greg.org – the making of, by greg allen

Jacob Kassay Flags

a collage on paper torn from a sketchbook is comprised of stickers of four us flags with the cantons of stars all in the center, creating a blue rectangle of stars surrounded by an elongated vertical rectangle of red and white stripes. jacob kassay made this in 2007, and now it's at von ammon gallery in dc — Jacob Kassay, Untitled, 2007, vinyl on paper, 13 3/4 x 11 in., on view at Von Ammon in DC

Focus Group 5, a new group show at Von Ammon in Washington includes works of the moment, some of which are also throwbacks.

There are works by six artists: Liz Craft, Catharine Czudej, Ignacio Gatica, Tony Matelli, and Banks Violette, and three early works on paper by Jacob Kassay.

These small compositions are vinyl stickers of the US flag in various mirrored configurations. They remind me of the incredible little stack of flags on plastic that Jasper Johns loaned to the recent show of flag works at Craig Starr.

a tiny painting of three flags, or rather three paintings of gradually smaller us flags stacked on top of one another, made of acrylic paint on plastic, and attached to the top half of a roughly a4-sized sheet of plastic, and then matted and framed with a thin maple frame, a 2000 work by jasper johns, from the artist's collection, on view in spring 2026 at craig starr gallery in nyc — Jasper Johns, Three Flags, 2000, 11 x 7 1/2 in., acrylic and graphite on four sheets of plastic, collection the artist, on view at Craig Starr

Like Johns, Kassay was working with the flag as an image and an object for several years before he got massive art world attention. Unlike Johns’s, Kassay’s flags have been much less widely seen. Also, it’s not clear whether he’s left the motif behind.

Though it’s been lost in a hall of silvered mirrors since, when Kassay popped in 2009, a flag-related installation was like his only Google image. That massive textile work, draped like an awning, was made by sewing together four flags, minus the cantons, So where there were stars, there was a large, rectangular void.

I’d thought of this work recently, and tried to find an image of it. [I’d been reminded of it while seeing the extraordinary, striped tarp, with two cutouts for doors, that covers the repaired signage on the Kennedy Center.] While searching, I found another early Kassay on perforated paper, which upended what I understood and wrote about the incredible sculpture/painting from his breakout show at Eleven Rivington. So I have updated that post.

Focus Group 5 at Von Ammon, by appt, 16 June-31 Aug 2026 [vonammon.net]
Previously, from 2020/2021/2026: Ur-Kassay

The Mar-a-Lago Pavilion

When he was announced as the US representative to the Venice Biennale, I first had to confirm that Alma Allen and I are not related. So I called my genealogy-fluent cousin in Heber, Utah, where Allen’s large, Mormon family was purportedly from, and she did the legwork, and asked around, and no.

I hadn’t thought of Allen or his work for a while, though I liked it in the early 2000s, when it was small, finely crafted elemental objets on the design blogs of shops in Silver Lake or whatever. Taking the US Pavilion gig now, in the utterly corrupt and degraded selection process, and signing onto the racist, exclusionist dogmas of this administration in doing so, is a complete abrogation of artistic integrity and human decency.

It’s un-American in the most principled sense, but also the kind of craven, delulu white guy move that seems to characterize this moment. Allen and curator Jeffrey Uslip really hit the bullshit bull’s eye with a pavilionful of generic, goldtone lobby art.

I’d been staying away from it all, after an initial burst of investigating when the WTF announcement dropped about Allen, Uslip, and the fake American Arts Conservancy (AAC). It really did feel like the patriotic thing was to just step back and let this ship sink on its own.

But Allen’s recent conspiracy complaints on Instagram, and subsequent reporting in Ocula are presenting false narratives about the whole process that no one seems to be addressing. So while I don’t know anything new about the supposed publicist bullying and blacklisting, I do think Allen is lame to think someone would have to be pressured or threatened into not wanting to do business with him anymore. Here’s what I do know to be wrong with his claim:

Allen says he was “one of five artists on a shortlist created by a committee of professionals” that included people from the NEA and two State Department organizations: the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, and Art in Embassies. The NEA told Ocula no, they were not involved. ECA administers the grant. Before any of this happened, Art in Embassies had already been taken over by the same political appointee who went on to create the AAC.

