Resembling armor without a body underneath, shell is made from felt etching blankets from the shop, and, amid a writer’s strike in Los Angeles, she collaborated with a film industry designer in need of work, who was enlisted through Felsen’s connections. The work came to be almost serendipitously “because this is Hollywood, and because of Sidney Felsen,” Hamilton told writer Joan Simon in a 2008 interview.

Enlisting established artists, like Hamilton, to create new work is perhaps what Felsen, now 99, is most widely known for. Having founded Gemini in 1966 with his fraternity brother and art collector Stanley Grinstein, Felsen is now the subject of a monographic exhibition, on view through July 7 at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, that mines 50-years-worth of his photographic archive. The exhibition’s title puts it more succinctly: “First Came a Friendship: Sidney B. Felsen and the Artists at Gemini G.E.L.” The exhibition’s curator Naoko Takahatake selected images that Felsen took over more than five decades, culled from more than 70,000 images, donated to the GRI in 2019 by Jack Shear, the partner of Ellsworth Kelly, another frequent Gemini collaborator.

Alongside Tamarind Lithography Workshop and Cirrus Editions (both in Los Angeles) and Universal Limited Art Editions (in New York), Gemini G.E.L. was a part of a budding wave of art printers established in the 1960s and ’70s that attracted top artists as collaborators. Among them were Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Serra, David Hockney, Claes Oldenburg, and Roy Lichtenstein who could work through some of their most heady ideas in a different medium than they became famous for. In 1999, Claudine Ise wrote for the Los Angeles Times, that Felsen molded Gemini into “an arterial channel between the Los Angeles and New York art worlds.”

“When he really started getting serious about photography, he switched to a Leica and he preferred the rangefinder because of the quiet shutter,” Takahatake told ARTnews in a recent interview.

Felsen, according to Takahatake, wanted to be a fly on the wall, preferring to be unseen and unheard to avoid disrupting their artistic processes. “He said the two words he felt he needed to live by were silent and invisible. One of the greatest compliments he felt someone could pay him was, when they would say: I didn’t even realize that you were there,” Takahatake said.

In the mid-’60s, Felsen brought in artists primarily on his own instinct, mailing postcards that acted as cold invitations to collaborate. That process would lead him to that building out a personal network with some of the mid-20th century’s biggest creative forces. Critics and historians who have analyzed Gemini’s peak years have emphasized how Felsen and Grinstein, who died in 2014, gave artists unusual amount of freedom to work, seemingly without any financial or material restrictions. A 2010 Artforum review of a Robert Rauschenberg show detailed how critical the shop was to the artist and his peers, providing an atmosphere that gave them “free rein and seemingly unlimited resources.”

There were few other artists who produced as much under Felsen’s tutelage as Rauschenberg. In a 2013 interview, Felsen recalled first meeting the artist, who was looking to make a full-body print using a medical X-Ray, at an airport in 1967. “He wanted one plate—6 feet—of his whole body. We found out there is no such thing in the United States—except that Eastman Kodak in Rochester had a six-foot machine,” Felsen said in the 2013 interview. For another project Felsen took Rauschenberg to a Los Angeles Times printing facility to scour through metal type barrels for material; it was one of some 50 times Rauschenberg came to the shop over the next three decades. Felsen balanced being a close friend, while giving Rauschenberg the space to ideate, often watching in awe at the speed of Rauschenberg’s creative spurts. “He never looked back at his work,” Felsen said.

Because Felsen sought to capture the print shop’s private moments, he never intended to publish his archive of images, which lined the studio’s walls. Until 2003, they went uncatalogued. And that approach allowed him to get a level of candid access that most journalists would dream of. “I can’t work in front of people,” Tacita Dean, a Turner Prize–winning artist who works primarily in photography and film, told the Getty for an essay accompanying the show. “It’s another eye in the room and the sense that somebody’s watching you. But Sidney’s photographs don’t have that.”

There’s a sense of a palpable joy in Felsen’s photographs, in which now famous artists resemble students at play, their expressions mostly candid and unserious. In one, David Hockney tacks drawings of his inner circle to Gemini’s walls, while in another, Richard Serra keeps his heads down, pouring black paint on the floor. “I think something that is quite notable about Gemini is the fact that they had to foster these long-term relationships with artists—it was by invitation,” Takahatake said.

