NYC Art Shows

Marcel Duchamp’s Nude, Ascending

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Show seen: Marcel Duchamp at MoMA

LHOOQ, or LOOK, or “She has a hot ass” on a Mona Lisa Postcard.

With all the attention on everything that came later in Marcel Duchamp’s long career, like the mustachioed Mona Lisa postcard, L.H.O.O.Q., 1919, above, the Bicycle Wheel, 1913, among many others, it’s all too easy to forget that Duchamp (1887-1968) started out as a Painter. So, it was the very rare chance to see the overview of his Paintings included in MoMA’s Marcel Duchamp, the first U.S. Retrospective show of the Artist in 50 years, that most intrigued me.

The entrance lobby. Press Previews are too early for me, so I have to wait a long time to get these shots during normal hours. When I finally get one like this, it feels like the show is open just for me. Or you. Anonymous Photographer, Broadway Photoshop, NY, Multiple Portrait of Marcel Duchamp, 1917 surrounds The Chess Game, 1910, center. Marcel Duchamp would “retire” (sort of) from Art to focus on chess, his other obsession, later in his career.

With 300 pieces spanning his 68-year career far more than Paintings were on view in one of the largest shows I’ve ever seen. After an opening gallery of early Paintings & Drawings from 1900-10 that saw the Artist “trying on” styles borrowed from Degas, Gauguin, Cézanne and others, in 1911 he embarked on something his own. In only the 2nd of 9 galleries, 3 works on its last wall  stopped me in my tracks.

Out of the darkness, a wall with three Paintings that grabbed me and haven’t let go. Nude (Sketch), Sad Young Man in a Train, 1911 (Dated 1912), left, Nude Descending the Staircase, (No. 2), 1912, center, (No. 1), 1911, right. A copy of the very comprehensive Exhibition Catalogue lies on the bench.

I became obsessed with one Painting and one question, that ran incessantly through my mind over what would be 5 visits to the show, a number that would have been doubled had I not been limited by health issues-

HOW did Duchamp come up with this?-

Nude Descending a Staircase, (No. 2), 1912, Oil on canvas.

As far as I know, t’s unprecedented in Art history to 1912, and remains singular since. The only three Paintings Duchamp did in this style I know of are on that wall. Brilliantly executed, with exquisitely controlled chaos, I’d never seen anything like Nude Descending a Staircase, (No. 2). Well, except when I saw it twice before- the first time in 2005 in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, who own it, and then in 2013 in the 100th Anniversary recreation of the legendary 1913 Armory Show, which introduced it to U.S. audiences in NYC & Chicago, at the NY Historical. 13 years ago is enough distance for it to leave a fresh impression. Seeing it now in the context of his Paintings up to 1912, and the only two other works in this style, floored me. The jump between what he had been doing and this is a giant leap. It left me feeling it was, at once, a gambit raising the stakes on the Cubists, and again, one of the boldest declarations that “I have arrived!” in Art history and certainly in Modern Art history. Marcel Duchamp was 26 when he Painted it. After being rejected for inclusion in a show in Paris because he was asked to, and refused to, change its title, he allowed it to be shown at The Armory Show in 1913 where it was sold for $324.00 ($240.00 after commission).

J. F. Griswold, The Rude Descending the Staircase, Cartoon by J. F. Griswold in The New York
Evening Sun, March 20, 1913.

Being sold was one thing. The scandal its showing created was another. “An explosion in a shingle factory,” The New York Times review called it in their review of The Armory Show . Duchamp got a chuckle out of that, but WHERE was the appreciation for what he had accomplished here?

Thelma Cudlipp, The Nude Descending the Stairs,  Cartoon in The Sun, April 20, 1913

No one at the time seemed to appreciate it. It’s been slow in coming since.

Consider what he was up against. In 1911, Vincent van Gogh’s star was finally rising (after his death in 1890) on the heels of the largest ever (to that point) retrospective of his work at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, in 1905. Monet was busy making breakthroughs in his gardens in Giverny. Cézanne had only been dead for 5 years, his accomplishments still being absorbed, and Edgar Degas would live for 6 more years. Kandinsky finished Composition V in 1911, the first completed work in his legendary Compositions series, while Hilma af Klint toiled in obscurity mid-way towards completing her Paintings for the Temple series, 1906-15. Meanwhile, the Cubism of Picasso, Brague & Juan Gris was at its peak, and Umberto Boccioni and the so-called Futurists were obsessed with observing the modern world. Against ALL of this, Marcel Duchamp steered his own course, playing his Art “chess pieces” somewhere else, into an unoccupied space. It seems to me that he did exactly this with his work his entire career.

Checkmate.

The mechanics of movement. Detail of Nude Descending, (No. 2) of the lower middle section shows some of the ways in which Duchamp depicts movement, including the semi-circular lines to the dots in a circle, which Duchamp borrowed and was in turn borrowed by Francis Bacon. Note the functions of the black lines.

It’s very interesting that the stated materials for Nude Descending are only oil on canvas- no mention of graphite or another medium for an underdrawing. Since there’s no mention of an x-ray or any other “beneath the surface” exam on the wall card, in the exhibition catalogue or on the Philadelphia Museum of Art website, I’m left to wonder if the “underdrawing” is really the black lines all over the work. They’re exact, though purposely open-ended, helping to create the movement of the figures while outlining shapes. Still, if there is no underdrawing, it’s remarkable how well the complex composition fits on the canvas. The jarring fluidity of the figures is echoed in the staircase, the most unique set of stairs I’ve ever seen. They seem to be more Cubist than the figures. Towards the front, we see the side and the top straight on. Must be hard to walk down!

The palette brightens the standard Cubist fare somewhat, especially when seen next to Nude Descending No. 1, which was displayed here to the right of No. 2. That means visitors proceeding through the show chronologically (i.e. from left to right in my picture of the wall) saw No. 2 before No. 11), and the even more cryptic, Nude (Sketch), Sad Young Man in a Train, 1911 (Dated 1912), installed to the left of No. 2. For me, No. 2’s palette, which is somewhat lighter than many Cubist Paintings, emphasizes the “statement” Duchamp may have been making here that he had fully arrived as a Painter. Regarding the title, Duchamp said it was an example of “the use of words as a means of adding color… of adding to the number of colors in a work2.” At least one Drawing, Once More to this Star, 1911, does precede Nude Descending (No. 1), but it seems to have little to do with the series beyond showing a figure on a staircase, though going up and facing the other way. I have not come across any others. 

Cubism is static, revealing multiple sides of the same still person or object. In 1911, Duchamp set out to bring movement to Painting. In Nude Descending the Staircase (No. 2), he succeeded masterfully, one-upping the Cubists at their own game, creating something new, something entirely his own. Voices from all of the “isms” of the time rejected it. Of course they did. Marcel Duchamp was eternally beyond category.

Checkmate.

“I wanted to get away from the physical aspect of painting. I was much more interested in recreating ideas in painting.” Quoted on MoMA’s Introductory Wall Card to gallery 2.

In pondering Duchamp’s road to the Nude Descending, on the preceding walls of gallery 2 there were hints. One day, he watched a woman walking her dog, but didn’t speak to her.

Portrait (Dulcinea), 1911

This episode resulted in Portrait (Dulcinea), 1911. Unlike Dulcinea in Don Quixote, this one was real. A bit like Dante & Beatrice Portinari, the repercussions of this encounter would be enduring in his Art. Here, we see the same woman 5 times, a definite precursor to the Nude Descendings. Seeing someone multiple times is a characteristic of Film which exposes multiple emulsive frames each second.

“In 1912 … the idea of describing the movement of a nude coming downstairs while still retaining static visual means to do this, particularly interested me. The fact that I had seen chronophotographs of fencers in action and horse galloping (what we today call stroboscopic photography) gave me the idea for the Nude. It doesn’t mean that I copied these photographs. The Futurists were also interested in somewhat the same idea, though I was never a Futurist. And of course the motion picture with its cinematic techniques was developing then too. The whole idea of movement, of speed, was in the air3.”

Eadweard Muybridge’s Woman Walking Downstairs, 1887, which I edited, then reversed to mimic the direction of the figure in the Painting, while making an assumption, as I explain below.

Film was a relatively recent invention. In its early days, Eadweard Muybridge, who died in 1904, created ground-breaking movement studies, including Woman Walking Downstairs (a nude) in 1887.

I merged the 9 frames I selected in the Muybridge Film into one to see how closely it would resemble the Painting. Would Duchamp have able to do something like this in 1911 is unknown to me. Still,  it doesn’t come close to what we see in the Painting, especially in the legs. It seems to me that most of the development took place in Duchamp’s mind.

Nude (Sketch), Sad Young Man in a Train, 1911 (Dated 1912).

Given their dates, at MoMA the three Paintings were not arranged chronologically (Perhaps the curators decided to flank the larger Painting with the two smaller pieces for symmetry’s sake?). I’m looking at them out of chronological order, too. It’s the other Painting besides the two Nude Descendings on this wall that has also been the subject of much controversy. What, exactly, is being shown in Nude (Sketch), Sad Young Man in a Train, 1911 (Dated 1912)? The motion has led some scholars to suggest a masturbatory significance to it4. Others see Duchamp, himself, as the “sad young man”- the exhibition catalogue calls it a “Self-Portrait5.”  I haven’t been able to find any comment by the Artist on it, so its mystery remains intact, and most interesting for me as one of the few Paintings on the way to Nude Descending (No. 2) in a similar style. Like No. 2. It also includes multiple versions of the same figure, and what appears to be the main figure is brighter than the others. That hints at something else all three may have in common.

Nude Descending the Staircase (No. 1), 1911

According to the exhibition catalogue, Nude Descending (No. 1) is a “sketch” for No. 2, and (being dated 1911) was done before it, though it hangs after it in the show. Of it, the curators says, it “focuses on Duchamp’s aim of producing ‘a static representation of movement. A single upright figure, almost tentatively carrying out the action of the title, is represented in a few successive positions, rendered in a Cubist vocabulary of lines and planes of muted color6.” It also helps me see what may be going on in No. 2 a bit clearer. We can see the background more distinctly and the figure is somewhat more definite. It’s effective, but seen after No. 2, has nowhere near the same impact. For me, its primary value is as a stepping stone to a classic, allowing a bit of insight into how Duchamp developed his masterpiece. There is also a No. 3, however it’s a reproduction of No 2 that Duchamp hand-colored for one of his best clients, the Arensbergs, who were upset they were too slow on the trigger to acquire No. 2. It was not included in the show. 

My drawing mannequin walking down some imaginary stairs, nude…

The more I looked at Nude Descending (No. 2), I couldn’t help but feel the figure in it  looks somewhat like a drawing mannequin, particularly the top half of it. Somewhat. Drawing mannequins have been around for a very long time in one form or other, possibly for centuries. IF Duchamp had one, he could alter its pose to mimic a nude walking down stairs. He “could have.” I have no idea if he did.

A nude descending a staircase. *- LIFE Magazine Photo.

The other interesting thing about Nude Descending is that the commentary down through the century has assumed the figure is female. Yet, some believe the torso does not look female. “…the overall proportions of the figure and the treatment of the chest region suggest that it is, if anything, masculine. There is also the possibility of an effeminate male or a male in drag given the suggestion of a long skirt or dress and Duchamp’s later incarnation a Rrose Sélavy, his female alter ego photographed by Man Ray…7.” That reads like a contradiction to me.

My version of Nude Descending (No. 2) higlighting the right-most figure.

When I isolated what I believe to be the first figure in Nude Desending (No. 2 ), it looks more female to me than it does when considering the Painting as a whole, but not conclusively. I think it’s nebulous.

Marcel Duchamp descending a staircase. *- I believe this is a LIFE Magazine Photo, but I’m not sure.

The possibility that Nude (No. 2)  is another Self-Portrait can’t be ruled out. I have to say that though the above Photo was taken years/decades later- of, but not by Duchamp, there is a bit of resemblance to the Painting for me. At this point, all the evidence on the identity or the sex of the subject I’ve seen is inconclusive. What’s not is that it’s a brilliant Painting.

Marcel Duchamp discussing Nude Descending (No. 2) with Art historian Henri Marceau at the Armory Show 50th Anniversary Exhibition in 1963. *-  Smithsonian Photo.

“My aim was a static representation of movement, a static composition of indications of various positions taken by a form in movement—with no attempt to give cinema effects through painting. The reduction of a head in movement to a bare line seemed to me defensible8.”

His frustration with Nude Descending(No. 2)’s reception led to his giving up Painting, permanently! Before he did, on view in gallery 3, Duchamp created a few other important Paintings – in a completely different, yet equally remarkable style, including this one-

Bride, Oil on Canvas, 1912. I can’t help but think Duchamp’s good friend, Francis Picabia went to school on it in this amazing Painting from 1914, barely two years after Bride. Picabia, like his friend, wasn’t one to stay in one place (or one style) for long, as I showed in the piece about hime linked above.

It also stopped me and gave me much to think about. In Bride, 1912, Duchamp has taken Nude Descending one step further. Gone is the, apparent, physical movement of the figure/Bride, in its place it’s replaced by what’s taking place in the mind and state of being. This image would become the central image in his legendary work, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors (Even), aka The Large Glass, 1915-23, which was not included in the MoMA show being permanently installed in the Philadelphia Museum of Art (where I saw it in 2005). As brilliant as Bride is, it’s apparently a study for The Large Glass. “The work can be viewed as ‘nature’ exposed or stripped bare by the scientific male gaze; this of course looks back to the voyeuristic theme of Dulcinea, but also, more importantly, anticipates The Large Glass as, literally, the Bride stripped bare by her Bachelors9 Marcel Duchamp or Rrose Sélavy, Box in a Valise. I counted at least 10 different Box in a Valises created between 1935 and 1941 in the show. It’s a bit ironic that Duchamp is the subject of a large museum Retrospective in NYC & Philly. He questioned the value of museums at one point, and created these as a “substitute.” Eventually, he came around and decided museums would be a good home for his oeuvre. He chose the Philadelphia Museum of Art. As part of his Boxes, Nude Descending (No. 2) got another life, as here where it is seen in a reproduction in the foldout left wing. He collaborated with the legendary Box genius, Joseph Cornell, on some of these.[/caption]

Thinking about the rest of the show, it seems to me that Marcel Duchamp spent his very long career bringing his favorite non-Art pastime, chess, to his work: he continually played chess with the Art world. He continually made gambits, moving his (Art) pieces where Art wasn’t. He also had serious questions regarding the viability of museums. Yet, he maintained a relationship with MoMA’s founding curator, Alfred Barr, who showed his work there early on, and MoMA helped Duchamp emigrate from Nazi Europe to the U.S. in 1941. Duchamp also guided his devoted collectors, Louise and Walter Arensberg  to leave their large collection to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1950, creating the world’s largest Duchamp holdings. It seems to me that in the end, Duchamp relaized museums were his best chance at maintaiing indefinite visibility. Marcel Duchamp at MoMA, and soon to open in Philadelphia, is proving him right.

As I walked through the rest of the show I couldn’t shake the sadness I felt that Duchamp, who’s Art career would continue for another FIFTY-SIX years after Nude (No.2), was no longer Painting.

“Symbolist traces may well have contributed to the unfavourable reception of Nude Descending a Staircase, (No.2) when Duchamp entered it for the Cubist-dominated Salon des Indépendants in March 1912. Albert Gleizes, a key figure in the Puteaux Cubist group and chairman of the hanging committee, asked Duchamp’s brothers to persuade him at least to change the title. Duchamp refused to do so and withdrew the picture. Although the work was shown in October of that year at the ‘Salon de la Section d’Or’ exhibition in Paris, and was later the succès de scandale at the International Exhibition of Modern Art, known as the Armory Show, in New York in 1913, Duchamp took the rejection badly10.”

“His lack of faith in the supposed open-mindedness of the self-appointed avant-garde, which manifested itself most obviously in the 1917 Fountain hoax (a porcelain urinal sent as an exhibit), can be dated from this event11.” Fed up with the reaction Nude Descending (No. 2) received, he turned his back on Painting, assumed another identity and created this in 1917-

Fountain, 1950 (replica, after lost 1917 original), Porcelain urinal

I don’t blame him.

As the 9 galleries of his work at MoMA showed, the world gained, perhaps, THE most influential Artist of the 20th century not named Picasso, but it lost what might have been one of its greatest Painting careers far too early.

“Watch yourself, skeleton, the museum will find you
all down the staircase, the first place you fell in love.” *

Special Thanks to Lana Hatten for research assistance. 

*- Soundtrack for this piece is “Stairs” by Joy Again from Forever, 2014.

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  1. Had I been curating, I would have put Nude Descending (No. 1) first, (No. 2) in the middle, andNude (Sketch), Sad Young Man in a Train, 1911 (Dated 1912) on the right. ↩
  2. ibid, P.87 ↩
  3. Katherine Kuh, Marcel Duchamp, Interview broadast on the BBC, March 29, 1961. ↩
  4. Ashton, etc., World of Art: Marcel Duchamp, P.51 ↩
  5. Marcel Duchamp, MoMA, P.86 ↩
  6. ibid, p.86. ↩
  7. Ashton, etc., World of Art: Marcel Duchamp, P.56. ↩
  8. Peter Brooker, Andrew Thacker, Geographies of Modernism, 2005 ↩
  9. Ashton, etc., World of Art: Marcel Duchamp, P.70.”

    “But, the damage had been done. “Immediately I wanted to change. The idea was to change; not to repeat myself.” Quoted on a MoMA Wall Card.

    So, after painting a Mural to hang over a client’s bookcase, this incredibly gifted Painter would Paint no more. He turned his attention to, well, everything else. After the Bride Stripped Bare, he invented the Readymades, which have achieved legendary status and. become incalculably influential.

    [caption id=”attachment_33864″ align=”aligncenter” width=”849″ ↩

  10. World of Art: Marcel Duchamp, P. 56. ↩
  11. ibid. ↩

Jack Whitten: The Black Monolith

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Show seen: Jack Whitten: The Messenger, MoMA, 2025.

After a quiet Summer, 2024, Summer Blockbusters brought the heat back to Manhattan in 2025. Four shows stood out to me: a pair at the Whitney1 and two at MoMA. Having already written about MoMA’s Hilma af Klint: What Stands Behind the Flowers, here, simultaneously upstairs on 6,  Jack Whitten: The Messenger, was the kind of show that made MoMA what it is for many around the world: one of, if not THE, leader in presenting excellent Modern (even Contemporary) Art shows. I’ve written about many of them in these e-pages these past 10 1/2 years.

Few Artists were more Contemporary than Jack Whitten. In fact, he invented some of its language, and a good deal of its emphasis/focus/center.

Man about town. Jack Whitten, a transplant from Alabama, was an NYC resident for 58 years, spending most of that time Downtown, before moving to Queens- except when he was “gone fishing,” as he wrote in his Notebooks on his departure for Crete each summer. The Artist is seen here on the corner of Broadway & Broome Street in the early 1970s on the Introductory wall card. When I see this Photo, I’m reminded that later he owned a building on Lispenard Street, a few blocks north of The World Trade Center. I tell the story of Jack Whitten on 9/11 further on.

