time figuring out how to proceed. Two weeks later, on December 28, he executed Version C, and on January 1, 1955, Version D. Instead of attaining clarity, though, he ended up with a hodge-podge: in both paintings he added a third woman, and the room became as crowded as a subway car at rush hour. Version C, too, has aspects reminiscent of Surrealism: breasts resembling ballistic missiles, feathered coiffures, a recumbent nude in a yogalike position. Stripes, dots, checkerboard squares, and other elements adorning the room add to its overall confusion and cacophonic tone. While the colorful palette stays the same, the artist has shuffled the deck, using red, blue, yellow, and green to identify different elements than they earlier had. And he continued, as he would in almost every version, to alter the appearance of tables and cushions. Wit h Version E , executed on Ja nuar y 16, Picasso’s composition became easier to read. He achieved this by enlarging the scale of the hookah smoker and the odalisque and by deploying less-frenetic decorative tiles. And his homage to his departed colleague entered a new phase: he finally made Matisse’s art the focal point of the scene, depicting a recumbent blue nude that immediately calls to mind Matisse’s Blue Nude (Memories

Opposite, bottom: Pablo Picasso, Les Femmes d’Alger (Version A), December 13, 1954, oil on canvas, 24 ¼ × 28 3⁄8 inches (61.5 × 72.2 cm), Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut; gift of the Carey Walker Foundation © 2021 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: courtesy Museum Berggruen

This page, above: Pablo Picasso, Les Femmes d’Alger (Version E), January 16, 1955, oil on canvas, 18 1⁄8 × 21 5⁄8 inches (46 × 54.9 cm), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; gift of Wilbur D. May © 2021 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York This page, below: Henri Matisse, Blue Nude (III), 1952, gouache on paper, cut and pasted, on white paper, 44 × 29 inches (112 × 73.5 cm), Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris © 2021 Succession H. Matisse/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: © CNAC/MNAM, Dis. RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, New York

of Biskra), of 1907. The black lines that outline her body also seem to reference Cubism. These were not, however, Picasso’s immediate points of departure in 1954–55: during his visits to Matisse at the Régina, he had seen a virtual cavalcade of the latest blue nudes by his longtime friend, including Blue Nude I–IV, Acrobats, Standing Blue Nude, Blue Nude, the Frog, The Parakeet and the Mermaid, Women and Monkeys, and The Swimming Pool.15 All of these works are cut-outs, and the way Picasso outlined all three women in Version E in black—the blue nude, the bare-breasted hookah-smoker in her red outfit, and the servant clothed in green—suggests that their body parts are composed of components that might have been snipped from paper with a pair of scissors. Note, too, how the wall and floor tiles now resemble the geometric segments of Matisse’s grand decorations. After painting two more versions over the next week, Picasso came on January 24 to Version H, where he increased the size of his canvas dramatically. Instead of using a prestretched 10F canvas (10 figure, in the French system of standard canvas sizes), he now worked on a 100F. This meant that the women could be larger and have more space between them. The table and the cushion became more noticeable as well. The next day, on January 25, in Version I, in a newly expanded doorway in the rear, the artist reintroduced the third member of the harem, who would now remain, adding variety with her arms poised above her head. P icasso was momentar ily sidetracked on Febr ua r y 6 when he pa inted Version K: he returned to working in grisaille, as he did again with Version L on February 9 and Version M on February 11. Version L features a solo figure, the hookah-smoking woman. Had the artist been notified that his estranged wife Olga Khokhlova, who had been stricken with cancer, was dying? It seems so. The couple had been separated since 1935, but had never divorced, and the artist, in his role as her husband, had continued to support her. After living in a clinic in Cannes for several years, she passed away on February 11.16 When Picasso drained the canvas of color, you might assume that he was thinking less about Matisse than he had been. But Version K and all the subsequent canvases—with the lone exception

151

Pablo Picasso, Les Femmes d’Alger (Version L), February 9, 1955, oil on canvas, 52 1⁄4 × 38 inches (130.2 × 96.8 cm), Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie © 2021 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: courtesy Museum Berggruen This page, below: Henri Matisse, Bathers by a River, 1909–17, oil on canvas, 102 1⁄2 × 154 1⁄4 inches (260 × 392 cm), The Art Institute of Chicago. Charles H. and Mary F. S. Worcester Collection © 2021 Succession H. Matisse/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: The Art Institute of Chicago/Art Resource, New York

