OLD NEWS

IT'S INTERNATIONAL SWORD SWALLOWERS DAY!
Pochoir print by Henri Matisse from the Jazz portfolio, 1947:
<https://tinyurl.com/4pza76m8> _‪PeterHuestis‬

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ANNE TRUITT SCULPTURES ARE, TOO by greg
<https://tinyurl.com/bde5cpxn>
A few weeks ago, when I saw something figural or human-scaled in some columnar Rachel Harrison sculptures in Dijon that also reminded me of Anne Truitt’s columns, I had to also realize I’d been embarrassingly bitchy <https://tinyurl.com/bdct8tn4> about Blake Gopnik reading Anne Truitt’s sculptures the same way once in the Washington Post.
Well, since then, a very archivally minded Truitt admirer sent me an even earlier review of a Truitt show that makes exactly the same point. A review written by Rachel Harrison.
I was just going to quote the part where Harrison compared visiting the show at Danese to arriving at a party where the guests were all wearing deceptively monochrome outfits, but then it turns out neither the show, nor the gallery, nor the review, not even the installation photo of three new (2001-02) sculptures are available online. So I’m posting a scan above and the full text after the jump, and will beg Harrison’s lawyers for forgiveness if they come calling.
The irony is, when I received this old review, I was sure I’d blogged about it and forgotten it. I did not. I’d misremembered a Times review about Truitt and Agnes Martin having simultaneous shows across the street from each other. But Time Out was huge at the time, and I’m still convinced it was the beginning of my awareness of Harrison’s appreciation of Truitt, which was in turn instrumental in my appreciation of Harrison.
Anne Truitt
Danese (through Feb. 8)
“The main room of Anne Truitt’s current exhibition consists of 11 five to seven-foot high painted rectangular columns. Truitt has chosen a challenging palette: rich muddy brown, safety orange, kelly green, bubble-gum pink, deep purple. With the exception of two multihued forms (one red and black; the other a combination of white, beige, black, pale blue and green), all the sculptures on view are monochrome. Or so it first appears. Closer inspection reveals an ultra thin border of contrasting color at the base of many of these forms.
“Visiting this show is a bit like arrive at a party to find almost everyone dressed head-to-toe in a single color. Except there’s one man in a blue-and-black striped suit (the intensity of which suggests plaid since the red and black are so committed and intertwined) and one woman in a loud print dress (jazzed unequal stripes of beige, green, black, blue and white). Their outfits seem too elaborate for this context. Maybe they’re at the wrong party? But after a while you realize that everyone is much more elegantly and pointedly dressed than you’d originally assumed. The all-pink person is wearing red shoes, and that tiny sliver of crimson completely transforms the way the pink resonates. Rarely does one see this sort of sophisticated complexity in sculpture: the integration of extremely reductive classical form with decorative and playful vivid color.
“In the early 1960s, Truitt’s work was hotly contested by major figures such as Donald Judd, who gave her 1963 solo debut at Andre Emmerich a nasty review.
Clement Greenberg, on the other hand, hailed her as the “inventor” of Minimal art. But Truitt never fit comfortably into the Minimalist canon. Her sculptures have always been intensely personal, meticulously hand-painted and more concerned with the way color and form interact than with mounting or winning any grand theoretical argument.
“Perhaps her work is less well known than that of other artists from her generation because it is so idiosyncratic and rigorous. (Being a woman back then certainly didn’t help either.) We can only hope that Truitt will make a comeback and take her rightful place in history alongside the Big Boys. In the meantime, you can thoroughly enjoy this underground gem of a show.
— Rachel Harrison” _greg.org

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SING
<https://tinyurl.com/bdeanb3u> _DavidShrigley