Still, it left me with a deep sadness that after decades of struggle, Jack Whitten (1939-2018) didn’t live to see it.

Installation view of the first gallery of Odyssey: Jack Whitten Sculpture 1963-2017. The Met Breuer, November 24, 2018

He didn’t live to see the other great show of his work either- Odyssey: Jack Whitten Sculpture 1963-2017, the Retrospective of his Sculpture which he mostly kept from public display, which came to NYC at The Met Breuer in 2018, and which I wrote about here. Together, they make a very compelling case for Mr. Whitten’s extraordinary creative & imaginative range, the extremely wide range of his talent & skill, his accomplishment, and his place as a 20th & 21st century Master.

Installation view of the first gallery of the final Jack Whitten solo show during his lifetime at Hauser & Wirth, February 7, 2017. It was the first time I had seen one of his Sculptures. Quantum Wall (A Gift for Prince), is on the back wall. It can be seen in full in my piece on Jack Whitten: Odyssey, here, an installation view of which is shown above.

Both shows point out a sorry reality for too many great Artists. Jack Whitten is just one of many who waited in vain for their U.S. Retrospective. Meanwhile, numerous deceased Artist receive show after show (I’ve seen ten shows of the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat in NYC since 2012, for example, and written about almost all of them), while too many deserving living Artists go ignored, until years- even decades, after their passing.

Jack Whitten: The Messenger, Installation view, MoMA, July 31, 2025.

Nonetheless, all the while, his Art continued to ascend the ranks of appreciation and acceptance. It wasn’t always thus. Getting to this point has. been a rough and rocky road. An excerpt from MoMA’s Exhibition Catalogue (which is recommended as the most comprehensive book on Jack Whitten ever, in spite of its cardboard binding) looks back to his beginnings-

“Whitten made some of his earliest images as a teenager, painting hand-lettered signs for local businesses in his hometown of Bessemer, Alabama, in the 1950s. One of his first paid jobs was for a Civil Rights protest on the steps of the county courthouse. These images were meant to travel: to say something, to have reach. Whitten learned the technique using tools left behind by his mother’s first husband, James Monroe Cross, a commercial sign-painter who died before Whitten was born. It was unusual for Cross, a Black man, to have a skilled occupation and own his own business in the deeply segregated Jim Crow South. The artist suggested that Cross was always under threat of suspicion, even violence, for his profession. Making images was a rebellion and a risk… ‘Transmission is the key,’ he said2,'”

The earliest work in the show reveals Jack Whitten’s life long passion for Jazz. The Messenger (For Art Blakey), 1990, left, and Homecoming: For Miles (Davis), 1992 (the year after Miles passed), right. Both Acrylic on canvas.

Reading that, my thoughts turned back to another MoMA blockbuster that was full of “signs,” literal and figurative: Ed Ruscha/Now Then, which occupied these same galleries not long ago, the subject of a 3-part series I wrote. There are surprising similarities, and differecnes, between them. Largely contemporaries, Mr. Ruscha (b. 1937, Mr. Whitten born two years later in 1939), is perhaps best-known for his word Paintings. Though he started with a paying job making protest signs bearing words, Jack Whitten’s Art is almost exclusively wordless, except for its titles. His Art transcended words while honoring his mantra, “Transmission is the key.” Both Artists were born and raised in the South. Jack Whitten in Alabama- “in apartheid,” he said, Ed Ruscha in Tusla, Oklahoma, considered part of the South by some. Both left and attended Art schools, Mr. Whitten at Cooper Union, NYC,3, and Ed Ruscha at CalArts in L.A.. Both stayed put in their new locales for the rest of their lives and their extraordinarily long careers. Both used their Art to regularly comment on the world around them, though Jack Whitten seemed more the Activist. It’s also interesting that both Artist oeuvres are almost entirely devoid of images of people.

NY Battle Ground, 1967, Oil on canvas

As for their significant differences, Jack Whitten had to survive the 1960s, including the violence that surrounded the Civil Rights Protests. Deeply effected hearing Dr. Martin Luther King speak at the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955-56 after Rosa Parks’s arrest, the event that brought Dr. King to prominence (and the event at which Jack Whitten met Dr. King), he soon became fed up with the violence surrounding the Civil Rights Movement, so he moved to NYC in 1960, then graduated from Cooper Union with a bachelor’s degree in 1964, before finding his voice through the influence of the Jazz Musicians he met and the 1st generation Abstract Expressionists who he encountered here. His work would remain abstract his entire career. In spite of all of this history, Jack Whitten skips it and begins his riveting, 568-page collection of his studio notes from 1962 to 2017, Notes from the Woodshed, (the closest thing we have to an autobiography), with the 1960s & with his move to NYC.

Light Sheet I, 1969, Acrylic on canvas

“Never in my wildest dreams did I think that I would reach thirty years of age without self-destructing. . . . The 1960s were coming to an end; I was still alive and in one piece.”

He would go on to live and work for another forty-eight years.

“1970 was the turning point,” he recalled4. At the start of a new decade, the Artist moved to a studio on Broome Street and had a breakthrough. He stopped making figurative art and got rid of his paintbrushes(!), which may be unprecedented among Painters in Western Art history to his time. The studio became a laboratory designed to experiment with acrylic paint5. The medium, a recent innovation made from plastic, offered a vastly expanded range of color, texture, and handling. Seizing the opportunity, Whitten invented tools and techniques that were entirely new to the history of Western art.

Welcome to Jack Whitten’s post-1970 practice in which he “made” Paintings (he said) without using paint brushes. With this, they were “developed,” akin to how Photographs were. Introducing The Developer. At 12 feet long, creating Art with it is the other part of the equation. Especially since none of the Art I’ve seen that Jack Whitten may have made with The Developer have a dimension of 12 feet. He’s using this on pieces that are smaller than the tool.

From an Afro-comb to a twelve-foot-long wooden rake, which he called The Developer (a reference to photography), novel implements were maneuvered by the artist to pull layers of acrylic paint across canvases laid on his studio floor in one sweeping movement6.” Inventing a technique is impressive. Making Art using it takes mastering it first. Easier said than done with a 12-foot long rake in your hands! In this extraordinary video from 2017, Jack Whitten talks about growing up in “American Apartheid,” as he calls it, meeting Dr. King, and demonstratesThe Developer-

What stands out to me is that Jack Whitten, when faced with violence, met it with non-violence. He turned his anger into Art. Art without words. Abstract Art, at that. Revolutionary for a Black Artist. An Art that continued to represent those he admired and “transmitted” what he experienced in ways never before seen. It seems to me that that says all you need to know about the man.

Back at MoMA, the result of all the techniques he invented and perfected and his seemingly endless creativity made Jack Whitten’s work is so unique, and different from itself, that MoMA’s curators chose to install the show with numerous one-work walls. I previously experienced this in diane arbus: in the beginning at The Met Breuer.

Installation view. Installing one work on a wall is something that works extremely well for Jack Whitten’s work, in my view, since so much of it is so different from everything else. It allowed each piece to be considered singly, and then as the viewer moved around, as part of his whole. It made it very easy to “get lost” in the work & the show, something I went back to it to experience again.

Here, I thought this worked brilliantly and the resulting installation of these walls is one of the features I’ll long think of when I think of Jack Whitten: The Messenger.

The First Loading Zone, 1973, Acrylic on canvas

Today, Gerhard Richter gets a lot of notoriety as a “squeegee master,” yet he didn’t begin using the technique until 19857! Still, techniques do not make a work “Art,” with a capital “A,” as I write it. Yet, at least to my eyes, having seen Gerhard Richter: Painting After All on its last day (my look at it here), and the last day of the lost & lamented Met Breuer, what I saw over both shows left me feeling that Jack Whitten’s “Developer” works will continue to rise in esteem & appreciation. Since I believe that comparing Artists or Art works is subjective, I’ll leave it at that.

Chinese Doorway, 1974, All work are Acrylic on canvas unless stated. At 89 1/2 × 43 1/4 inches, it’s hard to say if this was created with The Developer, but if not, it appears he used another of his scraping tools.

But his “Developer” works are just one part of the work Jack Whitten created over his 58 year career, a part that fit in seamlessly with everything else he created as was to be seen in the incredibly rare opportunity to experience a large body of his work. This is in itself, remarkable. I’ve seen countless group exhibitions where different styles didn’t mesh well with each other. Yet, in The Messenger they meshed brilliantly and coalesced into telling one story: his.

Black Monolith II (Homage To Ralph Ellison The Invisible Man), 1994, Acrylic, molasses, copper, salt, coal, ash, chocolate, onion, herbs, rust, eggshell, with razor blade on canvas. As close as Jack Whitten comes to “traditional Portraiture.”

Walking through it left me realizing that it’s hard to think of another Black Artist who captured the times he lived in and so many of its leading figures in her or his Art, besides Charles White. For me, at least, when these works (including his Black Monolith series) are taken as a whole, the result is something of a Self-Portrait of the Artist: a man of his time, in his time, who rose above his time and all the travails he encountered to create something completely new and completely Jack Whitten, leaving echoes & impressions of his experiences.

Chalk editor’s note- Insert “This” in front of “was once.” (No, I did not write it.) NYC is “only” 402 years old, still you can be sure that with every step you take here you’re walking on history. So it is here in front of this nondescript residential building. But back in the late 1950s and early 1960s this was the location of “the hippest place on earth”- the now legendary Five Spot nightclub. The list of Jazz immortals who performed here is only matched by the legends of Art, Music, & Literature who hung out here to hear them.

Among the leading, now legendary, figures of his day that Jack Whitten encountered and even spoke with are Jazz Masters Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane, the latter, who was embarking on his own spiritual quest after a period of drug use, had an especially deep and lasting impact on Whitten’s Art.

John Coltrane: Giant Steps, 1960. One classic that’s in both of our collections (Jack’s on LP as shown in the catalog. My LP was replaced with this CD after wearing out), John Coltrane is shown here, Photographed on the cover by Lee Friedlander, around the time he was frequenting The Five Spot.

Jack Whitten frequented the legendary Five Spot nightclub on East 5th Street, and came to amass a terrific Jazz record collection.

Asa’s Palace, 1973, Acrylic on canvas

Another thing that stands out for me is that Jack Whitten was one of the earliest Black Artists to adopt abstraction, something that has continued in the work of Mark Bradford among quite a few others.

“There are two kinds of abstraction, the abstraction of Pollock and the abstraction of [Piet] Mondrian,” Jack Whitten wrote in 1969. “It is possible to create a third abstraction based on the theory of transcending these two8*

His titles often “ground” the work, but then the viewer is left largely on her or his own, often with a staggering amount of detail to consider. This last puts the lie to theory that abstract Art is “dashed off,” perhaps born of a misunderstanding of Jackson Pollock’s “dripping” technique, or the appearance of Franz Kline’s brushwork. Walking through The Messenger, I was hard pressed to find a single work that looked “dashed off.” On the contrary there were works where Mr. Whitten first had to invent, then perfect, the technique he used before the work could begin!

Atlantis Rising, 1966, Acrylic on canvas

Jack Whitten was  an eyewitness to the first plane flying into World Trade Center 1 on 9/11 from 14 blocks away! Incredibly, his voice is heard on the only video there is of that plane impacting the North Tower, by the Naudet brothers who were making a documentary on the New York Fire Department. Following them around, that morning they answered a call about a gas leak at the building Jack Whitten owned on Lispenard Street. The Naudets happened to be filming the firemen who were trying to find it when the plane flew right over their heads! Jack Whitten’s voice is the one heard making the expletive as it crashes into the North Tower9. The NYFD immediately jumped in their trucks, accompanied by the French crew under the direction of the Naudet brothers and James Hanlon (making the renowned documentary 9/11) and headed off to Ground Zero. Mr. Whitten-

“I was in the street that morning. This plane came right overhead, and when that sound came overhead, you could feel your flesh crawling, I mean, seriously, rippling. We looked up, this plane was right on top of us. At first you didn’t see any flame, any smoke. You just saw this big gap and hole, and the sky was filled with a chandelier of glass. It was later you saw the smoke and the flames. My gut feeling told me that that was not an accident.  This is what I call the particularities of violence—close to 3,000 people were murdered in my neighborhood. People were screaming, crying.”

He stopped making Art, except for this piece, which took him five years to complete-

9.11.01, 2006. Acrylic, ash, animal blood, hair, and mixed media on canvas, 120 × 240″ (304.8 × 609.6 cm). In what I think was a brilliant move, the Baltimore Museum sold some of its older masterpieces, inciting an uproar, and used some of those funds to buy it, saddening me that an NYC museum hadn’t stepped up.  After five years of agonizing over it, Jack Whitten created one of the most stunning pieces of Art to come out of the tragedy.

“I wanted that painting to be more raw and visceral. A lot of emotional stuff in there. I’ve had people that stand before that painting and cry,” he said10.

Jack Whitten’s signature and inscription on the right edge of 9.11.01. This also shows a detail of the mosaic tiling the work consists of, each tile hand-crafted.

The work is also created with another technique he invented. Beginning in the 1990s, the Artist cut hardened sheets of acrylic paint into thousands of mosaic tiles that he used to assemble 9.11.01 and other works. In my piece on Jack Whitten: Odyssey, “Jack Whitten: Secretes from the Woodshed,” I show an Art21 video that shows Mr. Whitten actually creating one of his “mosaic” works.

Southern Manor, 1974, Acrylic on canvas

“Perhaps the ideal approach to the work of literature would be the one allowing for insight into the deepest psychological motives of the writer at the same time that it examined all external sociological factors operating within a given milieu. For while objectively a social reality, the work of art is, in its genesis, a projection of a deeply personal process, and any approach that ignores the personal at the expense of the social is necessarily incomplete,” Ralph Ellison speaking of a way of engageing Literature, c.194611.

Though he was here (NYC) during the heyday of Abstract Expressionism, arriving in 1960 on the tail end of the first generations’s success, he doesn’t seem to have been overly influenced by them directly when looking at his work. Their influence seems to me to have been more in freeing the young Artist to explore other ways of communicating in paint. Maybe this can be seen when he said his Paintings weren’t Painted, they were “made.” In fact, it seems to me his attendance at the numerous Jazz clubs that were in a golden age at the time may have had a deeper last effect. In the Music, he found other Artists who were familiar with what he had experienced, whereas the first gen AbEx Artists had not. Their influent may have helped Jack Whitten focus on what was most important for him to express. They were doing it without words. He would do it without representational images using techniques he invented.

One recognition Jack Whitten did live to receive was the National Medal of Arts by President Obama. “WASHINGTON, DC – On Thursday, September 22, in the East Room of the White House, President Barack Obama awarded the 2015 National Medal of Arts and the National Humanities Medal to distinguished recipients. First Lady Michelle Obama attended the ceremony.” *- Photo by Cheriss May, www.cherissmay.com. White House caption in quotes.

It’s become apparent that Jack Whitten is the spiritual and influential “godfather” of much of what we see today, less than a decade after his passing. He turned his back on so-called representational Art and found a new way of “transmitting” all of what he had witnessed, all he had heard, and all he had inside, in abstraction, forging a new path forward that others have turned into a highway.

For Michael Merriweather.  

*- Soundtrack for this piece is “Nutty” by Thelonious Monk, heard here with John Coltrane, recorded live at The Five Spot in 1957-58, with some rare Photos of them performing in the club-

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  1. Amy Sherald: American Sublime, which I wrote about here, and Christine Sun Kim: All Day All Night, which I wrote about here. ↩
  2. Jack Whitten: The Messenger, Michelle Kuo, P.37. ↩
  3. After attending Tuskegee Institute as a pre-med student. ↩
  4. ibid, P.47 ↩
  5. ibid ↩
  6. MoMA wall card ↩
  7. https://www.christies.com/en/artists/gerhard-richter?lotavailability=All&sortby=relevance ↩
  8. ibid, P.45, 47 ↩
  9. Jack Whitten: Five Decades of Painting, P.43-4. ↩
  10. https://www.moma.org/audio/playlist/345/4715 ↩
  11. Ralph Ellison, “Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity,” in Shadow and Act, 27 n. 1. ↩

Amy Sherald’s Second Chance

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Preface-
In honor of those who saved my life 19 years ago on February 7th, 2007, as one way of giving Thanks, this piece honors another survivor (of a different ailment): the Painter Amy Sherald. Amy’s remarkable story is told here better than I could tell it. My look at her Art follows.

Shows seen:
Amy Sherald: the heart of the matter…, Hauser & Wirth, October, 2019, and
Amy Sherald: American Sublime, Whitney Museum, Summer, 2025

The Whitney & MoMA went toe-to-toe with dueling summer blockbusters in 2025, with each institution mounting two. I began this series with a look at Hilma af Klint: What Stands Behind the Flowers at MoMA, where Jack Whitten: The Messenger was installed on 6. All the while, 40 blocks south, Amy Sherald: American Sublime was up at the same time as Christine Sun Kim’s landmark All Day All Night, comprising the Whitney share of the four must-see Summer shows.

Hauser & Wirth, October 15, 2019.

I first saw Amy Sherald’s work at her NYC debut show, “the heart of the matter…,”  at Hauser & Wirth in October, 2019, a show that contained 8 Paintings.

The select content allowed for more space around each that worked extremely well in my view. Handsome, 2019, Oil on canvas, 54 x 43 inches, was also shown in American Sublime. Seen at Hauser & Wirth, October 15, 2019.

Fast forward to April 9, 2025, American Sublime contains 44 Paintings, the earliest dating from 2007- just 18 years prior! In those last two sentences hides the remarkable fact that Ms. Sherald (B. 1973) went from NYC debut show to an NYC early mid-career major museum Retrospective in a little more than five years! There aren’t a lot of Artists I can say that about.

Whitney Museum, July 25, 2025

Installation view. July 25, 2025.

What’s more remarkable is that just seven years before her Hauser show, on December 18, 2012, Amy Sherald underwent a heart transplant at age 39! That concluded a harrowing 10 years she spent after being diagnosed with congestive heart failure at age 30, and a two-month wait in the hospital for a donated heart (as is recounted in the piece I linked up top). Today, Amy Sherald is yet another fine Painter who burst on the scene this past decade and has wasted no time solidifying a place in museums around the world.

Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance), 2014. Oil on canvas. The Painting that brought Amy Sherald to national attention was inspired by Alice in Wonderland.

And, “burst on the scene…” she did as her 2019  NYC debut show came just three years after Amy won the 2016 National Portrait Gallery’s Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition with Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance), becoming both the first woman and the first African-American woman to win it.

Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama aka First Lady Michelle Obama, 2018, Oil on linen. (The first title was on the wall card.) After being personally selected by Mrs. Obama to Paint her official Portrait, a prescient choice at the time. Amy Sherald’s stature has only continued to grow. The former First Lady selected the Michelle Smith Milly label dress she is wearing that channels Piet Mondrian through Gee’s Bends Quilt Making, blending the modern with the historic. Gee’s Bend is a remote Black Alabama community of the descendants of former slaves.