152

of the hookah-smoking woman in Version O, the last work in the series—include heads without facial features. This quality appears in many works by Matisse, including The Joy of Life (1905), Le Café maure (Arab coffeehouse, 1912–13), Bathers by the River (1909–17), The Dance of 1932–33 (the mural in the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia), and, of course, all of the cut-outs that show figures. By the time Picasso painted Version O, he had cleverly updated Delacroix’s Femmes d’Alger using Matisse’s visual language, from the decorative stripes on the right side of the canvas to the semiblue nude odalisque to the blank faces of three of the figures. With the more “realistic” hookah-smoking woman, Picasso may have been sending a love letter to Jacqueline Roque, his future wife; the canvas was painted on February 14, Valentine’s Day. No less an authority than William S. Rubin, who knew the artist’s second wife, identified a “reincarnation [of Roque] as the ‘odalisque’ with the hookah on the left of the final variation.”17 There is one more aspect of this series of canvases to consider. Although Picasso may long have been planning to paint a work related to Delacroix’s Femmes d ’Alger of 1834, in the Louvre—we have no reason to doubt Gilot about this—why did he particularly associate Matisse with that work? The explanation is simple. After his two trips to Morocco, Matisse had himself updated Delacroix’s Femmes d’Alger in his Three Sisters triptych of 1917. After creating dozens of paintings of the model Lorette in 1916–17, Matisse began to dress her as a Moroccan. Sometimes she languidly posed with the squat table with the checkerboard top that he had acquired in Africa. In one painting she is accompanied by a Black servant also wearing Arab-style clothing, and carrying coffee on a tray. Since Matisse executed a variety of paintings on Moroccan themes, including studio paintings of women in Arabian garments, the way he costumed Lorette has never seemed odd. But in 1918, when the Three Sisters triptych appeared in the Matisse/ Picasso show at the Paul Guillaume gallery, Picasso must have realized that his friend was updating Delacroix’s Femmes d’Alger by transferring the subject to three chic Parisian women in a contemporary apartment. As in Delacroix’s paintings, Matisse depicted a trio. In the center and left panels, some members of the “harem” also wear Moroccan robes

and turbans. Although furnishings and objects fashionable in France round out the scene, which is also better lit than in the Delacroix, the tell-tale squat table appears in the lower righthand corner of one picture. The tall vertical panels, unusual for Matisse, add a modern touch to Delacroix’s format. As a unit, the figures, furnishings, and format are something of an anomaly in the artist’s career. When writing on Picasso’s Femmes d ’Alger, many art historians and curators have focused on Picasso and Delacroix. At the Museum Berggruen in Berlin, it became clear that Matisse needed to be restored to the conversation.