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TAKING A SEAT AT ROBERT THERRIEN’S TABLE by Matt Stromberg
<https://tinyurl.com/4wkun3np>
Robert Therrien’s “Under the Table” (1994) is arguably one of the most popular artworks at the Broad. The 10-foot-tall (~3-meter-tall), meticulously scaled-up version of a sturdy Gunlocke table surrounded by six chairs occupies an absurdly small room at the museum. It’s often filled with wide-eyed visitors who take turns posing for pictures under the monumental table, gazing at its underside in wonder.
“I think that artists can get swallowed up by their most famous works,” Broad curator Ed Schad told in an interview. “If you are in the arts, specifically the Los Angeles art world, you know him very well. But I don’t get the impression that, outside of that sculpture, Robert Therrien is very well known by a general audience.”
Robert Therrien: This is a Story, curated by Schad at the Broad, aims to change that. The exhibition brings together over 120 works produced over five decades by the late artist, who spent his entire adult life in LA. Along with oversized tables, chairs, pots, and plates for which Therrien is best known, the show includes sculptures and drawings that hover between the specific and the universal — investigations into form and material inspired by the artist’s own personal history.
<https://tinyurl.com/4zuysx38>
Robert Therrien was born in Chicago in 1947, but his family relocated to Palo Alto, California, when he was nine when the Golden State’s milder climate proved more restorative for his childhood asthma. As a child, he was an avid fan of cartoons and comics with an anti-authoritarian streak. In the late 1960s, he attended Oakland’s California College of Arts and Crafts (now the California College of Arts) and then studied printmaking at the Brooks Institute in Santa Barbara and painting at the Santa Barbara Art Institute. At the suggestion of his professor, painter James Jarvaise, he moved to LA in 1971 to get his MFA at the University of Southern California, setting himself up in a studio on a nondescript stretch of Pico Boulevard just east of Fairfax, where he would remain for almost two decades.
Some of his earliest works from this period were enigmatic sculptures that drew from imagery from childhood memories — coffins recalling the death of his father when he was 14, chapels symbolic of his Catholic upbringing, Dutch doors from his grandparents’ home, snowmen as self-portraits — that he would return to again and again throughout his career. They would transform, as well: The snowman tipped on its side and became a cloud, a butterfly turned into a bow, and the chapel morphed into an oil can.
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“The forms migrate, wandering far from the personal, then back again,” Schad writes in the show’s catalog. “They repeat but are never repetitive … they expand and contract, shift materials, and swing between colors and patinas.”
The exhibition features a timeline created by Therrien and his former assistant, the artist Christina Forrer, that charts the progression of his chapel-turned-oil-can forms, inspired by a similar graphic illustrating the evolution of Romanian sculptor Constantin Brâncuși’s Bird in Space <https://tinyurl.com/yeksykna> (1923–40) series.
“What he wanted to show by revisiting the sculpture was that it’s never done,” Forrer said in an interview. “The chart is kind of a spiral, showing a sense of refinement, trying to make the impossible happen.”
Although his sculptures bore some resemblance to the simplified forms of minimalism, Therrien himself rejected this comparison. “He would take the kind of reduced forms that he was seeing in Judd and Lewitt, the spirit of minimalism, and would pollute them with his own memories, and with his own zany approach to materials,” Schad added.
<https://tinyurl.com/ypct5sjv>
At the same time, Therrien didn’t intend for his art to be read through a biographical lens. He was famously reticent to explain his work, preferring viewers to bring in their own interpretations and associations; to that end, he often named his works “No title” rather than the standard “Untitled.”
“He’s always been mining from the same place: his past, his childhood, and objects that everybody is familiar with and has connections to,” said Dean Anes, Therrien’s liaison at Gagosian Gallery, who now co-directs his estate. “The more connections he had to his subjects, the better. It was never one straight read.”
Therrien’s works are imbued with a sense of deadpan humor, channeling the slapstick of the cartoons he loved in his childhood. Schad notes in his catalog essay that the off-center spire of Therrien’s chapel resembles a hand with its middle finger extended, an irreverent rebuke to institutional authority. ”No title (large stainless beard)” (1999), a nearly 20-foot-tall tangle of steel wires, recalls both the facial hair of an omnipotent deity and, with its ear loops, a goofy, theatrical costume.
