Like I said, every Ugo Mulas photo rewrites art history, if only by making us realize every other photographer of the Twombly rooms at via Monserrato decided to censor his sofa.
Previously, very much related: Cyhaus: Bela Lugosi, Bed
Cy’s Matters
School Bus Yellow Corner Piece
I don’t think Fred Sandback drawings automatically serve as diagrams for a sculptural installation. But if the angry ghost of Fred Sandback haunts the buyer of this sketch for stretching a six-foot square of school bus yellow elastic cord across a corner, at least they get to meet the artist, right?
Lot 205, 25 Mar 2026, Fred Sandback, School Bus Yellow Corner Piece, est $3-5,000 [ragoarts]
Related: Yellow Corner Piece, 1970, gift of Virginia Dwan, 1986 [walkerart]
For Sale: The Spiral Jetty, 16mm
I never thought I’d be back in the bidding on The Spiral Jetty business, but here we are.
A 16mm print of Robert Smithson’s film, The Spiral Jetty that belonged to a retired art history professor is selling at Rago next week. The condition of the 50-year-old film seems fine, but who knows if it’s playable? How many film prints are there? Does it matter? Is this an artifact people want [to spend $6-8,000 on]?
Is it 20x better than just buying the DVD from EAI? Oh, wait, now you really have to be an educational institution to buy it? Are any retired art professors selling the DVDs, too?
Benning x Bess x de Maria
We’re probably all off the hook for seeing it because the Fridericianvm’s Forrest Bess retrospective opened in February 2020. But we should all be very aware of the related edition made by James Benning.
Benning loves an extreme pursuit of solitude where he finds it. And in Kassel, he found it in Walter de Maria’s Vertical Earth Kilometer, which he turned into one of Bess’s mysterious, little cosmological pictures, complete with a handmade frame.
Any further similarities to Bess or connections to de Maria’s rod, I leave buried in the platz.
[breaking tumblr update] @voorwerk proposed it, and measurements confirm that Benning’s print is a life-size image of de Maria’s 2cm-wide rod. A Vertical Earth Kilometer Facsimile Object, if you will.]
James Benning: After Bess (solid brass round rod), 2020 [fridericianum.org]
Shiv Roy, Rashid. Rashid, Shiv Roy
I was sure that by now Bravin Lee could not shake me with its awesome artist rugs. And to be fair, it is not the Rashid Johnson limited-edition, ethically hand-knotted wool Anxious Rug that shook me here: it is the setting.
Because Johnson’s rug is in what I can only assume to be Shiv Roy’s rebound loft, under the buck wild Rubens she inherited at some point after Season 4. The wide angle lens distortion of the painting’s dimensions is also unsettling, but the punch of ditching the frame and rawdawging an Old Master like that more than makes up for it.
Previously, related: Prepare for BravinLee Artist Rugs
Cy Twombly Froggie
This screenshot from months ago was mis-saved into my research folder for an article I’m tryna finish, no idea why. But the story Sally Mann told about this photo is less interesting than the photo itself, and much less interesting than the fact that Twombly had this junk store froggie in his Lexington studio and called it Froggie. It’s in her Twombly photos book.
I think the frog is only like 3.5 inches tall.
[update: nvm, Tacita Dean photographed it too, and it is three apples tall.]
Murakami’s Monet Monotype
I heard two discussions of Takashi Murakami’s show in Los Angeles today, from people who could not be more different. And basically, it sounds and looks fascinating.
Murakami’s facility with Japanese art history has always been one of his secret superpowers. And it sounds like the current SUPERFLAT show at Perrotin slots into his overarching and innovative critique of western art history’s relationship to Japanese art and culture. It looks specifically at 18th and 19th century Japanese painting and ukiyo-e, and their connection to and co-optation by the Impressionists and the Japonisme movement.