Most well-known today, perhaps, for her Portraits of Michelle Obama and Breonna Taylor, Amy Sherald: American Sublime revealed the depth of her accomplishment (already) in works that are almost always forthright, with subjects usually facing the viewer head-on, while steeped in a subtlety that rewards extended and repeated looking. Adding a unique twist is that the faces, hands, arms, legs of each of her subjects are gorgeously rendered in grisaille(!), something I’ve never seen done in a color Painting before, and something that has become her trademark. She uses grisaille as a way of “challenging the concept of color as race1.”

Untitled (Opal), 2019, Oil on linen. Standing in front of Opal, I found myself wondering why I’d never seen a Painting like this before. It seems so incredibly straight-forward, yet only Amy Sherald could have Painted it and made it as unique as it is. From the grisaille, to the position of her hands & fingers, to her expression and the choice of colors, which Wes Anderson might admire, it’s a remarkable blend of a Portrait of Opal through the eyes of an Artist with a vision.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s I spent much time wondering what new developments would come to Portraiture after the work of great 20th Century Artists, like Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, Alice Neel, Marlene Dumas, Picasso, and others. 25+ years in, the genre is continually being reinvented, yet again, by a number of Artists who have come to prominence this decade- including Amy Sherald, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, and Frank Auerbach (who passed away in 2024).

Bo Bartlett, Oligarchy, 2016, Oil on linen. See at Ameringer McEnery Yohe, August 12, 2016.

Interestingly, Amy credits the Painter Bo Bartlett with showing her the possibilities. Others have posited that Ms. Sherald’s use of grisaille goes back to old black & white Photos of Black subjects, and not Painting or Painted Portraiture. However, on 19th Century Photographs Ms. Sherald said-

“It wasn’t what inspired my work, but it’s what affirmed my journey with it, and it’s where I was finally able to find these representations of black Americans that spoke to me in the same way that I wanted my work to speak to the world. They were family photographs, similar to the image of my grandmother that I oftentimes mention, where she had her picture taken.”

The Artist’s grandmother, Jewel Hendricks, as seen on page 28 of the excellent American Sublime catalog.

“Looking at how they represented themselves— they’re quiet, regal, graceful. It was an outward action that had inward meaning. They don’t smile, but there’s something there-this is what I look for in people— the feeling that you get when you look at those old photographs. When you look into their eyes, you are being told a story. It’s almost as if they’re standing in front of you, and they have a living and breathing kind of energy. There is something so captivating about that. And it’s not frivolous. It’s a very serious, deliberate kind of thing, having your picture taken, especially then2.”

Breonna Taylor, 2020 Oil on linen.

In work after work, American Sublime reveals that Amy Sherald is a master of Portrait story telling. Her Portrait of Michelle Obama, Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama, is a classic case in point that manages to subtly weave multiple threads. Crossing cultural boundaries by dialoguing Mondrian-like elements and Gee’s Bends Quilt Making is artistically ground-breaking, topped off with a natural and wonderfully relaxed pose, enhanced by the background pale blue, that is just stunning.

This is what Amy Sherald does.

Commissioned to Paint the late Breonna Taylor, her first posthumous Portrait, Ms. Sherald visited her family and spent time with her mother, Tamika Palmer, who spoke of Breonna’s interest in fashion. Amy commissioned a dress for the Portrait, and also added an engagement ring on her finger “to represent the love between Taylor and her partner, Kenneth Walker… Sherald incorporated the ring to give him solace and to suggest a brighter future3.” Of the finished Painting she said, “I don’t think I thought much about the viewer so much as I thought about her family when I was making this portrait….but when you’re speaking about violence against women and police brutality, she’s become the face for that movement,” she said4.

The intro for the Audio Guide for her 2019 Painting, The Girl Next Door says, “The artist discusses how she transforms the historical function of portraiture…” That’s a lot to have accomplished in 18 years already. Along the way, she renders a wide range of subjects that encompass an equally wide range of Black Americans, including more than a few who are new to museum walls showing the scope of her vision.

American Grit, 2024 Oil on linen.

As soon as she was able to, she sought out the family of the woman, Kristen, whose heart she now has. Amy was 39 when she received Kristin’s heart. Kristin died at 38. Amy calls it “a perfect match.”

Kingdom, 2022 Oil on linen

“What kind of person was she? What kind of things did she like. Who did she love? I romantically believe in muscle memory, heart memory. It means a lot for me to be able to just kind of get to know her family a little bit. When I met her father he made me feel her heart beat. … I still call it Kristen’s heart.”

Trans Forming Liberty, 2024 Oil on canvas

“I live without fear. I work without fear. I wake up and produce these ideas without thinking so much about painting something stupid or people not liking it. I’m living this moment: I wake up every day, and I have to make sure that my work continues to speak to generations. I need to make things that are going to resonate in that way.” 

For Love, and for Country, 2022 Oil on linen.

She continues, “But I also truly believe in who I am as a human. I believe in my power. I believe in timing. I believe that this is my “now,” and that nothing can go wrong now. I understand that as a fact. I’ve been through the worst of the worst, and it was still okay. I wake up, and I keep it moving every day for Kristin and my brother Michael. You don’t waste second chances5.”

A God Blessed Land (Empire of Dirt), 2022 Oil on linen.

*- Soundtrack for this piece is “I Can See Clearly Now,” written & performed by Johnny Nash from the 1972 album of the same name, which he performs here the following year-

For those who kept me here, and for Lisa, who gave this total stranger her extra ticket to the sold-out Basquiat show at the Brant Foundation in Spring, 2019, enabling me to see it and share it with the world. As she was leaving she told me she was looking forward to seeing Amy Sherald: the heart of the matter….

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You can also support it by buying Art, Art books & Music from my collection!
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Written & photographed by Kenn Sava for nighthawknyc.com unless otherwise credited. To send comments, thoughts, feedback or propositions click here. Click the white box on the upper right for the archives or to search them. Subscribe to be notified of new pieces below. Your information will be used for no other purpose.

  1. https://nmwa.org/art/artists/amy-sherald/ ↩
  2. “Amy Sherald in Conversation with Ta-Nehisi Coates” in Amy Sherald: The World We Make, P.184 ↩
  3. https://nmaahc.si.edu/object/nmaahc_2021.117 ↩
  4. ibid. ↩
  5. ibid. P.186 ↩

CJ Hendry: Colored Pencil Mastery to Art SuperStar

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Show seen- CJ Hendry, Flower Market 2.0, Rockefeller Center, September 19-21, 2025

Having just written about Hilma af Klint’s Flower Paintings (with guest star Georgia O’Keeffe), there is another Artist who garnered quite a bit of attention with Flower Art in NYC in 2025: the Artist known as CJ Hendry. Learning about her and experiencing her work in 2025 turned out to be an adventure, the likes of which I’ve never experienced in the NYC Art world.

What do I mean, “quite a bit of attention…”, and “The likes of which I’ve never experienced…”? Check out the 5 city-block long line of people (on the far side of the barricade) waiting to get into her show, sped-up 400%-

I sped it up 400%(!) so you wouldn’t have to spend the 10 minutes I spent walking to the end of what was the longest line I’ve ever stood in in NYC, let alone for an Art event. What’s it all about? Why are so many people interested in CJ Hendry?

Ms. Hendry first came to my attention this past Spring while I was researching the current State-of-the-Art in Colored Pencil Drawing, and discovered this-

Detail of Light Peach Rose, the whole 41 x 41 inches shown next, Colored Pencil, on paper or board (not specified), Date unknown. The Artist works on a detail with a Caran D’ache Luminance Color Pencil. *- CJ Hendry Studio Photo.

The full work, Light Peach Rose, 41 x 41 inches, mounted on a wall, as the Artist adds a detail, or holds the pencil there ostensibly so we know it’s not a Photograph. *- CJ Hendry Studio Photo.

Astounded by her work, as numerous others have been, I searched deeper, looking for answers about how she gets such spectacular results.

One of her most remarkable Flower Drawings. Title, size, date, materials besides Colored Pencils, unknown. Ms. Hendry loves to play with the picture plane and the picture “frame,” here, with a large part of the composition seeming to extend out of the frame and appear to be 3-D. In some of her pieces she even Draws an intricate gilded frame. *- CJ Hendry Studio Photo.

Details are few and far between. It’s not that she’s overly secretive, I think she’s just busy. The closest I’ve come are a few yt videos she’s posted where you can actually watch her Draw. One lasts SIX HOURS! Yes, I’ve watched all of it, and parts of it more than once. It’s not a lesson per se, it’s the Artist at work, and there’s no sound (Ms Hendry usually listens to audiobooks or shows during her marathon Drawing sessions), but it’s revealing nonetheless.

My most recent piece on Hilma af Klint focused on her Nature Series Portfolio consisting of 42 Watercolor Paintings containing renderings of 100 varieties of flowers that was on view at MoMA this Spring and Summer. The piece focused on Art depicting individual flowers, which is exactly what CJ Hendry is doing here. As the year went on, I found myself pondering the similarities, and differences, between CJ Hendry, Hilma af Klint and Georgia O’Keeffe on a regular basis. I’ll get to that.

Flower, Colored Pencil on Paper or board, Date unknown. One of her source Drawings for her Plush Flowers, seen further below. *- CJ Hendry Studio Photo.

Having spent 2025 looking at Flower Art almost exclusively, I was immediately struck by another series of Flowers she’s drawn, that includes this one. I’ve seen twelve of these Drawings, though there are likely more given she & her team proceeded to make them into a series of about 27 different Plush Flowers that were given away and sold in the two Flower Markets she’s set up on Roosevelt Island in 2024, and in Rockefeller Center in September, 2025- the show all those folks in the video were waiting to get in to see51. Looking at these reminded me of Georgia O’Keeffe’s famous quote about “realism”-

Busy lady. The Artist moves past a wall of 12 of her Flower Drawings. *- CJ Hendry Studio Photo.

“Nothing is less real than realism. Details are confusing. It is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis, that we get at the real meaning of things,” Georgia O’Keeffe.

Plush Flower, 2024-5. Each 20 inches tall. Each meticulously crafted, with a double-sided tag. *- CJ Hendry Studio Photo.

I don’t know if Ms. Hendry knows that quote, or has been influenced by it, yet looking at her Plush Flowers and the Drawings they’re based on, I’m struck by how sensitively she’s “edited” nature’s creations while still retaining species recognition. Frankly, it’s darn remarkable.

The Artist with a full Bouquet of her Plush Flowers. *- CJ Hendry Studio Photo.

As we’ve seen up top, she’s as capable as any human being currently alive/known to me this side of Robert Longo and Andrew Holmes at being able to Draw hyper-realistic (her term for her work) flowers. That she hasn’t here I find very interesting. She opted to create her own take on these Flowers that look like Roses, Sunflowers, et al, riffing on their essence. Were these Drawn/designed to make mass-manufacturing of them more affordable? I tend to doubt it because the attention to detail on each Plush Flower, as the end result result is known as,  is there. When I say “mass-manufacturing,” CJ Hendry deals in hundreds of thousands of them! In her own way, it seems to me that has done something not all that different from what Hilma af Kint did in her Nature Studies Portfolio on view at MoMA as I said in my piece on it: her Plush Flowers and the Drawings they’re base on speak to the essence of each species, as she sees it.

Original Drawing, left, resulting Plush Flower as sold at her Flower Market, right. *-  CJ Hendry Studio Photo.

A grid I put together of 25 of the 27 CJ Hendry 2025 Plush Flowers based on her Drawings available at her 2025 NYC Flower Market. *-Photos by CJ Hendry Studio.

Beyond her Flowers speaking to the essence of the flowers they replicate, they also speak to A LOT of people, as you saw in the video I posted up top, taken on Saturday, September 2o, 2025. That 5 city-block long line for a flower show (CJ Hendry’s Flower Market 2.0 at Rockefeller Plaza), or an Art show, must be a record. Here’s a map of the route I took in the video-

The map of the line, September 20, 2025.
Map Key-
Sunflower (one of CJ Hendry’s Plush Flowers)- Location of CJ Hendry’s Flower Market.
Red Line- My path to the end of the line of those waiting to get in.
Oof- Kenn Sava’s position at the end of the line.
Note- The distance from Rockefeller Plaza to 6th Avenue is about 2 City blocks.

In it we’re walking west on West 49th Street, before turning right onto Sixth Avenue, past Radio City Music Hall, and up to just short of the corner of West 52nd Street! The gent in the blue suit at the end of the line is selling tickets for Top of the Rock (i.e. the roof deck of 30 Rockefeller Plaza), directly behind the location of Flower Market, which offered an exclusive 28th Plush Flower to those who went.

At the other end of the line, the wait for these visitors near the entrance of Flower Market (the white tent)  is just about over.

The wait to get in was TWO HOURS! When I finally reached the end of the line to begin my wait I found myself standing so far from the show’s entrance I was within feet of the corner of West 52nd Street on 6th Avenue. It dawned on me that I was now a block away from MoMA where at that very moment Hilma af Klint: What Stands Behind the Flowers was beginning its final week! Flowers, flowers everywhere…When Flower Market opened on September 19th, I heard that over 100,000 Pluh Flowers were available. After the show ended, those remaining were sold on her site in bouquets of the all 27 Flowers. They sold out within days.

Bouquet up! Inside Flower Market 2.0, Visitors can have one of any one of the 27 designs for free. Each additional Flower is $5.00. I happened to notice that Crate & Barrel sells their decorative flowers for $19.95 to about $50 EACH, and they’re not designed by a known Artist (as far as I know). September 20, 2025.

After possibly being the first to put Georgia O’Keeffe and Hilma af Klint together last time, I now might well be the first to put Hilma af Klint & CJ Hendry together, but for that weekend, anyway, they weren’t all that far apart. CJ Hendry’s Flower Market was up (from September 19-22, 2025) 3 blocks directly south and parallel of MoMA smack dab in the heart of Rockefeller Plaza, as the map earlier shows, behind the famous skating rink, steps away from Fifth Avenue, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Radio City Music, Hall, etc., etc., and smack dab in front of the iconic Art Deco RCA Building at 30 Rock. Yes, the big time. Real Estate in NYC doesn’t come any more expensive than this.

Just HOW popular is CJ Hendry? In an interview last year Ms. Hendry stated that she grossed $20 million in a prior year. Putting that in perspective, that’s $20 million…

-WITHOUT a dealer or gallery representation- ever. (Her Colored Pencil Drawings currently go for $85,000 to $500,000. depending on size. But before you reach for your wallet, there’s another line to get on, this one “for years,” for the chance to buy one, only through her website.)
-WITHOUT a traditional white-wall “show.”
-WITHOUT a book out. In fact, there are surprisingly few articles written on her work.

So, HOW did this. happen?  CJ Hendry (she’s gone by her initials for as far back in her youth as I could go) is a mid-30-something transplanted Aussie Artist born in Durban, South Africa before growing up in Brisbane. She now lives & works in Brooklyn. She spent seven years in college studying Architecture and finance but left without a degree(!). In fact, she quit “days before I was kicked out for failing grades2.” While she was in school she worked as an $18./hour waitress, spending all her money on high-end luxury fashion & accessories. After quitting college, she decided to sell her wardrobe on eBay and with the proceeds take 365 days and devote herself to something she knew she had always been good at: Drawing, to see if she could make any headway with it.  Now, I don’t think I need to tell anyone that making a living Drawing is something that has really only been accomplished (after YEARS of struggle) by comic book Artists & graphic novelists, like R. Crumb and Chris Ware. In Art, Drawing is seen as a means to an end (in another medium), and almost never the end itself. She put in 16-hour days Drawing born of the discipline she learned becoming a professional swimmer who failed twice to make Australia’s Olympic Team. She decided not to put in another four years to try a third time. Still, “I owe everything to that (discipline)3,” she says now. It enabled her to create a portfolio she took around to Brisbane galleries. There was no interest.

“I didn’t take the traditional route because no one wanted to sign me. Fuck, I guess I’m on my own….I just did it on my own.”

She decided to post her work on Instagram. It took a while until she received a DM expressing interest in buying her work. The sender came out to her parent’s house, where she was still living, saw the work in her bedroom and paid CJ the amount she asked (“in the thousands,” she says) for the piece. With the proceeds she bought herself a Chanel Surf Board, which I believe still hangs in her studio, and she took things from there.

“Everything I draw would sell, and I’m so grateful for that. I went to a university for finance. I get business. I love business. I think I’m better at business than I am art. I’m a hopeless artist. I’m an ok artist, but I’m really good at strategy & business. and I love that. I think art is the byproduct of strategy and business. I think there are a lot of artists who are very good artists but don’t maybe have that business side4.”

As a result of her Flower Market and her Plush Flowers,  I realized that Colored Pencil Drawing is far from all she does. She’s mounted events/shows that have garnered notoriety for their unique concepts and installations to the point that they draw crowds, then live on in legend after (clicking on each entry in that link will show you what I mean). As part of these events, she created pieces (original Drawing-inspired objects in a you-name-it wide range of materials) that seem to me, and no doubt others, to bring her very close to the realm of something akin to 21st Century “Pop.” (For the sake of keeping this piece from getting VERY long, and since she has released so many other items, I’ll keep the focus here to her Flowers.) She now Draws with a few assistants, part of the “small team” she’s enlisted to facilitate and realize her many projects, shows, multi-media pieces, etc. So, CJ Hendry has become her own factory, now headquartered in a 22,000 square foot studio in Greenpoint, BKLYN. As I pealed her onion, discovering more and more about her, the name Andy Warhol repeatedly came to my mind.

Andy Warhol, Flowers, Screenprints, 1964-65 seen at Andy Warhol: From A to B And Back Again, Whitney Museum, December 21, 2018

I began to wonder- Is she Andy Warhol 2.0,? Seriously.

CJ Hendry, Blomma, 2025, Painted canvas Flower and Beech wood frame. This design has become her de facto symbol. *- CJ Hendry Studio Photo.

