Excavation, 1950, from the MoMA exhibition. ©2011 The Willem de Kooning Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/Art Institute of Chicago

This month, for the first time since its 2004 redesign, the Museum of Modern Art will turn over its entire sixth floor to a single artist. The one so honored is Willem de Kooning, the reluctant Abstract Expressionist whose career was a lightning rod and whose late-period legacy has been the subject of intense debate and competition for more than two decades. The retrospective, opening September 18, will include almost 200 works and will be accompanied by a 500-page catalogue with some 700 images.

The first retrospective since de Kooning’s death in 1997, it will give us our first opportunity to experience the artist from start to almost-finish, beginning with academic paintings made in Holland in 1916–17 and ending in 1987, the year de Kooning’s longtime dealer Xavier Fourcade died and three years before de Kooning, who suffered from Alzheimer’s during the last decade of his life, put down his paintbrush for the last time. It will trace the artist’s evolution from the figurative and black-and-white paintings of the 1940s through the “Woman” series of 1950–53 to the large gestural abstractions of the ’70s and the ’80s, as he transformed painting by compulsively articulating his process and contorting pictorial space.

“In many periods de Kooning wanted to create difficulties in order to be inventive,” says John Elderfield, the museum’s chief curator emeritus of painting and sculpture, who organized the retrospective. “Right from the start of his career, it’s not something as passive as chance. It’s not Duchamp dropping a thread. It’s extraordinary work where the discipline is relaxed right at the last moment. De Kooning was so well trained, such an obsessive technician, and yet he was willing to let go of it.”

A number of agents, aside from the artist, are involved in making and maintaining an artist’s career: dealer, curator, collector, lawyer, and (perhaps increasingly less so) critic. With a deceased artist, there are also heirs. These people are motivated by different (and sometimes conflicting) considerations, among them the desire for recognition, power, control, and remuneration.

De Kooning was declared unfit to handle his affairs 22 years ago, shortly after the death of his wife, Elaine. From that time, information ceased to be available about artworks in his possession, including those still being worked on. His oeuvre was controlled primarily by Lisa de Kooning, his only child and heir; attorney John Eastman, the son of de Kooning’s longtime attorney Lee Eastman; and John Silberman, an attorney who represented Lisa and Eastman in their court application to be appointed as de Kooning’s conservators and later represented his estate. Lisa, Eastman, and Silberman largely determined how the artist’s works were cared for, exhibited, and sold during the last eight years of his life and after his death at the age of 92.

De Kooning’s life was full of intrigue and struggle—from his incessant artistic manipulations to his scandalous love affairs, bouts with alcoholism, and continuing efforts to paint in his later years despite his dementia. Equally contentious was the management of his career after he was declared mentally incompetent and of his legacy after his death—particularly the sale of the works he created, aided to varying degrees by his assistants, while he suffered from Alzheimer’s.

After de Kooning’s death, Lisa and Eastman became co-executors of his estate, and, in an effort to protect the market for his work, they won a court order to seal details about the estate’s contents. They directed the dispersal of works in de Kooning’s possession at the time of his death and created the Willem de Kooning Foundation, which was established in 2001 and received a portion of the collection not sold or kept by Lisa.

After decades of determining how best to create museum exposure and market demand for de Kooning’s late works (many of which were still in the artist’s studio after his death), to provide Lisa with financial security, and to promote and protect de Kooning’s legacy, the MoMA retrospective is a personal victory for the individuals charged with de Kooning’s care 22 years ago.

 Continue reading my ARTnews article  . . .

It’s hard to remember back to what it was really like. But there are moments when the feelings of horror come back with such clarity that no time seems to have passed and my heart and mind freeze with the thought of what life was like at that moment–the utter and complete fear and uncertainty. The events unfolded on the television screen when I was meant to be on a train heading into the offices at ARTnews. I was just about to leave the house when I saw the image of the first tower burning with a big hole in the side of it. The newscaster didn’t seem to have much information–no plane was mentioned. My first thought was that the fire would take a long time to put out–that they would still be putting it out when I got home that night. I think the news about the first plane came quickly, which is why I must not have left the house. Everyone knows the rest of the thick-as-molasses unfolding of the story. I called my daughter’s school and asked them to tell her that I was at home, that I hadn’t gone into the city. I could have picked her up–other parents did, a good many didn’t–but I wanted to try to spare her sweet third-grade-mind from the alarm of watching me absorb what was happening. That night I remember waking up to the sound of bombing. I lay stick straight convinced that bombs were being dropped on a street not too far away and that they were getting closer. I felt like I was in Beirut or somewhere similar. It was thunder.