“A lot of my friend were artists or just collectors,” Felsen said in the 2013 interview, describing how he’d put aside his career as an accountant to work with artists. Initially, he focused on LA artists, but he soon found himself nearly at the center of the global art world. In 1966, through chance, Man Ray, ever an enigma of an artist, came to Gemini when he had a retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The Surrealist had recently relocated from Paris to LA, focusing on commissioned photographs for fashion magazines; the museum arranged for him to stay at Grinstein’s house, bringing him into Gemini’s circle.

Decades later, with a close-knit yet expansive network, Felsen continued to run the shop until 2018, at the age of 93, always with the guiding principle, as Takahatake put it, of “how to be a good friend.”

In 2015, the Rauschenberg Foundation, which manages the late artist’s estate, left Gagosian, which has been its gallery since his death in 2008, for a trio of galleries consisting of Ropac, Strina, and Pace. Pace last mounted a Rauschenberg solo exhibition at its New York space in 2021, which focused on his work from the 1980s through the mid-2000s.

In a statement sent to ARTnews, Pace said it had stopped working with the estate “in a formal capacity” in 2020: “We were honored to represent Bob during his lifetime and to collaborate with him on the realization of several major institutional projects and commissions. We remain dedicated to preserving his legacy and will continue to stage projects related to the significant Rauschenberg works in our possession. We wish the Foundation team a very successful collaboration with Gladstone.”

Last year, Gladstone mounted a two-part exhibition of Rauschenberg’s work, featuring his “Venetians” (1972–73) and “Early Egyptians” (1973–74) series. In a press release, Gladstone said that following that show’s “success,” this new relationship marks Gladstone’s “continued commitment to preserving the legacy of Robert Rauschenberg’s remarkable life and work and expanding upon his impact on contemporary artists working today.”

Kathy Halbreich, the foundation’s executive director, said in a statement, “Working with Barbara Gladstone and Max Falkenstein last spring was an immense pleasure especially as many artists saw the sculptures and, in their elated comments, suggested just how prescient Bob remains today. I am so grateful that Bob’s work will be seen alongside the remarkable roster of artists Gladstone Gallery nurtures.”

For its part, Gladstone will bring one work by Rauschenberg to Art Basel Hong Kong next week, a 1991 black-and-white piece, Maybe Market (Night Shade), priced between $800,000 and $1 million, according to FT. And it will mount an exhibition of the artist’s “Spreads” (1975–83) and “Scales” (1977–81) series in May at its West 21st Street location in Chelsea.

Considered one of the most important artists of the second half of the 20th century, Rauschenberg is known for his “Combines” series, begun in the mid-1950s, which drastically departed from the Abstract Expressionists who were in vogue at the time in New York art world. Those works merged painting and sculpture, often with found, everyday objects, into something entirely its own. A relentless experimenter, Rauschenberg created numerous other kinds of art in the decades that followed.

In a statement, gallery founder Barbara Gladstone said, “We feel incredibly grateful for this opportunity to work alongside the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation leadership and staff to help realize their mission of supporting innovative artists, art organizations, and socially engaged institutions, as well as the continued research and contextualization of Rauschenberg’s impressive body of work. There is so much to be discovered and discussed about his radically inventive approach to artmaking, and we are honored to take on this significant responsibility alongside the Foundation.”

Update, March 17, 2023: This article has been updated to include a statement from Pace Gallery.

The building now houses the Foundation’s offices, as well as exhibition galleries and an archive. Those attending exhibitions can find examples of Rauschenberg’s and others’ work on display. There are no residential areas accessible to visitors, but his kitchen is visitable.

Researchers can request an appointment to carry out research at the foundation’s archives at the house, though appointments are “mostly limited to students and professionals,” a spokesperson for the foundation told Hyperallergic in a report Monday.

Rauschenberg purchased the five-story building at 381 Lafayette Street in 1965. Situated between Manhattan’s NoHo and SoHo neighborhoods, it was originally constructed as a townhouse; in the early 1800s it became the administrative offices for an adjacent orphanage, and later, a school. Though the school relocated to Staten Island in 1929, the convent and offices stayed.

After Rauschenberg purchased the building, he spent a year renovating it, removing religious fixtures such as an altar from the chapel—though it still boasts three iconic Gothic lancet windows. At that time, SoHo was an up-and-coming neighborhood for New York artists and galleries, and Rauschenberg regularly exhibited art and held parties.