From an Art & business perspective, I think thee is a very strong case to be made that she is at least one of those that could be said about, while remaining resolutely CJ Hendry. Unlike the vivacious, omni-present Mr. Warhol, however, CJ appears to have no “social life.” She was quoted on August 9th on Instagram saying her life is “work and kids…not much else, ” which is a change from the 24/7 she said she worked since she started making Art. She is never seen at parties, or out on the town, or with media stars. The only “CJ Hendry Superstars” are her products, which have always sold out to this point. Yet, in an interview she recommended “not investing” in her5, but rather buy the work of up-and-coming Artists who need the support. Her Art is also noteworthy for the lack of human subjects in it to date. I’ve only seen one CJ Hendry Portrait- a commission from 4 years ago. Like Andy, CJ began her Drawing career rendering luxury products, including shoes, boots, and fashion accessories. From them she’s moved on to “things that are always around us,” like well-worn sneakers, cigarette butts and flowers. On Drawing the latter she said-

Who says a Drawing isn’ t Art? Unknown title, date, Caran d’Ache Luminance colored pencil (in her hand) on paper or board. *-  CJ Hendry Studio Photo

“Ever since I started mucking around with being an artist, flower imagery kind of frustrated me…It always seemed like the obvious and basic direction to go. I held off for many years because I just couldn’t figure them out. So somehow petals make sense, the flower being broken down, not full of life. Each petal looks so different like its own mini sculpture…”

I can’t say I’ve seen an Artist take this approach to them. Who else has Drawn or Painted a flower petal as their finished piece? In Art classes, students are taught to study anatomy in order to render the figure. Ms. Hendry is taking the same approach to flowers. It can only help her when she comes to depicting the whole.

Right now, it looks like flowers may be a anomaly in her work. Looking back, Ms. Hendry turned her focus to a subject, produced a series of Drawings of it, perhaps released some related items, and moved on. Though she recently Drew a character named “Juju,” and released a batch of (now sold-out) related items, her Flowers will continue to be a part of her work. She has announced Flower Markets will be mounted in Abu Dhabi and Hong Kong early this year.

The Artist works on one of her Complementary Colors series of Drawings circa 2018. Notice the pencil point. It looks to me like a right out-of-the-box Prismacolor Premier! In fact, in the videos I’ve seen, she uses very basic accessories. Electric sharpener (an Xacto seen in one), spray fixative, painter’s tape to hold down copy paper shielding white areas while she works flat on a very large wood table. I haven’t seen her erase (in what I’ve seen), use a mahlstick, a pencil extender or an easel. (She puts a sheet of something unknown, possibly, glassine, under her drawing hand as she works over finished areas.) Oh, and there’s an entire shelving unit of boxes holding thousands of colored pencils arranged by color. Drawings in progress, or finished, are kept in suitably sized clear archival sleeves. *- CJ Hendry Studio gif

Among the numerous striking pieces in her career to date is a stunning 2018 series called Complementary Colors. Like all of her work, it speaks for itself. 

Possibly the paint blob she was just seen working on. Colored pencil(!) on ? Title, size, date unknown from her Complimentary Colors series. c.2018. *-  CJ Hendry Studio Photo.

“I’ve peaked! It is downhill from here for me.” CJ Hendry, TedTalk, 2018.

She couldn’t have been more wrong when she said those words in 2018 at about the time she created the paint blob above. Her career has gone straight up, like an arrow into the weightlessness of space since, hitting that $20M she mentioned a year or two ago! Still, the market and the public are fickle. The CJ Hendry buzz may subside one of these days, but with Drawing talent like she has I doubt she’s entirely going away.

While the future is unwritten, we can take stock of the recent past. In addition to the facts that she’s brought more attention to Drawing as a medium & an Art form, which sorely needs it, and colored pencil Drawing (DITTO!), the thing I admire most about Ms. Hendry is that she’s succeeded entirely by her own devices. She’s proven it can be done, but, IT’S NOT THAT EASY!

“If you try to follow in someone’s footsteps exactly it won’t work for you. You’ve got to find your own thing. I haven’t had anyone to follow. There’s no one who’s done it this way. I’m a huge anomaly in the art world2.”

When repeatedly asked about how she did it, she stresses the HARD work she put in to get here- those 16-hour drawing sessions, 24/7. All the sacrifices she made (i.e. a social life, college, etc.) AND the fact that she has a background in finance. Hilma af Klint and Georgia O’Keeffe had to work to succeed in a male-dominated world. Georgia had a champion in Alfred Stieglitz who helped her navigate it early on. Hilma wasn’t so lucky. She never found her champion and decided her work was for the future. Whether that future is now, or not…the jury is out in my view.

I wonder how many visitors chose a Sunflower and thought about Van Gogh. I did.

That brings me to the similarities and differences between Hilma and CJ Hendry. As I wrote in my recent piece on her, Hilma didn’t live to realize the Temple she envisioned to house her Art, partly because she was seeking to have her work installed by existing spiritual organizations. As I said, I believe her work has been left in a quandary as a result.

Flower Market 2.0, Rockefeller Center, NYC, September 20, 2025.

CJ Hendry built her own “temple.” Actually, she’s already built a whole series of them. She uses temporary spaces for her shows/events, including some that have involved complete renovations of buildings, to realize her visions. Ironically, at the moment I took this picture, Flower Market 2.0, was pointed directly & poignently at MoMA & Hilma af Klint: What Stands Behind the Flowers three blocks north (to the left). What stands behind these Flowers is a woman who’s a force of nature. “Carpe diem” could well be CJ Hendry’s motto. While Hima af Klint’s work’s place is, it seems, still undecided, and appears stuck between today’s Art machine & the Artist’s intentions, as I said last time, CJ Hendry stands at the opposite end of that spectrum, as someone who relishes and uses the Art machine’s focus on “materialism” while skating rings around the usual dictates of today’s Art establishment, remarkably achieving success without its help or involvement, on her own terms.

She’s right, no one can follow in someone else’s footsteps and expect the same results. Still, there is much to be learned from her example. Perhaps, most importantly, that it CAN be done.

I don’t think CJ Hendry will be the last Artist to “make it” on their own terms.

*- Soundtrack for this piece is “God Bless the Child,” by Billie Holiday and Arthur Herzog, Jr, 1939, seen here in this incredibly rare live recording by the immortal Lady Day with the equally immortal Count Basie, who I had the honor of meeting-

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  1. With Flower Markets being announced for 2026 in Hong Kong and Abu Dhabi. ↩
  2. Short Story Long podcast #162, CJ Hendry. ↩
  3. ibid. ↩
  4. Both quotes ibid. ↩
  5. ibid ↩
  6. Short Story Long podcast #162, CJ Hendry. ↩

Hilma af Klint in the 21st Century: The Spirit vs. The Machine

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Shows seen: Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future, Guggenheim Museum, 2018-19.
Georgia O’Keeffe: To See Takes Time, MoMA, 2023, and
Hilma af Klint: What Stands Behind the Flowers, MoMA, 2025

Hilma af Klint, Tree of Knowledge, No. 1,  from The W Series, 1913, Watercolor, gouache, graphite, metallic paint, and ink on paper, Guggenheim Museum, December 31, 2018..

Succinctly put, Hilma af Klint is one of the most remarkable and unique Artists I’ve encountered.

Of the thousands of Art shows I’ve seen in my life, I consider about 10 to be truly monumental. Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future is one of them. I’m so grateful I got to experience it with Lana Hattan1, and her Photos are included in this piece. Guggenheim Museum, New Year’s Eve, December 31, 2018. Enduring Thanks to the woman who took this.

Having seen two shows of her work, and most of the books published on it, Hilma’s work continually surprises me. Much of her oeuvre features that rarest of all qualities in Art: it’s unprecedented. I saw Paintings for the Future exactly seven years ago as I write this yet I haven’t written about it to this point for two reasons- 1) I’m still thinking about it and researching Hilma (as my featured entry on Hilma books in my “NoteWorthy Art Books of the 21st Century” piece earlier this year attests). 2) I’ve come to see that boxing Hilma as an “abstract Artist,” as the Art machine has labelled her, does her an immense disservice. I find it at odds with the very nature of her work.

Group IX/SUW, The Swan, No. 1 from The SUW/UW Series, 1915, Oil on canvas. Reaching for the light. Of all the Painting shows I’ve seen at the Guggenheim Museum, the installation of Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future was transcendent. More on this later. *- Photo by Lana Hattan, Guggenheim Museum, December 31, 2018. I’m pleased to be able to present this show through her eyes, too.

Beyond all of that, recent developments may make her work “Basquiat hard” (my term for an Artist’s work that is mostly out of pubic view) to see going forward.
That’s a lot to cover. I’ll try to in what follows.

It begins with the flower…

“If your heart is in them flowers, bring ’em on,” Tanya Tucker-*

Georgia O’Keeffe, The White Calico Flower, 1931, Oil on canvas, as seen at the Whitney Museum, June 30, 2023

Flower Art was a niche thing, largely reserved for Illustration, until Artists like Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986) made viewers sit up and take notice of them. Of course, Vincent van Gogh, and the 17-century Dutch Masters a century before him, among countless others, had Painted wonderful Still-Life bouquets for many years prior, but individual flowers had not received much attention. Earlier last century, that began to change.

Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe, 1918. Gelatin silver print. It’s hard to believe Georgia could Draw & Paint flowers like this, and it looks like Mr. Stieglitz found it remarkable, too. Note the year this was taken. *- Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Photo.

“Nobody sees a flower really; it is so small. We haven’t time, and to see takes time- like to have a friend takes time,” Georgia O’Keeffe, paraphrased by MoMA for the title of their 2023 show, Georgia O’Keeffe: To See Takes Time.

Georgia O’Keeffe, Canna Lily, 1918-20 Watercolor on paper, seen at Georgia O’Keeffe: To See Takes Time., MoMA, July 4 2023. Exactly 2 years later these same gallery walls would display Flower Watercolors by Hilma af Klint Painted at about the same time. (Lights lowered to protect the Art.) MoMA, June 9, 2023.

She continued: “So I said to myself- I’ll paint what I see- what the flower is to me but I’ll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking the time to look at it- I will make even busy New Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers.” She would eventually give us 200 Paintings of them, a number of which are now iconic. So, it was fitting that MoMA’s Georgia O’Keeffe: To See Takes Time  contained some of her Flowers, including three early Calla Lilies watercolors from 1918-20, right as she was transitioning from Painting in watercolors to oils2.

Hilma af Klint, Motacilla Alba: Wagtail with Guidelines, left, Violet Blossoms with Guidelines, both from Series I, 1919, Watercolor, graphite, and metallic paint on paper, right. Tucked away in Paintings for the Future this Flower Watercolor, right, looks like a page from Hilma af Klint’s Nature Studies Portfolio that would become the focus of the next major NYC Museum show of her work seven years later. An interesting realistic(!) harbinger, it’s not part of that Portfolio. Seen at the Guggenheim Museum, December 31, 2018, this sheet was also included in MoMA’s What Stands Behind the Flowers in 2025. MoMA’s wallcard for it speculates that Hilma may have removed it from Nature Studies.

Meanwhile at the same time Georgia was creating her Calla Lilies, across the ocean in Sweden, an almost completely unknown Artist named Hilma af Klint (i.e. HaK, born 25 years before Georgia in 1862) began rendering over 100 Flowers in Watercolors in a Portfolio she titled Nature Studies, 1919. As far as I know, they didn’t know each other (though I wonder if Art astute Hilma came to know of Georgia as the American rose to fame). As far as I can tell, the set remained hidden from public display until May 11, 2025, when MoMA opened Hilma af Klint: What Stands Behind the Flowers, coincidentally in the same galleries that had held Georgia O’Keeffe: To See Takes Time two year before. 

Five of Hilma af Klint’s The Ten Largest, a series devoted to the human lifespan, part of her now-famous Paintings for the Temple series. Note the shapes that seem organic or “flower-like.” Guggenheim Museum, December 31, 2018. *- Photo by Lana Hattan, Guggenheim Museum, December 31, 2018.

When her Art was last seen in an NYC museum in 2018-19, Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future drew a Guggenheim Museum all-time record 600,000 other viewers to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Museum Rotunda. I always walk down the ramp after taking the unique semi-circular elevator to the top of the Guggenheim as Frank Lloyd Wright wanted visitors to do which means I saw Paintings for the Future in reverse chronological order. Preceding it, R.H. Quaytman: +x, Chapter 34, occupied the 6th, or top Ramp. While this might seem incongruous to some, a deep dive into Hilma af Klint’s sparse NYC history reveals that R.H. Quaytman has a long history of championing Hilma af Klint that includes curating the first HaK show in an NYC museum, The Secret Pictures by Hilma af Klint at MoMA PS1 in early 19893. +x, Chapter 34 worked seamlessly with Paintings for the Future in my view.

Herein lies a problem (among others) with branding HaK an “abstract Artist.”  To the left, above the sign, on Ramp 1 is Summer Landscape, 1888, Oil on canvas, juxtaposed by parts of three of The Ten Largest, all 10 from 1907, far right, from her landmark Paintings for the Temple series, partially shown in the prior picture, in a completely different style. December 31, 2018.

As we got to Ramp 1 (the lowest ramp), there were two bays containing work that looked pretty representational to me that featured Summer Landscape, 1888, above, left, and 2 Flower Watercolors from the 1890s, center, between the  visitors above, all shown closer below-

Summer Landscape, 1888, Oil on canvas. Hilma was about 26 when she Painted this in the year she graduated from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts.*- Photo by Lana Hattan, Guggenheim Museum, December 31, 2018.

Poppy, 1890s, Watercolor, ink, and graphite on paper, left, Portrait study of the head of a woman, center, and Portrait study of a sitting woman to its right,  both Charcoal, crayon and graphite on paper, both c.1918. Distortion of the frames due to the curved wall. *-Photo by Lana Hattan, Guggenheim Museum, December 31, 2018.

Though early in her career, before the more well-known Paintings they call “abstract,” these revealed an accomplished technique in both oils and watercolors, honed over 6 years at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm (1882-88), where Hilma was one of its first female students. At that moment, I realized there was much more to Hilma af Klint than the Art machine’s limiting marketing hype would have us believe.

“Blue Book” Vol. 10. Hilma painstakingly recreated every one of her Paintings for the Temple (Painted, again, by hand) in a series of blue books on the left-hand page accompanied by a black & white Photo of the piece on the right-hand page, probably because color photography wasn’t yet practical. Guggenheim Museum, December 31, 2018.

Hilma, a devoted, life-long spiritualist,t who attended seances (and believed her “most important work” was the 192-canvas series The Paintings for the Temple, 1906-15, partially shown earlier, which were guided by other beings), came to feel that her time wasn’t THE time for her Art to be seen. Since the entire Temple series is so numerous, and includes 10 very large Paintings, Hilma fastidiously recreated the entire series in 10 remarkable smaller “Blue books,” as they are known, a “portable museum,” which she carried with her to show Rudolf Steiner (in 1920), and others, in hopes of having the originals shown in a spiritual context. That’s how important it was to her.

This makes me wonder- How many “abstract” Artists would be able to exactly recreate 192 of their Paintings? An impressive technical achievement, that she could do it tells me that her compositions were no accident, something I think is important to bear in mind.

Is THIS the time Hilma envisioned for her work? The introductory wall card for Paintings for the Future on the Guggenheim’s curved wall outlines how the curators saw Hilma’s Art in 2018. I disagree with parts of this. For example, they mention HaK being “a respected landscape and portrait painter,” acknowledging she Painted in other styles, yet they ignore the fact that she returned to Painting representationally in 1919 with Nature Studies, as I show further on. They state her work was “untethered from recognizable references to the physical world.” What about the flowers and other natural elements that appear frequently, as shown in The Ten Largest picture earlier, and in Group VII (further on) and other pieces later on? *- Photo by Lana Hattan, Guggenheim Museum, December 31, 2018. Click for full size.

Failing to achieve this, in 1932, she decreed that none of her Paintings or Drawings should be shown until twenty years after her death in hopes of finding a more accepting time. Her work wound up being out of sight for 45 years. After she was tragically struck by a street car in 1944 and died from her injuries, her will left her entire creative estate to her nephew, Erik. Her work was stored in an attic for two decades before Erik had the Paintings unrolled and Photographed. Those 1,300 Paintings and 26,000 pages of text forms the basis of what is now the Hilma af Klint Foundation, which was created in 19724. The Foundation made a major effort to organize the work and prepare it for public display. Eleven of her Paintings were finally shown in The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985 in Los Angeles in 1986, but it wasn’t until 2013 that she finally received a full retrospective (in Europe), in a show titled Hilma af Klint: Pioneer of Abstraction (the catalog for which is also on my list).

Georgiana Houghon, The Love of God, August 3, 1864, Watercolor and gouache on paper, 23.7 x 32.6 cm, An Automatic Painting, Hilma af Klint was about 2 when Georgiana Painted it. *-Victorian Spiritualists’ Union, Melbourne Photo.

That show rode on the hype about Hillma being “the first abstract Artist,” (says the Tate, no less) before Kandinsky, Mondrian, et al., and a woman. The truth is Hilma was not even the first woman in her spiritualist circle to create what they call abstract work- Georgiana Houghton (1814-1884), 48 years Hilma’s senior, who proceeded her in creating Automatic Paintings & Drawings, may be a better candidate for that title. But, boxing HaK as such helped the powers that be draw huge crowds to the 2013 show of a complete unknown. Paintings for the Future (one of the two most important NYC Painting shows I saw in the prior decade, along with this one) took things to an entirely different level. Six years later comes MoMA’s Hilma af Klint: What Stands Behind the Flowers, her first NYC museum show since the Guggenheim blockbuster. Hilma’s work doesn’t need any hype to “sell” it now. The world knows who she is. All the “abstraction” talk has kept people from looking at her work, in my view. It’s time to look at the Art for what it is.

Installation view of the 2nd gallery of Hilma af Klint: What Stands Behind the Flowers at MoMA, which contained the first part of Nature Studies on the walls and a selection of her writings, and books by others on flower studies, in the center vitrine. Opening week, May 18, 2025.

What Stands Behind reveals that AFTER she completed the Paintings for the Temple in 1915, Hilma went back to working “representationally!” I guess no one bothered to tell her she was supposed to be an “abstract” Artist in the future. The more likely case is that HaK was a very talented and creative woman, an Artist more than capable of creating in whatever style she needed to work in for what she was trying to accomplish. It seems to me that THAT is a MORE impressive thing than sticking her in any one limiting box!

“One has to think of the realm of the nature spirits as the realm of thought; these entities hover around us, some like driving winds, others like soft summer breezes,” Hilma af Klint, MoMA wall card.

Convolvulus arvensis (Field Bindweed), Monotropa hypopitys (Pinesap). Sheet 20 from the portfolio Nature Studies July 11–24, 1919, Watercolor, pencil, ink, and metallic paint on paper. One of the 46 sheets in watercolor, pencil, ink, gouache and metallic paint on paper included in Nature Studies. Being 19 11/16 by 10 5/8 inches, these sheets would seem too large for Hilma to work on in situ. But that’s purely my conjecture. Unlike Georgia O’Keeffe, HaK didn’t confine herself to one specimen per sheet. Over 100 are included on the Nature Studies! Underneath, the curators translate HaK’s notations of the species name and its character as perceived by the Artist: “Determination” for the Field Blindweed, top, and “One-sidedness” for the Pinesap, bottom. MoMA, September 26, 2025.

She also continued to work on creating a “language” (see Group 2, further below) that included letters, words and diagrams. These are seen in almost all of the series she created in her life (including Nature Studies).