I didn’t go into Manhattan the next day. I headed in on Thursday. I had just started my new job as senior writer for the magazine and it didn’t feel right to stay at home when others were in the office. Anyway, we were being urged to go back to work. My daughter was scared for me to go into the city–I don’t think she ever got over that fear. The train station in Princeton had some posters of the people who were missing, Penn station had many more. I felt like I  was walking through a memorial for months. All of those faces–smiling, alone, with families, missing. I don’t remember when they started to come down. I remember feeling sad when I no longer saw them anymore.

The walk from Penn station to 38th street was empty of people. I remember only a lone guy on a bike at one point–near the corner of sixth avenue and macy’s. I had never seen NYC like that and never want to see it like that again. It was unimaginable. No street vendors. No street traffic. It was beyond disconcerting. The thought that people would return one day seemed beyond foolish.

The first article I wrote as senior writer was about the aftershocks in the art world after the attacks. It was a horrible and hard article to write. I met with Mary McFadden a few days after the attacks to profile her for the same issue. She seemed intent on coming across as completely unaffected, and I never forgave her for it.

I decided to visit the site of the world trade center a week or so later on a Saturday. I was alone and listened to Giant Sand (Well Dusted) on my headphones the entire time. I wrote about my visit in an email to a friend:

hiya. It was okay; kind of strange. I didn’t bring Ashley with me; she stayed home with Chris and learned about mulching the yard so that the perennials will come back next year. I went down to Fulton Street and when I got out of the subway station there were some people just standing around and then others kind of walking in a procession behind the police barricades. Some had cameras; some were really old. I couldn’t hear any of them cause I kept my headphones on. There was soot all over the windows and a burger king was open. You could still smell something in the air. There was no traffic anywhere, except sometimes a police car and there was a Haagen daas truck at one point (this was later after I turned around past the huge flag on the NYSE building), and everyone was walking up the empty streets. I could see a huge crane and there was still a remnant of one of the towers (I think) and its glassless windows. There was a flag hanging from one of the nearby buildings and the crane had a couple of flags near the top. I thought I’d walk around the entire blockade in one huge square but I was completely disoriented. I wanted to find the financial center and the Brooklyn Bridge and figure out how everything met up so that I could remember it. But I got tired of all the people (there really weren’t all that many) or maybe I wanted to be there but I wanted to be invisible because I just didn’t know what I was doing or why I was there and it just seemed kind of pointless. I found the Brooklyn Bridge and walked across it and it was a cloudy day and there was one young girl on a skateboard with a Kansas sweatshirt on and looking at her almost made me cry but didn’t. I walked to the promenade in Brooklyn Heights and there were candles and dried flowers tied to railings and some photographs and names and a kid’s painting and a few letters that I didn’t read. There were people around but not many and then I walked to the subway and got off at Union Square where there were some people playing music and others writing in chalk on the ground and I kept trying to figure out which way I needed to walk if I wanted to catch a taxi to Chelsea and all of the street signs read East. I went to Postmasters and saw the projection of lower manhattan and the time lapse that made the boats look like they were rocks skipping across the water. Then I went to some of the other galleries and saw the portrait of President Bush at Friedrich Petzel hanging next to a picture of urine (or something like it) projecting out of a woman’s crotch. It seemed like there were more people in Chelsea than anywhere else I’d been. I took the 5:03 train home. Basically I don’t know what I was doing. I didn’t feel much no matter how many emotional buttons I tried to push and no matter how much I tried to picture what I had seen happening on tv actually happening. I have to write a story for artnews and I figure if I am going to try to write about art, the art world, and the art market in that context I better make sure that I try to remember and understand what happened and do some sort of hard penance for reducing it to whatever I end up reducing it to. I’ll be up for a while. They’re expecting it tomorrow and I haven’t even started.

You can read the article here.