Rauschenberg is perhaps best known for his “Combines” series of the 1950s and ’60s: paintings and collages into which he incorporated ready-made materials like taxidermy animals, fans, and pillows. Before he controversially won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 1964, he had collaborated with painters such as Jasper Johns and Cy Twombly, as well as dancer Merce Cunningham, who used some of Rauschenberg’s work as stage backdrops.

The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation also maintains a studio space that the artist had in Captiva, Florida, where he moved in 1970. It is also at work on a catalogue raisonné that is expected to take 15 to 20 years to complete. The first volume is slated to be published in 2025.

Highlights on view there range from surveys of new work by today’s top artists to rare looks at under-recognized series by well-known giants of art history. At times, it can feel like there are too many exhibitions on view to know what to do with. To help you comb through them, ARTnews has selected five to see during Frieze New York.

The Headlines

THE FUTURE IS NOW. After eight years of restoration that included the use of gel infused with grime-destroying bacteria, Michelangelo’s marble Medici chapel is officially back on view in Florence, the Guardian reports. For the bacteria connoisseur: Three strains were used, including Serratia ficaria SH7. Cleaning was apparently extra difficult because liquids from Alessandro Medici’s remains had stained the stone. Meanwhile, an AI program has been developed by DeepMind (of Alphabet, née Google) that aims to restore missing text in ancient Greek inscriptions, and date that material, the Verge reports. And “Virtual Veronese,” an exhibition at London’s National Gallery that uses virtual reality to set works by that maestro in their original settings, is “thought-provoking, touching, fun, and free,” Jackie Wullschläger says in the Financial Times.

FINANCIAL LITERACY. Today’s papers bear two stories about artists who address money in their work. The Guardian chatted with Rachael Clerke, who is staging a project at a community center in Bristol, England, called “Transactionland” that includes a kind of shoplifting roleplaying game and a “Debt Gala,” inspired by the luxe Met Gala. Speaking of the Met, the New York Times spoke with Emilie Lemakis, a guard at the museum who has made buttons for some of her colleagues that state the length of their tenure at the museum and their hourly rate. “I had this fantasy of everyone who worked in the museum wearing a button,” she told journalist Colin Moynihan, explaining that a “lot of people feel ashamed by what they make and I think that’s wrong.”

The Digest

Three galleries are joining forces to show work from the 1970s through the ‘90s by Robert Rauschenberg that is coming from the artist’s foundation: Thaddaeus Ropac (in Salzburg, Austria), Gladstone (New York), and Mnuchin (ditto). The foundation’s advisor, Allan Schwartzman, termed the artist “the most undervalued artist of the postwar period.” [Financial Times]

An exhibition at the Museum of the Liberation of Paris, “Women War Photographers,” looks at eight of them, including Gerda Taro, who was killed during the Spanish Civil War in 1937, and Lee Miller. “We felt it was important to feature women photojournalists who were underrepresented in research, catalogs, and museum exhibitions,” said art historian Anne-Marie Beckmann, who organized a version of the show in 2019 at the Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf, Germany. [The New York Times]

Are you an art leader interested in living in beautiful Baltimore, Maryland? This is your moment. No fewer than three august institutions in Charm City are looking for directors: the Baltimore Museum of Art, the American Visionary Art Museum, and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. AVAM may announce its pick within a month, while the BMA’s search to replace Christopher Bedford (tapped in February to lead SFMOMA) “could be a yearlong quest,” journalist Mary Carole McCauley reports. [Baltimore Sun and Baltimore Sun]

Fourth-generation art collector Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza got the profile treatment from Hilarie M. Sheets. “Collecting is not an indulgence,” Thyssen-Bornemisza said. “You may think you own something that is indeed seductive, interesting, beautiful, but it is your responsibility to protect it, to nurture it, to bring it back out of the cobwebs, to revisit it, to republish it.” [The New York Times]

Pussy Riot member Nadya Tolokonnikova (who made an appearance in yesterday’s “Breakfast” due to her crypto endeavors) has curated a show of public art on advertising spaces in the United States. [The Art Newspaper]

An update: The rare Harry Potter first edition that was defaced with incredible drawings by an unknown youth, and purchased for £0.50 in a charity shop (as mentioned here recently), sold for £15,500 (about $20,400)—more than five times its top estimate!—at Hansons in Staffordshire, England. “What a battle for the battered and bruised Potter,” said auctioneer Charles Hanson, who mused that the volume “deserves to be in a museum.” (It went to a U.S. collector.) [BBC News]