Murakami has made intricate copies of ukiyo-e that traveled to 19th century France. And he’s made a full-scale copy of Monet’s 1875 painting, Woman with a Parasol — Madame Monet and her Son. Whether it’s a work like the Monet, painted in one quick, plein air session, or the dense woodblock prints, Murakami unifies them with his own technique, described as, “layer upon layer of silkscreened acrylic paint, applied with a special squeegee work application method.”
Which, what?? I am absolutely down for using exhaustive screenprinting for a monotype. But after seeing details on Perrotin’s website, this squeegee work application method is beyond my understanding. And I, for one, would like to see it.
[MORNING AFTER UPDATE] Oh, right, I can.
I googled at first, but only found that I’d joined the legion of content mills who republished Murakami’s press release text as-is. So I ended up at the sources.
Here are details of how Murakami translated Monet’s wet-on-wet brushstrokes into however many screens. Sometimes the scratchy structure of an emptied brush gets preserved, like the tan dots above the ‘M’. And sometimes it becomes a gradient of color, like the bottom of the ‘t’.
Some colors get more intense in Murakami’s version, like that mustardy flame above the ‘n’, which is barely a thing in the Monet. But that same effect also makes the bare canvas/underlayer of Monet much more intricate. Like everything going on above the ‘et’ feels very different. Murakami’s resolution is higher, or seems higher, an oversharpening fallacy. But his colors look more liquid; they were laid down in the precise shape of a flow that never happened.
Art Is About The Long Run
Because it was acquired by an esteemed American collector in 2010, right in between her shows at Greene Naftali, the first public view of Rachel Harrison’s 2008 work Mustard and Ketchup only came in October 2019, when Interview Magazine published a detail alongside Harrison’s conversation with actor, director, and visual artist Matt Dillon. It included a printout of a photo, taken December 6, 2007 at the Musée d’Orsay, of French president Nicolas Sarkozy making a gesture to German chancellor Angela Merkel as she looks at Gustave Courbet’s self-portrait, Le Désespéré (1843-45), painter’s taped to a sheet of pink insulation board.
The painting, then owned by a BNP Paribas art investment fund, was on loan to a Courbet retrospective that later traveled to the Met and Montpellier. The painting was last on public view at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt in 2010-11.
The photo, by Maya Vidon for the European Pressphoto Agency, was published in the New York Times on December 7, 2007, to illustrate a news story about Merkel and Sarkozy pressuring Iran while the US pursued sanctions over the country’s nuclear program.
Harrison also appended the Vidon photo to a smallish, Rothko-esque painting which she showed in Vienna in 2008-09. It was perhaps the least leisurely of group of photos of world leaders at leisure, which appeared in works throughout the atypically thematically unified show. The photo and the show are mentioned in the catalogue for Harrison’s Whitney retrospective.
In October 2025, Le Désespéré went back on view at Musée d’Orsay for five years, and it was revealed that BNP Paribas had at some point sold the painting to Qatar Museums. Several days later Nicolas Sarkozy reported to la Santé prison in Montparnasse to serve a 5-year prison sentence for soliciting funds for his 2007 election campagin from Muammar Gaddafi. He was in solitary confinement for 20 days before being released pending appeal.
While in prison Sarkozy wrote Journal d’un prisonnier, a 216-page book, which was published in December: « En prison, il n’y a rien à voir, rien à faire. J’oublie le silence qui n’existe pas à la Santé où il y a beaucoup à entendre. Le bruit y est hélas constant. À l’image du désert, la vie intérieure se fortifie en prison. » [en]
This month the entirety of Mustard and Ketchup was revealed to the public for the first time, at Sotheby’s, where it will be sold today, as I type this, in fact. It turns out to be a delicate thing. The condiment bottles that give the work its name also give it an alternate scale. The photo is at (standing) eye level atop a dowel mounted into a square pedestal, surrounded by drill shavings. In one moment it looks like a teleprompter or information sign. Or a self-portrait on a go-go dancing platform. Then the eye falls, and suddenly the Burger Toppings of Calais are shuffling on their own mini-plinth at the base of the largest truckstop billboard America has to offer.