In October, I covered the trial of Alfred Taubman, the former Sotheby’s chairman who stood accused of colluding with Christie’s. I took the subway to the courthouse, which was closer to the site of the world trade center than I ever realized. We had to go through long lines of security. It was a strange feeling to watch the trial unfold and to be so close to the destruction. There was a distinct scent in the air that I can’t describe but will never leave me. Someone I met during the trial took me to a law office that overlooked the footprints of the towers. What I remember most is how much I liked the look of the huge American flag hanging off the side of a building.

Muenster Walk, 1997, by Janet Cardiff

I’ve always liked the idea of symmetry between art and life. Mathematicians look for it in equations. Physicists look for it in nature. Ever since I was introduced to the work of Janet Cardiff, I’ve listened for it in moments. I am always grateful for artists who are capable of making me associate and disassociate–sometimes miraculously at the same time. Cardiff has made me hear life in unexpected moments. Once, I returned from an interview to discover that I had accidentally recorded my movements afterward–the sound of my footsteps, my passage down a hall, my greeting to someone I didn’t know very well, my pouring of water, opening a door, walking up stairs. In these brilliantly connected yet isolated moments, common activities become otherwordly–the sound of a dishwasher, a flushing toilet, a clanking utensil, a drawer closing, a light changing, paper moving, a dish set. Mostly, though, Cardiff has made me love the feeling of hearing the symmetry of footsteps.

Turns out there is a blog and new book dedicated to visual moments like this–two bicoastal friends finding symmetry between everyday images and artworks. Love the idea. Check it out. [Huffington Post and Interview]

. . . is 6’1″; wears a size 11 1/2 shoe; can’t decide what he wants to tell you; thinks there are so many truths; is 95 percent vegan; made his “Paris Hilton” paintings wearing plastic 3 1/2-inch heels; has always had this idea that you should go for what you want and not settle, set your sights high and you probably will get it; thinks all of this sounds like a plan but it happened much more organically, it was all very simple; almost exhibited blown-up silkscreen versions of telephone doodles left by famous artists at Sonnabend rather than “Red, Black, Green, Red, White, and Blue”; thinks his father was a bit more like Archie Bunker than he probably imagined; liked high school; thinks Cocaine Buffet was a bit of a tacky plan; thinks he never really learns from his mistakes; says it never occurred to him that it could backfire; believes you piece together the truths of your origins; has a natural tendency toward self-sabotage; has tried organizing a committee of people he trusts to tell Rob Pruitt what he should do next, but he can never take any of their ideas because he prefers his own; believes a lot of his stuff looks so crappy because its important that he make it himself; wears basically the same outfit, including a black pleather studded belt, nearly every day; might have painted Ileana Sonnabend’s bathroom door; believes he’s been most influenced by Minimalism; is never sure that what he is saying is 100 percent true; is glad there is only one (brilliant) Jeff Koons; loves miso soup; knows he’s not lazy; can’t tell you the whole truth about everything because it would sound so clinical; thinks of the Art Awards as a group show determined by a very democratic process; wants to make a big series of paintings about Woody Allen some day; doesn’t walk around thinking he’s the best but doesn’t think anyone’s the best; has never asked the hard questions of his parents; thinks it would be cuter if dollar bills looked like chocolate-chip cookes (everyone loves cookies); thinks cheating can be a way of picking and choosing what you want to learn for the future; smokes Marlboro Lights; wants to know who your favorite contemporary artist is; wants to know how much you’re getting paid; likes to look at the pictures people post on eBay; is not going to stop until people think he’s better than Maurizio Cattelan.

from my Art+Auction profile, available here

Rob Pruitt's Keeping Warm, 2001 (via gavinbrown.biz)

Rob Pruitt has been driving around for the past several weeks with a large stuffed panda in the back seat of his white Toyota Prius. The panda has seen better days — Pruitt found it on the side of the road five years ago on the way to his house in Montauk, where he has spent summers and many weekends since 2004 with his partner, the artist Jonathan Horowitz. Four toy panda cubs are in a box in the trunk. “I’ve been taking pictures of them in different poses,” Pruitt says.