So the “committee of professionals” was the political appointee who chose herself, and her instant zombie arts organization.

Ocula adds to reporting of the chaotic announcement/leak/rescinding/collapse last September of artist Robert Lazzarini’s proposal, with curator John Ravenal’s claim that the State Department initially asked them to partner with AAC when their original sponsor, the University of South Florida, dropped out. AAC, Ravenal said, “decided to instead sponsor another project.”

In other words, AAC was selected for the Biennale before the artist was. Because it is run by a political appointee, who took over the pavilion and the selection process that had long been led by a panel of outside art and museum experts. It’s a pattern of rejection of independent expertise, consolidation of control, and politicization that’s been happening all over the administration.

The reporting on the AAC and its complete lack of arts-related experience has focused narrowly on its founder’s artisanal pet food business. Which distracts from her one actual qualification: she is a Mar-a-Lago member. When the AAC first popped up, I found the founder in dozens of party photos for events at Mar-a-Lago: fashion shows, dog shelter benefits, lawn parties, benefit auctions, some absolutely cringe, giant Rolex sculpture show. She’s a party loyalist and a loyal partier, and she knew enough to choose the goldest possible option. And a white guy.

Which is the second part of Allen’s claim, that he was on “a shortlist” with three Black women—Julie Mehretu, Barbara Chase-Riboud and Kennedy Yanko—and William Eggleston. Let’s be real. None of those women would be picked, and none would say yes if they were.

Mehretu and Yanko were already selected by Koyo Kouoh for the actual Biennale. Both also have overlaps, if not connections, to Uslip, who worked at Mehretu’s early gallery, The Project, and in Yanko’s hometown of St. Louis. So this shortlist feels more like a Uslip wishlist, if not an entire fiction. AAC’s website listed Uslip as an advisor seemingly unrelated to the US Pavilion deal. Was he involved in meeting Lazzarini? Was the list just a feint, hiding the reality that he was calling maga-sympatico white guys until he found one who’d say yes?

Uslip has not, afaik, commented on any of this; instead he’s left Allen to sputter and flail alone.

Seaweed Ellsworth Kelly Saw

a mostly white ellsworth kelly painting of seaweed with black lines depicting the symmetrical tendrils of a branch of seaweed splayed out and pinned to a wall, in a white shadow box frame, photographed by albemuth at the philadelphia museum — Ellsworth Kelly, *Seaweed*, 1949, oil on canvas, 72.4 x 99.7 cm, 📷: @albemuth at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where it was a 2023 gift of the Ellsworth Kelly Foundation

I forget what a delight it is to read Ellsworth Kelly’s catalogue raisonné, especially the first volume, which covers Kelly’s years in Paris. As Yve-Alain Bois, who’s writing the CR, has noted frequently, Kelly was exploring and discovering and inventing so many things that would become the focus of his decades-long career. Between this generative importance and Kelly’s own exhaustive archiving, Bois wrote an essay filled with new insights and historical detail for basically every painting.

I’d forgotten all this when I saw @albemuth post his photo of Seaweed, the largest painting Kelly made during his 1949 stay on Belle-Île, off the Atlantic coast near Nantes. It’s one of several fascinating, mostly white paintings from the moment, that toggle between the seemingly abstract and the diagrammatic, including two favorites, Toilette and Kilometer Marker, which were both in the EK100 show at Glenstone in 2023.

And I’d completely forgotten that these white works especially were part of Kelly’s grappling with Picasso, whose spindly, spiky linear postwar paintings loomed over Kelly’s sojourn in Paris. Kelly threaded a path between Picasso’s distorted visions and the world as he—Kelly—saw and found it, and then spent seventy+ fruitful years making art in that reality.