As Rachel Harrison said to Matt Dillon, “How does anyone know? It’s a crap shoot. And with art, it’s about the long run.”
[DAY AFTER UPDATE]
A kind reader sent a link to Le Consortium in Dijon, where Harrison’s 2008 exhibition Lay of the Land includes the same detail image as appeared nine years later in Interview. And though it does not appear in the museum’s installation shots, I’ve been assured Mustard and Ketchup was on view in Dijon. The world has now been neatly divided into those who saw Harrison’s show in Dijon, and those who did not. And the revelatory experience described in this post no longer holds for the former group. Hopefully amusement at the phrase, the Burger Toppings of Calais will be enough to keep us all together.
[MORNING AFTER UPDATE]
The good people of Greene Naftali have shared a photo of Mustard and Ketchup installed at Le Consortium in Dijon. Thus through jpg technology we can begin to narrow the divide between those who saw the show and the rest of us who now at least know a bit what it looked like. And it looks great, especially with its spindly formal rhyming with the mic stand in American Idol in the background. [American Idol was published in Bomb alongside the great conversation between Harrison and Nayland Blake—about the difference between seeing something in person and seeing it online. which I wrote a bit about last fall during Blake’s shows at Matthew Marks. The title of that post echoes the title of this one: Artworks Unfolding Slowly Over Time, In Cyberspace.
More than many of Harrison’s shows, the prevalence of rectangular columnar forms in the Dijon show made me think of Anne Truitt, an artist I know Harrison had been interested in for a long time. And American Idol, combined with the literal [Courbet] self-portrait posted at head height in Mustard and Ketchup, left me seeing figural references in Harrison’s work.
And that led me to think back about similar references in Truitt’s sculptures, too. Which is ironic, since I was really kind of a bitch to Blake Gopnik when he anthropomorphized Truitt’s columns of color in his Washington Post review of her 2009 Hirshhorn retrospective. Art is about the long run, indeed, and maybe in the long run, I’ll get it right.
Jacques Adnet Vichy Desk
As I was quietly thanking Jacques Adnet for this sleek, spare, and elegant desk, it did occur to me that 1940 was a helluva year to be designing modernist steel furniture in Paris. Let’s unpack that a bit!
Lot 44, 05 Mar 2026, Jacques Adnet, desk, est USD 10-15,000 [update: sold for $10,795][christies]
Warhol Traded This Painting For A Massage
On his pre-blizzard gallery run, greg.org hero and advance scout Jack got curious about why this small, unassuming Warhol at Christie’s was dedicated to Dr. Linda Li. Turns out she was the first to treat him when he started having gallbladder pain in January 1987.
Unfortunately for Warhol, Dr. Li was a chiropractor, and her massage only made Warhol’s pain worse. It took him three more weeks to see an actual specialist. He got promptly admitted to the hospital undercover, had surgery, and then died in recovery on February 22nd, 39 years ago last Sunday.
If only we didn’t have a healthcare system where even rich, famous somebodies with bodies had to barter paintings for unhelpful medical care, Warhol might still be with us. He’d be 98, and New York Magazine would be asking him what he thought of Heated Rivalry.
[later in the day update]
After someone mentioned The Warhol Diaries, I looked, and Dr. Li is all over them; Warhol went to her all the time for vitamins, massage/alignment/chiro and crystals, and so did a bunch of other famous people. So I imagine this painting, dated 1985, is more likely to have been a gift at some point, not a straight-up attempt to get out of paying for treatment. Hilariously, Warhol was wary of doctors especially who wanted to take art for payment. One guy asked, and he said, “maybe a print,” and the dr. was like, “No, I mean a portrait for me, and one for my mother,” and Warhol was all, “He wants $50,000 worth of art? What do I do?”