Woodland Strawberry, Hilma’s notation- “Liberator. Longing to produce balance within the blood syntem by expelling either white or red biood cells.” European wood sorrel- “Fragility-submissiveness shyness-humility fear -respect self-loathing-obedience.” Catsfoot– “Peace and harmony.” and Dandelion- “Beginning.”

Bilberry, Apple, Common Pear, Lingonberry

Looking at Hilma’s Art is different than looking at the Art of any other Artist I know of. Quite a few of her Paintings for the Temple (as seen in the picture earlier) and other “abstract” works included at MoMA (below) have elements that look organic, including flower shapes. In some of her Temple series, lines of dots connect figures, reminiscent of the af Klint family’s heritage as noted cartographers & mapmakers. Then, any number of her pieces, including almost all her Nature Studies, include diagrams that contain basic geometric shapes- circles, squares, cones, etc. The viewer needs to decide what to make of them, or look to the Hilma’s Notebooks for insights. Finally, there’s the “language” the Artist developed, abetted by her use of letter “codes,” as Julia Voss outlines in her Biography. As a result, it seems to me there is still a long way to go in coming to fully understand Hilma af Klint’s work. Lumping it all into ANY one-word catchphrase box only takes us further away from that point of truly understanding it-if that’s possible.

Group VII, No 1-5, from the US Series, 1908, Watercolor and pencil on paper. 11 years. before the Nature Studies portfolio, what seems to be flower-like shapes abound. Seen at the beginning of  MoMA’s show.

The wall card for Group VII. Installed at the show’s entrance, is a relatively rare instance of the Art world looking beyond Hilma the “abstract Artist” thus far, or hedging their bets on their use of that box. Here, the organic shapes are accompanied by letters that are parts of the “code” Hilma used. See next.

Another piece of the puzzle. Hilma’s original Notebook containing her Key to the mysterious words and omnipresent letter “codes” she used throughout her oeuvre. It’s an essential part of “decyphering” her work. Hilma’s code is detailed in English in the book Hilma af Klint: Notes and Methods. *- Photo by Lana Hattan, Guggenheim Museum, December 31, 2018.

ALL this talk about Hilma’s style misses the point! Hilma was not out to win any “style wars.” All of her work was about something entirely different, and that difference was substance over style.

Apple, no date, Watercolor on paper. Virtually every Art or Drawing class begins with rendering, coloring & shading basic shapes, like the sphere (often an apple, orange or lemon). Here HaK takes it to an entirely different level, and we get to marvel at her powers of observation, especially in the incredibly subtle variance of the local color. It’s also fascinating to me how minimal the shadows are, something you never see taught in how-to books which glory in the different kinds of shadows. In most of her Nature Studies, except the previous one, Hilma leaves out the ground, as she does here, too. In this case, doing so gives her the chance to show more of the bottom detail, again something I can’t say I’ve seen done often.

On the opposite end of that spectrum from the 21st century hype around it, there is something else at the beating heart of her work, something her “abstract” Paintings for the Temple and her representational Nature Studies have in common, and something that is at the core of the recent debate regarding continuing to publicly display her work. Hilma af Klint’s work is centered on the spirit. She created her work for fellow spiritual seekers. The Paintings for the Temple are devoted to the human spirit (with the aid of spirits who have moved on to another level). After completing them in 1915, never one to think small, the Artist turned her attention to an even bigger subject- the spirit of the natural world, commencing with the atom, in works that filled three quarters of the first gallery at MoMA, before moving on to the spirit in nature, beginning with flowers (in Nature Studies), which filled most of the succeeding two large galleries. These were supplemented by her late Flower Watercolors, which reminded me of some of Georgia OKeeffe’s Watercolors that were shown in these galleries at MoMA in 2023. The bottom line is that Spiritual Art is still outré to the Art machine, whatever type it is. They can’t sell it, and Art without monetization does not keep the Art machine going.

Common Sunflower. To Hilma- “Love is the greatest of all.”

Meanwhile, throughout What Lies Behind, part of the sheer joy in looking at her work, her marvelous technique shines in piece after piece. It’s surprising to me that Hilma has gotten so little credit for it. She came upon it the hard way, through continual hard work and 6 years at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. This was followed by work as an Illustrator, including illustrating a book on horse surgery by the director of the Veterinary Institute, Stockholm, who kept Hilma’s Drawings for the rest of his life.

From Group 2 February 12-19, 1919 Watercolor, pencil, and metallic paint on paper. This was one of numerous examples of her technique I could site. Here, we see the Artist working on ideas for herself in a series of sheets titled Group 1, Group 2, Group 3. No matter for public display or her own purposes, Hilma was always meticulous in her execution. Of the Groups, MoMA says- “Together, the drawings form narratives that allude to pollination, reproduction, and evolution. By April 19, 1919, after more than three months of progress, af Klint had established a vast and diverse diagrammatic language. The very next day, she began her Nature Studies portfolio.”

This enlarged detail of the lower center of the previous image perhaps measures 3 or 4 inches wide by an inch and change high (the bounding rectangle). Easy to miss because it’s in pencil and the actual Drawing part seems to have faded,  it’s noteworthy for two reasons. First, its meticulousness, and second for the title- Die Blumenkrone means “The Flower Crown.” Even in the dead of wnter (i.e February 18th as the date reads), Hilma had flowers on her mind.

What Stands Behind also makes the case in spades or her accomplishment as a Watercolorist- both in her Flowers and in the later Flower work (not part of the Nature Studies series) shown in the final gallery, in a different style again, as seen below.

Ear of Grain, 1922, Watercolor on paper, from the series, On the Viewing of Flowers, with a apparetnly relevant section of the wall card, left. MoMA, September 26, 2025.

Georgia O’Keeffe, Morning Sky, left, and Morning Sky, and Morning Sky with Houses, right, 1916, Watercolors on paper. MoMA, September 9, 2023.

I might be the only one to draw parallels between Georgia O’Keeffe & Hilma af Klint, but when I saw the wall of 1922 Watercolors by Hilma in the last gallery, including Ear of Grain, above, I couldn’t help but recall Georgia’s Watercolors that had been hung in these galleries two years previously. It’s fascinating to think about their commonalities, as extraordinary, ground-breaking Artists, and as extraordinary women, at much the same time, on almost opposite sides of the globe. What Stands Behind The Flowers begins some of the heavy lifting on the road to assessing Hilma af Klint’s full accomplishment. In spite of that, I’m not sure THIS is the ideal time Hilma envisioned for her Art to be shown.

MoMA Gift Shop display for the show. More items behind me and to the left. While I’ll reserve comment on the other items, MoMA’s Exhibition Catalogue for the show is highly recommended. May 18, 2025.

In too many (most?) cases today a work of Art is mentioned followed by its price as if that’s the most important thing about it! Then, the rush is on to plaster it on everything from umbrellas to baby onesies. Hilma’s spiritualist Art stands directly at odds with that. She opposed materialism in Art. To this point, it’s largely escaped it (though MoMA, who has come to own Nature Studies, produced a $500.00 Limited Edition of it, as far as I can tell, the first Hilma af Klint Limited Edition, in addition to putting the series on refrigerator magnets, postcards and a poster)5.

Rebel. With a cause.

Trapped in the future. But, is this THE future she envisioned for her Art? One of the few Photographs of Hilma af Klint. This one was affixed to a wall at the Guggenheims’s landmark Paintings for the Future in 2018.

Perhaps this experience sounded a warning bell. Earlier this year a struggle broke out inside the Hilma af Klint Foundation about whether or not her work should continue to be exhibited. The Foundation’s chairman of the board, af Klint’s great-grandnephew, who, like his great-grandfather, is also named Erik af Klint, is against it feeling that Hilma wanted her work to be seen in a spiritual context by fellow seekers, i.e. to “keep the work available to those who seek spiritual knowledge or who can contribute to fulfilling the mission that Hilma af Klint’s spiritual principles intended.”

On Hilma’s spiritualism. Guggenheim Museum, December 31, 2018..

Therefore, I think there is a strong case to be made for ending public displays of her work at this point. Perhaps a future time will be more ready to accept, and see her work as she intended it to be seen, and provide the Artist’s full accomplishment with the respect it deserves..

“Beam me up, Frank!” The control panel on Frank Lloyd Wright’s semi-circular Elevator at the Guggenheim. December 31, 2018.

Experiencing Paintings for the Future at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim brought home another problematic aspect of experiencing Hilma af Klint’s work today.

Temple Design, 1931, Notebook in the Hilma af Klint Foundation Collection (*) as seen in Julia Voss, Hilma af Klint.

It turns out that Hilma had not only envisioned that “ideal space” for the display of her work, i.e. a “Temple” as she called it (as in her Paintings for the Temple series), she put some of her ideas for it down on paper.

Lana Hattan immediately upon exiting the elevator on the 6th Floor, in both of our favorite buildings, in one of my favorite pictures of her. I thank her for her generosity in allowing me to publish some of the Photos she took that day. December 31, 2018.

Her sketches for it have quite a bit in common with Wright’s masterpiece on 5th Avenue. Both feature circular floors or ramps that rise to a top that opens up to the sky. Also coincidentally, Hilla Rebay, director of the Museum Non-Objective Painting which  preceded the Guggenheim Museum, said she envisioned “people communing with the work in Solomon R. Guggenheim’s collection in a a ‘temple of spirit.6,'” in commissioning Wright to design it.

Group IX/UW, The Dove, No. 3, left, Group IX/UW, The Dove, No. 1, right, both from The SUW/UW Series, 1915, Oil on canvas.The work on the right is the original of the work she reproduced by hand in the Blue Book picture shown earlier. Guggenheim Museum, December 31, 2018..

I didn’t know about her Temple, or her Drawings for it, when I saw the Guggenheim show, yet I came away feeling the Architecture added exponentially to the experience of it. At this point, it leaves me feeling her dream should be realized, though that’s not part of the current discussion (as far as I know). Failing to realize the Temple she had envisioned to hold at least part of her work, it remains in a sort of limbo without it.

Of course, today’s Art machine is adamantly opposed to Hilma shows ending, seeing a potentially huge marketing opportunity vanish. Her art being for spiritual seekers, is diametrically different than how the Art world sees it now. Spiritual seeking vs dollar signs- I’ll be interested in seeing which way this one turns out, but I’ll be hoping Mr. af Klint succeeds. (Digression for full disclosure- In case anything I write here makes you wonder, I’m not a religious person. I’ll leave it at that and end the digression.) I’ve always believed the Artist’s intentions for her (or his) work should be respected above all else. As for all those who will bemoan not being able to see her work, consider that for most of the past 30 years Jean-Michel Basquiat has been THE most popular Contemporary Artist in the world, and almost none of his work is in the hands of museums or public collections resulting in a paucity of shows, as I discussed here7. Somehow his popularity has continued to increase without direct access to his work.

Hilma af Klint books for sale in the window at the Rudolf Steiner Bookstore in Manhattan. A long-time admirer of Mr. Steiner, I think she’d be ok with this. December 11, 2025.

Hilma’s work can be seen by everyone in the excellent seven-volume Catalogue Raisonne her Foundation has published (which I collectively named a NoteWorthy Art Book of the 21st Century), and a number of other books. For those who want to know more about Hilma, Julia Voss’s excellent Hilma af Klint Biography is the current go-to source and a must-read. It reveals an extremely private woman who was solely focused on her spiritual development and her Art to the extent that she wrote virtually NOTHING about herself and her private life in those 26,000 pages she left! But, she did make crystal clear what she was about and what she wanted for her Art.

If Hilma were alive today would she be enamored with the Art world and its machine, an Art world that seems to have no clue how to handle “spiritual Art?” I have my doubts. That future she envisioned in the 1930s still feels like a dream. So, it just might be a good thing if Hilma af Klint shows stop. Some further point in the future may be a better time for her work to be seen & fully appreciated- one without  an Art world in such a hurry to judge it, box it, and associate it solely by the dollar signs it hangs on it.

Wake me up when we get there.

*- Soundtrack for this piece is “Bring My Flowers Now,” by Tanya Tucker, the de facto title track from her 2019 album, While I’m Livin’, which she performs here-

“I know we’re gonna ride again someday…”

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  1. The last show we’ve been able to see together. ↩
  2. She would begin Painting flowers in earnest in the mid-1920s. ↩
  3. Ms. Quaytman’s book Spine and her new book, Book, 2025, are on my list of NoteWorthy Art Books of this century. ↩
  4. Julia Voss, Hilma af Klint: A Biography, PP..1,2 & 4. After mentioning I was in the middle of reading it at the time I published my NoteWorthy Art Books of the Century piece, I’ve added A Biography to the list. A marvelous accomplishment with a terrific translation from the original German, it’s essential reading for anyone interested in HaK. ↩
  5. I’m still a bit puzzled by Nature Studies’ Provenance. MoMA’s site says they bought it, but from whom and how that owner came to own it is unspecified. How it didn’t wind up in, or being acquired by, her Foundation puzzles me. I tried to find out, but received no answers. ↩
  6. Here. ↩
  7. By the way, I have managed to cover almost every single NYC Basquiat show these past 10 years, so you can see a good deal of his work here. ↩

Es Devlin Rides the Wild Horses

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Show Seen: An Atlas of Es Devlin @ the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Museum of Design

The one and only Es Devlin in the one and only time she appears in her show, in her piece Memory Place. (her hands appear a few times elsewhere). Displayed in the show’s entrance lobby where visitors wait for the next showing of her 4-minute intro video which takes place in a fascinating recreation of her studio. The pictures in this piece are thumbnails. Click any for full size.

Having first experienced Es Devlin’s brilliance in 2010, the release of her debut Art , An Atlas of Es Devlin, the NighthawkNYC.com NoteWorthy Art Book of the Year for 2024, fired my curiosity as to what the show of the same name would be like. How would Es Devlin and the curators at the Cooper Hewitt distill the innumerable projects Ms. Devlin has been involved in these past 29 years already, and the book’s 900 pages, into a comprehensive and concise show, a “mid-career” retrospective, no less?

The show is so innovative, the attention to detail so exceptional, that even the shipping crates that transported the Art have their place in it! One of many things in An Atlas I’ve never seen before. I explain further on. Seen here are the labels on a crate that contained 2 models.

Opening in November, 2023, I pondered this all through 2024 as various ailments kept me from getting to 2 East 91st Street, and finding out. Stage Design is one of the most ephemeral Art forms there is. The book is divided between Sketches and notes, followed by a large section of color Photos of the performances. Building my expectations around that, finally getting to see the show twice during its final week, I got the unexpected: a show that largely consisted of beautiful scale Models of the stage sets, most created for exhibition! (Two were contained in the shipping crate shown here.) Well, if anything has proven to be the trademark of Es Devlin’s work, it’s the unexpected, which continues to remind me of Robert Rauschenberg.

Hang on to your hats! Installation view of the introductory gallery in the recreation of her studio before the Film begins. I rushed in to get this shot before it was filled up by those in line behind me. Beware, those seemingly innocent items on the table are not what they seem. Neither is that back wall.

Filling  the entirety of the 3rd floor, arriving visitors are asked to wait for the next showing of a 4-minute Introductory Film, which takes place in a gallery designed as a recreation of her studio, with a large work table in the middle, filled with the tools of her craft.

As the Artist speaks and Draws in the Video projected on the rear wall, the objects on the table undergo all sorts of permutations.

As visitors surround it and begin to take it all in, the Film begins. Compellingly narrated by the Artist in powerfully evocative words in Ms. Devlin’s hypnotic voice, accompanied by stunning visuals that somehow bring items lying on the table to life, the Artist takes us on a tour of her ideas and her work.

One section of the recreation of Es Devlin’s studio with the lights low during the Introductory Film. Full of ideas, some realized, some partially realized, some not realized yet, I imagined this room to be something akin to walking around in her brain.

On three of the walls surrounding the table were a cornucopia of fascinating objects I could have spent a few hours studying on their own. A bit like Sarah Sze’s incredibly involved installations, a lot of work went into their installation.

The Film ends with a bang.

At the culmination of the presentation, the Artist’s hands split the screen in half, opening the back wall, revealing her piece, Iris, beckoning visitors to enter the beginning of the main body of the show. Talk about a dramatic opening. Stage craft meets Art show in a way I can’t say I’ve experienced before. But, I bet I will again. I have no doubt An Atlas was must-see viewing for innumerable curators and gallerists.

The second “introductory gallery” features Es’s Iris.

Working with “names’ virtually her entire career, the first stop is her Iris with a voice over of Es reciting the names of her collaborators. A nice “Thank You” for the opportunities and sharing the credit for the results of this most collaborative of mediums. Iris, with multiple aperture blades, contains the names of the Artist collaborators on the outer blades, and all those involved with creating and mounting her projects fill the inner blades, a list that fills the first 9 pages in her book! It introduces what is a running theme in the show: collaboration, as you might expect for an Artist whose craft is Stage Design, like a bass player, something that doesn’t exist on its own (unless you’re a genius, like my late acquaintance, Jaco Pastorius). Still, it’s definitely her show. Her voice and vision runs through each and every work. Still, as any creative person who’s been hired by someone knows, working with someone else “who has a say” is often extremely challenging; perhaps the hardest part of the job. More than likely the Artist got the job for being who he or she is. For someone else to come in and suddenly want to change/modify that vision can be both counterproductive and counterintuitive. Not every Artist can do it.  The “dynamics” of creative collaboration is why most bands have the shelf life of milk. Yet, though it must have been there, in An Atlas there is no sign of creative struggle or difficulty. Making this all the more impressive, the list of her projects takes 4 pages in the book (as I showed here)! Either her brilliance is just a matter of fact for all her bosses, or she has an extremely winning way, as belied by her hypnotic voice. My money’s on both.

Installation view of the first gallery of work, with the earliest pieces at the far end. If you look closely you’ll notice mirrors at each end of the wall. In what might have been an effort to make the show feel larger, all the galleries had wall-sized mirrors on each end.

After leaving Iris, next up is the gallery of her fascinating early works, largely Drawings and Mixed Media works on paper, i.e. pen, markers, paint on paper Portrait and figure studies, like countless other Art students. I had to look closer to find the roots of her Stage Design work. In between the large studies, I saw sketchbooks, notebooks and loose sheets that contained outlines and ideas for stage productions, none of which are listed in her book.

On the very bottom of the far end of the wall, just above the power outlets, and so difficult to see, I spotted these notebook pages, the one at the lower right reads “Madam Butterfly,” perhaps one of the earliest Stage Designs in the show (the book in the upper left is dated October, 1994). Note that Es has Drawn the entire thing, boldly and confidently, in ink with no white-out or corrections. That speaks to the clarity of her vision, even early on. Immediately above it is a costume design. Note the inclusion of the pencil. I just love that her work was so centered on Drawing and hand-written notes, and continues to be. I don’t see Madam Butterfly listed in her book.

