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.”

The performance, which includes renditions of lead single “Wild Flower,” “Change Pt. 2,” and “Still Life,” coincides with the release of his solo album, Indigo, on December 2 and showcases numerous works at the museum.

“I thought [“Still Life”]could resonate with the artwork perfectly because you know it’s a whole kind of transformation,” the singer, rapper, and songwriter said in an interview with the museum published Friday. RM added that Dia Beacon had transformed the former box factory into a “magical,” “charming,” and “fascinating” place.

“The way the light touches the surface of the artworks, it’s just visually amazing.”

RM, whose real name is Kim Namjoon, visited Dia Beacon last December and posted images of the museum’s exhibits to his now 40 million Instagram followers.

The works showcased in RM’s performance include Robert Irwin’s landscape architecture on the property, John Chamberlain’s crushed metal sculptures, Richard Serra’s Torqued Ellipses, and Dan Flavin’s 1973 light sculpture untitled (to you, Heiner, with admiration and affection).

In the interview with Dia Beacon, RM further explained why he chose each work, starting with his admiration for Richard Serra’s sculptures in museums like Glenstone and LACMA.

“I absolutely wanted to do a live performance along his artworks in Dia Beacon because his artworks are kind of like a symbol of this place,” RM said.

For his choice of John Chamberlain, RM said he was fascinated by “the idea of how tough steel or cars could be transformed into an actual sculpture. I found it very refreshing.” RM additionally called Dan Flavin’s use of fluorescent lights captivating and said “his works have the power to transform, his lamps have a greater presence in this LED world that we live in today.”

RM has been recognized as an arts advocate for his much publicized visits to dozens of museums and galleries, amid a hectic schedule of concert performances and publicity events. RM’s enthusiastic posts about visits to places like the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and The Getty Museum, has increased their online engagement on social media and sent BTS fans to see those institutions, eager to see the same works he posted on Instagram.

RM has also been personally studying, collecting, and loaning art, like a $1.2 million sculpture by American multidisciplinary artist Roni Horn titled Untitled (But the boomerang that returns is not the same one I threw), 2013–17, works by Korean artists Yun Hyong-keun and Lee Bae, as well as a sculpture by the American Minimalist Joel Shapiro. Earlier this year, RM lent a sculpture by artist Kwon Jin Kyu to the Seoul Museum of Art.

RM’s influence on the art world even made an out-of-print book on Korean artists a bestseller, after he was photographed reading it in the summer of 2021. He was also recently recognized by a South Korean agency for his numerous financial contributions to arts institutions helping preserve the country’s artifacts overseas.

In a previous interview with ARTnews, RM explained that he chooses the museums and galleries he visits outside South Korea based on exhibitions featuring favorite artists, his own curiosity, and the spaces themselves. In South Korea, RM goes to places that feature modern and contemporary Korean artists.

“Visual art has helped me develop unique textures of sound, and added depth to my music. The habit of thinking in different senses and dimensions … also inspired me a lot,” he said.

See the film below:

In a prior post, the Qatar Museums said the vandalism took place on December 28 and that an unspecified number of people had been apprehended in connection with them. Since the vandalism, the institution has undertaken a cleaning effort for the work to rid it of scratches and graffiti.

“Over the last 2 months, security have patrolled the area and are reporting incidents to the police,” the Qatar Museums wrote on Wednesday. “Vandalism of all kinds is a crime punishable by law, and Qatar Museums emphasises our collective social responsibility to preserve public art.”

East West/West East was commissioned by the Qatari royal family, and it features a set of monolith-like steel plates arranged across a half-mile stretch. Those plates are of varying heights, with the tallest one rising 55 feet into the air.

Serra’s sculpture—among the largest ones that the Minimalist sculptor has ever produced—has been the subject of vandalism on at least one other occasion. In 2020, the Qatar Museums said that East West/West East was “severely and deliberately damaged” by vandals. A campaign to support the protection of public works in Qatar was launched months later that involved the addition of surveillance systems to monitor the area around the Serra commission.

There are indoor galleries nearby, but Storm King isn’t a museum in any static sense. Throughout its 60-year history, the sculpture park has more than doubled in size, with its borders currently occupying some 500 acres. Its curatorial ambitions have grown, too, and its landscape now accommodates pieces both permanent and ephemeral. During the current pandemic, with indoor museums seeming less appealing, the art center has become a bona fide destination—tickets are now selling out weeks in advance, making Storm King one of the hottest New York art spaces right now.

But before it became the sensation it is currently, Storm King started out relatively small. “The project began as a family-led institution,” John Stern, the president of Storm King since 2008, told ARTnews. “My grandfather started this from his love of the Hudson Highlands.”

When they purchased the Vermont Hatch estate in Mountainville in 1959 that would later become Storm King, metal manufacturers Ralph “Ted” Ogden and H. Peter Stern envisioned a more modest operation. Ogden planned an indoor museum dedicated to the paintings of the Hudson River School, to be housed in the French-inspired stone chateau on the grounds. Nothing about the area was picture-perfect, however: the estate was in disrepair; construction of the New York State Thruway had displaced millions square yards of gravel from the farmlands, depriving the landscape of natural protection from the elements; and nearby cedars and dogwoods were choked with vines and poison ivy.

Ogden overhauled the aesthetics together with his son-in-law Stern, who also managed the administrative side of the operation, and landscape architect William A. Rutherford, Sr. Together, they filled depressions, softened the hillside, built walkways, and restored the gardens. Later, it was decided the diseased Red Pines were to be replaced with White Pines on a yearly basis. (The grounds are a work in eternal progress.)

Storm King Art Center opened in 1960 with exhibitions centered on American and European pastoral paintings, watercolors, and drawings. Still, Ogden was unsatisfied. “He was searching for an art medium that would work alongside the open space,” said Stern.

In 1967, Ogden traveled to the Adirondacks to visit the home and studio of David Smith, an Abstract Expressionist sculptor who had died suddenly two years prior. It was a formative visit, as Ogden saw in the outdoor arrangement of Smith’s sculptures a new vision for his beloved project. He acquired 13 brightly colored steel, iron, and bronze pieces that now rank among Storm King’s most prized possessions. David Collens, Storm King’s director and chief curator since the mid-1970s, developed the idea that each piece required its own space in the landscape. 

Alexander Calder, Five Swords, 1976.

Today, a facilities crew with fewer than a dozen members maintains the giant complex. They trim trees, replant native flora, and refurbish the sculptures. It often takes a full day to mow Maya Lin’s Storm King Wavefield, a 240,000-square-foot rolling swell of grass. At any given time, the grounds contain around 115 sculptures, including permanent installations by Alexander Calder, Sol LeWitt, Isamu Noguchi, and Nam June Paik. Storm King senior curator Nora Lawrence explained that commissioned artists are encouraged to create works in tandem with the environment, with the understanding that the demands of the land may inform the final outcome. (Mercurial Upstate New York weather exerts its own will, too.)

Unlike conventional museums, Storm King will grapple with more existential threats in the coming years, as climate change demands new strategies of preservation. In the meantime, the institution faces expected challenges, such as how to be a better community partner or keep programming incisive. “We all want to continue to present people with what they’ve always loved about Storm King, but help evolve the idea of what outdoor sculpture can be,” Lawrence said.

Below are five seminal exhibitions and site-specific commission that have come to define Storm King.