Beginning, in important ways, with Seaweed, which Yve-Alain identifies as the first example of Kelly faithfully recording a flat compositional source onto a flat canvas, a crucial non-compositional strategy he—Bois—calls transfer. Kelly splayed the tendrils of a piece of seaweed found on the beach and pinned to the wall of the one-room shack he’d rented on Belle-Île, and then he painted it, and then erased [sic] extraneous parts with white overpainting to complete the picture. And it’s somehow those palimpsests, like shadows, that give Seaweed a vibrational presence. And then there’s that pin, which now looks like the head of some winged creature. But that’s probably just me.

a photo of an ellsworth kelly painting published in his catalogue raisonne, the black line on white painting is titled monstrance, and depicts a central circle with a dot in the center, and lines radiating from it around its circumference. the title, monstrance, refers to the catholic eucharist, but the specific shape is from a sundial type structure kelly saw on the front of a building in france — Ellsworth Kelly, Monstrance, CR65, 1949, oil on plywood, 61 x 50.2 cm, as published in the EK CR, Vol. 1

And I’d not forgotten this other fascinating painting from Belle-Île, but really had never clocked it all. Monstrance‘s title refers to the sunburst-shaped stand that holds the consecrated eucharist in a Catholic liturgy. But reading Yve-Alain’s entry for the work, the motif turns out to be based on a sundial-like construction on the facade of a building next to the church on Belle-Île. Tracing the iterations and adaptations through Kelly’s sketches and notes, Bois shows how Kelly processed seeing Picasso’s The Kitchen in Paris, and fused multiple references—to a sun-shaped monstrance he sketched in a Paris museum and to the sundial in front of him—into a single painting.

a stained glass window in ellsworth kelly's austin, a minimalist white arched chapel built posthumously to his design, is shaped like a monstrance, or a burst of lines radiating from a negative circle in the center. each thin window is a different color of the spectrum, happy pride. photographed and posted to flickr by jason john paul haskins — Ellsworth Kelly, Austin (larget monstrance-shaped detail), 2015, 📷: Jason John Paul Haskins via flickr

And so I’d completely forgotten this Monstrance was connected the other window in Austin, Kelly’s chapel at The Blanton. And I did not realize Kelly left the painting to The Blanton after his death. Which now makes me want to see a stained glass version of Seaweed, tbh.

John Hersey, Charles E. Martin & Obi

the cover of the august 31, 1946 issue of the new yorker magazine is filled by a horizonless painting by charles e martin of dozens of small figures, mostly tan to dark brown in skin tone, engaged in summer leisure activities in an impossibly compact park-like setting. a small beach at the center abuts a river or lake with a sailboat, a couple plays tennis, or rather chases a dog that took their ball, some people mount and jump horses over a hedgerow, the lower center is a game of lawn croquet next to a path filled with smiling groups of people. in the upper right the edge of a house whose roof casts shade over a porch is next to two pale people in hammocks in the shade of some trees. wrapped around the middle of the magazine is a white obi band of paper, torn after many decades, that reads, in all caps, hiroshima this entire issue is devoted to the story of how an atomic bomb destoyed a city. via davidhudson on tumblr

Yesterday, June 17th, was John Hersey’s birthday, and @davidhudson posted about it on tumblr. Rather than his customary, fascinatingly-curated portrait, though, Hudson posted the cover of the August 31, 1946 issue of The New Yorker, which was entirely filled with Hersey’s devastating essay, “Hiroshima,” the first firsthand report of the horrific experience and aftermath of the US atomic bomb attack a year earlier.

I’d never seen the actual magazine, and immediately was caught up by two things: Charles E. Martin’s carefree summer cover in no way prepares you for what’s inside. If anything, it misleads with its frolicking encyclopedia of vacation fun. Also The New Yorker cover, in 1946, is not where I would have expected to see so many people of color, certainly not engaging in so many activities coded so white: sailing, golf, croquet, tennis, horse jumping?

So this is either a subtle social revolution ten years before Althea Gibson, and two whole years before even the US military was desegregated, or it’s the end of August, and these people are just deeply tanned. The presence in the upper right corner of two pale figures in hammocks in the shade makes me think it’s the latter.

The editors must have sensed the looming dissonance, though, which accounts for the other thing: the paper band around the magazine, known, ironically, as an obi, the Japanese term for a kimono sash, which warns:

HIROSHIMA
THIS ENTIRE ISSUE IS DEVOTED TO THE STORY
OF HOW AN ATOMIC BOMB DESTROYED A CITY

The matter-of-factness of it is almost overwhelmed by the fact that it has survived, now, 80 years.