From this gallery, what are we to make of her beginnings? Where did all of what has followed come from? Between visits, I researched her background. Her CV on esdevlin.com, lists her Education, chronologically, as-

-Cranbrook School, 1984-1989 (a “co-ed grammar school1”
-BA Hans English Literature 2.1, Bristol University, 1990-1993
-Fine Art Foundation, Central Saint Martins, UAL, 1994-1995
-Motley Stage Design Course, 1995-1996

That’s it! After taking Art-centric courses for scarcely two years, then she just takes off. In only the second gallery of work, at the beginning of her professional career, the ideas are fresh, innovative & previously unseen- qualities that characterize her work to this day. Still in school(!), she’s already on her way. In the first vitrine, I was struck by her work with Wire, a 4-piece rock band, in 2003. Zillions of 4-piece bands, including a few with yours truly involved, have appeared on stage since The Beatles set a standard for what such a lineup “should” look like. “I didn’t know much, but I was bored of seeing the typical silhouette of a band,” she said on the wall card (where all Es Devlin quotes herein derive).

And so, Wire appeared like this-

Studies: Flag: Burning, for the band Wire’s Farewell Performance, 2003, Barbican Hall, London. Es Devlin’s first stage design for a concert. She made “illustrated cue sheets from which they ran the lights and the videos.” She spoke about not having enough money to afford velcro to enclose the band, so she had to use staples.

11 years later, another 4-piece band looked like this-

No staples here! U2, “Innocence & Experience” World Tour, 2014. *= Photo from esdevlin.com.

Wire would lead to such extraordinarily innovative shows as “Innocence & Experience,” 2014, and the subsequent “Experience & Innocence,” 2018, both by U2, who also includes 4 members. I believe this performance of “Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses” is from the “Experience & Innocence” tour. I saw U2 on what I believe was their first U.S. tour at the Ritz in 1980. Bono still sounds as strong as ever. To my mind, Wire, 2003, to U2 a decade later provides a classic case study in Es Devlin’s evolution.

Model, Bangerz, 3-D printed resin, recreated for exhibition. Staged, 2014, Miley Cyrus’s Bangerz World Arena Tour. Models of Ms. Devlin’s designs were the highlight of the show for me. Here, her face is a video projection from above that continually changed. To the side, a huge model of her beloved dog was also on stage. “We decided the Miley Cyrus should perform the entire show on her tongue. The first iteration was impractical, so we reduced the length of the tongue to a slide, down which Miley made her entrance- a sculptural portrait of a young woman rewriting her own script.”

Moving through the show, it became apparent to me that though elements recur, as. you see, Es Devlin has no one “style.” Since her words appear on virtually every wall card. Who else to speak better about her work? I’ll largely let her take it from here.

Model, The Lehman Trilogy, Painted MDF, acrylic, yardstick, 3-D printed resin, brass, and LED, recreated for exhibition, Staged in 2018 at the Royal National Theater, London, and the Park Avenue Armory, NYC. Es Devlin’s Tony Award-winning, rotating, design for Stefano Massini’s play The Lehman Trilogy, based on the family of businessmen. All the Models shown here with a center pole rotated. “A revolving glass box propels the action of The Lehman Trilogy, a parable that follows three generations of the Lehman family to chart the rise and periodic crashes of capitalism. Cardboard bankers boxes formed the foundations of the visual vocabulary. The more we invested the boxes with meaning, the more poignant the revelation became that those containers of cotton and coffee would become containers of financial records and numbers, ultimately revealing themselves to contain nothing at all.”

Model, Parsifal, Laser-cut form, resin and paint, recreated for exhibition. Staged in 2012 at the Royal Danish Opera, Copenhagen. “Richard Wagner conceived his final work as a ritual mass for the consecration of a stage. Over four hours of largely static drama, the audience transcends time and space through a rite of compassion. The director Keith Warner and I conceived an enormous revolving rook chess piece whose conical interior formed a new theater within Copenhagen’s opera house. We presented Parsifal’s odyssey from naivety to wisdom as a resistance to the rules of an antiquated game.”

As her career has progressed, a good number of her works have an “otherworldly” feel to them. Figures are frequently enclosed, in a maze, or presented in surroundings that are hard to fathom, often with no apparent way out.

Model, Howie The Rookie, Graphite and paint on laser-cut MDF and LED, recreated for exhibition, Staged 1999, Bush Theater, London, UK. “My first stab designs were experiments in framing light. The Bush Theatre was a room above a West London pub with an audience of 75 people. Mark O’Rowe’s play Howie the Rookie is a pair of potent, visceral monologues set in the housing estates of Tallaght on the outskirts of Dublin, Ireland. I perforated a concrete plane with a line of light. This line conveyed both a burning horizon and a road making on a highway.”

Model, Macbeth, Graphite and paint on laser-cut MDF, acrylic mirror and LED, recreated for exhibition, Staged 2003, Theater an her Wien, Vienna. “The design for Ernest Block’s opera of Shakespeare’s play Macbeth was based on a revolving mirrored illusion box. Its rotations evoked Macbeth’s churning conscience. We conjured scenes through smoke and mirrors. A half-bed wedged against a mirror appeared as a single whole, while Macbeth and his wife were duplicated. The illusion of a whole banquet full of guests overlaid their machinations as the box turned.”

Installation view of one of the corridors. It’s not as long as it looks. Note the overhead video projectors.

Model, Atlas, 3D-printed resin and LED, recreated for exhibition. Staged 2019, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles, CA. Meredith Monk’s transcendent wordless opera, Atlas, charts the spiritual growth of the 19th-century explorer Alexandra David-Néel. The young girl encounters travel companions and spirit guides within a 12-meter-diameter sphere, scored with webs of international trade and travel routes. The form encompasses Monk’s radiant vision of a possible alternative to the current world order.”

Model, La Caja Mágica/The Seed, Graphite and paint on laser-cut MDF, nd LED, recreated for exhibition. Staged 2010 MTV Europe Music Awards, La Caja Mágica Arena, Madrid, and 2020, Jubail Mangrove Park, Abu Dhabi. “For the MTV Europe Music Awards, I imagined a 10-meter high revolving box that could reveal a shapeshifting series of performances. (Among others) Rhianna sang within a sea of red carnations pouring out of an iris (see next pic).”

Model, Fundamental, MDF, acrylic, acetate, and LED, recreated for exhibition. Staged for the Pet Sop Boys World Tour, 2006-7. Es says, “Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe’s album Fundamental critiqued Tony Blair, George W. Bush, the Iraq War, and immigration policy. For the tour, an X-ray image of a divided brain expressed the cognitive dissonance we felt as our country remained entangled in a ware we didn’t want. The show was performed outside the Tower of London, complete with projected pink tanks for the anti-war extravaganza ‘The Sodom and Gomorrah Show’ and giant sequined cowboy hats for the Bush/Blair pantomime “I’m with Stupid.” 

Model, Your Voices, Acrylic, filament, nylon thread, and LED, recreated for exhibition. Installed in the fountain at Lincoln Center, NYC, in 2022, Es says of it, “New York is the most linguistically diverse city on the planet, with 637 languages spoken by its inhabitants. Your Voices celebrated this diversity. Like a giant harp, the sculpture’s glowing arcs enveloped visitors and local choirs with an illuminated web. The piece rotated through a soundscape of languages from all over the city: from Arabic to Ashanti to Zapotec and Zulu. The strands spliced and framed the viewer’s perspectives, just as our perspectives are shifted when we learn to speak through the voices of others.”

Installation view.

Model, Compton Super Bowl, Laser-cut MDF, acrylic, 3D-printed resin, and LED, recreated for exhibition. Staged for the 2022 NFL Super Bowl Halftime Show featuring Dr. Dre, Kenrick Lamar, Eminem, Mary J. Blige, Snoop Dogg, and 50 Cent, Los Angeles, CA. “Dr. Dre and I proposed etching a map of the city of Compton onto the global Super Bowl stage. We case the buildings as charcters that led from Snoop Dogg’s house to 50 Cent in the club to Eminem breaking out of jail.”

Model: Come Home Again, 2022, Acrylic and printed resin. “For Come Home Again, I constructed a one-third-scale replica of the dome of London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral on the lawn outside Tate Modern, facing the cathedral across the river. I filled dome with observational drawings of 243 of the 15,000 non-human species that call London home; the Londoners most at risk of extinction. ”All of the 243 animals depicted were based on Es Devlin Drawings.

Es Devlin in front of  the real Come Home Again, Tate Modern, London, 2022 *- Photo by Matt Alexander

The shipping crates for the Art, teased earlier, filled a gallery where a video screen was mounted in a stage set, providing seats for the visitors, with more all around me as I took this, and, cutting down on the need for space to store them! Something I’ve never seen before, it’s a  touch that shows the depth of the imagination and attention to detail that went into An Atlas at the Cooper Hewitt.

As if all the thought, planning and work that went into mounting An Atlas wasn’t enough, there is the incredibly innovative 900-page(!) book that accompanies it! So far, it’s the only Art book I’ve named a NoteWorthy Art Book for 2024, and that was before I saw the show. Here, in the show’s final gallery, another recreation of her studio, visitors get a look at the making of it, including the original book dummy (off-camera, in a vitrine to my left). This time, visitors were free to handle the items on the table, which were reproductions of the original work materials…right?

An Atlas, the show, reveals, that as her fame and notoriety grows,  so too are the opportunities for the Artist to step out and present her own work, without an overriding “boss,” as she has in major works like Come Home Again, and Your Voices, both 2022, and, of course, in An Atlas of Es Devlin, the book & show. Her own work shows the Artist bringing “big questions” to the forefront- including species near extinction (in Come Home Again, and in her piece Nevada Ark for U2’s The Sphere shows in 2023),

That Es Devlin’s work, and practice, is deeply rooted in traditional Art-making techniques, like Drawing and Sculpture, is a continual touchstone in both the show and the book. She uses them to produce work that lives on, and continually pushes, the cutting-edge of Stage Design and Production. I find this both fascinating and inspiring. On one hand, her example shows what is still possible by just putting pen or pencil to paper; that a master’s or doctorate degree are not prerequisites for achieving a very successful career, or greatness, in one’s chosen field in the Arts. On the other, it also reaffirms over and over again the power of one person’s creative vision. In her chosen field, her work strikes me as being downright unprecedented. In the larger world of Art, Es Devlin’s vision is at once as personal and as expansive as almost anyone else’s working today.

*- Soundtrack for this piece is “Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses,” by U2 from Achtung Baby, 1991.

My look at the 900-page An Atlas of Es Devlin, the NighthawkNYC.com NoteWorthy Art Book of 2024, published to accompany the show, is here. 

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  1. Their site describes the school as “a co-educational grammar school in the heart of the glorious Wealden countryside.” ↩

So, You Want To Work At An Art Gallery…

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Summer in the City is a time for Fresh Air Kids, scrambling to stay cool, making sure to put on that sunscreen and water, water, water. 

Notice that none of those are particularly Art-related. 

That’s because most of the galleries are on short schedules, closed on Saturdays, or maybe the entire month of August, and the museums are gearing up for their new fall seasons. As a result, it was easy to miss a sleeper show up at David Zwirner’s 19th Street location- After Hours, mounted just east of the construction going on in their western gallery, which they apparently figured summer was a good time to get done. I’m glad I didn’t sleep on it. It’s a show of Art by the staff of David Zwirner’s galleries around the world. Very handsomely installed, it’s easy on the eyes and a number of pieces linger in the mind. “Easy” and “linger”…two words that go nicely with summer. 

T. Dylan Moore, Self-Portrait, 2024, Casein on paper. Jasper Johns, has used this seemingly difficult medium to work with medium extensively, making me sit up and take notice of its possibilities- as T. Dylan Moore’s Self-Portrait does here (shot at an angle to minimize glare). Seen in After Hours, July 17, 2024. Pictures in this piece are thumbnails. Click any for full size.

I can hear some readers saying, “Man, it must be slow in NYC if he’s writing about a show by gallery staff members.” In reply I would remind readers that I first met Caslon Bevington in 2017 while she was working at David Zwirner. I have subsequently written about two of her solo shows.

Chase Barnes, Stateless Revision 1, Machine Vision, 2023, Multi-channel video installation on dual NEC monitors. Seen in  After Hours, July 18, 2024.

The big takeaway from After Hours for me is that there are A LOT of talented folks working for David Zwirner. This is not the first rodeo for any number of them. Chase Barnes, for example, already has a PhotoBook published by Jason Koxvold’s renowned Gnomic Book. It shows me the track to working at a major gallery is F A S T. Being an Artist looks good on a resume for a gallery gig, and having shown or been published travels well by repute. It’s also got to be a real asset for said Art dealer to have such people on their staff in innumerable ways. 

Lauren Ferrara, Absence, 2020, Found wood, recycled fabric, recycled paper, and recycled plastic bags, seen at After Hours, July 17, 2024.

In my experience, most people don’t give a second thought to staff members they encounter at an Art gallery. To work in a New York Gallery is an achievement in itself. A lot of people are drawn by the beauty and glamour of working with Art & Artists. That means there’s a lot of competition for these jobs. It serves to reason that an Artist seeking such employment would have an edge all other things being equal. And maybe that’s why the quality in After Hours was so high.

I was impressed with After Hours to the point that I saw it 4 times.The last two visits were because of  Oji Haynes. 

Kris Graves, the mastermind behind LOST IV taking a group portrait of 7 of the 10 Artist/Authors included in the set. From left, Oji Haynes, Richard Renaldi, Melody Melamed, Peter Baker, Tracy Dong, Melissa Alcena and Yoav Horesh. Seen at the LOST IV Book Release, Printed Matter, July 11, 2024.

I met Mr. Haynes at the Kris Graves Project’s 10-volume  LOST IV book release at Printed Matter. So taken with his PhotoBook, Anthem, was I that I took the bold step (for me) of walking over and telling him. We proceeded to have a remarkable conversation during which we discovered a shared passion for Art book collecting, with any number of overlapping Artists, from Robert Rauschenberg to Gordon Parks and Jeff Wall. He also revealed it was his first PhotoBook, consisting of an overview of his Photography to date,  and he had been reluctant to do it. Luckily, Kris Graves managed to convince him that now was indeed the time and the results are one of the strongest books (in my view) in the set. No mean feat in fast company. 

A spread from Anthem. Mr. Haynes told me he had originally envisioned the right-hand Photo as the cover. *- Kris Graves Projects Photo.

Then, he told me he had moved on in his practice and was now creating Sculptural pieces, and one of them was included in After Hours! Ahhh…he, too, is a David Zwirner staffer. I went back to the show on a mission.

Oji Haynes, Scriptures, 2024, String lights, cement, inkjet photo, diamond dust, and mixed media on fabric couch. Seen in  After Hours, July 17, 2024.

Tucked nicely into a corner at the far end of a large gallery, his piece, Scriptures, 2024, couldn’t be more different, yet similar, to his Photography. His book consists of intimate moments, most, but not all, including people- singly, in paris or small groups. Scriptures is intimate, as well, in a different way. Though I continue to ponder it, I had a few initial reactions. 

Left side showing the text, “LISTEN TO WHAT”

Right side showing the text, “GOD HAS TO SAY.”

First, it struck me as a collection of things people might find buried if they took apart a couch they’d had for a long time. Things that might fall out if you lifted it up from one end. Second, it gave me a feeling somewhat reminiscent to looking at Kerry James Marshall’s Souvenir II, a work that memorializes memories.

Kerry James Marshall, Souvenir II, 1997, Acrylic, collage, and glitter on unstreteched canvas banner. *-Renaissance Society Photo.

Then, I thought I’d love to see it hung between Mr. Marshall’s piece and Robert Rauschenberg’s revolutionary Bed. Rauschenberg mounted a bed on a wall. Mr. Haynes has mounted a couch on the two walls of a corner.

Robert Rauschenberg, Bed, 1955, Oil and pencil on pillow, quilt, and sheet on wood supports. The first work to take a piece of everyday household furniture and reenvision it. Of this work, Sarah Sze said, “That kind of intimacy is very specific to Rauschenberg. A willingness to be tender, to be intimate, to share a kind of a very interior urgency. An urgency to share a kind of interior self publicly1.” Her words resonated with me while seeing Scriptures. Seen at MoMA during Robert Rauschenberg Among Friends, August 5, 2017.

Or, next to them in chronological sequence. While Mr. Marshall’s piece may be seen as primarily a memorial to MLK, JFK and RFK and slain Civil Rights workers, the intimacy is heightened by the fact that it, and Mr. Marshall’s similar Souvenirs Series, take place in living rooms, where (no doubt) carefully chosen items abound, including couches. It’s that feeling and those items I thought of when seeing Mr. Haynes’s Scriptures. All three works are filled with the touchstones of a life, or the lives of an immediate few. In Oji Haynes’s case, the “meaning” is up to the viewer. I see a number of dreams in a self-enclosed space, though your results may differ. 

Oji Haynes holding a copy of his first PhotoBook, Anthem, at the LOST IV Book Release, Printed Matter, July 11.2024.

The definitions of “scriptures’ in the American Heritage Dictionary are- “1. A sacred writing or book. 2- A passage from such a writing or book. 3- The writings collected as the Bible.” Taking those as a point of context, tilts things to the “sacred,” and what’s sacred for whosever items these are. In one sense, it’s a time capsule of hopes, dreams, achievements, memories, simultaneously revealing the passage of time. Auspicious, indeed. Mr. Haynes was not on hand when I went back to After Hours. He told me he had to go install work in a show in San Francisco.

With work like Scriptures hot on the heels of a just-released auspicious first PhotoBook Anthem, Oji Haynes has already reached another new plateau. I’ll be among those watching with interest where he, and his Art, goes next. 

So, Beware: That Art gallery staff member you see or speak to on your next visit may well be an Artist whose work you’ll be going to see one day soon. It’s happened to me. More than once.

*- Soundtrack for this piece is “Summer in the City” by John Sebastian and Lovin’ Spoonful from 1966. This vintage video could have been shot here this week-

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Ed Ruscha & The Two-Sided Coin of Influence

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1- Heads

One door closed, another opened. Los Angeles County Museum on Fire, 1965-8, Oil on canvas, seen at MoMA. Ed Ruscha/Now Then is now open there. Pictures in this piece are thumbnails. Click any for full size.

Ed Ruscha/Now Then is a memory for those of us who saw it at MoMA from September 10, 2023 to January 15th of this year. It’s a memory in the making for those who are seeing it now at LACMA, seen above in Ed Ruscha’s 1965-8 nebulous “portrait” of it (which I discussed in Part 1), or will be seeing it until it closes there on October 6th. They’ll be pleased to know it’s a show with staying power, a show I continue to relive and think about on a daily basis, six months after it closed here. After following the trail of his devlopment in Part 1, “Ed Ruscha’s Head Scratchers,” seeing some echoes of the work of Artists past, I began to wonder… Every Artist I’ve come across has had influences. Who influenced Ed Ruscha? As the show was up, and now after it ended here, that question lingered.