Lot 232, 26 Feb 2026, Andy Warhol, Be a Somebody with a Body, 1985, est. $60-80,000 [update: sold for $65,000][christies]
Michael Jenkins, Thirteen Lights and Counting
West Flanders furniture dealer Roger Vanthournout and his wife Josette collected art for over six decades. Did they see Michael Jenkins and Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ show at Xavier Hufkens in Brussels in 1991? Is that what got them interested in Jenkins’ work, leading them to buy two large works on paper at Galerie Hans Mayer in Dusseldorf in 1992? Roger died in 2005, and Josette died last year, so we can’t ask them.
But we can sure look at Jenkins’ work in unexpectedly fascinating relation to Gonzalez-Torres’s. These two works, Counting (L) and Thirteen Lights (R), are flashe and pencil on paper. They also appear to be collage, not trompe l’oeil; so the drawings on paper that look taped on are taped on. And the drawings are of thirteen light bulbs on a string.
Felix made a stack with Jenkins in 1990. His portrait of Jenkins was in 1991. Both artists made works with bondage gear, and Felix made the go-go dancing platform—with 13 lights along each edge—in 1991. Then 1992 was full of light strings, with either 24 or 42 bulbs. The motif cannot be a coincidence. Whether there was a conversation about or between these two artist-friends’ works, there was certainly a shared context. Unlike Felix’s work, though, Jenkins’ has almost never been seen or shown or discussed beyond the moment of its making, during the AIDS crisis and queer resistance.
The most extensive text on Jenkins’ practice, I think, is his Summer 1992 Bomb interview with Bill Arning. He doesn’t mention anything directly related to these works, except for yellow, a color used for its nautical references to quarantine and disease. [I just read a quote from Victor Klemperer, too, about the horror of being forced to wear the six-pointed star in Germany; he mentioned yellow’s historic association with the plague and fear of Jews.]
Felix and the Vanthournouts are gone, but maybe it’s time to ask Jenkins.
[next morning update]
It’s a mixture of gratitude to Michael Seiwert for posting the Artforum review of Jenkins’ 1991 show at Jay Gorney, and sadness at my having not thought about Artforum when writing this post. On the bright side, Contemporary Art Library recently posted an archive of Gorney’s shows, including Jenkins. Incredible. Two things pertain to the drawings at hand: Jenkins was in portrait mode. All the drawings in 1991 were this 60×36 human/door/window scale. The counting is in NYC, too, in one drawing, but the counting is different, continuous, where the drawing above seems to record multiple counts. There’s the trace of human experience without an indication what’s being tallied or why.
The yellow stripes appear in one drawing, and inside this sculpture, Tower with Crazee Windows, 1991. Beautiful photos everywhere, though the yellow does start to feel immediately overwhelming. Maybe Jenkins thought so, too. The two 1993 works he showed next were red and white.
Lot 1286, ending 12 Mar 2026, Michael Jenkins, Thirteen Lights, 1992, EUR500-700 [update sold for GBP 508, weirdly low]
Lot 1288, ending 12 Mar 2026, Michael Jenkins, Counting, 1992, EUR500-700 [update sold for GBP 889, weirdly higher than the lights one, also weirdly low] [christies]
If You Don’t Bid We Will Never Forget
When I saw this giant eye staring out from the lot at Christie’s, with barely a five-figure estimate, I was sure it was some random photo, ancillary merch. But no, it is the entire video installation, one of the greatest works of the 21st century.
If the price of art meant anything at all, Douglas Gordon’s Play Dead; Real Time (Other Way), 2003, should be like $10 million, easy. That one of the edition of just seven is coming up for auction in the first place is wild. Look at that exhibition history. So many institutions, is there even another copy in private hands?
But with an estimate of just $20-30,000? That is completely bonkers. Is this really who we are as a culture/economy? Do the people with so much money really value this artwork so little?
Srsly, seeing Play Dead at Gagosian, in the gallery where it was made, remains one of the most amazing video art experiences I’ve ever had. It should be installed on life-size screens everywhere. [And, again, it has.]