The Kicker

THE SOUND OF SUCCESS. A 1714 Stradivarius violin known as the “da Vinci, Ex-Seidel” (no relation to Leonardo, apparently) will be offered at an online auction from Tarisio (a fine-instruments specialist), with a top estimate of $20 million, Bloomberg reports. That figure is quite a bit higher than the $25,000 that a prior owner, Russian-American musician Toscha Seidel , paid for it in 1924. (Adjusting for inflation, that would be around $413,000 today.) “From the musician’s standpoint, it’s definitely priceless,” Tarisio director Carlos Tomé told the outlet. “From the audience point of view also it’s priceless, but you have to put a monetary value to it.” [Bloomberg]

On Tuesday, the New York–based foundation revealed plans to kick off a multivolume catalogue raisonné for the artist that will exist online, where it will be made available free of cost to all. In 2025, the foundation will unveil the first two volumes—one that acts as an overview of Rauschenberg’s work, the other featuring an in-depth record of all works he produced between 1948 and 1953.

The catalogue raisonné will deal only with Rauschenberg’s paintings and sculptures (including his famed “Combines”), so it is set to exclude his drawings, prints, and works in other mediums. Still, all told, the catalogue raisonné will cover some 3,000 paintings and sculptures by the artist, who died at 82 in 2008. The scope of the project and its ability to be reedited as needed—an intervention only possible because it is digital—are meant to act as a reflection of Rauschenberg’s own ethos. Julia Blaut, the senior director of curatorial affairs at the foundation who has been overseeing the catalogue raisonné with Eric Banks, said in an interview, “There is this kind of messiness to Rauschenberg’s career, and we didn’t want to artificially clean it up.”

Kathy Halbreich, the executive director of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, said that the unusual format for the catalogue raisonné is in part a response to the “fluid, nonbinary” nature of Rauschenberg’s practice. Because the catalogue raisonné is free, she continued, it “allows us to serve a broader audience than most [catalogues raisonnés] do, which are first about the market and second about scholarship.”

A catalogue raisonné is typically composed of an exhaustive listing of artworks by a given artist, and this one will indeed serve that purpose, too. But whereas catalogues raisonnés can often be inaccessible to people who don’t have graduate degrees in art history, this one will function more like the luxe tones that accompany major artist retrospectives, with essays by artists and art historians that elucidate aspects of Rauschenberg’s life and art.

Art historian Michael Lobel will address historiography surrounding Rauschenberg, and artist Amy Sillman will address the interplay of ready-made images and gestural abstraction in Rauschenberg’s paintings. Whitney Museum conservator Matthew Skopek and historian Darby English will write on the same work: Untitled [four panel glossy black painting] (ca. 1951), which dates back to Rauschenberg’s early period. Other essays will be penned by curators Carlos Basualdo, Helen Molesworth, and Courtney J. Martin, and by artists Glenn Ligon and Terry Winters.

Halbreich described the project as a constantly evolving one that has been constantly in flux—partly because of Covid, which has prevented the foundation from examining certain works, and partly because it was always intended that way. “Most catalogues raisonnés are done,” Halbreich said. “That’s it. That’s the man, that’s the life, that’s the woman’s ambition, the end. This doesn’t really have a ‘the end’ to it, and I think that’s really suitable for this artist.”

Correction, 2/1/21, 10:50 a.m.: A previous version of this article misstated the scope of the catalogue raisonné project. It will cover Rauschenberg’s paintings and sculptures, not just his paintings. Additionally, Julia Blaut’s last name was misspelled.

The gossip, like much of the vividly reported sex, is quite hot. Warhol was orally fixated and didn’t like to be touched; there’s a scene of foot worship, too. Rauschenberg’s asshole—which he became “addicted” to opening to Giorno—was “soft, silken, voluptuous.” Giorno also takes credit for permanently enlarging the size of Rauschenberg’s nipples through his loving attention to them. With Johns there’s a lot of morning sex, glossed over with an uncharacteristic lack of specificity, though we’re assured their lovemaking was “wonderful.”

Some of the sex comes off as more complicated: fucking Burroughs (a habitual premature ejaculator) for the first time, Giorno thinks: “Your dick is as small as a clitoris. You misogynist, if you knew that I’m thinking that your ass is a cunt and your cock is a clit, you’d explode with anger.” They have a threesome with Allen Ginsberg, Giorno’s lifelong frenemy. Sucking Ginsberg’s dick, Giorno writes, is “a fate worse than death.”