Richard Serra, Schunnemunk Fork (1990–91)

At the time Serra produced this site-specific commission, a group of trees marked the southern edge of Storm King’s property—an area previously unexplored by visiting artists. The venerated Minimalists set out to be among the first to chart the terrain. He inserted in a field four weathered steel plates, each about eight feet high and nearly three inches thick. They are arranged lengthwise in a careful interval, corresponding to the field’s eight-foot descent, but they appear to jut out from the environment as some hills rise and fall. Since the sculpture’s creation, the area around it has undergone subtle changes, as the landscape accommodated new walkways and sculptures.

Andy Goldsworthy, Storm King Wall (1997–98)

Goldsworthy’s first museum commission in the United States was conceived as a 750-foot-long dry stone wall snaking through the center’s grounds—a reference to centuries-old structures native to British farmlands. A team of British wallers were tasked with harvesting new stones and layering the artwork atop the remnants of a dilapidated farm wall, extending the original structure until it reached its intended endpoint at the base of an oak tree. Just as the sculpture was about to be completed, Goldsworthy changed course, and the work’s trajectory was extended nearly half a mile past the tree, plunging downhill into a nearby pond and emerging on the opposite bank. The wall, partly erected stone by stone, eventually winded uphill to the New York State Thruway, the western edge of Storm King’s property. It now spans a total length of 2,278 feet. The work “really illustrated a way in which artists could ask how the art, nature, and the visitor experience could come together,” said Lawrence. 

“Lynda Benglis: Water Sources” (2015)

Overlooking Storm King’s south sprawl is North South East West (1988–2015), a fountain sculpture by Lynda Benglis composed of four bronze and steel figures. Though they’re made of metal, wire, and ceramic, the figures resemble something organic, like lapping waves, slow-cooling lava, or primordial crustaceans. These are related to ones that appeared in “Water Sources,” the first-ever exhibition of Benglis’s water sculptures, with works dating back to the ’70s. Among the most recent sculptures on display was Hills and Clouds, a phosphorescent piece composed of layers of stainless steel  and polyurethane foam. The impression is of layers of clouds, or a gem-crusted cave shifting in the light. “I wanted to imply something that appears to rise instead of being connected entirely to the earth,” Benglis said at the time.

“David Smith: The White Sculptures” (2017)

The show, which Lawrence co-organized with David R. Collens, drew on an integral piece of Storm King history. Its focus was Abstract Expressionist sculptures by Smith, whose studio Ogden had visited in 1967. There, he found around 100 large and small-scale sculptures, nearly all of which were coated in bright colors. Just eight sculptures were left white. For this show, the sculpture park borrowed six of the eight white sculptures, placing them alongside what are believed to be Smith’s earliest works. It was an exhibition best served by its location; the varied hues of the natural backdrop appeared to bring out the cool white tones on display in Smith’s forms, whose cutouts resembled windows or frames.

“Indicators: Artists on Climate Change” (2018)

Concerns about nature in flux have always been felt at Storm King, and the art spaces’s greatest expression of that was the 2018 show “Indicators: Artists on Climate Change.” The 17 artists included pondered a diverse array of issues. Gabriela Salazar’s Matters in Shelter (and Place, Puerto Rico), 2018, featured wooden poles supporting a blue mesh tarp, under which lay coffee beans on a cinder block floor—an homage to temporary structures erected for Puerto Ricans displaced by Hurricane Maria. Elsewhere, Meg Webster offered a solar-powered garden that grew native flora that was replanted on the grounds following the show’s run. And in his film Midstream at Twilight (2016), Steve Rowell followed a drone as it traced the transit path of petroleum coke from the headquarters of Koch Industries to its endpoint at a power plant in China.  

Update, 11/16/20, 10:09 a.m.: The article has been updated to reflect H. Peter Stern’s role in the landscaping of the initial grounds of the Storm King Art Center.

Removals such as these have historical precedents. Below is a guide to some of the most notable artworks that have been removed—either by force or by choice—over the past 50 or so years.

Takis pulls work from Museum of Modern Art (1969)
“The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age,” Pontus Hultén’s 1968 group show at MoMA, has been considered a landmark exhibition for its interest in technology. But the show is also major for what happened around it—the removal of an artwork by the Greek artist Takis. Toward the end of the show’s run, Takis picked up a sculpture of his that was on view in the exhibition, claiming that the museum had not consulted him before installing it, and moved it into MoMA’s courtyard. He described the removal as a symbolic action intended to open up conversation between artists and upper-ranking museum staff. After discussion with MoMA’s director, the work was officially taken out of the exhibition for good.

Robert Morris closes show at the Whitney Museum (1970)
Robert Morris removed not just one artwork but an entire show as debate surrounding the Vietnam War raged in America. Many in the New York art scene tried to figure out what role artists could play in protest, and Morris became the leader of an antiwar movement that swept the city’s art world—and even resulted in a widespread strike that saw museums and galleries close. As part of his efforts, Morris shuttered his solo exhibition at the Whitney in an gesture, he said at the time, meant “to underscore the need I and others feel to shift priorities at this time from an making and viewing to unified action within the art community against the intensifying conditions of repression, war and racism in this country.”

Daniel Buren sculpture taken down at the Guggenheim (1971)
Many artists have dramatically transformed the rotunda of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, but none has courted so much scandal as Daniel Buren. His artistic intervention in the space—a striped drape titled Around the Corner that hung from the ceiling and extended almost all the way down—didn’t seem controversial. But some artists who were exhibiting in its midst (in a now-defunct recurring survey known as the Guggenheim International) felt differently. In an effort led by Dan Flavin and Donald Judd, five artists claimed that Buren’s art obstructed views of Frank Lloyd Wright’s sloping architecture—and their own work. They called for it to be deinstalled, and after they got what they wanted, feted art historian Douglas Crimp (then a curator at the museum) resigned because of the fracas.

Ulay moves Hitler’s favorite painting  (1976)
Sometimes removal can be both a form of protest and an artwork in itself. For a “protest action” titled Irritation – There is a Criminal Touch to Art, performance artist Ulay seized his attention on the 1837 Carl Spitzweg painting The Poor Poet: a quaint image of a writer counting out the meters of his verse in a cramped attic that was also Adolf Hitler’s favorite artwork (he even owned a copy of it). Ulay chose not to let Germany forget that fact by marching into the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, taking the work of the wall, and bringing it to the home of a Turkish immigrant elsewhere in the city. Ulay returned the painting 30 hours later, and the temporary theft was documented by his partner Marina Abramović.

Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc deinstalled (1989)
From its initial installation in 1981, Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc—a 120-foot-long arc crafted with Corten steel in Lower Manhattan’s Foley Plaza—was meant to lead to an intriguing reorientation of a viewer’s understanding of a picturesque location. Not everyone saw it that way, however—and after howls from the public, a jury voted in favor of taking down the enormous mass of 73 tons of steel that were unceremoniously hauled away to a government-owned parking lot in Brooklyn.

Adrian Piper pulls out of Conceptualism survey in L.A. (1995)
In 1995, the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles staged “1965–1975: Reconsidering the Object of Art,” a major survey focused loosely on the evolution of Conceptualism. But the proceedings were marred by controversy when one of the sponsors was revealed: Philip Morris, the cigarette company that owns Marlboro. The artists in the show claimed not to have been notified in advance, and Adrian Piper asked MOCA to pull her work from the show and replace it with Ashes to Ashes (1995), a piece focused on her parents’ struggles with—and, ultimately, deaths from—cancer that may have been caused by smoking. When the museum declined, she withdrew from the show entirely.