His career took off in the 1980s after a solo show at LA’s Museum of Contemporary Art in 1984, the year of his first Broad acquisition, followed by his inclusion in the Whitney Biennial the following year. He was soon picked up by two seminal galleries: Leo Castelli in New York and Konrad Fischer in Germany.
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Around 1990, he began working with art fabricators, including Jack Brogan, La Paloma, and Carlson & Co., to make his first monumental sculptures, allowing him to scale up with precision and verisimilitude. These works are often characterized by their sense of child-like whimsy, which is certainly present. However, this straightforward reading doesn’t do them justice and often omits the sense of anxiety or dread they evoke. Take, for instance, his comically overstacked piles of pots or plates that tower over the viewer with a mix of cartoon absurdity and potential disaster, on view in This is a Story.
“He liked those sort of altered states brought on by emotions and memory and fears,” Schad said. “When you walk around those plates, it becomes vertiginous and unsettling.” Fittingly, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) was one of Therrien’s favorite films, and he even owned the chair that Jimmy Stewart’s character stands on in an unsuccessful attempt to cure his condition.
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Next came whole environments, rooms filled with objects, or eerily devoid of any, such as “No title (room, panic doors)” (2013–14), which is included in the Broad’s exhibition. Shedding light on the other end of his artistic spectrum, the show features an array of intimate drawings and works on paper in which Therrien’s hand is more present than in the enlarged simulacra of everyday materials. Devils appear in several drawings, including “No title (devil thinking about three feet)” (1993), which features a mischievous red imp (modeled on the Underwood Deviled Ham logo <https://tinyurl.com/46m8372u> ) who waves at the viewers as thought bubbles containing feet float above its head.
Despite his laconic nature in interviews, Therrien was a garrulous and generous host who “liked to talk about all of his enthusiasms,” as Schad put it. In 1990, Therrien moved out of his Pico studio into a new studio in an industrial patch of South LA, a two-story, dusty-pink building he had designed himself. Schad writes in the catalog that, “like a mind, Therrien’s studio was to be an archive and a place of memory, a place with secret passageways, spaces open to change, and often doors that lead to nowhere.” Since his death in 2019, it has been the home of his estate, managed by Anes and Paul Cherwick, who also ran his studio.
Although the studio is presently not open to the public, the exhibition attempts to recreate some of its behind-the-scenes magic through vitrines of sketchbooks, photographs, stencils, and other ephemera, as well as the recreation of a red room at his studio packed with stacks of teetering pots comprising “No title (room, pots and pans I)” (2008–15). His studio replicates the layered characteristics of his work, as visitors moved through various work rooms and upstairs to a gleaming white exhibition space, leading to spartan living quarters and a modest kitchen which channels a timeless kind of 20th-century Americana. Friends would gather in this room around a table Therrien picked up at a flea market — the source material for “Under the Table” — as he served up salad from a ridiculously large bowl.
<https://tinyurl.com/3jffhcmb>
With windows on just one side, the studio felt disconnected from the streets outside. “The first day I shot for him, I couldn’t tell if I was there for an hour or 12,” photographer Joshua White, a close friend of Therrien, told . “When the doors and windows are closed, you’re immersed in his world.”
This is a Story aims to do just that: to immerse us in Therrien’s story and show his hometown the broad scope of his decades-long career, in which he perpetually returned to the same forms and ideas in expansive rather than redundant ways. His story continues to be written, looping back on itself and spiraling outward, just as his studio offered boundless wonder for his guests.
“I don’t know what to say but to look, really look, and have some fun. Wander around. That’s what we all did in Bob’s studio, Bob’s world,” Vicky Arnold, Therrien’s longtime partner, writes in the catalog. “That’s why he made it and what he made it for. For him and for all of us. Bob’s world — like no other.” _Hyperallergic