If you fear I’ve given all the juicy parts away, don’t worry, there’s plenty more. Giorno and Rauschenberg first get together after Rauschenberg shows up—heartbroken—at his apartment, in a nearly successful attempt to catch his then boyfriend, choreographer Steve Paxton, in flagrante delicto with Giorno! Giorno also dates Brion Gysin—who hates his Tangier neighbor Jane Bowles! There are plenty of details about art and poetry, too: accounts of openings, performances, dinners, and parties. But taking a cue from Giorno’s own narrative priorities, it seems appropriate to lead with sex.

John Giorno, Great Demon Kings: A Memoir of Poetry, Sex, Art, Death, and Enlightenment, New York, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2020; 368 pages, $28 hardcover

The impulse behind Giorno’s candor is, importantly, not vindictive—perhaps with the exception of how he portrays his relationship with the intensely private Rauschenberg, who once threatened to sue if Giorno included him in the memoir. Still, this book isn’t so much a tell-all out to settle scores as it is an organic extension of Giorno’s unyielding sex positivity. Even those not-quite-idyllic encounters mentioned above are, in Giorno’s account of them, made beautiful. His first time with Burroughs culminates in a spiritual experience (he feels as though he achieves union with death in the moment of Burroughs’s orgasm) and lays the foundation for an enduring friendship. When he and Ginsberg share a cab downtown after the threesome, he describes a moment of “pure transcendent connection” between them.

For a memoir by a gay man who came of age in the mid-twentieth century, Giorno’s book is—like the life it describes—astonishingly free of shame. His parents, well-to-do Italian Americans who worked in the fashion industry, are peripheral but supportive figures. There’s no coming-out narrative here, not even a coming-to-terms with his sexuality, just one mention of a high school girlfriend in the preface and, four pages later, Giorno’s first self-identification as a “gay poet,” during his sophomore year at Columbia. Of his twenty-one-year-old self in 1958, Giorno writes: “I was young and beautiful and that got me what I wanted and all I wanted was sex.”

Giorno’s unabashed celebration of gay sex set him apart from many of his lovers, particularly Rauschenberg, whose calculated reticence he respected (in his lifetime, at least) even as he firmly rejected it for himself. Giorno cites his “Pornographic Poem,” composed of language appropriated from a gay erotic story, as an early career breakthrough. The poem first appeared in Ted Berrigan’s mimeographed magazine C and was later included in An Anthology of New York Poets, published by Random House. Giorno never considered himself part of the New York School, however, and has choice words about a few of its members: in one pivotal scene, Frank O’Hara—who “could be a bitch”—and John Ashbery give a reading Giorno finds so boring that it spurs him on to his subsequent innovations in performance and sound poetry.

Giorno’s not shy about anything in this book, including own his good looks—ample evidence of which Warhol furnished, for example in Sleep (1964), his five-hour-and-twenty-minute film of Giorno sleeping. But Giorno’s pulchritude was also the source of an insecurity unique to pretty people: the fear that he was afforded his early opportunities on account of his attractiveness (and the famous lovers it attracted) rather than his talent, and that those famous lovers would forever overshadow him. Of his rise in the late ’60s, he wonders: “As a young poet, did I deserve it? […] Or was I just a beautiful piece of meat?” Recalling an Anne Waldman poem about visiting Johns in the Outer Banks that makes no mention of Giorno—even though she joined the vacationing couple on his invitation—he writes: “It felt all too familiar: as I had been with Andy, and then Bob, I was edited out of my lovers’ stories.”

That moment might be key to understanding an implicit project of Giorno’s memoir: to reassert his presence, unequivocally, in the record. But an unfortunate consequence of that agenda is how much time and space Giorno devotes to his various lovers at the expense of writing in greater detail about the rest of his life—including his own work. The book’s subtitle—“A Memoir of Poetry, Sex, Art, Death, and Enlightenment”—would more accurately reflect the book’s content if “sex” topped the list.