A 10 month-old reddit post quoting a New York Public Library exhibit I can’t find a primary source for suggests that the issue of The New Yorker the library borrowed from John Hersey High School in Arlington, Illinois was “possibly the only surviving original with its white obi band intact.” A September 2021 podcast notes the shock of author Leslie M.M. Blume, who’d written a whole book on Hersey’s investigation, and had searched 30 years for an issue with the obi, upon finally being shown one in the library of John Hersey High School.

Except I think it is not the same issue as in Hudson’s post.

Two months ago, Reddit user Ravenbookshop posted that they’d sold the copy to the school. Though The New Yorker had a circulation of over 300,000 after the war, the obi was only placed on the few thousand copies sold at newsstands in the city. It was one of five saved by his father, who operated the Raven Book Shop on Fourth Avenue, then known as Book Row. As of two months ago, at least, RBS was still holding onto one.

Newman The Monument, 2026

screenshot of an aeral view of the national mall and lincoln memorial reflecting pool, a long rectangle of algae green with darker blue water around the edges where trump lackey dumped hydrogen peroxide. alleys of trees recede similarly in the distance, with grass and another smaller lake on either side. posted by derek guy, aka dieworkwear on june 16 2026 — a painterly screenshot via @dieworkwear

Last night Derek @dieworkwear compared the hydrogen peroxide-filled Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool to a Rothko, and the uneven edges of blue and the center of algae green did feel Rothkovian.

Then @rabihalameddine said it looked more like a Barnett Newman to him, and I couldn’t unsee it. Or ignore it, especially when I knew just the Newman, and just what to do with it:

Johns Said Leave It Open

jasper johns target with plaster casts is a yellow and blue target on a red background, all in textured encaustic collage, with a shelf/cupboard structure on top with nine little individual compartments, each with its own wooden lid. the lids here are open, which is how johns liked them. like lucky charms each compartment has its own shape and color, a plaster cast of a body part painted in purple, blue white red pink orange green and dark purple? i can't remember, but the green one is a penis, and that got everyone worked up. this painting is owned by david geffen — Jasper Johns, Target with Plaster Casts (JJCR P4), 1955, encaustic and collage on canvas and wood with objects, also with encaustic on them, apparently 52 x 44 1/4 in., bought by Leo Castelli, 1958, sold to David Geffen 1993, currently on loan to the Guggenheim Bilbao, I believe.

Target with Plaster Casts (1955) has been vexing people since 1958 [or 1957, actually.] It’s the red-headed stepchild of Jasper Johns’s breakthrough work. Or maybe the green-dicked stepchild. The presence of body parts generally and a penis specifically have made critics’ questions seem especially awkward: What does it mean? What does it reveal about the artist? Oh wait, I didn’t mean that. But actually, does that mean the target’s a butt?

And the penis has been causing curators problems from the beginning. Meyer Schapiro selected Target with Plaster Casts and Green Target to show at the Jewish Museum in 1957. Then the museum put the work in a literal closet until Johns agreed to add some “mystery” to it by closing the penis lid; the artist angrily refused, and had the work returned. [This is where Leo Castelli saw Green Target and determined to track the unknown artist down and give him a show.]

It echoes the oft-repeated story—I’ve repeated it myself, in fact—of Alfred Barr at Johns’s groundbreaking 1958 show at Castelli, wanting to buy Target for Plaster Casts for MoMA, but only if Johns agreed to permanently closing the little door on the cast plaster penis. Johns refused again, and so Barr bought Target with Four Faces instead [and later gave the Sculls retroactive credit for the purchase, which they had nothing to do with], along with two other works, and he arranged for Philip Johnson to buy his other problematic fave, Flag, so he wouldn’t have to rationalize it to MoMA’s other trustees. And so Target with Plaster Casts became one of just two paintings that didn’t sell from that show. [Except that Leo Castelli bought it for himself, and kept it 35 years. So really, only White Flag didn’t sell, which is a mystery for another day.]