He has been transporting the pandas to different locations, including Montauk and his studio in Brooklyn, on an industrial street near the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. On a Sunday in January, Pruitt sits crossed-legged on the floor of his studio.

He’s trying to prop the ear of a small panda under the nose of the larger one so that they stay balanced long enough for him to snap some photos with his iPhone.

Pruitt himself is oddly adorable. He is softly silly in his mannerisms — every once in a while he twirls strands of his salt-and-pepper hair or pulls a chunk of bangs down over his right eye. Over dinner at a Japanese restaurant in downtown Manhattan near his longtime gallery, Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, he suggests ordering dishes to share and refuses the larger or last piece of anything. He shows up for a studio visit with oatmeal cookies and coffee for two. His work is similarly rooted in gestures of intimacy and sharing. He has made art out of anything and everything: pictures of pandas, old blue jeans, images of Paris Hilton, Marimekko prints, glitter, iPhotos — with which he has plastered Gavin Brown’s gallery, both inside and out — even real estate. He infuses quotidian objects and concepts with a seductive sense of community spiked with irreverence and humor. In his actions and words, he comes across as conscientious and generous (Max Brown, Gavin’s son and Pruitt’s godson, compares his voice to a monk’s), but his narrow dark-brown eyes reveal a poignant reticence.

For nearly 20 years Pruitt has traversed the rocky terrain of taste, perception, and criticism and emerged a beloved underdog. For seven of those years, he lived in self-imposed exile after the debacle of “Red, Black, Green, Red, White, and Blue,” the 1992 blacksploitation show he mounted with his then partner, Jack Early, at the Leo Castelli Gallery. It was “probably the most reviled, the most embarrassing, and the most disastrous exhibition in the history of the downtown art world,” states Jeffrey Deitch, the New York dealer recently appointed director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, in Pop Touched Me: The Art of Rob Pruitt, the artist’s monograph, released last month by Abrams. Continue reading . . .

The 91 stairs to Olaf Breuning's Tribeca studio via www.olafbreuning.com

The 91 stairs up to Olaf Breuning’s fifth–floor studio in Tribeca are not only formidable, they are ridiculous. Steep and slathered in gray paint, they look like something Breuning might have concocted himself if they hadn’t already been there when he moved in. Breuning has lived and worked here since 2008, when he left his previous studio, a former massage parlor below a seafood bar in SoHo.

“I think he saw that staircase and bought the apartment without seeing it,” says his longtime collaborator and best friend, Brian Kerstetter, who plays the main character—a bumbling, feckless drifter/hoodlum/tourist—in Breuning’s Home films. “He likes to make you jump through hoops and make you work a little bit.”

The stairs are featured in the series of photographs that welcome visitors to Breuning’s scavenger–hunt–like Web site (olafbreuning.com). “It used to be even worse,” says Kerstetter of Breuning’s “click here” online antics. “You used to have to type in long URLs. I told him, ‘I can’t sit here and do this all day.’”

The artist is known for his absurdist sense of humor (a scene in his 2004 film Home 1 follows a crowd of golf–club–wielding bungling mayhem–makers who tackle an “Amish” man, strip him naked, and force him to wear an E. T. mask). But Breuning, 40, who has dark, lush hair and brown eyes, is surprisingly tame in person. “He is very Swiss and very polite,” says Whitney Museum curator Shamim Momin. “But there is something not quite right. You get the sense that he might be messing with you. His bluntness makes you suspicious and unsure of what position to take.”

Artist Ruby Sky Stiler, Breuning’s studio assistant, attributes this in part to his “unusual sense of the English language, and the way he relates to words in a formal, instinctual way. Often he thinks things mean something entirely different than they do, and he has a few commonly used phrases. Like, when he means to ask how one is doing, he often says, ‘It comes good?’”

Continue reading my profile of Olaf Breuning for ARTnews here.

Olaf Breuning's Mammoth, 2008

The cover of Judith Goldman's 1985 monograph

A surefire way to irritate me beyond reasonable measure is to not understand my (perhaps unreasonable) attachment to books. I love their weight and feel and their sense of occupancy, their reason for being–to attempt to communicate something beyond time and distance. I particularly love my art books. James Rosenquist by Judith Goldman is one of my favorites. The cover alone is irresistible (reminds me rather unsurprisingly of a great album cover) but her text is equally swoon worthy:

December 1983: “I’ve got an idea for a real zinger–women, flowers, and dead fish.” James Rosenquist has just returned from a meeting at New York’s Four Seasons Restaurant, where he discussed the mural they had recently commissioned from him. He is excited, physically animated. “Maybe the fish won’t be dead,” he continues, “but they’re going to have real slippery eyes. Slippery fish and beautiful women.”