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THE MOUNT WASHINGTON POST
<https://tinyurl.com/4kx4sazx> _LisaAnneAuerbach

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ALEXANDER KLUGE, FILMMAKER, WRITER, PHILOSOPHER, 1932–2026
<https://tinyurl.com/3kyypz9b>
Alexander Kluge, the German filmmaker, writer and philosopher, has died age 94.
Born in 1932 in Halberstadt, Kluge started his career as a lawyer. He became legal counsel at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, where he first met Theodor Adorno and became one of the preeminent intellectual heirs to the Frankfurt School. Later in his life, his collaborator the philosopher Oskar Negt apparently referred to him as ‘Adorno’s favourite son’.
In 1958, Kluge started working in cinema as Fritz Lang’s assistant. He was one of the signatories of the Oberhausen Manifesto in 1962 calling for the establishment of New German Cinema, of which he became one of the most influential figures throughout the 1960s and 70s. He also founded his own television production company in 1987, Development Company for Television Program (DCTP) as a bid to bring quality programming to German television channels.
A widely-decorated director, some of his films include Yesterday’s Girl (1966), that won six prizes at the Venice Film Festival; Artists Under the Big Top: Perplexed (1968), that won the Venice Film Festival’s Golden Lion; Strongman Ferdinand (1976), that was awarded the FIPRESCI Prize at the Cannes Film Festival; Germany in Autumn (1978) that won a special recognition award at the Berlin International Film Festival. His latest film, Primitive Diversity (2025), ventured into experiments with generative AI.
As a writer, Kluge is mainly known for his short fiction stories and works of social criticism. He has been awarded many of the major German-language literary prize in recognition of his contributions to German literature and intellectual history, including the George Büchner Prize (2003), the Heinrich Böll Prize (1993) and the Heinrich von Kleist Prize (1985).v _ArtReview

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NOBODY WANTS TO TALK ABOUT THE ART.
They only want to talk about the artist’s mother’s neurosurgeon’s psychic impression of Berghain. _DeanKissick

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THE HAND OF ARTEMISIA GENTILESCHI
Detail of Simon Vouet, Portrait of Artemisia Gentileschi, c. 1625
<https://tinyurl.com/yjad5kcx> _JesseLocker

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IF WE'RE TEASING THE PLACE WITH A GIANT PHOTO OF JR'S ANNOYING BORDER INSTALLATION,
then hoo boy, this is gonna be something.
<https://tinyurl.com/3xd7w66p> _CarolinaAMiranda

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61. AAA TRIPTIK by Rainey Knudson
<https://tinyurl.com/ytapyvws>
Mention the AAA TripTik to anyone old enough to remember using one and there’s a gush of nostalgia for a simpler time. But the TripTik presaged GPS in a way paper road maps did not. You went to the local AAA branch, where an agent would sit with you and lay out your road trip, assembling narrow strips of map into a spiral-bound flipbook that you followed on a preordained path, with rest stops, restaurants, and motels noted. The agent would use a highlighter to mark the route. It was inexpressibly charming in retrospect.
It was also a single, authoritative voice telling you where to go. In the early and mid-20th century, AAA employed Pathfinders whose job was to physically measure roads, document construction, and note conditions. Their results were printed on cards that became the TripTiks. It was human-scaled work: identifying obstacles at ground level, knowing the roads so drivers didn’t have to. Today that’s all done invisibly, by satellites in orbit. What was human then is an algorithm now.
There was a cost to the convenience the TripTik pioneered, a cost to outsourcing navigation. What is GPS but an electronic TripTik? Research has shown a correlation between using GPS and reduced spatial memory in the hippocampus, the part of the brain that handles direction and memory. Looking at a map—which we are still free to do—requires that we do spatial navigation in our heads. It requires that we be the Pathfinder. _TheImpatientReader

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LOOKING AROUND
<https://tinyurl.com/4bwxkv69> _ON&ON / Jeff Weiss

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MAYNARD DIXON, "CLOUD WORLD," 1925,
<https://tinyurl.com/4ezcnst7> _MichaelLobel

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🍩LNEY’S D🍩NUTS OLNEY, TX
<https://tinyurl.com/yfaxdef3> _RuralIndexingProject