Tania Bruguera installation shuttered at the Havana Biennial (2000)
Tania Bruguera is no stranger to controversy, having regularly staged boundary-pushing performances that have raised the ire of officials in her home country of Cuba. Originally staged in a fortress used to house political prisoners in the 1950s, her installation Untitled (Havana, 2000) was a darkened space in which viewers could see barely visible nude performers who appeared to be slapping their bodies and video footage of Fidel Castro as they walked across a mat of sugarcane. Brugerua’s consideration of the state of the body under oppressive regimes was closed by authorities hours after opening. Since then, it has been acquired by MoMA, which restaged it in 2018.

Adrian Piper yanks video from black performance art exhibition (2013)
Eighteen years after her MOCA removal, Piper pulled work from “Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art,” an exhibition spread across NYU’s Grey Art Gallery and the Studio Museum in Harlem. Piper’s work appeared in the NYU part, where she was presenting documentation of her past performances as the Mythic Being—a male alter ego she assumed to test gender and racial norms. Piper said she felt limited by the show’s purview and suggested that curator Valerie Cassel Oliver organize “multi-ethnic exhibitions that give American audiences the rare opportunity to measure directly the groundbreaking achievements of African American artists against those of their peers in ‘the art world at large.’”

Yams Collective drops out of the Whitney Biennial (2014)
Amid outrage over a work by the white male artist Joe Scanlan, who got black female performers to play a fictional character known as Donelle Woolford, the Yams Collective (also known by the name HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN?) pulled their work from the Whitney Biennial in 2014. “We felt that the representation of an established academic white man posing as a privileged African-American woman is problematic, even if he tries to hide it in an avatar’s mystique,” one of the collective’s members told Hyperallergic at the time.

Shanghai officials strike Ai Weiwei from survey (2014)
Ai Weiwei has frequently accused governments and museum figures of censorship in ways that have affected his standing in his home country of China. In 2014, days before the government-operated Power Station of Art in Shanghai was to stage an exhibition devoted to the winners of collector Uli Sigg’s Chinese Contemporary Art Award, officials in the city yanked Ai’s work—including his famed Sunflower Seeds installation—and dropped his name from the artist list. At the time, Sigg said, “We don’t understand but we must accept that his works will not be in there.”

Animals pulled from Chinese art show in New York (2017)
The Guggenheim Museum faced a widespread outcry when several historically important artworks featuring live animals went on view in a survey of Chinese art. The controversial pieces included Huang Yong Ping’s Theater of the World, featuring a see-through case in which insects and amphibians preyed upon one another; photo documentation of Xu Bing’s A Case Study of Transference, in which pigs were inked with Chinese characters; and a Sun Yuan and Peng Yu video that involved dogs on treadmills. Animal-rights groups widely decried the works, and after an online petition garnered tens of thousands of signatures, the museum pulled them—leading some to wonder whether the protesters properly understood the cultural context for the art on view.

Olu Oguibe obelisk taken down in Germany (2018)
A giant obelisk dedicated to immigrants by Nigerian-born Olu Oguibe was one of the most celebrated offerings at the 2017 edition of Documenta—it even won the artist the exhibition’s top prize. But after the city of Kassel formalized plans to install the work, the work, titled Monument to Strangers and Refugees, was targeted by right-wing politicians who raised doubts about its pro-refugee message and the price of its installation. The monument was removed—but then, just two weeks later, reinstated.

10 artists pull out of the Aichi Triennale in Japan (2019)
Almost from its beginning, the Aichi Triennale began generating controversy when officials made the decision to remove a show-within-a-show titled “After ‘Freedom of Expression?’” That exhibition featured a sculpture by Kim Seo-kyung and Kim Eun-sung that referred to the history of ianfu—Asian women who were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese Imperial Army. And when it was taken off view, 10 artists—including Pedro Reyes, Tania Bruguera, Minouk Lim, and Claudia Martínez Garay—pulled their own works from the triennial, claiming that the removal of the ianfu piece was a violation of its makers’ freedom of expression. Ultimately, officials relented—and the ianfu work was reinstated along with all the other works that been taken away.

Installation view of “Reverse Curve” at Gagosian’s 21st Street location.

ANNIE ARMSTRONG/ARTNEWS

Tuesday night marked the opening of a three-part Richard Serra exhibition at Gagosian gallery in New York, with drawings on the Upper East Side and two much-anticipated large-scale steel pieces at two locations in Chelsea. On 21st Street, there’s Reverse Curve (2015–19), a Cor-Ten steel mammoth that towers over visitors, and on 24th Street, there’s Forged Rounds (2019), which is arranged like a forest of 50-ton rounded blocks. The opening brought out a bevy of art world dignitaries, and ARTnews asked some of them a simple question: Can you describe Richard Serra in three words? (Many respondents required a few more, but they all tried.)

Another question arose while spying the many who could be seen photographing Serra’s new work: Would Tilted Arc—the artist’s giant sculptural intervention on Manhattan’s Foley Federal Plaza that was removed following rampant public controversy in 1981—have stayed on view in the age of Instagram?

Answers to both queries follow below.

How would you describe Richard Serra in three words?

Joan Jonas, artist
Profound weight with lightness.

Hugh Freund, lawyer specializing in art and museums
Heavyweight art superstar.

Jerry Saltz, art critic for New York magazine
Between art and a dock.

Mary Heilmann, artist
Reminds me of surfing.

Susan Kleinberg, artist
Tough and beautiful.

Bill Powers, founder of Half Gallery 
Fifty-ton limit.

Larry Gagosian, founder of Gagosian gallery
It’s not possible.

Would Tilted Arc have remained standing if it were installed in the age of Instagram?

Joan Jonas
No. I don’t know why, but no.

Jerry Saltz
Tilted Arc was taken down because it succeeded in making its critique of corporate architecture. Would I leave it up today? Sure.

Mary Heilmann
Yes. I suppose people would have liked to take their picture with it.

Roberta Smith, co-chief art critic for the New York Times
Probably not. [But] I think it’s an interesting turning point: After that, Richard’s work becomes so much more involved. That was when he started having big shows [with] lines out the door. He changed something, and what he did was make his work really participatory—especially the “Arcs.”

Protesters outside a courthouse in Boston where a lawsuit against Purdue Pharma was being heard.

CHARLES KRUPA/AP/SHUTTERSTOCK

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Controversies

Update, 10:30 a.m.: Purdue Pharma—a company owned by the controversial Sackler family, which has been a significant donor to art museums in America and Europe—is reportedly willing to pay between $10 billion and $12 billion to settle 2,000 lawsuits. The cases have dealt with OxyContin, a painkiller that the company manufactured while allegedly misleading the public about drug’s addictive properties. [An earlier version of this post—and the Breakfast with ARTnews newsletter—incorrectly stated that the cases have been settled. Settlement talks are reportedly in progress.] [NBC News]

Here’s everything we know so far about convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s ties to the art world. [ARTnews]

In the wake of a controversy over Warren B. Kanders, a former Whitney Museum board member whose defense manufacturing company produces tear-gas canisters, Adam Weinberg discussed how philanthropy at museums may change. He said, “We would hate to see those who wish to support our efforts in bringing the work of American artists to a broad public become discouraged from doing so.” [The Art Newspaper]

Museums

More than 20 Impressionist paintings by Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and others have been gifted to the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia, by Doris and Shouky Shaheen. It’s one of the most significant donations of European art in the museum’s history. [The New York Times]

With her new commission for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s facade, Wangechi Mutu will focus on the representation of women in historical artworks. “They’re seen as powerful, of course, because they’re holding up the king, or they’re carrying the staff, but they’re forever laboring under the weight of whatever these men have created,” she said. “So I thought, Well, release them from that.” [W Magazine]