1. Surprisingly, this aspect of Picasso’s work has hardly been noticed. Years ago I brought it to the attention of Professor Robert Rosenblum at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, an authority on Picasso. Rosenblum was astonished at how often Picasso had expressed his grief this way. 2. See Gabriel Montua and Anna Wegenschimmel, Picasso & Les Femmes d’Alger, exh. cat. (Berlin: Museum Bergggruen, 2021), Susan Grace Galassi, Picasso’s Variations on the Masters: Confrontations with the Past (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996), and Leo Steinberg, “The Algerian Women and Picasso at Large,” in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 124–234. The Steinberg text has been viewed as a classic for decades; the present, much shorter essay approaches the variations from a different vantage point and should be viewed as a prequel to Steinberg’s. 3. See Yve-Alain Bois, Matisse and Picasso, exh. cat. (Fort Worth: Kimbell Art Museum, 1998), John Elderfield, Kirk Varnedoe, et al., Matisse Picasso, exh. cat. (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2003), Jack Flam, Matisse and Picasso: The Story of Their Rivalry and Friendship (Cambridge, MA: Westview Press, 2003), and Françoise Gilot, Matisse and Picasso: A Friendship in Art (New York: Anchor Books, 1990). 4. Guillaume Apollinaire, quoted in Flam, Matisse and Picasso, 114. For Apollinaire’s preface itself, see his Catalogue des Oeuvres de Matisse and Picasso: Henri Matisse 1918, in Flam, ed., Matisse: A Retrospective (New York: Park Lane, 1988), 169. For the Picasso text see Apollinaire on Art: Essays and Reviews 1902–18, ed. LeRoy C. Breunig (New York: Viking Press, 1971), 457–58 5. Henri Matisse, quoted in Bois, Matisse and Picasso, 33. 6. Bois, in ibid., 18. 7. Picasso, quoted in ibid., 20. 8. Montua, “Introduction: Picasso’s Femmes d’Alger at Museum Berggruen,” in Montua and Wegenschimmel, Picasso & Les Femmes d’Alger, 17. 9. Galassi reproduces four of these drawings, 134–35. Montua publishes the same four drawings by Picasso opposite a fullpage illustration of one of the works on paper by Delacroix; “Introduction,” 26–27. 10. Gilot and Carlton Lake, Life with Picasso (New York: Anchor Books, 1989), 202–3. Of the day in 1946 when they visited the Louvre, Gilot relates, “The next Tuesday morning, Pablo was up very early for him, and by eleven o’clock we were ready for the Louvre. He seemed more serious than usual and talked little.” 11. Gilot, quoted in Steinberg, “The Algerian Women and Picasso at Large,” 125. 12. On Matisse’s trips to Morocco see Jack Cowart et al., Matisse in Morocco: The Paintings and Drawings 1912–1913, exh. cat. (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1990). 13. On objects Matisse owned and used as props in his paintings see Ellen McBreen and Helen Burnham, Matisse in the Studio, exh. cat. (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 2017), and Phyllis Tuchman, “Matisse Junkies, Rejoice! A Survey of Grand Works and Studio Relics Captivates in Boston,” Artnews, May 2, 2017. Available online at www.artnews.com/art-news/reviews/matisse-junkiesrejoice-a-survey-of-grand-works-and-studio-relics-captivates-inboston-8426/ (accessed September 23, 2021). 14. Alas, many curators and critics agree with Marie-Laure Bernadac’s opinion that “ultimately, the Femmes d’Alger paintings are only an iconographic homage to Matisse since they are completely Picassian in their visual vocabulary.” Quoted in Montua, “Picasso, Les Femmes d’Alger, Matisse, and Tradition,” in Montua and Wegenschimmel, Picasso & Les Femmes d’Alger, 59. 15. See Jodi Hauptman et al., Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs, exh. cat. (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2015), cover, 203, 205–7, 209–10, 212, 215, 222–24. 16. See Tuchman, “One Work: Pablo Picasso’s ‘Les Femmes d’Alger (Version L),’” Art in America, August 17, 2021. Available online at www.artnews.com/art-in-america/aia-reviews/berggruenpablo-picasso-les-femmes-alger-version-l-1234601725/ (accessed September 24, 2021). 17. William S. Rubin, “The Jacqueline Portraits,” in Rubin, Picasso and Portraiture: Representation and Transformation, exh. cat. (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1996), 464. Both Rubin and Montua also see a similarity between Roque’s face and the woman seen in profile in the Louvre version of Delacroix’s Femmes d’Alger; see Rubin, ibid., 463, and Montua, “Introduction,” 24.

Lunch Monday–Saturday 12–3pm Dinner Monday–Saturday 6–11pm 976 Madison Avenue, New York T. 212 906 7141 reservation@kappomasanyc.com 153

GAGOSIAN ART ADVISORY Curatorial Advice Appraisals and Valuations Insurance, Estate Tax, Charitable Donation Collection Management Short and Long-Term Strategic Planning Collection Database Management Global Art Market Access Galleries, Auction, Art Fiars, Private Sale Negotiation Expertise

Contact Information Laura Paulson – Director and Principal lpaulson@gagosianartadvisory.com 917.755.9233 Mary Phelps – Director of Collections Management mphelps@gagosianartadvisory.com 917.636.8126

Jenny Mittica – Associate Director of Collections Management jmittica@gagosianartadvisory.com 917.853.4459 Bernard Lagrange – Director blagrange@gagosianartadvisory.com 609.751.8303 Olivia Grochmal – Appraisal Coordinator ogrochmal@gagosianartadvisory.com

Michael Walker – Director mwalker@gagosianartadvisory.com +44 782.729.7223 Nicole Fromer – Advisory Administrator nfromer@gagosianartadvisory.com 917.756.7518

Property from an Important East Coast Collection Jean Dubuffet, Les Ébats Champêtres, 1977 Sotheby's Contemporary Art Evening Auction | May 12, 2021 Estimate: $1,800,000-2,500,000 Price Realized: $3,892,000 Sold on behalf of a client of Gagosian Art Advisory

Carnegie Hall at Home Enjoy recent broadcasts and curated playlists available worldwide for streaming on demand, including programs for kids and families. carnegiehall.org/WatchAndListen

Jeff Goldberg / Esto

Your destination for the past, present, and future of art.