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THE AMAZING FRAME ONCE CREATED FOR VAN GOGH’S SUNFLOWERS by Martin Bailey
<https://tinyurl.com/yt7rztk8>
Three Sunflowers, with its exuberant colouring, was the first of the four sunflower still lifes which Van Gogh painted in Arles in August 1888. This painting has always been locked away in private collections, so it is little known. But there is a surprise: it's framing. Sadly, the frame has disappeared, but we are now able to reconstruct what it looked like with the sunflower painting.
The Three Sunflowers frame was covered with a very dark lacquer and decorated with randomly placed gold circles. What is most unusual is that the outer edges were not straight, but they were partly set back at a slight angle. This would be a curious design for a frame for any painting, but it is even more astonishing for a Van Gogh masterpiece.
In 1912 Three Sunflowers had been acquired by the successful Paris couturier Jacques Doucet. The secret of how he displayed the Van Gogh in his Art Deco home has now emerged, with the first clue being a small corner of the painting which appears in a 1930s photograph. This shows the interior of the Paris residence of Doucet’s nephew Jean.
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Look carefully, and one can just make out part of Three Sunflowers hanging in the upper-right corner. This was spotted by Art Deco specialist Alexandra Jaffré
, who is now working on a book on Doucet as a collector.
What makes this photograph particularly important is that it reveals the unusual frame which Doucet commissioned for Three Sunflowers soon after acquiring the Van Gogh. The frame can now be identified as one which was sold in 1989 by Sotheby’s. At the sale, it was suggested that it might have belonged to Doucet, but with no indication of what painting had once hung in it.
After being able to link the painting and the frame, we approached the museum which houses part of Doucet’s collection, the Musée Angladon-Collection Jacques Doucet in Avignon. Its director, Lauren Laz, then unearthed a family archival photograph of Paulette Angladon-Dubrujeaud, a member of the Doucet family. Dating from 1967, she is holding Three Sunflowers in its Doucet frame.
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A reconstruction of Van Gogh’s Three Sunflowers in its early frame (around 1913-20)
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We can now reconstruct what Three Sunflowers must have looked like in its Art Deco frame. But who was the bold designer of the framing? The Sotheby’s catalogue described it as “a Pierre Legrain lacquer frame”. Jaffré initially accepted the attribution to Legrain. He was a French designer who worked for Doucet for a decade from 1919 and is best known for his bookbindings.
But after further consideration, Jaffré now believes the frame was created by Eileen Gray, the Irish-born interior decorator. For a short period Gray specialised in lacquer and in 1913-14 she worked for Doucet.
A letter from Gray to Doucet records that she made him a frame, but the painting to go in it is unknown. This was in 1913, just under a year after he had bought Three Sunflowers. In an interview 60 years later Gray said that Doucet had “asked me to make lacquer frames for his Van Goghs”, although “this kind of work did not interest me at all” (Connaissance des Arts, August 1973). Her comment could suggest that she had not been responsible for the Three Sunflowers frame, but she might have simply needed the money and reluctantly gone ahead (or, after so many years, her memory may have been hazy).
What happened to the frame? The son of Doucet’s nephew Jean Dubrujeaud (also named Jean, he had the surname Angladon-Dubrujeaud), who had inherited Three Sunflowers, sold the painting in 1970. He apparently removed the frame, separating the two items. Three years later the frame was purchased at auction by the Paris-based American Art Deco collector-dealer Robert Walker.
Several years later the Doucet frame was bought by the London-based antiquities dealer Robin Symes for his personal collection. It was he who later sold it at the 1989 Sotheby’s auction. Symes eventually become infamous for handling looted antiquities, serving seven months’ imprisonment on a related charge. He died in 2023.
The present location of the frame which graced Three Sunflowers until 1970 and was sold by Symes in 1989 remains a mystery. The chances are that the frame’s present owner may be unaware of the Van Gogh connection, which would certainly add to its financial value.
And what happened to Three Sunflowers? Angladon-Dubrujeaud had kept the painting until 1970, when it was bought by an anonymous Swiss collector, whom we can name as George Embiricos. It went for the equivalent of £600,000. In 1996 the Van Gogh was sold to a very private European collector and it has now passed to his children.
When Three Sunflowers eventually comes onto the market, it will far exceed the sum paid for the most expensive Van Gogh sold at auction: the $117m for Orchard with Cypresses (April 1888) in 2022.
Three Sunflowers was not the only Van Gogh which had been acquired by Doucet. He owned Railway Carriages at Arles (August 1888), now at the Angladon museum in Avignon. Even more importantly, he bought Irises (May 1889), which in 1990 ended up at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
<https://tinyurl.com/4jkf4skn> _ArtNewspaper

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IT'S INTERNATIONAL REPETITIVE STRAIN INJURY AWARENESS DAY!
Photograph by Lewis Hine, 1910:
<https://tinyurl.com/4bjymsy3> _‪PeterHuestis‬