What’s even more extraordinary than Houston dealer/curator/collector/trustee Janie C. Lee [RIP] owning this piece, is that she apparently bought it from someone else, in 2006. Who TF would unload it so quickly? Some bootlegger, I assume [if so, hmu]. Anyway, while serving on the board of the Menil, Lee was one of the forces behind the creation of the Menil Drawing Institute. And the proceeds of her Christie’s sale will benefit the MDI. So really, you all have no excuse for abiding by this low estimate. Screw anonymous phone bidding; we need to name and shame the underbidders.
[half a day of outrage later update]: OK, it might be the case that this is a single-channel, monitor-based edition of a larger work. The show at Gagosian was titled, Play Dead; Real Time. The press release mentions three works, but does not name them. The stills are captioned, Play Dead; Real Time (Other Way), and are described as a “DVD on monitor” in a “dimensions variable” edition of 7. The installation shot is not captioned. MoMA’s edition of the work, Play Dead; Real Time, does not mention an edition, but is described as a “three-channel” work with two projectors, two screens, and a monitor. Crucially, the videos are different: “19:11 min., 14:44 min. (on large screens), 21:58 min. (on monitor).” Which all differ from (Other Way), which is 23:44. When the work [sic] was installed at Tate in 2013, it was titled, Play Dead; Real Time (this way, that way, the other way), implying that each screen was different. And indeed they were: the two projections move clockwise or counterclockwise and fade to black in between elephant tricks; the monitor work transitions by zooming in and out from the elephant’s eye. The monitor video’s duration is 23:44. If this is indeed a domestically sized element/variation of a larger installation, it should still be priced at between $1 and 3.333333 million, at least.
Lot 123, closing 27 Feb 2026, Douglas Gordon, Play Dead…, 2003, ed. 4/7, est. $20-30,000 [update: sold for $107,950, which ok][christies]
Cyhaus: Bela Lugosi’s Bed
We still live in a Cy Twombly world Horst built. His European dealers made their own versions of via di Monserrato to live in. And whether it’s to identify works in the background, or to copy the floor, we’re all left poring over the same few photos, a dozen or so slivers from which we try to construct some meaning, to conjure a view of a place and a moment. We make do with what history has left.
Except there’s more. Photographer Ugo Mulas was everywhere in the art world in the 1960s and 70s, taking pictures of everyone and where they worked and everything they made there. Mulas published a couple of books early on, hard to find and expensive; fact is, we haven’t really seen Mulas’s world or processed it. And it feels like every one of his thousands of photos could change Art History forever, yet his only apparent option is to try to sell a dozen of the aesthetic ones as editioned prints.
There are a dozen Ugo Mulas photos of c. 1969/70 via di Monserrato in the Cy Twombly Homes & Studios book, including the one above. There’s another photo of the same room in which the large table covered with an unprimed canvas looks like a mattress. In a third photo, there are instead two acrylic coffee tables covered with photos and art tchotchkes, so the mattress was a choice, or a moment.
Those spindly floor lamps are everywhere in Mulas’ Twombly photos, and nowhere in Horst’s. So is non-Twombly artwork. Warhol, Chamberlain, Johns, Alex Hay, Picasso, the Franchettis didn’t just have an artist in the family; they had direct access to Castelli’s backroom—and a guy who could get it for them wholesale.
But when I say every single Ugo Mulas photo could change Art History, this is what I mean:
Is this where the mattress ended up? The bedroom is not in Horst, and this Mulas is not in Homes & Studios. The carpet, the velvet, the sheets, Twombly’s love affair with green didn’t start in Bassano. The Kiss (Bela Lugosi) is one of Warhol’s earliest screenprints, which he made himself, on paper. On November 22, 1963.
[a few weeks later update] As I was saying…
This photo of the Twombly sofa is apparently from 1969, by Mulas. Which means every photographer at via Monserrato since then decided NOT to photograph this sofa. They’re all implicated. The Mulas interior shots were also apparently for/published in Vogue Italia in 1971 [not Jul/Aug, Nov, or Dec.] Also, here is a 1968 fashion shoot in Twombly’s apartment.