Choose from our extensive range of lecture series, special lectures, panel discussions, workshops, conferences, exhibition openings, and join the conversation.

ifa.nyu.edu/events

Without Limits: Helen Frankenthaler, Abstraction, and the Language of Print On view through 2.20.2022 This exhibition is organized by the Blanton Museum of Art. Images: (left) Helen Frankenthaler, Harvest, 1976, CP, lithograph, 26 x 22 in., Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin, Gift of the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, 2019.135.2. (center) Helen Frankenthaler, Harvest, 1976, WP 2, lithograph with crayon and masking tape, 26 1/8 x 20 1/8 in., Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin, Gift of the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, 2019.135.5. (right) Helen Frankenthaler, Harvest, 1976, AP 3/10, six color lithograph, 26 x 22 in., Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin, Gift of the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, 2019.135.1. Artwork © 2021 Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY / Tyler Graphics Ltd., Bedford Village, NY

Without Limits celebrates the art of printmaking and the generous gift from the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation of ten prints and six proofs spanning five decades of the artist’s career. Her work is joined by that of other artists in the Blanton’s collection who used the medium of print to capture and translate their own abstract visions.

The University of Texas at Austin / blantonmuseum.org / @blantonmuseum

$OH[DQGHU &DOGHU 8QWLWOHG 3KRWRJUDSK E\ 6DQGUD 3RLQWHW FRXUWHV\ RI &DOGHU )RXQGDWLRQ 1HZ <RUN $UW ÍHVRXUFH 1HZ <RUN Ǣ &DOGHU )RXQGDWLRQ 1HZ <RUN $UWLVWV ÍLJKWV 6RFLHW\ $Í6 1HZ <RUN 3LFWRULJKW $PVWHUGDP

2/$)8Í ELIASSON É,/9,1$6 .(Ë3,1$6 6,Ë21( LEIGH (Í1(672 1(72 &$Í67(1 1,&2/$, $., 6$6$Ë272 Í2Ë$1 6,*1(Í Ë21,.$ SOSNOWSKA 6$Í$+ SZE Í,Í.Í,7 7,Í$9$1,-$ Í277(Í'$Ë | 129(Ë%(Í – Ë$< | kunsthal.nl &DOGHŀ 12: This must-see exhibition shows how Alexander Calder became a source of inspiration for subsequent generations of artists.

168

Lee “Scratch” Perry, c. 1980. Photo: David Corio/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

GAME CHANGER LEE “SCRATCH” PERRY

Connor Garel celebrates the outsized impact of this legendary musician on the world of music and beyond. It probably started in Negril. It was the mid-1950s and Lee “Scratch” Perry was still in his early twenties, drifting about in Kendal and playing dominoes, which had suddenly, by the misfortune of his disenchantment, become redundant. He was beginning to hear news about the birth of a promising industry, a gleaming chance to circumvent the inheritance of his family’s rural poverty: in a bid to accommodate new tourism, Negril, a then underdeveloped part of western Jamaica, was getting some work done, and somebody had to be there to do that work. So to Negril he went, to help build the first road into the resort town. “When I was working with the rock,” Perry said of his construction labor, “I picked up these sonic vibrations. . . . When you throw the rock, it sounds like when you hear the thunder roll.” Nature whispered many things. Tumbling boulders sounded to him like beating drums; violent winds were like crashing cymbals. It was this poetic ear that led Perry to revolutionize the way we think about sound and the possibilities of a song, and that made him one of the greatest artists, in any medium, of the last half century—one who forever changed the course of popular music worldwide. By the time Perry got to Kingston, Jamaica’s capital, in the late ’50s, a whole circuit of mobile discos had cropped up to embrace the city’s working class, who had fallen hopelessly in love with the towers of bass-heavy speakers that pumped the dance-friendly riddims of ska, the ascendant musical form of the time. Perry quickly folded himself into the fray, working first as a janitor at Coxsone Dodd’s legendary Studio One, then ghostwriting and producing dozens of catchy songs there. But his relationships with the producers soon became acrimonious and the young engineer decided to form his own label, Upsetter Records. In 1968 he released his first major single, a loose and bubbling diss track called “People Funny Boy,” for which he ingeniously tucked the sound of a cooing baby into a muscular rhythm that is today credited both as the first reggae beat ever made and the first instance of sampling in recorded music. The song