Anyway, a recent rightwing-coded attempt to rebrand AI fabrications as Saidiya Hartman-style critical fabulation reminded me of some of the contorted criticism of Johns’s work, his early work, and particularly Target with Plaster Casts. Gavin Butt’s 2005 dissertation on art world gossip, Between You And Me: Queer Disclosures in the New York Art World 1948-1963, is an important and fascinating excavation, not just of often underground context of queer art history; it also makes the case for pulling what had been considered out-of-bounds subjects into meaningful, even revelatory art discourse.

But Butt also writes some hilariously cringe speculative monologues, ventriloquizing contemporary responses to Target with Plaster Casts from the likes of Barr and Andy Warhol. So instead of worrying about trustee reactions or public controversy, Butt imagines Barr angsting out out over his unexpected attraction to Johns’s [sic] penis, while Warhol size queens out about it, certain that it is, in fact, Johns’s, right? This emphasis, like Fred Orton’s much more muted but uptight interpretations, and Jill Johnston’s interviewing, and Jonathan Katz’s queer metaphors, and a lot of criticism since the mid-1990s, ends up concentrating on autobiography and Johns’s identity—acknowledged or not, performed properly [sic] or not—as a gay man.

a young jasper johns leaning insouciantly, fingers interlaced, chin on hands, on the top of his sturdy wooden artwork, target with plaster casts, with three of the nine wooden doors closed, so he can fit, and the red yellow and blue target below him. he stands on a black and white tile floor, in a bright photo studio with black backdrop. above and behind him is target with four faces, a similar painting in color and composition, except there's one wide door open to show four plaster faces instead of various body parts. there's a red chair on the left edge. dan budnik took this portrait photo in 1958, and this particular print of it is for sale at etherton gallery in tucson for, i am sure, a fair price — See? He’s not doctrinaire about it: Dan Budnik, Jasper Johns at the Ernst Haas Studio with Target with Plaster Casts and Target with Four Faces, East 71st Street, New York, 1958, signed archival pigment print, 22 x 17 in., at Etherton Gallery

And suddenly it occurs to me that these constructions don’t do justice to Target with Plaster Casts specifically, and vice versa, and actually even miss some key things Johns was doing, and the context in which he did them. Here’s what I’m wondering, seeing and thinking: my sense is, this work is not an anomaly, but fits in perfectly with what Johns was making and seeing at the time, and with how he worked. And it wasn’t abandoned, a path not taken; it resonates with things he continued to explore.

Helter Skelter, Reviewed

I want to sit down with you all and read Aruna D’Souza’s review of Helter Skelter together, out loud, and then read it again:

The show pairs two artists — one Black, one white — who have trained their vision for decades on both the US’s foundational violences and its rarer, complicated moments of beauty, through strategies of appropriation. Taken together, their work becomes a bracing indictment-slash-love letter to a deeply flawed nation.

But to my mind, what makes the exhibition even more quintessentially American is the fact that the curator seems — almost perversely — unable to face (or at least name) the racial implications of her own curatorial conceit.

D’Souza gets at the heart of what I’ve sensed about the show [from afar so far] but couldn’t articulate so well: that it doesn’t quite have a handle on what Jafa and Prince are actually doing as their work conveys the experiences of, respectively, Black and white culture.

Also, it still seems buck wild to me that this supposed powerful reckoning of The Real American Pavilion is happening at the Prada Foundation. Also, it still feels to me that a show titled Helter Skelter should have Cady Noland in it, and while I’m thinking about it, a Noland/Jafa show is something I would like to see.

Helter Skelter can’t look America in the eye [hyperallergic]
Previously, related: The Spiritual American Pavilion

Happiness is no Readymade

Happy art advisors floating down the Rhine with your belongings in tethered ziploc bags trailing behind season to all who celebrate.

a shaggy haired and mustachioed art gallerist is reflected a couple of times in a pale aqua multilayer, mirror, lacquer, and polished aluminum artwork by monica bonvicini that reads happiness is no readymade in atypically spaced and kerned text, part of the offering at art basel 2026 by tanya bonakdar gallery — Monica Bonvicini, Happiness, 2026, 2 Components lacquer, mirror, aluminum, 150 x 100 cm, via Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

Meanwhile, I’m just staring in dazzled awe at the shimmering totality of Tanya Bonakdar Gallery’s Art Basel booth this year.