We get glimpses, of course, of Giorno’s artistic and curatorial practice: “Pornographic Poem” (not, frankly, his best) is reproduced in full; he recounts collaborating with Bob Moog on sound poems using the Moog synthesizer, as well as the comic ease with which a weekend of reputation-making poetry concerts at Central Park’s Naumburg Bandshell in August 1968 came together (“I told the city I wanted to have a poetry festival, and they said, Wonderful, come get a permit”). The most illuminating section on his own work describes Dial-a-Poem, the poetry-on-demand phone service Giorno devised and managed in 1968–69. A single telephone number connected callers to a rotating collection of recorded readings by Giorno and various friends—John Cage, Jim Carroll, and Bernadette Mayer among them—in an attempt to realize Duchamp’s wish to “send art over the telephone.” The original Dial-a-Poem ran for nine months, during which time it became a media sensation, especially after an obscenity complaint, lodged by a mother enraged to discover her twelve-year-old son listening to Carroll’s ribald contribution, led to a brief shutdown. Though Dial-a-Poem has been staged multiple times since (including a 1970 installation at the Museum of Modern Art) and is currently operational at +1 (641) 793-8122, it’s thrilling to read about the first launch—and the technical obstacles Giorno overcame to keep it running.

Brion Gysin in Tangier, Morocco, in April 1966, photographed by John Giorno.

More often than not, however, Giorno’s non-romantic recollections tend to be cursory. He dedicates just two pages to the AIDS Treatment Project, which he founded in 1984 to redistribute money raised through his record label, Giorno Poetry Systems, to people with AIDS. Supported by benefit concerts and artist-donated royalties, the AIDS Treatment Project offered emergency cash grants of up to $5,000; by 1994, it had given  $460,732. In a moment of renewed interest in and support for mutual aid, this initiative seems to merit a longer, more edifying discussion.

Throughout the book, Giorno’s Tibetan Buddhist practice informs the vocabulary and perspective with which he narrates the events of his life; many passages wouldn’t be out of place in a Dharma talk. Of writing his first poem, in high school, Giorno recalls, “When it was finished, I felt very happy—a bright white feeling, a brief moment of bliss. From which comes the words follow your heart.” But his description, in the book’s final section, of traveling to India to meet his root teacher Dudjom Rinpoche, is rather anticlimactic. Even his account of visiting the Dalai Lama (having tagged along with fourteen-month-old Uma Thurman and her parents, notable Buddhists) lacks the vigor of his writing—so rich in passion and psychological insight—about his various love affairs. This might be endemic to the subject matter, or a problem of form. Though Giorno often wrote brilliantly in verse about seeking the end of seeking (see: “Grasping at Emptiness,” “Thanx 4 Nothing”), this paradox conforms less tidily to the conventions of narrative.

Giorno’s memoir is an incomplete self-portrait, even as it offers intimate perspectives on the great demon kings—“people controlled by their big egos”—he loved. Perhaps it’s meant to be a compliment that his partner for the last twenty-two years of his life, the artist Ugo Rondinone, is relegated to the brief epilogue. While anyone interested in the avant-garde circles in which Giorno was so enmeshed will find plenty to savor and be titillated by within, an unfamiliar reader could, I fear, come away from this book without a sense of what a truly mesmerizing performer he was. I suppose there’s YouTube for that. And, even as some of what motivates Giorno in this book seems to be a desire to edit himself back into his lovers’ stories (and claim responsibility for Rauschenberg’s “hog tits”), perhaps what’s lacking—a greater emphasis on his own art, curation, and organizing—is evidence of his approach, from another angle, of enlightenment. As he writes on the very last page: “I believe and feel in a soft way that I have lived a failed life because all my accomplishments were based on the force of my ego. I have one more really important thing to do, and this is to die.” Those of us who loved him only from afar are fortunate he graced us with this final word first.

Installation view of “Information,” 1970, at Museum of Modern Art, New York.

COURTESY MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

The Museum of Modern Art in New York will reopen after a $450 million renovation and expansion on October 21, marking one of the most dramatic transformations in the institution’s long and storied history. In the run-up to the museum’s next incarnation, ARTnews is looking back to important exhibitions from MoMA’s past and offering excerpts from articles and reviews from our archives—moving decade by decade from the museum’s inauguration to the present day. The fifth edition in this series features seven shows from the 1970s at MoMA, including a group exhibition that ushered in a new wave of Conceptualist art and a Stephen Shore outing that helped cement color photography as an artistic form of expression.

