Barnett Newman's Broken Obelisk, the de Menils, and MLK

Barnett Newman, Broken Obelisk, 1963–69. Cor-Ten steel, 24 ft. 10 in. x 10 ft. 11 in. x 10 ft. 11 in. Photo: 16 Miles

The Museum of Modern Art acquired its copy of Barnett Newman's Broken Obelisk (1963-69) in 1971 from an anonymous donor. The Rothko Chapel has one too, but it only came to own it after a fairly torturous series of political fights. As the Washington Post's John Kelly and The Stranger's Jen Graves (another lifetime cast of the sculpture is at the University of Washington) have explained in great detail, the sculpture almost never made it to Houston.

In 1969, to help acquire the statue, Houston had received a $45,000 federal grant, funding that philanthropists John and Dominique de Menil offered to match on the condition that the work was dedicated in honor of MLK, who had been assassinated the year before. The city council rejected the idea. The de Menils then proposed that the biblical line "Forgive Them, for They Know Not What They Do" be added to the pass of the statue, a suggestion that was also rejected. The work was supposed to sit in front of City Hall, and, as an activist told the Houston Chronicle in 2006: "[Mayor] Louie Welch was supposed to take it personally."

The de Menils eventually decided to purchase the work for the Institute of Religion and Human Development, which is now the site of the Rothko Chapel. They dedicated it to Martin Luther King. Next month, the Menil Collection is publishing Art and Activism (an image of the book is below), a thorough, impressively even-handed look at the couple's philanthropic and cultural pursuits, and it contains two particularly great items that tell us a little bit more about what the de Menils and Newman were thinking.

First, a report from the Houston Chronicle, August 20, 1969:

"Arts patrons Mr. and Mrs. John de Menil today challenged City Council to tell them why a modern sculpture they propose to help the city acquire should not be dedicated to the memory of Martin Luther King, Jr.

"'We understand you want to know why we have asked for this dedication,' de Menil said in appearance before council.

"We cannot understand your objections and were deeply surprised when the proposed dedication was not approved."

Second, a complete reproduction of the August 26, 1969 letter from Newman to John and Dominique de Menil, in which Newman shared how he actually felt about the plan to memorialize MLK:

"When you honored your gift by dedicating it to the memory of Martin Luther King, you also honored my work by rescuing it from the Philistines, who would have destroyed it as a work of art and made is a political 'thing.'

"I am very moved by what you have done and I feel with you, I am sure, a very special sense of happiness. After all it is not every day that we can stand up to the Philistines and win."

Knowing all of that, the Broken Obelisk looks even more exciting and even more rock solid in its current home in MoMA's sculpture garden.

More: MoMA curator Ann Temkin has a nice audio piece on MoMA's site that discusses the work in the context of the political climate at the time that Newman was working on it.


Art and Activism: Projects of John and Dominique de Menil, published by the Menil Collection

On an unrelated note: How great is this photo of John de Menil and Andy Warhol at the Expo 67 in Montreal? It's on the back cover of Art and Activism, and Wikipedia came through with it.


Unknown photographer

Three Gifts on View at the Wadsworth Atheneum

Sol LeWitt, Untitled, 1989. Wood and paint. Wadsworth Atheneum, gift of Coosje can Bruggen and Claes Oldenburg. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

One of the few things that is better than coming across a great, strange work of art (like the Wadsworth Atheneum’s untitled Sol LeWitt stalactite shown above), is discovering that the work happens to have been donated by someone rather exciting. It turns out that the LeWitt was given to the museum by none other than Claes Oldenburg and his wife and collaborator Coosje van Bruggen. Though the Minimalism of LeWitt occupies an aesthetic space far removed from the Pop splendor of Oldenburg and van Bruggen, it’s possible to see a shared sensibility in their practices.

As art historian Rosalind Krauss has written, it is tempting to see LeWitt’s work as a product or representation of cold, clear rationality, a tribute to human reason. But, Krauss has argued, that position does not withstand close scrutiny. “His math is far too simple; his solutions are far too inelegant,” she writes in her 1977 essay “LeWitt in Progress. “[T]he formal conditions of his work are far too scattered and obsessional to produce anything like … [a] diagram of human reason.” Writing of the 1960s, Krauss continues, “It was an extraordinary decade in which objects proliferated in a seemingly endless and obsessional chain, each one answering the other…” That is a thesis that seems to apply equally well to LeWitt's cubic outgrowths and Oldenburg's absurd sculptures of everyday objects.


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But wait. There are other works with fascinating provenances at the Wadsworth. For instance, Barnett Newman’s 1948 Onement II, the sequel to his pivotal Onement I and the prequel to Onement III (both in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art), was donated by sculptor Tony Smith. (The color is terrible in the photograph that I took of it, so I will spare you that image.)


Florine Stettheimer, Beauty Contest: To the Memory of P.T. Barnum, 1924. Oil on canvas. Wadsworth Atheneum, gift of Ettie Stettheimer.

There’s also a particularly nice Florine Stettheimer painting, the 1924 Beauty Contest: To the Memory of P.T. Barnum, donated by her sister Ettie Stettheimer. Ettie also gave one of Florine’s paintings to MoMA and, in a rather unfortunate decision, 50 painting to my alma mater, Columbia Unviersity, in 1967, when the school was planning to build an arts center. That building was never constructed, and most of the paintings are reportedly sitting in storage. This is especially unfortunate because Stettheimer’s works are typically displayed with wonderfully bizarre frames. Thankfully, the Wadsworth is showing the one it owns. (The Stettheimers moved in a rarefied artistic circle. Look in the upper-left corner of the painting above. Thanks to the very helpful placard posted next to the work, I can inform you that is the photographer Edward Steichen!)