London’s National Gallery of Art will reportedly acquire Orazio Gentileschi’s The Finding of Moses. The painting is currently on loan to the museum, reportedly from collector Graham Kirkham. [The Art Newspaper]

Galleries

The Contemporary Istanbul art fair has revealed the exhibitor list for its 2019 edition. [Press Release]

Artists

Former Institute of Contemporary Arts London artistic director Ekow Eshun on “why being an African artist is so important today.” [CNN]

Ahead of a major outing at Gagosian gallery in New York next month, Deborah Solomon profiles Richard Serra, the Minimalist sculptor behind hulking installations constructed from steel. Is his new work tender? “I don’t think in those terms. It sounds like you are talking about steak.” [The New York Times]

Pokémon

A headline we simply could not make up: “Pokémon GO community faces problems with art museum.” [The Auburn Plainsman]

The story of Brancusi and America is long and rich, though to date told only in parts.² The artist’s innovations are so numerous—and so apparently contradictory—that doubts can arise about the true extent of his influence. Could one artist really have galvanized sculptural practice so thoroughly? Yes, but all his formal contributions have not yet been fully researched and documented. Nor was he the sole influence on later sculptors. Nevertheless, as Martin Puryear has said, “even those who may not be aware of it, owe a debt to Brancusi.”³

The essence of Brancusi’s greatness is his ability to balance opposites, to find equal measure between seemingly irreconcilable factors: male and female, organic and machine-like, ancient and modern, smooth and rough, dense and “weightless.” Such fusions enabled Brancusi to utterly recast existing motifs. He did not originate the “kiss” theme, but he revived its face-to-face fundamentals so thoroughly, so elementally, that the work’s blockiness seems to convey a new (and simultaneously very old) notion regarding the equality of partners. He did not invent the memorial column, but his famed “endless” version is so profoundly different—fully abstract, freed from all programmatic rhetoric and narrative—that it seems unprecedented.

Late in life, Brancusi—Paris-based, though born, raised, and first artistically schooled in Romania—declared: “Without the Americans, I would not have been able to produce all this or even to have existed.”⁴ His first connection with an American artist came in 1907, when he met Edward Steichen at Rodin’s home in Meudon, a suburb of Paris. (Brancusi had previously been an assistant to Rodin, but grew restless and left after two months.) Steichen later saw his bronze Maiastra in the 1911 Salon des Indépendants exhibition and purchased it from the artist. Brancusi installed the work in Steichen’s garden in Voulangis on a tall pedestal, an early example of his predilection for bold verticality.

During this early period, Brancusi discovered the smooth-surfaced figures of Elie Nadelman, Polish-born but soon destined to establish himself as a noted American artist. He met Marcel Duchamp (who would spend many years in the US and eventually become an American citizen) at the Duchamp brothers’ home in Puteaux, and the two artists became close friends. Duchamp would curate two shows for Brancusi in the US and loyally promote him among his acquaintances and professional contacts. Meanwhile, the American collector and painter Walter Pach, living in Paris, alerted the organizers of the landmark 1913 Armory Show in New York to Brancusi’s work; five of his pieces were included—and singled out for withering ridicule in the press.

But in March the next year, Alfred Stieglitz, on the recommendation of Steichen, gave Brancusi his first solo exhibition, at the 291 gallery in New York. Criticism now was muted, and some reviews were even favorable. Americans had taken to Brancusi’s work, and collectors were buying. The painter Arthur B. Davies, one of the organizers of the Armory Show, had acquired a piece in 1912, and soon the sculptures were being collected by progressive buyers like John Quinn, Walter and Louise Arensberg, Katherine Dreier, and, later, Peggy Guggenheim.⁵ By contrast, Brancusi never had a one-person show in France during his lifetime. Although he was widely befriended by avant-garde figures like Modigliani and Man Ray, French critics tended to think of him as a peasant, an outsider, more a craftsman than a real artist.⁶ He was ignored in print by such leading art writers as Guillaume Apollinaire and André Salmon. The first essay on him was written by Ezra Pound in 1921,⁷ beginning a long critical and artistic dialogue that is still widely evident across American art.

Light

One of Brancusi’s major formal innovations was sculptural luminosity—the play of light on works like the two versions of Bird in Space (1928 and ca. 1941) held by MoMA. This almost preternatural glow results from the artist’s compulsive polishing of hard materials and his search for an inner light, the essence of the forms he created. He could make surfaces as translucent, as soft, as human skin—an effect seen in his Torso of a Young Girl (ca. 1923) in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

After working with Brancusi from 1927 to 1929, Isamu Noguchi continued to develop this high-polish technique, which also became prevalent in the more conservative work of American artists William Zorach, Hugo Robus, and Paul Manship. Scintillating reflection later energized the welded-steel work of David Smith, such as The Hero (1951–52), with its frontal, architectural frame and zigzag base. Subsequently, in pieces such as Cubi XXVII (1965), Smith expanded the frame to a gatelike structure of burnished stainless steel, composed of disparate stacked elements that catch and reflect light, dematerializing solid metal before our very eyes.

Intense, shimmering light animates much of Donald Judd’s art, especially the plexiglass and steel boxes of the 1960s and the one hundred milled aluminum boxes installed at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas. At sunrise and sunset, the latter works—displayed in a huge glass-walled shed—seem to dissolve in the intense Southwestern sun. For both Brancusi and Judd, light generates deeply felt spiritual (though not formally religious) associations.⁸

Brancusi loved to take photographs, many of which—focusing on light, sky, and columns—recall Stieglitz’s cloud series from the 1920s. The quest for infinite space, on earth and above, runs throughout American art, from the Luminist painters of the nineteenth century through Georgia O’Keeffe and Arthur Dove to Michael Heizer and James Turrell. Brancusi’s dematerialization of forms by light must be counted as a precedent for the California Light and Space movement. Later, Walter de Maria’s Lightning Field (1977) claimed the land, capturing natural forces through multiple stainless-steel poles, all reaching for the heavens.

Motion

Brancusi’s light creates constant motion; we see our reflections in the polished bronzes and can follow our own gestures and physical maneuvers, thus becoming part of the piece. For Brancusi, this visual flow evoked a world in constant flux, like water, giving sculpture a new expressive power. He increased that dynamism dramatically when he introduced actual movement into his work. Consider, for example, the smaller polished bronze version of Leda (1926), placed on a mirror base and set on a revolving motorized pedestal, and the 1930 blue-gray marble Fish (“I want just the flash of its spirit”⁹), shown at MoMA on a rotating stand. Brancusi’s adoption of movement, real and implied, fulfilled a longtime dream of sculptors to overcome the dead weight of objects and seemingly lift them up in the air, off the pedestal. Indeed, Brancusi dispensed with the traditional pedestal and made the base an intrinsic part of the sculpture.

Duchamp, Brancusi’s fellow-European guide to America, was modernism’s other inventor of movement. The Cubist artists who gathered in Puteaux, sometimes called the Golden Section group (Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, Robert Delaunay, and others), sought to capture the grand themes of modern life, to go beyond the traditional genres of still life, landscape, and portraiture that Picasso and Georges Braque preferred. Speed, change, and movement—elements beloved by the Futurists but also closely associated with the US—were firmly embraced by Duchamp and Brancusi. Duchamp’s Nude Descending the Staircase led the way in 1911–12, followed in 1913 by his first readymade, the Bicycle Wheel, and then continued with the spinning disks in his film Anemic Cinema (1926).