Frank Stella
March 24, 1970–June 2, 1970

The show: When Frank Stella became the subject of this exhibition, he was just 33 years old. He remains the youngest artist to ever receive a MoMA retrospective. The show included more than 60 paintings and drawings, including the work that is often considered Stella’s masterpiece, “Die Fahne Hoch!” (1959), which had figured also figured in 1959’s “16 Americans,” a classic show in MoMA’s exhibition history. Though critics had once considered Stella’s abstractions radical and new, some reviewing the exhibition said that they had begun to sour on his art, alleging that it had lost its edge.

What ARTnews said: “It is not too surprising that the Stella exhibition, organized by curator William Rubin, should come as a mixed blessing. This has nothing to do with the obviously vital questions posed by the show about Stella himself. As an artist Stella has been intelligent, consistent, relevant, prolific, highly influential and has turned out a body of work which has been, at least in terms of the issues it dealt with, close to the heart of much of the most serious painting and sculpture of the 1960s. Yet not only are there few surprises or insights forthcoming from the current presentation, but—more disturbing—it does not entirely sustain our recollections or expectations of provocation and profundity.” —Elizabeth C. Baker

“Information”
July 2, 1970–September 20, 1970

The show: This game-changing group show curated by Kynaston McShine, who died earlier this year, focused broadly on new modes of communication and is widely viewed as one of the most important Conceptual art shows of all time. “Information” generated a number of important artworks, including, perhaps most notably, Hans Haacke’s famed MoMA Poll (1970), in which visitors were asked to share whether they would be willing to vote for New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, a board member who had controversially supported the Vietnam War. With its emphasis on data and information over aesthetics and visual pleasure, the exhibition was perceived during its time as a welcome shock.

What ARTnews said: “If Action Painting apologized about the cracks in the carpet (the sidewalk), and the minims argued for three years about the accent in the ‘of’ in the phrase ‘the mother of John Ruskin,’ then these young men have lightened the accent, and we are very thankful that they have. But if Expressionism was a flight into illness, and Pop had a watery relationship with its unconscious, and if Minimalism was the insertion into the uterus, then these young men had better leave a string, to get out!” —David Shapiro

Installation view of “Barnett Newman,” 1971, at Museum of Modern Art.

COURTESY MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

Barnett Newman
October 21, 1971–January 10, 1972

The show: When Barnett Newman died in 1970, many felt that a giant of the New York art world had been lost. A little more than a year after his death, MoMA opened the first retrospective for the artist, who was best known for his pared-down abstractions, many of them featuring large color fields bisected by thin vertical lines that Newman called “zips.” A press release for the show billed Newman as “one of the most original and influential of the band of artists that emerged in the decade after World War II.” To mark the show, ARTnews asked a spread of artists, including Dan Flavin, Lee Krasner, and Tony Smith, to respond to Newman’s work.

What ARTnews said: “When I saw Newman’s show at French & Co. in 1959, I thought the paintings were good but I was kind of critical of him because of the geometry which I think was probably the problem Barney got into with everybody in the ’50s. I think people misread that geometry. I misread it too.” —Donald Judd

Marcel Duchamp
December 28, 1973–February 24, 1974

The show: Following a short delay caused by a strike led by a MoMA workers’ union, the museum opened the first Marcel Duchamp retrospective to ever be staged in New York. With more than 200 works on view, the show, which opened first at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and later traveled to the Art Institute of Chicago, was a rare glimpse at the full of the Dadaist’s art, whose influence could be felt everywhere in the years following his death.

What ARTnews said: “Like a law of his own ‘amusing physics,’ Marcel Duchamp’s role in the development of 20th-century art reversed the normal succession of events attendant upon the creation of a significant body of work…. Among the major artists of the 20th century, he seemed to offer the most viable alternatives to the emphasis on self-expression through the handling of paint that culminated in Abstract-Expressionism in the U.S. and the various manifestations in Europe. Duchamp had broken through all the categories—physical, technical, and esthetic—that had hitherto stratified the art world.” —John Tancock

“Photographs by Stephen Shore”
October 8, 1976–January 4, 1977

The show: At a time when many were just beginning to understand how photography could be art, MoMA took the daring step of showcasing work by Stephen Shore, whose pictures, shot during travels across America, departed from the old paradigms set down by the medium’s pioneers. Most notably, they were done in color, a style thought by many to be the stuff of fashion photography and advertising. In a press release, Shore was billed as being part of a “new generation” that had been raising color photography to the status of art. Critics, however, were suspicious.