“Did they understand it?” What I had meant to ask was if they liked it.

Rosenquist finds the question beside the point and not wanting to be impolite, steers the conversation in another direction. “Did I ever tell you about the time I was down in Florida visiting Bob Rauschenberg? We’d had dinner and a lot to drink. We were pretty swacked, and after dinner Bob showed me his new work. I looked for a while and told him I liked it, but I wasn’t sure I understood it. Bob started to laugh and laugh and was still laughing when he said, “Do you think I understand it?”

Another favorite is Mel Bochner: Thought Made Visible 1966–73, a catalogue published in conjunction with an exhibition at Yale University Art Gallery in 1995. I love this one primarily because I believe it changed my life. Really. I was 25 when I was introduced to Mel Bochner. I was working as a features reporter for a daily newspaper in Connecticut and by default had been assigned to provide arts coverage for the Sunday paper. I would drive around the state in a dying Mazda (it seemed to require oil replenishment every sixty miles) and write about artists, gallerists, and writers in the area (Cleve Gray, Robert Natkin, Rosamond Bernier, Jacques Kaplan) as well as regional exhibitions. Here is some of what I wrote about the Bochner exhibition:

Black-and-white, pen and ink, Bochner’s art includes everything from rough diagrams and preliminary sketches to typed letters and stamped envelopes. He defines art as measuring tape on a wall, floored newspaper painted blue, even stones placed on pieces of white paper. Rarely are Bochner’s works straight-forward. They require translation. They rely on finding a common language which is, of course, the trickiest art of all.

“Language is what keeps people apart and ideas from being understood,” says Bochner, a tall, slender man of model proportion with a sweep of thick, silver hair, and a tendency to wink frequently and smile occasionally. He is gentle and patient in the fluid, graceful way he moves his hands–more like a dancer, less like a salesman–when he speaks. “I’ve always been interested in the hidden conventions that govern life and art.”

I studied that catalogue like mad, trying to pin down his mental teasers. It was invigorating. His art made everything and anything possible–all forms of communication and miscommunication. It suddenly wasn’t something that I was failing to understand (and by it I mean those “hidden conventions” that had flummoxed me since at least adolescence); it was something that no one (not to be presumptuous or idealistic) completely understood  even if they thought they did. Ultimately, the exercise of translation (and not just a single translation but repeated and often increasingly contorted translations) that Bochner’s art required opened an entire world of learning for me. I was no longer intimidated by not knowing; I was completely enthralled by it. Everything became about translation–from art and physics to mathematics and relationships. The world of knowing became one glorious invention of systems and practices that veiled the amazing and thrilling comfort of not knowing and perhaps, maybe and fleetingly, understanding just a little. Seriously and simply beautiful.

Bochner wins me over with lines like the "dead ends and vicious circles of language."

Falling hard for the music and visuals in this; all labors should be so provocatively and oddly uplifting (happy long weekend):

Front Page of the New York Times, July 15, 2009

1. Goldman Sachs Posts Richest Quarterly Profit in Its 140-year History

2. White Male Republicans Make Latina Supreme Court Nominee Swear that Her Gender and Race Won’t Interfere with Her Rulings

3. Editors at the New York Times endorse the branding of the Great Recession (capital G; capital R), surely (or hopefully) infuriating a copy editor somewhere. Back in March, they were still using quotation marks when they posted this chart about its usage:

Source: NYT/Nexis archives. Some big caveats: Though I tried to weed them out, these numbers do contain some duplicate stories (e.g., content that was syndicated); in some cases the term “Great Recession” may not have been capitalized and/or may have had an indefinite article preceding it (i.e., in a phrase like “this could be the beginning of a great recession“); and given the plethora of blogs, podcasts, etc., that don’t make it into the Nexis archives, these sources are by no means comprehensive.