Marcel Duchamp, L.H.O.O.Q., 1919, or later. One Artist Ed Ruscha has repeatedly expressed his admiration for is Duchamp, who he met in the early 1960s. There are numerous version of L.H.O.O.Q. since the 1919 original. I chose this one because t contains all the elements of the original, which I cannot find (if you have  let me know)- the mustache, the goatee, and the famous letters all of which Duchamp added to a Mona Lisa postcard. Duchamp once said that L.H.O.O.Q. means “there is fire down below,” though I’ve seen other definitions.  *- Photographer unknown.

“Duchamp had quite a sizable influence on me from a pictorial standpoint and from an emotional standpoint,” Ed Ruscha (Ed Ruscha, Leave Any Information After the Signal, P.324).

Ed Ruscha has not written an autobiography, so his book, Leave Any Information After the Signal, a collection of “Writings, Interviews, Bits, Pages” from 1960 to 2000 is the closest thing we have to a primary written source. In addition to just looking, I turned to it, along with the numerous other interviews he’s given over his six-decade plus career, for insights.

As seen in Part 1– Encountering Johns’s  Target with Four Faces in a black & white reproduction in a 1957 magazine was, he said, an ‘atomic bomb’ in his training, ‘a stranger fruit’ that he ‘saw as something that didn’t seem to follow the history of art. My teachers said it was not art. ‘I didn’t need to see the colors or the size…’ ‘I was especially taken with the fact that it was symmetrical, which was just absolutely taboo in art school- you didn’t make anything symmetrical…Art school was modernism, it was asymmetry, it was giant brush strokes…it was all these other things that were gestural rather than cerebral. So I began moving to things that had more of a premeditation1.’” Jasper Johns, Target with Four Faces, 1955, Encaustic on newspaper and cloth over canvas surrounded by four tinted-plaster faces in wood box with hinged front. Seen in Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror at the Whitney in 2021.

Besides naming Duchamp, Jasper Johns and his counterpart Robert Rauschenberg, Ed Ruscha hasn’t addressed the subject of influences all that often.

René Magritte, The Treachery of Images (This is Not a Pipe), 1929, Oil on canvas. (Not in the show.) *-LACMA Photo

Pondering the visual evidence, the first name that came to mind was Rene Magritte, 1898-1967, a well-known Belgian Artist who also had a long career and touched on a number of subjects Ed Ruscha has, while sharing his fondness for taking the familiar out of context (which Mr. Ruscha does with words, objects and places). He also incorporated words. Though often labelled a “Surrealist,” his work touches on any number of other realms and styles of Painting, which made him ahead of his time. As a result, his influence is extraordinary and ongoing. Time and again, I’d look at an Ed Ruscha, or a section of one, and think “Magritte,” beginning with Actual Size, 1962, which I showed in Part 1, which echoes Magritte’s The Treachery of Images, 1929 better known by the famous words it includes, “This is Not a Pipe2.” The Magritte seems to echo his contemporary, Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q., from 1919.

Salvador Dalí, Open Field with Ball in Centre and Mountains in  Rear, Study for the Walt Disney film Destino, 1948, Oil on masonite, left. Ed Ruscha, Painkillers, Tranquilizers, Olive, 1969, right. (*- Dali from the Dalí & Film MoMA catalog. Ed Ruscha as I saw it in the show.)3.

Of him, Mr. Ruscha said, “Yes, Magritte did influence me, but it came the other way around—what I call 360-degree influence. That’s influence from a person’s thoughts and force and not from his pictures, which the person being influenced has not seen, until later on. The same with Dalí. I’ve been influenced by Dalí, but it’s been through other sources. Because I’ll go back, and I’ll be working on something and I’ll see a picture of Dalí’s I’ve never seen before, and there is my work. (P.56).” I wrote about seeing Dalí in Rauscha in Part 1– before I found that quote.

Surrealism Soaped and Scrubbed, Ed Ruscha’s cover design for Artforum 5, No. 1, Special Issue: Surrealism, September, 1966. 

What about “Surrealism’s” influence, that of the group of European Artists so labelled?

Ed Ruscha was Art Director for Artforum Magazine from 1966-19724. His cover for the September, 1966 “Surrealism” Special Edition I find fascinating, particularly in regards to Ed Ruscha’s Art, overall. While this image has almost nothing to do with “historical Surrealism,” I find it ripe with the “kind” of surrealism (small “s,” which he also uses here) I see in Ed Ruscha’s work, while also being another of his trademarked play on words. There is nothing in “historical Surrealism” that influenced this (as far as I know), and so it’s another work that makes me wonder what, if anything, inspired it. On page 349 of Leave Any Information After the Signal, Mr. Ruscha denies the influence of the Surrealists handling of light on his work. That’s all he has to say about it.

The Back of Hollywood, 1977, Oil on canvas. Was Ed Ruscha the first to Paint words backwards? Probably not.

What about influences on his Word Painting? In After the Signal, he said,  “Well, there’ve been so many artists who have used words throughout the centuries really, but the ones I enjoy are mostly from the twentieth century. Say, Kurt Schwitters. [. . .] 5” On page 115, Paul Karlstrom directly asks Mr. Ruscha,  “Who were your heroes then, your role models?” He replied, “Well, I guess de Kooning was, and Franz Kline. Franz Kline had a lot to say at that particular time, and so they were more or less the passwords. You just emulated them, almost automatically. Then if you couldn’t emulate them you weren’t really on the right track. I still think that. But the work of Johns and Rauschenberg marked a departure in the sense that their work was premeditated.” It sounds like he was referring to his early days as a student under the Abstract Expressionist influenced Chouinard faculty in the late 1950s, as once again, it’s hard for me to see the influence of de Kooning or Kline in Ed Ruscha’s work.

Joan Miró, Photo: This is the Color of My Dreams 1925, Oil on canvas. *- Met Museum Photo

The Surrealists began as a literary “movement,” that experimented with “automatic writing.” Later, their influence spread to Painting. In Miró’s Photo: This is the Color of My Dreams, it comes full circle. Part of the Artist’s “peinture-poésie” (painting-poetry) series, this strikes me as a forerunner or precursor to the Word Paintings of Ed Ruscha. Yet, I have no idea if he saw it, or other works in Mirós series,  or when.

America’s Future, 1977, Oil on canvas. The title is shown in the next picture.

The feeling I’m left with is that these Artists “effected” him in ways outside of a direct visual influence. They are, what I call, “echoes.” What Ed Ruscha called “360 degree” influences. As for the stated influences, in Part 2, I mentioned that Thomas Cole was the influence on Mr. Ruscha’s Course of Empire series, from who he borrowed the name of the series. It seems to me the rest of his influences, if any, remain up for conjecture. Still, taking him at his work on possible influences would leave Ed Ruscha remarkably original.

Detail. Though Painted 18 years before he began his Course of Empire series I showed in Part 2, seeing this made me wonder if this work should be appended to the end of the series, i.e. the final outcome of it.

2- Tails

Turning the influence coin over, however, 67 years, and counting, into one of the most remarkable careers in American Art history, at this moment in time it’s hard to think of another Modern & Contemporary Artist, let alone an American Artist, who is more influential than Ed Ruscha is. In fact, it’s impossible for me to list here all the realms in which his influence can be seen. Those that come to mind the quickest include-

-His role in furthering the breaking of the strangle hold of Abstract Expressionism in Painting in the early 1960s.

-His unique way of incorporating words and typography into his Art.

-His Paintings of L.A. and the American West6.

No place on the planet has more Artist’s books than NYC’s Printed Matter, home of 15 ,000 books they’ve created. How many are/were inspired in part or wholly by Ed Ruscha? I don’t know the total but I keep finding more every time I go in. May 6, 2024.

-His ground-breaking Artist’s books/PhotoBooks. (Is it a stretch to say he’s played a defining role in the Contemporary Artist’s Book & PhotoBook phenomenon? I don’t think so.)

-His style of nonjudgmental roadside and aerial Photography.

-Entire genres of Painting, Photography and books have sprung up around his work.

Jeff Brouws, Various Small Books Referencing Various Small Books by Ed Ruscha, 2013. 288 pages of books, and just books, by other Artists influenced by Ed Ruscha, and it’s now 11 years old!

To this point, at least two substantial books, including the book above, have been published focused solely on his influence! All of this is even more impressive (or mind-boggling) when you consider Ed Ruscha is still with us and going strong at 86. Usually, the influence of Artists is something referred to in the past tense.

-His unique way of incorporating words and typography into his Art.

Ed Ruscha’s presence is so pronounced at Printed Matter, they even have a well-worn box just for books he’s influenced. ‘Nuff said. No, that’s not a copy of Mr. Ruscha’s very rare Twentysix Gasoline Stations. It’s Michalis Pincher’s 2009 homage to it, which “borrows” Ruscha’s cover verbatim.

All of this, also, makes it harder to fathom that Ed Ruscha/Now Then was the first large Ed Ruscha show here in 41 years7, and his first show at MoMA! That makes the extent of his influence that much more impressive. Suffice it to say it’s a lot easier to see Ed Ruscha’s influence than it might be to see the influence of others on his work.is so pronounced.

The saddest moment of the entire 4 month run of Ed Ruscha/ Now Then: the show’s entrance, moments after it closed for the last time on January 15, 2024. I saw it on its first preview day, and I was there when it closed for good. Shows are fugacious events. The ending of a great show is always sad; like saying “goodbye” to a friend. One you’ll never see again.

-Takeaways

In addition to providing an opportunity to ponder the scope of his influence, Now Then provides the chance to assess his achievement and his place among the important Artists of both the 20th and 21st centuries. Ed Ruscha strikes me as an Artist who is continually moving forward to the point that he is a seemingly endless innovator. Ed Ruscha/Now Then provided a rare chance to see the craft behind the mystery his work evokes; to watch the Artist move on an almost step-by-step basis from his beginnings though each of his phases, with a focus on his recurring themes and his innovations.

Yet, he’s also an Artist who’s extremely aware of his, and our, pasts, and his Art stays in touch with it often in surprising ways. Ed Ruscha has never stood still long enough to have any box his work gets put in fit for very long. The Ed Ruscha box is the only one that fits an Artist as extraordinarily diverse as Mr. Ruscha has been and continues to be. Ed Ruscha/Now Then is a show that will live long in memory, and no doubt, influence.

Part 1 of my look at Ed Ruscha/Now Then is here. Part 2 is here.

*- Soundtrack for this piece is  “Goodnight My Love,” as performed by Paul Anna. In 2017, MOCA commissioned a short documentary on two themes in Ed Ruscha’s work (the text of which is here). In the resulting piece, Ed Ruscha says, “I’m gonna play this tune called ‘Goodnight My Love’ and this represents everrything I felt about California when I first came out here…” Because he doesn’t specify which recording he’s going to play, I chose the Paul Anka version from 1969.

NighthawkNYC.com has been entirely self-funded & ad-free since 2015! If you’ve found it worthwhile, PLEASE donate securely by PayPal below to allow me to continue. Thank you, Kenn.

You can also support it by buying Art, Art books & Music from my collection!
Art & Books may be found here. Music here and here.

Written & photographed by Kenn Sava for nighthawknyc.com unless otherwise credited. To send comments, thoughts, feedback or propositions click here. Click the white box on the upper right for the archives or to search them. Subscribe to be notified of new Posts below. Your information will be used for no other purpose.

  1. Alexandra Schwartz, Ed Ruscha’s Los Angeles, P.15 ↩
  2. I cannot think of Rene Magritte without thinking of the singular Photographer, Duane Michals. When I met him, I quickly shifted the chat from Photography to Painting. He rightly gloated over the fact that he had met and Photographed his three favorite Painters- Balthus, Giorgio de Chirico, and Rene Magritte, with who he did a terrific PhotoBook, that he graciously signed for me. All three are under-appreciated in my book, and remain among my favorites, too. ↩
  3. In spite of being among the best known, in my view, Dalí may be the most under-appreciated Artist of the 20th century, as anyone who saw the incredible Salvador Dalí Centennial Exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum in 2005 knows. It’s partially his own fault, as the endless fantastic stunts he put on overshadows the appreciation of his Art in my opinion. History will eventually fix that, I believe. ↩
  4. Alexandra Schwartz, P.35 ↩
  5. Ed Ruscha, Leave Any Information After the Signal, P. 324 ↩
  6. Along with those of, and quite different from,Georgia O’Keeffe. ↩
  7. As I mentioned in Part 1, the last big Ed Ruscha show here was the traveling retrospective, The Works of Ed Ruscha, which came to the Whitney Museum in 1982! ↩

NoteWorthy PhotoBook of 2024: LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity

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The NighthawkNYC.com NoteWorthy PhotoBook of 2024: LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity, Published by the Museum of Modern Art

When I met her at the Museum of Modern Art on May 10th, at the Preview of her stunning early mid-career retrospective, I told Ms. Frazier her book, LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity, was my NoteWorthy PhotoBook of the Year. Yes, the year. Even though we’re barely half way through 2024 as I write this and there are still six full months to go). With all due respect to all the books not yet released as well as those I have not yet seen, Ms. Frazier  gets my 2024 Trophy as most recommended PhotoBook for her powerful & urgently important book, published to accompany and expand on the show of the same name. Frankly, she deserves a medal for the work she has done.

LaToya Ruby Frazier proudly showing me her new book, Monuments of Soilidarity at MoMA, May 10, 2024

Having begun taking Photographs at 16, she seemed to find her voice almost immediately. “I had decided when I was a teenager that I had to make work that was socially and politically conscious1,” she said.

Auspicious beginnings. The Notion of Family, 2016.

Her early work focused on 3 generations of her family and life in her hometown of Braddock, PA in her debut PhotoBook, The Notion of Family, in 2016, which announced her arrival to the world in memorable fashion. She subsequently turned her attention to the coalminers in the Borinage, Belgium, in And From the Coaltips a Tree Will Rise, in 2017. Returning the U.S., she documented the closing of the G.M. plant in Lordstown, Ohio in The Last Cruze, 2019, and the man-made water crisis in Flint, Michigan in Flint Is Family In Three Acts, 2022 in book form. All four books are NoteWorthy in their own right.

MoMA, May 12, 2024

Monuments of Solidarity is an overview of LaToya Ruby Frazier’s work to date in what is a Show of the Year candidate along with Käthe Kollwitz, which happens to be installed right next to Monuments of Solidarity at MoMA. Monuments takes the viewer right up to the work shown in her most recent NYC gallery show, More Than Conquerors: A Monument for Community Health Workers of Baltimore, Maryland, 2021-22, which I wrote about here. The piece, which consists of 18 Inkjet panels on IV stands, was recently fittingly acquired by the forward-looking Baltimore Museum.

Partial installation view, More Than Conquerors: A Monument for Community Health Workers of Baltimore, Maryland, 2021-22, as installed at MoMA May 12, 2024. Each piece is in 2 parts. On the right-hand panel is a text written by the subject of her Photo on the left panel. You can see it installed at Gladstone Gallery in my look at it here.

There are a lot of great Artists in this country. You have your list. I have mine. There are also a lot of important Artists working here today. One thing that sets LaToya Ruby Frazier apart, in my view, is that, in addition to her poignant Photography, she brings her subjects right into her work. Though hers is the overall vision, the results feel collaborative. This serves to make the results unlike most of what’s come before.

Installation view. Flint Is Family section. May 12, 2024 including more compelling texts from her subjects accompanying her Photos.

After posing for the picture with her book, she asked me what I thought of her show. I told her I was very moved by the Photos she took with and about her Grandmother, now well-known images from her instant classic The Notion of Family. In them we see the Artist’s vision and talent were stunningly present from an early age, as if she was born with a camera in her hand, while we also get insights into her and her family’s life in her hometown. Braddock, PA, which in turn fueled her passion to inspire change and to right wrongs.

UPMC Braddock Hospital and Holland Avenue Parking Lot, 2011. The community hospital in ruins, where her grandmother passed.

After we see the passing of her Grandmother, the show took an immediate turn and from then on was focused on depicting crises effecting “everyday” citizens, working class people, and issues of race. 

MoMA, May 10, 2024

Monuments of Solidarity is not only a “PhotoBook.” It delves deeply into its subjects in a way I find every bit as powerful as her Photographs are. This is evidence of LaToya’s extraordinary way with people. Watching her at MoMA, she took the time to have an actual moment with everyone she encountered. Even me (we’d never met).

LaToya Ruby Frazier Takes on Levis, 2011, Stills from the Video which premiered on Art21. LaToya took issue with Levi’s after they featured her hometown, Braddock, PA, in an “Everybody’s Work Is Equally Important” ad campaign. As part of the campaign, Levi’s  opened a public Photo Workshop in SoHo. In response, LaToya put on a pair of Levi’s and in a performance in front of the Levi’s Photo Workshop, preceded to destroy them while wearing them. The intense Video is looped in the show. From the book, Monuments of Solidarity.

LaToya Ruby Frazier, the person, makes every bit as good, and memorable, an impression as her work does, though the intensity we see in pieces like her incredible Levi’s Performance Video remained under the surface.

MoMA, May 10, 2024

I think her people skills, which isn’t the right term for someone who is as genuine as Mr. Frazier is…make that her humanity, is a central reason why her Art is so powerful and so direct, project after project. LaToya gets to the heart of the issue and speaks to why it is important- for those directly involved, and for all of us, like very few Artists working today can.

Partial installation view. The Last Cruze, 2019 (recently acquired by MoMA), looks at the last Chevy Cruze to be made in Lordstown, Ohio after G.M. halted production and closed the plant, throwing all the workers out of their jobs.

Ms. Frazier’s work is compared by some to that of the F.S.A. (Farm Services Administration) Photographers of the 1930s, including Dorothea Lange. As I ‘ve showed, one thing of many that sets her work apart is that she foregrounds the experiences of her subjects right alongside her Photographs in texts they authored; something the FSA Artists didn’t do. In fact, I can’t think of any Artist who has done it as consistently as LaTory Ruby Frazier has.

On this spread from The Last Cruze PhotoBook the subjects of Photos accompany them in pieces they wrote.

She gives many, maybe event most, of the actual people she depicts in her projects, their own voice. Quite often their words take up more space in her books and in this exhibition than her Photos do! I can’t say I’ve ever seen that before, either. In the literal sense, her work truly is a collection of  “moments of solidarity” between Artist and subject.

Entrance to at MoMA as seen on May 10, 2024. The show is up through July 20th.

Two asides- Two coincidences struck me while preparing this piece. First, LaToya Ruby Frazier – Monuments of Soilidarity is installed right across the hall from the equally terrific Käthe Kollwitz at MoMA. Walking through one, and then the other, it was impossible for me to ignore how much in common they share. I wish I had asked LaToya what she made of Ms. Kollwitz’s show. Both Artists have made the “Art of social purpose” the center of their work.

“I have no right to withdraw from the responsibility of being an advocate. It is my duty to voice the sufferings of men, the never-ending sufferings heaped mountain-high.” Käthe Kollwitz, 1867-1945, 2.

Her first major retrospective at an NYC museum (How is that possible?) makes an open and shut case for Käthe Kollwitz as one of the major Artists of her time, something that has been well-known in Germany and elsewhere, making it past time for the rest of the world to catch up.