Among the glassy highlights: one of Monica Bonvicini’s mirror text works that simultaneously seduce with your own tinted reflection in a catchy text—Happiness is no Readymade—and unsettle with kerning-induced anxiety.

a 14.6 meter square panel of mirror polished aluminum with the cropped text, i do you in giant black letters leans against and towers over the modernist glass box on a stepped plinth of mies van der rohe's neue nationalgalerie in berlin, for monica bonvicini's 2022 show. photo, like every other art world photo in berlin, by jens ziehe — installation view, Monica Bonvicini, I do you, 2022, black foil on alucobond, aluminum trusses, 14.6 x 14.6 m, at the Neue Nationalgalerie, photo: Jens Ziehe via monicabonvicini.net

Bonvicini started the series in 2022, the same time she had an amazing show at the Neue Nationalegalerie in Berlin, I do you, that was fronted by a similarly tensely composed and cropped text on a mirror-finish aluminum panel.

Fun fact: in addition to the rubble and original glass from the just-completed renovation of the Neue Nationalgalerie, Bonvicini’s upper floor installation also included a structural sign element reading DESIRE, which in 2025 became a tattoo edition available through worksonskin.

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, Art Basel 2026 Online Viewing Room [tanyabonakdargallery]

Previously, related, Bonvicini meets Bonnefous: Felix Gonzalez-Torres Tattoo: Origins

Duane Michals, The Bunch of Violets, 1872, 1983/2020

duane michals' 1983 photo of a tabletop in the manet's house has a small framed painting of violets and a closed fan in between a vase of red tulips and three short stacks of old art history reference books for morisot and renoir. the photo is in much larger black page, with the bunch of violets, 1872, written in silver underneath, as michals often did — Michals Manet Bunch of VIolets, 1872, 1983 via

Duane Michals died this week; he was 94. via Wayne Bremser comes an incredible archive at the Yale-hosted Praxis, of the archival photos, pdfs, and videos Michals began sending around to friends and colleagues during the COVID era. @bremser has pulled some interviews and video shorts, particularly. I’ll flag just one incredible pdf, sent on Sept 24, 2020, when Michals recounted his visit in 1983 to the descendants of Édouard Manet [manet.pdf]:

Everything there was something thrilling to see. One of my favorite paintings by him is of a little bouquet of violets and a ladie’s fan, and they owned it. I could pick it up, look at the back of it, and feel its patina.

Originally a gift to Berthe Morisot, the Manet family also owned the artist’s portrait of Morisot, which is now in the Musée d’Orsay.

Duane Michals PDFs [museumofnonvisibleart via @bremser]
previously, related: Not a Manet Facsimile Object

This Week At The Brooklyn Rail: Venice, Duchamp, Sepuya

The Brooklyn Rail was en fuego this week:

I spoil nothing by quoting the kicker from Jesse Weaver Shipley’s powerful, broad, and focused review of In Minor Keys, Koyo Kouoh’s Venice Biennale, realized after her recent death by her team of collaborators [shoutout to one of that team, @siddharthamiter, for the heads up]:

The uniqueness of this Venice Biennale is in positing African curation as an ontological stance from which to watch, listen, apprehend, adapt, connect fragments of the world, and forge new embodied modes of communication.

Shipley has deep, full looks at many African participants whose contributions to the Biennale I’ve not seen discussed too much elsewhere, and certainly not with any depth. I only single out blaxTARLINES KUMASI because the Ghanaian art/teaching collective’s name has the same Marcus Garvey reference that moves through Kahlil Joseph’s collaborative film/installation BLKNWS.

Between In Minor Keys, BLKNWS and the expanded Arthur Jafa-verse, and Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman’s mindblowing 2021 Afrofuturist musical Neptune Frost, it really does feel like a generative African/diasporic vision is coming into fuller view, not just of itself, but the world. And if white American/European critics and audience don’t recognize or resonate with key aspects of it, maybe that’s because for once/again, it’s not for them/us.

The New Social Environment panel with all three curators of the Duchamp retrospective: Matthew Affron, Michelle Kuo, and Ann Temkin was moderated by none other than Thierry du Duve. On the one hand, it’s amazing to have a moderator who’s as expert on the artist as the curators; on the other, a slightly less erudite interlocutor might have couched more things in the form of a question than a statement. But then we would not have had the fireworks of Francis Naumann refuting some of du Duve’s statements.