marked the inauguration of a new and pliant musical genre designed to carry sharp social commentary about a Kingston marred by political upheaval. Perry believed in confession, in music that could “make wrongs right”; reggae was the sound of the dispossessed, speaking truth to spiritual power. Perry found music in the most unlikely places. That he sampled this odd bundle of noise in “People Funny Boy” nine years before Stevie Wonder’s “Isn’t She Lovely” opened with the cries of a newborn baby, and two decades before Timbaland placed his own gurgling baby sample on Aaliyah’s twitchy, lilting “Are You That Somebody” (which clearly inspired many of Destiny’s Child’s Writing’s on the Wall–era songs), is a testament to his clarity of vision. Perry anticipated the forms and moods of popular music before anyone else could get there. It was this cultural forecasting that attracted a young Bob Marley, who, desperately in need of a new sound, was offered the series of sparse and haunting tracks that became 1970’s Soul Rebels. (Perry also produced Marley’s “Keep on Moving,” “Duppy Conqueror,” and “Mr. Brown.”) “I gave Bob Marley reggae as a present,” Perry said, like Prometheus bringing fire to mankind. He played the prophet, Marley played the king, and, with the help of the Wailers, they all made some of reggae’s finest and most powerful work, cementing them as the international stars who would smuggle the music to the world beyond Jamaica. A whole constellation of artists was enamored of Perry’s slow, loping beats. He worked w it h t he Congos, Jun ior Mur v i n, Pau l a nd Linda McCartney, the Clash, the Beastie Boys— Jean-Michel Basquiat, too, cited the producer as an influence. Perry looked askance at the trappings of social convention, occupying instead that fraught and exalted cavity between genius and madness. “The studio must be a living thing,” he would say. “The machine must be live and intelligent.” Most Kingston studios in the ’70s used an expansive sixteen-track setup, but Perry made do with a basic four-track Teac recorder. The reggae historian Lloyd Bradley has said that Perry took

musical ideas “way past the point at which logic would tell most people to stop,” which seems perfectly true: there were stories of him burying master tapes in his garden, then dousing them with whiskey, blood, and urine; of blowing weed smoke over recording equipment; of mic-ing a palm tree to capture the “living African heartbeat.” Keith Richards once described him as “the Salvador Dalí of music.” “The world is his instrument,” Richards said. “You just have to listen.” Many if not most of us now live our lives among sounds drawn subtly or unsubtly from Perry’s cosmological palette. It was Perry whose pioneering of dub music hammered down the foundations of contemporary electronic music. He’d take a reggae song and strip it down to its riddim only to rebuild it, slipping it to a newer, shinier outfit. He’d stretch a sweet voice into a quivering, spectral moan; a drumline would stutter and get woozy, as if it were stoned; an existing song became, somehow, a new one, both reenergized and distinct, as though it had sprung from the depths of a stem cell. He revised the role of a studio engineer and remade it in his own image, which was the image of an auteur. Popular culture is, of course, Black culture, and the world has run up a historical deficit it can never stabilize. The writer Sharine Taylor has noted how Jamaica’s soundscapes are so often adopted by non-Caribbean artists that its originators seem constantly at risk of being painted over. So what does it mean that we’re so deeply indebted to a single man, this freewheeling multiverse who made so much beauty? If you’ve ever pressed play on a song by Arca, or FKA Twigs, or Flying Lotus, or indeed have spent time at some rave improvised beneath a city highway, then you’re cashing in on the seeds Perry planted. From house, jungle, and garage to dubstep, rock, and hip-hop, the immortal giant haunts the canon. Perhaps he hasn’t really died, present as he is all around us, fragments of that interstellar legacy floating about in all that we listen to—shimmering in all the delays, the echoes, the reverbs, the sounds that bore into our joints and release our bodies into motion. 169