Brancusi’s emphasis, at first, was less on literal movement than on the implicit motion of his highly stylized biomorphic forms and the perceptual dynamic induced by stacked and/or polished shapes. He incorporated endless implied motion in the spiral that stands in for the author of Ulysses in his cardboard-and-metal Portrait of James Joyce (ca. 1928). O’Keeffe, who had previously scrutinized the spiral form in her own 1916 charcoal No. 8-Special (Drawing No. 8) and who surely knew about Brancusi through Stieglitz, later used this eternal form in her 1946 sculpture Abstraction. Robert Smithson credited Brancusi’s spiral as a key source for his Spiral Jetty (1970).¹⁰

Perceptual motion—as opposed to literal movement—is evident in works such as Brancusi’s birdlike and highly reflective Maiastra (1911), his leaning Torso (1912), and most notably his Maiastra of 1910–12 at MoMA. In the last of these, the eye’s transit is upward, though viewers pause to ponder each segment before reaching the apex: an emblematic representation of the magical bird that guides lovers in Romanian folklore.

Eroticism

Numerous avant-garde artists felt that the rapid rise of aviation, signaling the primacy of the machine, unleashed semimystical forces. In 1912, Brancusi and Duchamp, along with Fernand Léger, visited the Exposition de la Locomotion Aérienne in Paris. They were all struck by the beauty of the planes, especially by the propellers, which Brancusi—prompted by Duchamp—took as the new standard for sculpture. For him, physical flight now joined with spiritual release, which in turn was innately linked to the erotic—just as it was for Duchamp. Brancusi’s Princess X (1915–16), clearly phallic, is also a woman’s portrait, another example of how Brancusi could reconcile seeming opposites. Duchamp’s Fountain (1917), an object originally designed for male urination, also—when repositioned by the artist—evokes a vagina. So, too, the beautiful Brancusi marble Leda (1920), owned by the Art Institute of Chicago, suggests both a phallus and a reclining female nude.

Brancusi’s formal androgyny is paralleled in O’Keeffe’s grieving figure statue of 1916, followed by the 1920s paintings in which the forms soar in the air, probing a higher order. In her Grey Line with Lavender and Yellow (ca. 1923), O’Keeffe combines vaginal and phallic shapes. Finally, In the Patio IX (1950) features a V-shaped black image formed by the walls that resembles a bird rising into a vast sky.

Verticality

Soaring verticality is one of the most salient characteristics of Brancusi’s sculpture. The wooden, archaic-looking Adam and Eve (1921) and King of Kings (1938) at the Guggenheim embody this tendency, figures seemingly elongated into space. Throughout his life, Brancusi was compelled to seek a higher order, to find freedom and release from earthly concerns, as exemplified by his crowning accomplishment, the 98-foot-tall Endless Column (1938) in Târgu-Jiu, Romania. The supernal impulse permeates his entire oeuvre, which he once described as “advancing toward the divine.”¹¹

The Endless Column, transcending its commission as a military memorial, has been an icon—and a provocation—for countless American artists. We see it echoed by figures as varied as Barnett Newman, Tal Streeter, Lynda Benglis, Serra, Dale Chihuly, Puryear, and Ellsworth Kelly. Of particular note is Claes Oldenburg’s Clothespin (1976) in Philadelphia and Batcolumn (1977) in Chicago. Each captures an essential aspect of its city’s history—one referring (as Oldenburg himself stated) to The Kiss in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the other to epic moments of baseball in Chicago. Brancusi has everything, said Serra, and here we find how his monumentality could be adapted to the American vernacular.

As Carl Andre remarked, Brancusi’s column is endless because it has no terminal points; there is no head or foot to contain and complete it.¹² This is evident at MoMA in the work’s first version, a nearly seven-foot carved oak shaft dated 1918. Continuity is strongly implied by the use of half elements at the top and bottom. The roughly geometric units could be extended infinitely both above and below ground, like an axis mundi. Andre’s 1966 Lever, a thirty-eight-foot file of bricks set on the floor, is essentially Brancusi’s Endless Column aligned horizontally. The possibilities of the infinite, as explored by artists like Judd and De Maria, gave modular-component sculpture a powerful dynamism.

Unity

Works like Brancusi’s Maiastra, with its use of disparate elements, helped engender later art such as Robert Rauschenberg’s Odalisk (1955-58), a brilliant takeoff on the MoMA sculpture. Rauschenberg’s bird is a common rooster, love is indicated by a pinup, but above all the artist created a whole new order of Constructivism. Each part has its own role, its own story. The installation of Rauschenberg’s 1953 show at the Stable Gallery, New York, looked much like Brancusi’s studio, complete with a bench, a single egg shape, and a standing column; on the wall was an all-white painting activated by light and shadows, just as Brancusi’s reflective pieces are. This ensemble effect, prefiguring installation art, was adopted by David Smith in his sculpture field in the Adirondacks, and then by Judd in his compounds in Marfa.

Judd, however, insisted on art with no extraneous parts, and pointed to Jean Arp and Brancusi as sources for this type of form. He created vertical stacks of repeated elements as Brancusi had in his various columns—works characterized by the seriality of more or less identical units.¹³ In addition, Judd arranged multiple individual objects to produce a unified experience, again as Brancusi did in his studio. Both artists wished viewers to see the assembled works whole, as a total unity, a careful and continual adjustment to a single space.

At the same time, the columns, as well as other pieces such as Architectural Project (1918) and The Gate of the Kiss (1938), have an architectural character. Brancusi saw architecture as inhabited sculpture. In 1926, when he first glimpsed the New York skyline from his arriving ship, he exclaimed, “Why, it is my studio! . . . All these blocks, all these pieces to be shifted and juggled with, as the experiment grows and changes.”¹⁴ In 1956, the year before he died, Brancusi proposed a fifteen-hundred-foot Endless Column to be built in Chicago, a kind of living sculpture that would incorporate apartments. Frank Gehry has said that he learned more from Brancusi than from most architects—a judgment confirmed by the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, whose sweeping forms were taken directly from Brancusi’s studio.¹⁵

Time

Like many artists of the early twentieth century, Brancusi had a quasi-scientific fascination with time. We see this in the 1910–12 version of Maiastra, the first piece we encounter at MoMA. It is not as well-known as other works, but it contains many of Brancusi’s innovations. Time is apparent in the way we must read the sculpture vertically; in the contrast between the smooth surfaces of the bird with the awkward carved figures below, which appear to be on the verge of collapse, saved by the artist from some long-lost archaeological site. Encountering this sculptural fusion of ancient and modern, we travel centuries. At Puteaux, the philosophy of Henri Bergson was an intellectual force. In works such as Creative Evolution (1907), Bergson outlined the way perceptions evolve, one moment at a time, each moment containing the essence of the past moment and at the same time part of the future stage; this progression, called la durée, was a reaction against the old one-second-at-a-time Impressionist view. Thus we move from old to new, at the same time, in a single piece through a gradual transformation. This is the basis of Brancusi’s development of the “Bird in Space” sequence, from 1919 to 1941. He starts with a primary form, then slowly transforms it with minute but distinct differences, a process also evident in his ovoid heads.