Preparing this piece also reminded me of another young woman Artist who I selected as my NoteWorthy Art Book of 2024: Es Devlin. Though they’re from different parts of the world, and work in different mediums, they’re both making extraordinary inroads into the world with their work. As I wrote in my look at Es’s book, An Atlas of Es Devlin, she’s garnered unheard of media acclaim. LaToya was just named one of Time’s “100 Most Influential People of 2024.” That’s pretty amazing, of course, but I bet it doesn’t come with a cool Owl statuette!  ; )

Woman of Steel Button Pin, 2017

“Woman of Steel” reads the button on the cover. Though she’s not a steelworker, she could easily wear one and it would completely suit her in the literal sense.

*-Soundtrack for this piece is “Poverty” by Yemi Alade, from her album, Woman of Steel, fittingly, performed here live-

NighthawkNYC.com has been entirely self-funded & ad-free since 2015! If you’ve found it worthwhile, PLEASE donate securely by PayPal below to allow me to continue. Thank you, Kenn.

You can also support it by buying Art, Art books & Music from my collection!
Art & Books may be found here. Music here and here.

Written & photographed by Kenn Sava for nighthawknyc.com unless otherwise credited. To send comments, thoughts, feedback or propositions click here. Click the white box on the upper right for the archives or to search them. Subscribe to be notified of new Posts below. Your information will be used for no other purpose.

  1. “Latoya Ruby Frazier Takes on Levi’s,” Art21 ↩
  2. As quoted, here. ↩

Ed Ruscha’s Wall Rockets

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If you find this piece worthwhile, please donate via PayPal to support it & independent Art writing.
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This is Part 2 of my look at Ed Ruscha/Now Then at MoMA. Part 1 is here, Part 3 is here.

From the late 1950s, through the early 1960s Ed Ruscha made regular trips back and forth between Oklahoma City, where he grew up, and L.A., his adopted home since the late 1950s. In 19621, he Photographed the gas stations that caught his eye on these journeys with his trusty Yashika Twin-reflex camera, taking 60 or 70 Photographs2. In an interview in 1973 he said, “What used to belong to the Navaho and Apache Indians now belongs to the white man and he’s got gas stations out there. So, I started seeing it as cultural curiosities.”

“I’d always wanted to make a book of some kind.”

He continues. “When I was in Oklahoma I got a brainstorm in the middle of the night to do this little book called Twentysix Gasoline Stations. I knew the title. I knew it would be photographs of twenty-six gasoline stations3.” “The first book came out of a play with words. The title came before I even thought about the pictures. I like the word ‘gasoline’ and I like the specific quality of ‘twenty-six4.'”  “Months went into the planning of that. I could have saved myself a lot of trouble by loosening up. You know, not gotten so concerned with how I wanted the thing to look. I changed the form about fifty times at the printer’s5.” He self-published Twentysix Gasoline Stations in 1963 (although the title page states 1962).

You’re looking at a revolution. Twentysix Gasoline Stations, 1963, revolutionized the Artist book, the PhotoBook, and street-side Phtography, with unique design, turning gas station Photography into a genre in the process. This copy was hanging for visitors to peruse, which was somewhat surprising as it’s now a rare book- even this second edition copy is worth hundreds of dollars. Knowing all of it from reproductions, this was the first time I was able to page through an actual copy of it. Pictures in this piece are thumbnails. Click on any for full size.

It’s an Artist’s book/PhotoBook whose influence is now incalculable.

Published in an edition of 400 copies, a case can be made that it ‘s the most influential PhotoBook of the contemporary period after Robert Frank’s The Americans (which the Artist acknowledges as an influence). Twentysix Gasoline Stations, with its “industrial” look and feel stood at odds with the frequently hand-made Artist’s book norm to the time. Virtually every aspect of the Artist’s book was reimagined, from the typography and text layout on the cover to the sparseness of the interior contents, with a lack of text save for image titles.

Believe it or not, this is one of the most influential Photographs in Modern & Contemporary Photography. STANDARD, ARMADILLO, TX, perhaps the key image in Twentysix Gasoline Stations, went on to have multiple lives of its own, inspiring numerous Ed Ruscha Paintings, Drawings & Prints, as well as the work of other Artists.

Speaking of the end result, he said-

“I realized that for the first time this book had an inexplicable thing I was looking for, and that was a kind of a “Huh?” That‘s what I’ve always worked around. All it is is a device to disarm somebody with my particular message6.”

Having immersed myself in PhotoBooks for the past 7 years, and Art books most of my life, it’s impossible for me to overstate the influence Twentysix Gasoline Stations has had, and continues to have, on the Art world. It turned Art & PhotoBook creation and publishing on its head, rewriting what a book could be and who could make one. He’s said he meant the pictures to be “like a collection of readymades7,” a term and genre Marcel Duchamp put on the Art map. Still, it received a mixed reaction when it was released, including famously being rejected by the Library of Congress.

Standard Station, Amarillo, TX, 1963, Oil on canvas, 64 15/16 x 121 13/16 inches. The “locomotive” compositional device, seen in Large Trademark with Eight Spotlights, 1962, in Part 1, returns, splitting the composition in two, just the beginning of what’s fascinating about this.

“I would say I came to painting through photography,” Ed Ruscha8

The STANDARD, ARMADILLO, TX, Photograph begat the Standard Station, Amarillo, TX Painting in 1963. Obviously, the Photo just shown has been reworked, reimagined, or he based this on another Photo. Whatever the case may be, the resulting composition seen here would subsequently take many forms and become iconic. Standard Station, Ten Cent Western Being Torn in Half, below, followed a year later.The Paintings begat Standard Station, Amarillo, TX Prints, with Standard Station, Amarillo, TX Drawings being created along the way. So ubiquitous did they become that gas station Paintings and gas station Photography are now, basically, his genres. Sooner or later, everyone who shoots or Paints a gas station is going to be compared to Ed Ruscha. Many, like Vik Muniz, openly acknowledge the influence.

What strikes me are the abstract elements, like the selective detailing- you can read the prices on the gas pumps, but detail disappears on everything behind them, creating a surreal experience (the “realistic” gas pumps offset against the featureless building behind them), under that big red sign whose white lettering, offset against the engulfing darkness, feels bold.

Standard Station, Ten Cent Western Being Torn in Half, 1964, Oil on canvas, 65 x 121 1/2 inches. Mr. Ruscha has likened  the comic flying off the canvas to the upper right to a “coda” in Music. For me, it looks like debris, garbage, pollution. In this piece, the featureless building has light and shadows added to it. Once again, the numbers and text on the gas pumps are very legible.

At the time, Ed Ruscha shot them, gas stations were bastions of the new found freedom of the open road and the catalyst of the massive post-war westward exodus that the Artist, himself, became a part of. Over time, gas stations would be seen differently as the toll of pollution and environmental decay mounted.

Ed Ruscha’s second most famous Artist book/PhotoBook. A copy of the legendary Every Building on the Sunset Strip, 1966, published in one long accordion fold. Ed Ruscha put a tripod on the back of a truck and went up and down Sunset Strip taking one Photo after another until he had shot every building on both sides of the street. Here, we get one direction on the top of the page, with what’s across the street synchronized and mirrored along the bottom.

Further books followed- 14 more to 1972, the most famous of which is Every Building on the Sunset Strip, 1966, another ground-breaking work. Ed Ruscha has stated that part of the reason he went west after high school, instead of east, was because of the glamour of L.A. Here, he shows the “glamour” of the famous Sunset Strip in all its “glory.” Then, in 1973, he shot all 12 miles of Hollywood Blvd. In 2004, he reshot Hollywood Blvd in color, and paired with the 1972 images, they became the book THEN & NOW in 2005. It’s one example of Ed Ruscha combining his love of the effects of time with revisiting his past subjects.

In all the acclaim he receives I almost never hear credit given the Artist for his exceptional Painting technique- the equal of anyone else’s of his time. Right from the start, Painting after Painting reveals sublime subtlety and under-appreciated skill.  Then Now provided a glorious chance to study his, often large, Paintings up close and marvel at his skill and taste. It also provides the extremely rare chance to see works of the same subject side by side, particularly two of his famous Standard Gasoline Station Paintings.

Shows present once-in-a-lifetime opportunities to see great works united from distant parts of the globe for a brief time. That’s why I waited over an hour for the crowds to part to get this shot. More than likely, I’ll never see these two great Standard Stations together again. Both of these also feature the “speeding locomotive” compositional device seen in the Large Trademark Painting, which adds to the somewhat surreal overall effect, wonder and mystery.

Further to the Large Trademark Painting, Ed Ruscha also began Painting the sights of L.A., & Hollywood which again seems to be his domain to the point that I can’t think of anyone who Painted them before he did. Richard Diebenkorn didn’t as far as I know. Anyone else?

“Being in Los Angeles has had little or no effect on my work. I could have done it anywhere.” Ed Ruscha, Leave Any Information at the Signal, Statement in “West Coast Style”

Los Angeles County Museum on Fire, 1965-8, 53 1/2 x 133. 1/2 inches. Fun fact- Guess where Ed Ruscha/Now Then reopened on April 7, 2024 after closing at MoMA? You’re looking at it.

Los Angeles County Museum on Fire, 1965-8, like most of Ed Ruscha’s work, has been the subject of endless conjecture. Over the years, the Artist has made a few statements about it, including this one, “… There’s no great message here. It’s just a picture to look at9.” That might be hard to believe. After graduating college, he took that trip to Europe I mentioned in Part 1, and came away disappointed at the lack of Contemporary Art on view in the museums. Back home, things weren’t much better. Contemporary Art was slow to gain admission to the hallowed halls of institutions here. Is it a stretch to think this was somewhere on his mind when he Painted this? I tend to think it was in there somewhere. The Watts riots had recently taken place. The Now Then Catalogue has this to say about it-

“Ruscha’s characteristic denial of content ignores the fact that not far from his studio in mid-August 1965, just a few months after the inauguration of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the city of Los Angeles was burning10.”

Ed Ruscha said, “The plain truth behind the Watts riots is that the riots themselves were good and beneficial and healthy regardless of loss of life. The Watts riots nationalized sympathy for a gigantic racial injustice11.”

He soon set a number of other sites on fire in his Paintings, including the an Amarillo Standard Station (which wasn’t in the show), and Norm’s, which was.

Norm’s, La Cienega, on Fire, 1964, Oil and pencil on canvas. The work features a complete lack of detail, save for the letters “ORMS” on the sign.  It’s interesting how the flames follow the “locomotive” line. Without those letters (which themselves are meaningless without the title), this Painting would be a completely abstract composition of shapes and lines.

For someone who’s so closely associated with L.A., and has been for over 60 years, it’s strange that some of his most well-known work shows L.A. landmarks being destroyed or in ruins. For example, he has continued to “destroy” the Hollywood sign, in different ways, over and over again throughout his career. Still, his fame continued to rise as did his association with the city. In spite of all this (and possibly because of it), in 1978, a six-story(!) tall mural (also referred to as the “Ed Ruscha Monument”) of the Artist was created by the Artist Kent Twitchell, for who Ed Ruscha was “the unorthodox hero of the art world.” Would anyone else be able to “destroy” a city’s landmarks and then become seen as the figurehead of that city’s Art community with a monument created for them? It didn’t happen for Nero. Unlike the emperor, Ed Ruscha didn’t actually destroy anything, except maybe in his mind and on some large canvases.

Rancho, 1968, Oil on canvas, which looks like it was made with a liquid, surrounded by Fire, Sin, Rustic Pines, each 1967, Gunpowder on paper, from left to right.

This calls to mind another thing Ed Ruscha doesn’t get enough credit for: innovation. In the 3rd, 4th and 5th galleries we see pieces made out of strange and unprecedented materials. Unhappy with the possibilities of paint or pencil, the Artist began exploring the possibilities of Drawing with gunpowder! The results, as seen above, are incredible. He found he had more control with it. In 1969, the Artist began going further, using unconventional materials in his Stains Portfolio of seventy-five substances ranging from L.A. tap water to egg yolk.

Installation view of Chocolate Room, 1971/2023, Chocolate on paper sheets.

His Chocolate Room for the United States Pavilion at the 1970 Venice Biennale, and recreated in a room of its own in Now Then, followed. After that, he began using a number of these “other” materials in his Word and Phrase Paintings.

Cotton Puffs, 1974. Egg yolk on moiré fabric, 36 × 40″

Along with this constant experimentation came the inevitable failure, like the egg yokes in Cotton Puffs, 1974, fading quickly. Ed has been remarkably cool with these. Accepting them for what they are12. (And probably learning in the process.) Each has its place in his oeuvre, with all the examples on view seeming to hold up remarkably well over the years given they are experiments. By the mid-70s, he had gone back to pastel on paper13. Though the materials experiments were short-lived, it led me to peruse the 7 volumes of the Ed Ruscha: Catalogue Raisonne of the Paintings, published by Steidl (which is a bit ironic- or fitting- because Steidl has published the work of any number of Photographers who include gas stations in their work, including the entirety of the 3-volume set, Gas Stop, by David Freund), which revealed that this insatiable exploration of materials was only the tip of his creativity iceberg. Paging through it (which only goes up to 2011 at this point), I was amazed to discover that though he has created a number of works with ostensibly the same subject, no two are identical. The differences are obvious or subtle. Still, this speaks to Ed Ruscha’s seemingly endless powers of invention and refusal to repeat himself verbatim. I was stunned when I discovered this, which was completely unexpected (though I should have been tipped off by what his STANDARD STATION, ALBUQUERQUE Photograph became). Seeing this range and variety gave me a glimpse of insight into just what may be keeping him going and creating since the late 1950s.

Wall Rockets, 2000, Acrylic on canvas

Perhaps THE highlight of Ed Ruscha/Now Then at MoMA for me was the chance to see 6 of the 10 Paintings from the Artist’s Course of Empire series. As I’ve looked at his work over the past 24 years of this century, these have fascinated me as much as any other work by Mr. Ruscha. Created for, and then debuted, at the 2005 Venice Biennalle, they subsequently travelled to NYC where they were on display at the Whitney in a show of the same name, the last important (though small) Ed Ruscha show in NYC until Now Then. Somehow, I missed them there, so seeing 6 might be as close as I get to seeing them all.

3 works from Ed Ruscha’s Blue Collar series, 1993, on the 3 facing walls.

Occupying the large, penultimate gallery of the show, the Course of Empire Paintings strike me as serving as a touchstone for a number of Ed Ruscha themes. They also eerily presage what has been going on in much of NYC (and perhaps elsewhere) this decade, with a number of stores and businesses closing due to Covid, then more closing due to the realities of our post-Covid (if we are post-Covid) economy, many have changed hands in a short time. Others remain for rent. The shape, perspectives and lack of detailing on the one-story  buildings I find reminiscent of Standard Station, Ten Cent Western Being Torn in Half, seen earlier. In each, our point of view is the same, and the same as in that Standard Station Painting- they are seen from below.

At the opposite end of the gallery, the same scenes reappear in his Course of Empire series, 2005, now in color, though right and left are flipped. (The scene on the right wall is that depicted on the left wall in Blue Collar Photo, above this one. The scene on the left wall is the scene shown on the right wall of the Blue Collar series above this one.)

The series evolved over a period of 13 years, with Ed Ruscha Painting the 5 black & white pieces, titled Blue Collar, in 1992-

Blue Collar Trade School, 1992, Acrylic on canvas. The only multi-story structure in the series.

Returning to the subject and the same sites  in 2005, this time in color and showing the effects of the passage of time.

The Old Trade School Building, 2005, Acrylic on canvas

Perhaps, his most subtly powerful series, their under-stated compositions lead to open-ended interpretations.

Installation view of the complete Course of Empire, by Thomas Cole, 1834-36, as seen at The Met’s Thomas Cole’s Journey in 2018. The rise and fall of civilization as seen from the same place, with the same distinctive mountain peak appearing in each Painting.

Based on, and in homage to, Thomas Cole’s legendary Course of Empire series, 1834-6, (which I wrote about here), they are another instance of Ruscha revisiting earlier work, his Blue Collar series from 1992. These also highlight that alongside the humor in any number of his pieces, running parallel, is a real depth of concern. Concern for the country, the world, the environment.

Psycho Spaghetti Western #7, 2010-11, Acrylic on canvas

“It’s all just rape of the land for profit these days. It’s fairly sick. Southern California is all just one big city now. But what do you say about progress? … So something’s got to give, and the landscape’s the first thing that gives….There is a certain flavor of decadence that inspires me. And when I drive into some sort of industrial wasteland in America, with the themeparks and warehouses, there’s something saying something to me. It’s a mixture of those things that gives me some sense of reality and moves me along as an artist,” Ed Ruscha 14.

Taking full advantage of having such a long career, the Artist has revisited past themes, and places, fairly often to the point that it’s a running theme in his work. Change over time…for the better, or worse, is left to the viewer to decide. Ostensibly set in L.A., the structures in Blue Collar/Course of Empire could be literally anywhere. As such they have a universality to them (as do a number of other 21st century Ruscha’s) that sets them apart from his purely L.A. work, like his Hollywood sign pieces.

Our Flag, 2017, Acrylic on canvas. The last work in the show.

Thomas Cole influencing Ed Ruscha’s Blue Collar & Course of Empire series started me thinking about other possible influences on his work. I touched on some in Part 1. In Part 3, I’ll take a closer look at them, and then flip that coin over.

Part 3 is here. 

*- Soundtrack for this piece is “L.A. Woman” by The Doors, one of the ultimate L.A. bands, from the 1971 album of the same name. (Narrowly beating out “California Girls” by the Beach Boys from Summer Days (And Summer Nights), 1965.) Ed Ruscha was into “car culture” before moving to L.A., and after, among other things he has in common with the #1 L.A. band of its time. Notice the gas station Jim Morrison, “another lost angel,” to quote his lyric, stops in to about half way through-

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  1. Ed Ruscha: Catalogue Raisonne of the Paintings, Vol 7, P.476 ↩
  2. E.R., Tate, P.30 ↩
  3. Willoughby Sharp, ‘“… a kind of a Huh?”, An Interview with Edward Ruscha’, Avalanche, no.7, Winter/ Spring 1973, p.30. ↩
  4. ER, Tate, P. 31 ↩
  5. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/edward-ruscha-1882/ed-ruscha-and-art-everyday ↩
  6. Here. ↩
  7. Reading Ed Ruscha, P.50 ↩
  8. Ed Ruscha, Photographer, P.7 ↩
  9. Ed Ruscha quoted in Ed Ruscha/Now Then Exhibition Catalog, P.21 ↩
  10. Ed Ruscha/Now Then Exhibition Catalog, P.21 ↩
  11. Ed Ruscha, Leave Any Information at the Signal, P.5 ↩
  12. E.R., Tate, P.65 ↩
  13. Ed Ruscha/Now Then, P.170 ↩
  14. Leave Any Information at the Signal, P.18 ↩