Previously, related: Cy Twombly’s Homes, Picassos
Xavier Dolan on the Berlinalefail
Director/actor Xavier Dolan responds in le Monde to the refusal by Wim Wenders and the jury of the Berlinale to criticize or even comment on the German government’s support for Israeli genocide in Palestine, and Wenders’cowardly declaration that artists and filmmakers “have to stay out of politics”:
Pour certains artistes-citoyens, comme Patti Smith, Mark Ruffalo, Spike Lee, Susan Sarandon ou Liam Cunningham, prendre la parole est, au-delà du droit acquis, un devoir − dans certains cas, il s’agit même d’un destin. Pour eux – pour moi aussi –, se taire, penser que notre éducation, notre situation, notre métier n’ouvrent pas droit à la parole politique, c’est perdre sa voix. C’est renoncer à l’absolue nécessité du dialogue.
Dans une époque de surdité et d’aveuglement, l’art impose l’écoute de la communauté. Il la rend visible et, en même temps, lui rend la vue. Il illustre ses griefs, ses complaintes, pose pour elle ses questions, en cherche les réponses à coups de peintures, de chants et d’images. Il organise et tend au bien, au soin de la société. Il n’a jamais été et ne sera jamais – au grand dam des faux dieux, des élus égocentriques et des bandits qu’il affiche et dénonce – apolitique.
For certain artist-citizens – Patti Smith, Mark Ruffalo, Spike Lee, Susan Sarandon, Liam Cunningham – speaking out is, beyond an acquired right, a duty. In some cases, it is a destiny. For them – for me, too – to stay silent, to believe that our education, our circumstances, our craft do not entitle us to political speech, is to lose one’s voice. It is to renounce the absolute necessity of dialogue.
In an era of deafness and blindness, art compels the community to listen. It makes the community visible, and in doing so, restores its sight. It illustrates its grievances, its laments, poses its questions for it, and searches for answers in strokes of paint, in song, in images. It organizes and tends toward the good – toward the care of society. It has never been, and will never be – much to the dismay of the false gods, the self-serving elected officials, and the bandits it names and condemns – apolitical.
Xavier Dolan, filmmaker: “Where does the idea that artists should ‘stay out of politics’ come from?” [lemonde.fr, published in both English and in original French]
The Chens’ Bonsai Forest
There’s a house I pass on the way to my mother’s, which had an incredible front yard. When the guy’s wife died, he apparently threw himself into the garden they’d tended together. For years he crafted a kind of freehand Chinese landscape in front of his 1960s ranch house. There were these incredible trees, some kind of pine, I don’t know, very long, droopy branches like willows, windswept like Van Gogh cypresses, with long-needles, and then some rocks and bursts of tall grasses. It felt a bit idiosyncratic, but an obvious masterpiece, especially amidst the generic lawns or Sketch-up xeriscaping.
Then the house went up for sale, and the buyer ended up scraping the whole thing. Whatever’s there now is irrelevant, and I wonder how many people driving by even remember what was created—and what was lost.
I thought of that garden when I saw this bonsai forest in the auction of Jonathan and Margaret Chen’s collection at LA Modern. JF Chen is one of the biggest, most influential antique and furniture dealers in the modernist world. The Chens seem to be going strong, inshallah, and their store on Melrose is in their daughters’ capable hands, but it does seem like they’re paring back.
Maybe this bonsai forest is a product, assembled and cultivated by Chen’s bonsai whisperer to the stars. Or maybe it’s been on the back deck for forty years, I don’t have the skill to tell. But I do feel like buying a bonsai tree is a multigenerational commitment of care, like taking in someone’s dog–if dogs lived to be a two hundred years old. And this is a whole forest. The chances of someone screwing this up feel very high.
Lot 159, 5 Mar 2026, Bonsai Forest, est. $4-6,000 [update: sold for $3,810, be a good steward!][lamodern]