Time is apparent in MoMA’s Endless Column because Brancusi left clear evidence of the work involved in the roughhewn, hand-carved surfaces. The piece is composed of geometric shapes, but it bespeaks a very human type of geometry, another amalgam of opposites. On one section we see what look to be initials, recalling graffiti left on an ancient monument; yet the work is the most up-to-the-moment sort imaginable. Its repeated shapes offer a new sense of structure and stability. The serial units should be seen as a manifestation of the post-WWI “return to order,” so termed by Jean Cocteau. In 1916, in the Paris magazine SIC, poets and critics such as Apollinaire called for an art of harmony and stability, a reaction to the mass destruction of the global conflict. The free-form abstractions of prewar art were to be renounced in favor of a classical structure, around which a new and better world could be built.¹⁶

Clarity

The 1950s were marked by a return to volume, a reaction against the dominant 1940s mode of linear welded sculpture. Only Noguchi had maintained a consistent allegiance to Brancusi’s approach—to his radical simplification of forms, his finely treated surfaces, his infatuation with implied movement and spiritual lift, balanced by his loyalty to physicality and the continuation of sculpture as an object of weight and density. For artists in the 1950s, it was now impossible to avoid Brancusi. His work was being acquired by museums in New York and Philadelphia, and his first-ever retrospective was organized in 1955 at the Guggenheim by director James Johnson Sweeney, who acquired the pieces now on view there.

During this period, many younger US-based artists visited Brancusi’s studio in Paris, attracted by his aesthetic and his fame. Among them was Louise Bourgeois, whose early work was based on Brancusi’s practice of stacking on a vertical axis, her idiosyncratic pieces mimicking his zigzag shapes. Many of her other sculptures of the era were single lightweight objects reminiscent of the “Bird in Space” series. But perhaps the most consequential visit to Brancusi’s studio was made by Ellsworth Kelly in 1950. By then, Brancusi had stopped producing new objects and spent his time polishing and endlessly arranging and rearranging his sculptures so that they could be seen in the best light, sequences, and combinations. One could observe how the works affected the space as one moved among them.

On his visit, Kelly was inspired by the clarity of Brancusi’s shapes and forms; he was also prompted to follow a path of spirituality in his work. His oeuvre came to include flat paintings, reliefs, and sculptures in which he cultivated Brancusi’s principles, including the activation of the viewer’s space. His credo is fully evident in his posthumous chapel in Austin (2018), an homage to Brancusi and Henri Matisse. Kelly said that his aim was “to free shape from its ground, and then to work the shape so that it has a definite relationship to the space around it; so that it has a clarity and a measure within itself of its parts (angles, curves, edges and mass); and so that, with color and tonality, the shape finds its own space and always demands its freedom and separateness.”¹⁷ He could have been speaking for Brancusi himself, the fountainhead of so much advanced American sculpture.

Endnotes

1. Serra made this remark after he had studied and drawn Brancusi’s work daily for four months in 1964–65. See Friedrich Teja Bach, “Brancusi and Serra—Serra and Brancusi,” in Oliver Wick, ed., Constantin Brancusi and Richard Serra: A Handbook of Possibilities, Riehen/Basel, Fondation Beyeler, 2011, p. 34.

2. The relationship has been best discussed in Sidney Geist, Brancusi: A Study of the Sculpture, New York, Grossman, 1967; Anna Chave, Constantin Brancusi: Shifting the Bases of Art, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1993; Friedrich Teja Bach, Margit Rowell, and Ann Temkin, Constantin Brancusi, 1876–1957, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1995; Roxana Marcoci, “Site of Contestation: Constantin Brancusi’s World War I Memorial,” dissertation, New York University Institute of Fine Arts, 1998; and Eric Gibson, “Displaying Brancusi,” New Criterion, December 2018, newcriterion.com. 

3. Quoted in Roxana Marcoci, “The Anti-Historicist Approach: Brancusi, ‘Our Contemporary,’” Art Journal, vol. 59, no. 2, 2000, p. 33.

4. Quoted in Hugh Eakin, “The Aesthetic Beauty of Brancusi,” New York Review of Books, July 28, 2018, nybooks.com/daily.

5. Judith Zilczer, “‘The Noble Buyer’: John Quinn, Patron of the Avant-Garde,” in John Quinn, Patron of the Avant-Garde, Washington, D.C., Smithsonian Institution Press, 1978, pp. 150–52, and Ann Temkin, “Brancusi and His American Collectors” in Constantin Brancusi: 1876–1957, pp. 50-73.

6. Chave, Constantin Brancusi: Shifting the Bases of Art, p. 22.

7. Ezra Pound, “Brancusi,” Little Review, Autumn 1921, pp. 3–7.

8. Judd, when told by a friend that the effect of light on his sculptures was almost mystical, retorted angrily, “What do you mean almost?” He was much more cordial to a priest who stopped by his house in Marfa and told him they were “in the same business.” Donald Judd, in conversation with the author, Marfa, 1979.

9. Quoted in Malvina Hoffman, Sculpture Inside and Out, New York, W.W. Norton & Company, 1939, p. 52.

10. See Marcoci, “Site of Contestation,” p. 187.

11. Quoted in Pierre Cabanne, Constantin Brancusi, Paris, Vilo, 2002, p. 14.

12. Phyllis Tuchman, “An Interview with Carl Andre,” Artforum, June 1970, pp. 55–61.

13. Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,” in Donald Judd: Complete Writings 1959–1975, Halifax, Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and New York, New York University Press, 1975, p. 184.

14. Quoted in Dorothy Dudley, “Brancusi,” The Dial, February 1927, n.p.  Brancusi made a total of three trips to the US. In 1926 he came for his show at the Brummer Gallery in New York; he then went to Washington, liked the Washington Monument (while vowing to make a column even bigger), and met many prominent Americans at a dinner in his honor. He revisited the country that year in September. In 1939 he attended “Art in Our Time: 10th Anniversary Exhibition: Painting, Sculpture, Prints” at MoMA.

15. Ian Jeffrey, “How Brancusi Influenced Frank Gehry’s Design for the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao,” blog entry, Jan. 18, 2018, guggenheim.org.

16. See my Patrick Henry Bruce, American Modernist: A Catalogue Raisonné, New York, Museum of Modern Art, 1979, pp. 26 and 62, and, for a comprehensive discussion of the era, Kenneth E. Silver, Esprit de Corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War, 1914–1925, London, Thames and Hudson, 1989.

17. Quoted in Madeleine Grynsztejn, “Clear-Cut: The Art of Ellsworth Kelly,” in Ellsworth Kelly in San Francisco, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and University of California Press, 2002, p. 9.

The first two issues of the Feminist Art Journal (FAJ), a quarterly that ran from 1972 to 1977, featured the column Male Chauvinist Exposé, which named artists, critics, and other art world personalities who treated their female colleagues with disrespect. The column was just one of the many ways that Nemser worked to help women voice their discontent with a clearly inequitable status quo. Even as Nemser blew the whistle on the art world, she wanted to be part of the larger conversation about contemporary art. She saw her journal as a means to introduce political issues into the art world.

FAJ was Nemser’s attempt to rectify the discrimination she personally witnessed and experienced in the ’60s and ’70s. Her article “Egomania and the Male Artist,” published in the journal’s second issue in the fall of 1972, called out Richard Serra for telling her to “fuck off” when she tried to interview him for an article, and accused Vito Acconci of having an inappropriate relationship with a student. (According to Nemser’s article, Acconci had invited the young woman to live with him and his then girlfriend, leading to a toxic love triangle that Acconci cast as a performance but that ultimately led to the student’s attempted suicide.) At the end of the piece, Nemser invoked a familiar question, and the obvious answer: “‘Why do they do it, these egomaniacal male artists?’ . . .  they have been allowed to get away with it!”