What ARTnews said: “Stephen Shore’s photographs at the Museum of Modern Art raise a serious question for modern photography: what is the photographer’s contribution as compared to that of the popular artist who provides him his subject. Is it ‘Shore as photographer’ we really like, or simply the designer of the movie marquee he photographs, the signmaker of the fruit stand, the architects and planners who allowed a huge purple glass building to be juxtaposed with a California bungalow?” —Phil Patton

Installation view of “Robert Rauschenberg,” 1977, at Museum of Modern Art, New York.

COURTESY MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

Robert Rauschenberg
March 25, 1977–May 17, 1977

The show: Around two decades after Robert Rauschenberg altered the course of art history with his “combines,” assemblages that bridged the gap between painting and sculpture through the use of ready-made objects, MoMA gave him a full retrospective, with 150 artworks included. In its press materials, the museum billed him as “the most innovative, prolific, and audacious artist since Picasso,” and it brought on big curatorial talent to go alongside such a great—Kynaston McShine oversaw the MoMA presentation of the show, which was originally organized by Walter Hopps for the National Collection of Fine Arts in Washington, D.C.

What ARTnews said: “In work after work, Rauschenberg shaped visual monuments that stayed fixed in the mind through the very peculiarity and immediacy that gave them life. His vision is such that the everyday—a crumpled scrap of paper, a photograph, a newspaper headline, a postcard, a rusty bucket, a door or, indeed, a stuffed goat—becomes transmuted into an expressive metaphor, the meaning of which is as elusive as it is somehow charged with clarity and myriad inner meanings.” —John Gruen

Sol LeWitt
February 3, 1978–April 4, 1978

The show: Though “Information” seemed to usher in a new age at MoMA, it would be eight years before the museum would give a Conceptual artist a full-scale museum show. The first to receive that honor was Sol LeWitt, whose experiments with Minimalism, mathematics, and Russian avant-garde aesthetics were showcased through nearly 150 drawings, sculptures, and photographic pieces.

What ARTnews said: “Conceptual art has arrived. Or has it? It has been around for something like a decade, but with the first full-length retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art by one of its foremost exponents, Sol LeWitt, the phenomenon (‘movement’ implies a shared effort, which is not the case) has been give an official seal of approval. Most critics have had trouble with conceptual art in the past, along with most of the public. It was simply too dry, too cerebral and ‘anti-aesthetic’ to satisfy even liberal requirements for an artistic statement. Now, with a certain sense of relief, they have caught conceptual art by the tail through LeWitt, in whom has been discovered the apotheosis not only of Mondrian, Seurat, Constructivism and other European manifestations of ‘scientifically’ inspired art, but also American Abstract Expressionism, Pop and formalist thinking of the ’50s and ’60s.” —Ellen Schwartz

Robert Rauschenberg’s Buffalo II, 1964, sold for $88.8 million.

CHRISTIE’S IMAGES LTD. 2019

The buyer of one of the most high-profile lots at the New York auctions in May has been revealed.

Alice Walton, heir to the Walmart fortune and an ARTnews “Top 200 Collector” since 2005, is reportedly the purchaser of Robert Rauschenberg’s silkscreen work Buffalo II (1964), which shattered the artist’s previous record ($18.6 million) when the painting sold for $88.8 million at Christie’s last month in New York. The news was first reported by Jeremy Hodkin’s Canvas newsletter.

When Buffalo II came up for auction, it triggered a heated 20-minute bidding war. Within that period, it quickly surpassed its low estimate of $50 million, then its high estimate of $70 million, and eventually went to Sara Friedlander, the house’s international director and head of postwar and contemporary art, who, the Canvas said, was working with Walton, for a hammer price of $78 million.

Walton is the founder of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas. She has bought some of the most notable modern and contemporary artworks to have come up for auction in recent years, including Georgia O’Keeffe’s Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1, which set the record for the most expensive work by a female artist in 2014 at $44.4 million. (Canvas noted that Crystal Bridges declined to comment on Walton’s personal collection, which is separate from the museum’s permanent holdings. A spokesperson also said it had not been acquired for the museum.)

Rauschenberg created Buffalo II months after the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy. An appropriated image of Kennedy from when he was still a junior senator from Massachusetts looms large in the upper right section of the mostly blue-toned composition, as do other distinctly American images—a bald eagle, the Coca-Cola logo, a Huey helicopter used in Vietnam. The work had originally been part of the collection of the Robert B. and Beatrice C. Mayer family, which acquired it directly from the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1965.