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Before Artists' Burgers: "The Sandwiches of the Artist"

Mark Rothko, Brown and Gray Sandwich, 1963. Liverwurst and peanut butter on white bread, with crusts removed.

I spent most of yesterday coveting each of the delicious, artist-themed burgers served up at The Laundromat over the weekend. C-Monster and Winglike have wonderful coverage. The Robert Smithson burger was shaped in a spiral (and featured pickles embedded in the bun), the giant Rachel Harrison burger was an awkward assemblage of burger staples (and a plastic army figure), and the Jeff Koons looked like a Jeff Koons.

It reminded me of one of my all-time favorite pieces ever published in the staid journal of art history October back in 1981 called "The Sandwiches of the Artists." Part of the Art World Follies issue that included Douglas Crimp's infamous "The End of Painting" and Rosalind Krauss's seminal attack on biographically-grounded art history, "In the Name of Picasso", the piece, by curator and canon E. A. Carmean Jr., was a work of rigorous, joyous frivolity, featuring sandwiches in tribute to the century's great modernists, prefiguring this weekend's cookout almost three decades in advance.

Barnett Newman, Sandwich 9, 1964-1965. Bacon and mustard on white bread.

In Carmean's detailed research on the eating habits of the artists, we learn that Gorky initially ate sandwiches like Picasso and Cézanne before coming under the influence of de Kooning and Miró, who introduced him to the pastry tube and thin spreads of condiments. Still, he was a traditionalist at heart, Carmean emphasizes. "Gorky continued to create his lunches in the nineteenth century fashion, by first making small cracker versions..."

Robert Motherwell, The Anchovies for the Spanish Olives, No. 78 (Moutarde), 1957. Anchovies and olives on mayonnaise, with mustard, on bread.

There's no free online version, unfortunately, but I've posted four of Carmean's most delightful creations. (You can access the full version through the redoubtable JSTOR.) There're also sandwiches by de Kooning and David Smith, alongside photos of Motherwell enjoying lunch, Gorky and Breton brandishing bagged lunches and truffle forks on a picnic, and Rothko fretting on the telephone over the cost of liverwurst.

Jackson Pollock, Sandwich No. 20 (Almond Ribbons), 1950. Pasta and vegetables on bread.

"Between 1940-1945 Pollock began to stack this meat, inspired by Picasso's Jambon quiches of the surrealist period. ... Breaking with previous traditions [in 1950], he created the meatless meal on bread; 'I am a garden,' he once said to Hans Hoffman."

The final bit of relevant culinary news is that L'Ecole in New York debuted a cocktail in honor of Donald Judd last week composed of tequila and cassis.

Remembering Tony Rosenthal, Remembering "Sculpture in Environment"

A very grainy image from the Times of Claes Oldenburg working on Hole on October 1, 1967.

The sculptor Tony Rosenthal, responsible for the much-loved spinning cube Alamo at Astor Place in New York, passed away on Tuesday. As is often the case with Times obituaries, there was a gem hiding inside: Alamo was supposed to remain at its current home for the month of October 1967, but neighborhood residents petitioned to keep the sculpture, and they got it.

Alamo had been installed as part of the Sculpture in Environment exhibition run by Samuel Adams Green and the New York City Office of Cultural Affairs, which placed twenty-five works around the city by well-known names like Alexander Calder, Barnett Newman, and David Smith (whose Zig IV, installed at Lincoln Center, is the only piece still in its original location) and some less-remembered names like Preston McClanahan and Richard Stankiewicz.

Seven years before Creative Time and a decade before the Public Art Fund, New York's city government was tackling some fairly radical art and organizing what Hilton Kramer declared was "probably the most extensive temporary display of new sculpture ever sponsored by a municipality." Olafur Eliasson's New York City Waterfalls, PLOT09, Chicago's Cow Parade, and every other public art event all owe some bit of their success to Sculpture in Environment.

Triangle with Ears, 1966. One of the two Calder sculptures shown in Harlem.

Each artist was allowed to pick their place in and contribution to the show. Alexander Calder picked Harlem, showing two sculptures outside the Lenox Terrace Apartments at 10 West 135th Street. "It's just that I feel sympathy for the Negro, and would like to make a gesture of friendship, if they would accept it," he told the Times, offering to donate his works to the Harlem community. (The artists included were almost uniformly white males, excepting Louise Nevelson, further complicating his wince-inducing - but certainly well-intentioned - remark.)

After being told by Green that he would not be allowed to create a traffic jam, declare New York a sculpture, create a free food machine, play a recurring, recorded scream, or craft a whimsical "silly subway" as his contribution to the show, Claes Oldenburg decided to dig a 6 x 6 x 3 foot ditch northwest of Cleopatra's Needle, just behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Aided by two gravediggers he paid $50 (working well before Chris Burden and Urs Fischer), Oldenburg excavated the ground and proceeded to refill it. Suzaan Boettger published a brilliant summary and analysis of the event in Artforum.

Broken Obelisk, 1963, in the Times. Hilton Kramer, generally displeased, provided the quotation.

Along with Calder, there were other more traditional sculptures. Barnett Newman's Broken Obelisk, 1963, for example, showed up outside the Seagram Building, just a few blocks from the Museum of Modern Art new atrium, which it would inaugurate in 2004. Hilton Kramer was harsh in his appraisal of the affair, noting that Green had been "thoroughly democratic in choosing good and bad sculptors alike." "Much of the work," he wrote, "violates rather than adorns the urban environment," establishing the line of critique on which shows of public art are largely judged up to this day.