Nemser began her art-world career in 1966 as an aspiring art historian with an MA from NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts. She became a reporter for Arts magazine, and later wrote for numerous publications, including Art Journal, Art in America, and Artforum. While gathering information for a possible article in 1969, she attended meetings of the Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC), a group of artists and cultural workers who organized actions to promote artists’ rights and institutional reforms. At the time, they held their meetings at Museum, an artist-run organization near Washington Square Park. Nemser’s resulting article in Art Journal, titled “A Revolution of Artists,” addressed how contemporary artists were engaging with the political landscape and rejecting capitalist materialism by making non-objects.¹

It was at AWC meetings that Nemser was introduced to several women who identified as feminists and called themselves Women Artists in Revolution (WAR). Muriel Castanis, Juliette Gordon, Silviana Goldsmith, Carolyn Mazzello, Jacqueline Skiles, and others belonged to AWC, but formed their own group to address concerns of sexism and gender bias, a priority not shared by the majority at AWC. As Nemser recalls, women in the WAR group faced backlash from their male peers. In one instance, Juliette Gordon was met with derision when she spoke up about the lack of female representation in museum and gallery exhibitions, and said there should be a wing at the Museum of Modern Art dedicated to women.²

Though Nemser attended her first WAR meetings as a reporter who had not yet identified as a feminist, she credits the group’s consciousness-raising sessions for her conversion. In a meeting in the summer of 1969, a WAR member asked her if she had ever encountered problems as a woman in the art world. Something clicked. Nemser’s deep-seated frustration with the obstacles that had stymied her efforts to find success as an art historian and critic surfaced. Thinking back to the lack of support from NYU professors (who discouraged her from pursuing a PhD and told her to focus on American art since, as a mother, she would have trouble traveling to Europe) and Arts editors (who would not commission a feature story from her, even though she had been writing reviews for years), Nemser realized that these struggles all stemmed from sexist discrimination. In 1975 she wrote of this pivotal moment: “It soon occurred to me that the art world, my liberal, avant-garde art world, was no more exempt from . . . sexist behavior than any other world.”³ From then on, Nemser went to WAR meetings not just as a reporter but as a fellow feminist.

In January 1970, the group presented “X¹²,” an exhibition by twelve women artists, at Museum. In solidarity, Nemser reviewed the show for Arts, hailing it as “the first openly feminist exhibition.”⁴ She then began, with newfound fervor, to seek out more opportunities to write about women artists and their concerns. She attended meetings of other feminist groups, such as the Ad Hoc Committee of Women Artists, whose founding members included art historian Lucy Lippard and artists Faith Ringgold and Poppy Johnson. The group famously called for the 1970 Whitney Annual to include at least 50 percent female artists, though their demands were not met.

Pitching articles with a feminist angle, Nemser encountered myriad points of view among other women in the art world, many of whom did not share her feminist beliefs. She sent out a short questionnaire: “Do you believe there is discrimination against female artists? Have you ever experienced it first hand? And if so, in what way? Do you feel that reforms in regards to women artists’ rights should be instituted? What suggestions would you make?” The responses diverged widely. As reported in a 1971 Nemser article in Arts, Eva Hesse’s reply was curt: “Excellence has no sex.”⁵ Many others also denied the presence of sexism, expressing a belief that skill and merit would bring success, even in a male-dominated art world.

WHILE NEMSER was grappling with how to pursue her interests in both feminism and art criticism, she continued to write articles with a more neutral tone. In 1970 she published an interview with Eva Hesse in Artforum and a feature on Chuck Close in Art in America, which led to her second feature for the magazine, a 1971 essay on Gordon Matta-Clark’s and Alan Sonfist’s experiments with organic matter.

Around that time Nemser met Patricia Mainardi, a figurative artist and member of the Redstockings, a radical feminist group that had formed in 1969. Along with artists Marjorie Kramer, Irene Peslikis, and Lucia Vernarelli, they started Women and Art, which they deemed the “first women artists’ feminist-oriented journal.”⁶ This experience helped Nemser, who officially joined Redstockings, solidify her position as a feminist critic and activist. But the magazine folded almost as soon as it began. Marxist and non-Marxist feminists clashed over a plan to include a Marxist insert written by men in the second issue, which was never printed.

After this schism, the editors of Women and Art dispersed. Nemser and Mainardi joined forces with artist Irene Moss to establish FAJ. The journal set a precedent for what a feminist art publication could be. Save for a few exceptions, all the articles were by women. Faith Ringgold, Marcia Tucker, and Howardena Pindell were some of the most prominent contributors. The journal featured interviews with female artists such as Yvonne Rainer, Janet Fish, and Barbara Hepworth, as well as long-form essays on women working in music, theater, and literature. Art historians provided notable articles on women’s contributions to medieval art and Surrealism. There were even satirical pieces such as Nemser’s 1972 “Interview with Successful Woman Artist,” a fictitious conversation with an abstract painter who avoids other female artists like the plague. All told, FAJ offered multiple points of view, united by a fundamental belief that art plays a crucial role in elucidating society. In a letter from the late 1970s, Nemser wrote of the journal’s ethos: “We believe that art has the power to change people’s thinking and their lives for the better and that, at this moment in history, women’s art is moving quickly and forcefully in this direction.”⁷

In the first issue, Nemser published her article “Stereotypes and Women Artists,” which had been killed by Art in America’s editor Brian O’Doherty. The piece argues that male critics strategically used language to demean and undermine the art of women. Nemser quotes two reviews of Helen Frankthaler by Donald Judd, in which he says her paintings are “united by emotion,” and that her “softness is fine, but it would be more profound if it were also hard.” Peter Plagens, writing on Georgia O’Keefe in Artforum, says that “whether or not there are sexual parts lurking in the pictorial configurations may never get affirmation one way or the other, but in the light of her whole work the idea is painfully trivial.” While Judd’s points rely on an essentializing concept of femininity, Plagens’s comment reveals a deeply ingrained resistance to considering the influence of gender on artistic practice and criticism.⁸

Of the thirty articles in the first issue, six were written by Nemser herself. Though subsequent issues had more contributors, all had writing by Nemser, who became FAJ ’s sole editor-in-chief when Mainardi left in 1973 to focus on her painting practice. FAJ provided readers with motley musings on the work of female artists, on what it was like to be a woman in the art world, and on blatant gender discrimination. Nemser described the journal as “moderate.” “We are not militant or anti-male. We don’t feel that men are the enemy,” she told a reporter for the Boston Globe.⁹

The same Globe article described FAJ as the “watchdog of an establishment machismo.” The journal became a source for stories that unveiled sexism in the arts. It was also the earliest publication of its kind to cultivate a wide readership over a considerable period. By the end of its five-year run, FAJ had a circulation of eight thousand copies—an impressive following in light of the journal’s low budget and niche interest—and Nemser printed ten thousand copies of the last issue. A contributor to a 1978 issue of Art Workers News described FAJ as “famous for being a catalyst and inspiration for women artists coast to coast.”¹⁰ 

FAJ sustained itself for almost the entirety of its life span through subscriptions, grants, and sales, soliciting advertisements only for its final issue, which was organized around the theme “Women in Pursuit of Success!” By this time, Nemser and her husband were running the magazine almost completely on their own. Though FAJ’s popularity had grown, there weren’t enough funds to sustain it. Nemser was never able to pay herself a salary. She had hoped that the publication, which began as a black-and-white tabloid format newspaper and became a glossy magazine in 1975, would become a slick color periodical, as widely read as Artforum or Art in America. Nemser made the last issue of FAJ the most impressive one yet: more than fifty pages, on coated paper, with color illustrations. Then she let her venture expire.