Though I don’t have enough basis to assess du Duve’s claims about Duchamp’s painting fails, I lean towards Naumann, whose decades of researching and dealing with Duchamp’s art objects feels of a piece with the material, chronological grounding of MoMA’s show.

I had a conflict and missed the NSE conversation with Paul Mpagi Sepuya, but it’s online now, so none of us has any excuse left. Will report back.

Codex Twombly

I have been waiting since February, when greg.org hero Jack sent along the link to the Master Drawings Symposium, for video of this year’s Ricciardi Prize lecture by Giovanni Lusi. I finally watched it, and it’s great.

screenshot of a horst photo of cy twombly's bookshelf with a gerhard richter grisaille portrait of a lady's head on the floor next to a bust of a caesar. to the right are four books of old master artworks giovani lusi identified from their spines in the photo. — While everyone else was distracted by the Richter, Giovanni Lusi was reading the spines of Twombly’s bookshelf. Screenshot from his 2026 Drawing Masters Symposium lecture via vimeo

Of course, anyone who reconstructs the period library of Cy Twombly by analyzing the spines on a bookshelf in the 1966 Vogue Horst photoshoot is going to have my attention. Lusi’s work goes beyond the circumstantial to trace Twombly’s early, formative engagement in Rome with the works of Old Masters—in this case, Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings and codices.

a slide from giovanni lusi's lecture on twombly and leonardo shows a page from codex atlantico covered with little diagrams, blocks of texts, and sketches. on the right is a twombly drawing with a less dense composition, but similarly filled by texts, crossed out texts, small sketches and diagrams, in a way that echoes leonardo's own ersatz composition. — Screenshot of a slide from Giovanni Lusi’s 2026 Drawing Masters Symposium lecture showing a page from Leonardo’s Codex Atlanticus and Twombly’s Delian Ode 55, 1961, which was shown in Geneva in 1963. The brochure has a collage of Twombly’s head peeking out from Leonardo’s beard. Incredible stuff.

Lusi locates specific references and connections between Twombly drawings and paintings, including unearthing gallery checklists that show works with original titles like, “About Leonardo.” But the most fascinating thing for me was the link between Twombly’s all-over text and diagram painting compositions and the packed, palimpsest content of a Leonardo codex. It’s a reference I imagine almost no one at the time would have suggested for a young contemporary painter—and apparently one which few Twombly observers have recognized since.

There’s much more to be understood about how Twombly worked, and whether he worked from encountering Old Master originals, or—as Lusi suggests—from studying them in reproduction. When he offhandedly identifies the paperback source of a set of Leonardo collages Twombly made in Captiva in 1968, it makes a strong case for an entire dissertation just on Twombly’s library.

[few minutes later update] Come for the Twombly X Leonardo, stay for Femke Speelberg’s introduction to a fascinating, monumental 15th century architectural rendering which is the centerpiece of a show at the Met right now.

Fernand Nadal Gets Out Of Saigon

I’ve had my copy of Nihon No Minka for 30 years, and I only just found these three photos between the book and the dust jacket.

three black and white photos stacked on a wood tabletop to give a sense of what they are without subjecting these early 20th century people to too much more colonial male gaze. they are all portraits of indigenous people, mostly lined up in a group, but the one on top is a man in a loincloth standing in front of a raised thatch house, while dozens of people in white european suits mill about in the distant background. all are by fernand nadal, a french photographer in saigon from 1920 to 1940 or so

They’re stamped Photo NADAL Saigon, the mark of Fernand Nadal, who operated a photo studio in Saigon for several decades in the early 20th century, when France still called the southern region of Vietnam Cochinchine.

Nadal did lots of work for colonial companies and surveyors, and most of the images I see online are from his souvenir postcard sets. They’re almost all cities, though, buildings and public spaces mostly devoid of people.