Nemser’s letter to subscribers in the fall of 1977 announcing the journal’s end prompted an outpouring of support. Joan Marter, a professor at Rutgers, wrote: “The loss of the Feminist Art Journal will have a serious impact on the field of Women’s Studies. However, I want to thank you for your remarkable accomplishments in the field. You were certainly among the first to raise the consciousness of the art world to women’s issues.”¹¹ Feminist art historian Eleanor Tufts wrote: “Well, I just can’t let the demise of your excellent journal go by without congratulating you both on this pioneer publication. You made a great contribution bringing attention to women’s art and gaining for it the prominence it has today.”¹²

After FAJ, Nemser continued her writing career, venturing into theater criticism and fiction. There are now three editions of her book Art Talk, an anthology first published in 1975 containing numerous interviews with female artists, some of which were first published in FAJ. The series is a valuable resource illuminating attitudes toward feminism and art in the 1970s.

Writing to the editors of the new newspaper HER New York in 1993, Nemser gave this advice: “We need a press that analyzes the sexist underpinnings of seeming ‘objective’ presentations. . . . Just be honest about the way sexism still controls every aspect of our world.”¹³ Nemser’s legacy persists, as her mission to make the art world more diverse and accessible has been taken up by others. FAJ broke ground for similar and arguably better-known feminist art magazines such as New York–based HERESIES: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics (1977–93), produced by the collective of the same name, and Los Angeles–based Chrysalis: A Magazine of Women’s Culture (1977–80), which was started by members of the Woman’s Building in downtown LA. Though mainstream publications have now absorbed feminist perspectives, FAJ remains significant because it placed feminism front and center as the organizing principle of the publication—an approach that, even today, looks daring and new.

Endnotes

1. Cindy Nemser, “A Revolution of Artists,” Art Journal, 29, Fall 1969, p. 44.

2. This anecdote and others about AWC and WAR meetings are included in Nemser’s unpublished memoir.

3. Cindy Nemser, “Introduction,” Art Talk, New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1975, p. 1.

4. Cindy Nemser cited in Vernita Nemec, “X¹²: Feminist Artists First Show Together,” Woman Art, Summer 1976, p. 4.

5. Correspondence between Cindy Nemser and Eva Hesse, January 1970, 2013.m.21-Nemser, box 1, folder 8, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. Hesse’s handwritten response includes the line: “The way to beat discrimination in art is by art”; but only “excellence has no sex” appeared in the published version. The article was originally commissioned for Art in America, but after Nemser sent the draft to then editor Jean Lipman, she did not hear back about a publication date. She became nervous that Lipman found the piece too controversial, and so showed the draft to Al Demark at Arts. He decided to publish it immediately, in the February 1971 issue.

6. Cindy Nemser et al. quoted in Mary D. Garrard, “Feminist Politics: Networks and Organizations,” in Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, eds. Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s, History and  Impact, New York, Harry N. Abrams Inc., 1996, p. 90.

7. Undated letter written by Cindy Nemser in her personal archives.

8. Donald Judd and Peter Plagens quoted in Cindy Nemser, “Stereotypes and Women Artists,” Feminist Art Journal, April 1972, p. 22.

9. Nemser quoted in Gale McManus, “Feminist Art Journal: Watchdog of an establishment machismo,” Boston Globe, Sept. 3, 1974, p. 18.

10. Anne Sharp, “An Art Workers’ News Guide for Women Artists and the Business of Art,” Art Workers News, July 1978, p. 16.

11. Correspondence from Joan M. Marter to Cindy Nemser, Oct. 6, 1977, 2013.m.21-Nemser, box 1, folder 27, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles.

12. Correspondence from Eleanor Tufts to Cindy Nemser, Mar. 2, 1978, 2013.m.21-Nemser, box 1, folder 27, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles.

13. Cindy Nemser, “Shake the Puff,” HER New York, Oct. 21, 1993, 2013.m.21-Nemser, box 3, folder 17, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles.

Chef Ignacio Mattos.

KARISSA ONG

“Muses” is a column for which creators from different disciplines reveal sources of artistic inspiration and instigation. 

Ignacio Mattos has become a star of the New York food scene as the visionary behind Estela and Café Altro Paradiso (both in SoHo), as well as Flora Bar, the fine dining destination on the lower level of the Met Breuer. Prior to opening those establishments, he cooked at Il Buco and Isa, and his experience out of town includes work with Alice Waters’s Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California. He is also the author of Estela, a cookbook with recipes for some of his finest creations. For “Muses,” Mattos told ARTnews about artists and works he likes. —Andy Battaglia

Chef Ignacio Mattos.

KARISSA ONG

James Ensor
James Ensor’s art resonates with me—how it feels, how truthful it is, the empathy within his work, the color palette. The way that his compositions come together is stunning. It’s beautifully balanced. I think I was 14—that’s the memory I have of seeing the work and being like, “Wow!” It was in a book or encyclopedia, back home in Uruguay. I had it in mind that I wanted to go to art school, but it didn’t work out. I don’t regret it, but I think I would have been decent at it.

Romuald Hazoumè
It’s beautiful what he’s able to do with so little. His last show at Gagosian was gorgeous. It’s pretty amazing how resourceful he is—his work is almost like a cemetery for trash. It’s full circle. I’m obsessed with how beautiful the work is—how simple the elements are and how they’re so smartly put together. I approach cooking in a similar way, with very unexpected and common things put together in a fun and unusual way. When I see someone else doing it and doing it so beautifully, I find a connection.

I try to go to galleries as much as I can. I really enjoy it. I know what I like, and I try to stay curious. Being at Flora at the museum is also fun. It’s cool that we have the museum above with all the shows going on there.

Richard Serra
I love how overwhelming some of the work is, and how simple. I also love his approach and his whole philosophy. The scale of it and the simplicity are really disarming in a beautiful way. The movement, the flow. I have a hard time thinking of one particular. It’s hard to pick. One of the early works that looks like a cape is really stunning. His sculptures, for the most part, I love them all.

ARTnews: Has he eaten at your restaurants?

Not that I’m aware of. Maybe he’s been but incognito. We definitely get artists coming to the restaurants. At the museum we get a bunch.

Louise Bourgeois
I love her intensity and rage. There’s a documentary on her where she’s playing with a tangerine [Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, the Mistress, and the Tangerine, from 2013]—I think that’s one of the most beautiful things ever. I like her drawings quite a bit—raw and pure in a way.

Francesca Woodman
It’s fascinating that she was so young and so open and raw with her feelings. Her work is emotionally complex, and it’s so advanced and mature for someone so young. I’ve come across a couple books and saw some of her work and I really enjoy it.

ARTnews: How did you approach photographing your food for your book?

It’s really hard to put in a book how it would feel to dine and how the food would feel. It’s hard to pass along those very primal experiences. I wanted to keep the integrity of the food and how it looks. I was a little concerned that it would come across as too bold and intimidating. I wanted it to be a cookbook, something that was accessible; I didn’t want it to be a coffee-table book. I think we came out with something cool.

Grayson Perry
I’ve been completely in love with his pottery work but also the tapestry work. He’s an interesting character, but I think the work is really stunning. I also love the documentary that he did about taste [the 2012 TV series All in the Best Possible Taste with Grayson Perry]. He did a study of working class, middle class, and the aristocratic class in England, and it’s very interesting to see. For me, taste is completely fascinating—what makes someone have a certain sensibility. I didn’t grow up with access to much art, but I could sense what is good. I also associate myself with the punk-rock influence in his work. Ceramics are interesting—you put so much work into a thing and then you put it into a kiln and you don’t know what’s going to happen.