These are actual silver gelatin prints, 18 x 24 cm (actually around 17 x 23 by my quick check), with portraits of indigenous people in a rural village setting. The one photo of a man has a larger group of people in colonial dress in the background, but otherwise, everyone is South Vietnamese or Cambodian. Maybe the group of women are photographed under the same house the guy is standing in front of, I haven’t Errol Morris’d them yet.

There Is No Me in Minka

a two page spread of a large book on a wood table is open to a black and white photo from the 1950s of an early 19th century sake shop in hiroshima, with a vast single room and a high ceiling made of impossibly thick curved wood beams. the ground floor is filled with white rectangles like tables or tanks or something related to sake i guess the point is these sick beams tho — Mukai-ya, a sake shop in Hiroshima built in 1832, 📷: Futagawa Yukio via Nihon no Minka

The months after coming back from Japan are always when it hits the hardest, the desire to live in a minka by the sea. Except most minka are not by the sea, so you’d have to move it there. Or you’d have to live where the minka remain, in the mountains.

a large photobook from 1962 sits open on a wooden tabletop to a large black and white photo that fills two pages. the image is of a village in kyushu japan with thatched roofs, stretching toward a small hill in the background. nihon no minka — whole bunch of minka in Satsuma Shinashi, Kagoshima, I think, 📷: Futagawa Yukio for Nihon no Minka

Instead, I just pull out my copy of Itõ Teiji and Futagawa Yukio’s incredible 1957-59 survey of minka, 日本の民家, and soak in it. I read Craig Mod’s accounts of walks, and consider that rapidly depopulating rural Japan is probably not the place for foreigners to grow old in.

And then I rewatch Minka, Davina Pardo’s extraordinary 2011 short film about the love and life of two men and their house. And as I wonder if Yoshihiro Takishita still has any minka lying around, waiting to be reassembled, and then I’m like, yeah, three hundred years in, the heating really does sound like an unsolved issue, maybe I’ll just visit.

Previously, related: Kusakabe House, Takayama

In Gropius-Bau What’d Andy Do? A Speer Lichtdom Erect

thomas hoepker photo of andy warhol from 1981, with andy in jeans, a white shirt and green and blue rep tie, standing sheepishly, as if andy had any other posing mode, next to a stuffed great dane mounted on a pedestal, and with a stacked diptych in red above white of a black silkscreened image of albert speer's lichtdom, the cathedral of light the nazi architect created for a nazi party rally in nuremberg in 1934. the screenprinting process abstracts the beams of light, which are inverted and painted black, and form a slightly conical structure that would have been visible in the cloudy night sky. — 1981 pic by Magnum photographer Thomas Hoepker of Andy Warhol at 860 Broadway with the caption identifying the stuffed dog, but not the Albert Speer-related paintings behind him, via @twixnmix via @voorwerk

I swear, until this morning I was just going to like and reblog this photo of Warhol and move on. And then the Angel of History started piling rubble on top of rubble on the White House lawn.

Albert Speer was Hitler’s favorite architect, and Andy Warhol loved him. In the early 80s he made multiple paintings of Speer’s Lichtdom, and they seem to exist only in the backgrounds of snapshots of Warhol himself. Though they appeared in a major international exhibition in 1982, they seem to have been ignored by dealers and curators and historians then and since.

Museums Will Not Save Us, Annotated

“The Ultimate Fight ring had not yet been erected on the White House lawn.”

The first line of the survey I did for Art in America of museums’ America 250 shows already locks it into a slightly less bleak past, April, when this stupid UFC thing did not yet stand. And reading the piece for the first time in over a month, I gotta say, it goes downhill from there.

The headline is, “As the Country Turns 250, Why Won’t Its Museums Meet The Moment?” My editor’s working title for the piece was “Picturing Independence”; mine was “Museums Will Not Save Us.” It started bleak, and it got bleaker, but I am grateful for the opportunity and the insights and all the folks who helped along the way.

For reasons beyond me that perhaps relate to the article appearing first in print, the links I used for reference do not appear in the Art in America published version. So I’ve gathered them here, like bonus content for a DVD. [Ask your parents.]

“As the Country Turns 250, Why Won’t Its Museums Meet The Moment?” [art in america, summer 2026]

A YouTube video of the bonkers CG history of America projected on the Washington Monument beginning on New Years, 2026: