Real Estate Art: 3723 Knollwood St.

 Robert Boyd

I haven't done one of these in years. The thing is that after several years of relative quiescence on this blog, COVID has triggered a bunch of new videos, it has made me interested in blogging again. I will never go back to the days of 2012 when I (and my collaborators) produced 330 blog posts. (Not unless someone wants to pay me.) The last real estate art post was done in 2017.

So this morning, as I drank my coffee, I idly was flipping through HAR.com and came across this gem in River Oaks. This house can be yours for 7 million dollars. And it is filled with art. (Which I assume is not included in the purchase price.) A lot of the art is under glass, so it's hard to tell if it is a print or even a poster. I will leave that for you readers to decide. A few pieces I could identify--I leave the rest to you, dear readers.

I think this is the front door. You can see art in the front hallway.

I like how they designed book-shelves to display their art books. Books not for reading, but for displaying.

This is the front hall. I have no idea what these artworks are.

There is something blue hanging over the fireplace, as well as several pieces to the right and several in the book-shelves to the left.

The woman on the pink painting appears to be practicing yoga.

I like how these two door pieces on either side of the window, but I love the three dimensional thought-balloon to the right.

These two pieces appear to be Robert Longo drawings.

The piece hanging in the breakfast nook appears to be an Andy Warhol flowers print, but I've never seen one this dark.

More art books on display, as well as a pair of what appear to be abstract prints. And, if that neon in the fireplace?

Three handsome black-and-white pieces are perfect for this all-white room.

Here's a painting I recognize. It appears to be a painting by Houston artist Paul Kremer.

I like that this upside-down portrait is in the bar. If you pass out, it probably looks right-side-up.

More art books on display. The print on the right of the TV looks familiar, but I can't identify it.

I don't recognize it, but I like the circular piece here.

In this bedroom, we have a George Rodrigue piece. It appears to be a poster. The presence of a Rodrigue makes me question their taste a little.

Cute dog. 

The black-and-white text piece over the bed in this black, white and grey room. It's a challenging piece of art (that I can't identify), but it seems perfectly designed to match the room. 

More poster art?

The Robert Indiana print on the left fits in with this jaunty room.

Oh my god! Is this an actual Jasper Johns?

If you can identify any of these, please comment below.

It's an Ill Wind

Robert Boyd



Sure it's killed 157 people so far, caused billions of dollar in damages, and flooded galleries throughout Chelsea, but at least one art collector came out ahead because of Sandy. At the delayed Phillips de Pury "Editions" auction in New York City yesterday, this collector reasoned the floor bidding would be, let's say, light. So he phoned in a "crazy lowball" bid for a Jasper Johns and won it. Bargains are there if you are clever enough to spot them. (Which is why he's successful and you're not!)

Note on Leo & His Circle

Gallery owners are some of the key gatekeepers for art, and some have the ability (and good luck) to be tastemakers. This is a fact that drives artists crazy, and causes them to conceive elaborate strategies to avoid being gallery artists. Personally, I'm for whatever works to get art to people who want to see it. That necessarily includes galleries.

And the fact is that it's hard to successfully run a gallery (I would be surprised if they had a success rate significantly higher than restaurants). And few gallery owners succeed in bringing truly great artists before the public eye. But some do, and because some do, anyone interested in the history of art needs to know something about galleries and their owners and directors. (Just as, likewise, anyone interested in the history of culture has to be aware of the great editors and great A&R men and great movie producers and great impresarios.)



For that reason alone, Leo and His Circle: The Life of Leo Castelli by Annie Cohen-Solieil would be worth a look. That it is a really well-written, compelling biography is an unexpected bonus. Castelli was born Leo Krausz in 1907. His family was forced to adopt his mother's family name when Mussolini decreed that all Italians must have Italian names--a decree that was apparently aimed mainly at Trieste's Slovene population. But Castelli's father, a Hungarian Jew, was affected by this decree as well. The book deals with Castelli's complex family roots--as complex as the city of Trieste itself. Partly Italian and partly Austro-Hungarian, Italy got Trieste as settlement after the first World War. One result of Castelli's multinational upbringing is that he was himself multi-lingual. Combine that with an extremely suave personality, superb social skills, and a fantastic feel for art, and you have the perfect recipe for a successful New York art dealer.

The book discusses how Castelli got there. It wasn't instantaneous, to say the least. He and his wife collected art and then just before World War II, Castelli opened a gallery in Paris with a dealer named Rene Drouin. Talk about bad timing! This was the exception, though. Castelli was really a guy who mostly lived off his wife's family's money until he was 50. They helped him get jobs, set him up in business, while he spent his time as a socialite and art lover.

But as an art lover, he got deeply involved in art, especially in the art being done in New York after the war. He got involved in what was going on, helped people, acted as a host for parties, etc. Nothing that made him any money, but stuff that made him an important figure on the scene. He laid the groundwork for a gallery. And finally, in February 1957, he opened it up in his apartment. He was 50 years old! A true model for all late-bloomers.

He quickly signed on such artists as Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, etc. He put his artists on a salary of sorts, so they could live between shows. This was risky behavior for a gallery owner, and some of the minimalist and post-minimalist artists Castelli scarcely paid off this on-going investment. He also franchised his gallery nationally and internationally with galleries he owned as well as with strategic partnerships. (I wish the mechanics of the latter had been better explicated in the book. If, for example, if there was a Roy Lichtenstein show at Janie C. Lee in Dallas, how did Castelli get paid?)

Castelli was famous for having a waiting list to be able to buy art from particular artists. How this waiting list worked was fairly arbitrary--Castelli wanted to make sure you were the right customer to be buying the art. He well understood that there was a brand value to certain collectors. What the book doesn't say is whether Castelli originated this practice, which has been used since (my friend Robert Weiss was on waiting lists for Robert Williams paintings--it was a strictly numerical list, and when a new Williams show opened, there was a lot of trading of spots among collectors. Weiss eventually acquired two Williams paintings before his tragic death in a car accident. He was the first serious art collector I ever knew).

In the 80s and 90s, young gallery owners who learned Castelli's techniques started to eclipse him. Some of his top artists jumped ship. Still, he had an extremely successful career, and it is reasonable to ask if the recent history of art would have been the same without him. (Cohen-Solal implies it would not have been.) Would Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg have been the giants they were if Castelli hadn't been there pushing their work? It's not a totally comfortable question to ask, but it's true that cultural gate-keepers like Castelli may have an effect on the art form with which they are are associated. The magnitude of that effect is impossible to quantify (because it is impossible to test the alternative outcome). But the effect is there.

Painting Below Zero by James Rosenquist

 Robert Boyd



Painting Below Zero by James Rosenquist

James Rosenquist was one of the early pop artists. He has an almost perfect pop biography--midwestern boy, learns the fine art of painting billboards, moves to New York and wows the swells with his paintings of jet fighters and spaghetti. His new autobiography doesn't challenge this capsule biography, but it enriches it a lot.

I think for people my age and younger, the weird thing about Rosenquist's story was that he was a billboard painter. This is a profession that doesn't exist anymore, and one could be forgiven for being surprised that it ever existed. The idea that it was cost-effective to hire an artist to paint your billboard seems amazing today. But apparently it was common at one time. Rosenquist got his start painting billboards on the road in the midwest, including many in Minneapolis. These required a combination of sign-painting skills (he had to paint large display fonts) and more-or-less realistic painting. But beyond that was the skill of painting big--not being able to see the whole while you are painting, yet coming out of it with an intelligible image. Obviously this is a skill that mural painters have always had to master. On top of all this, he had to learn to paint it quick.

He had artistic ambitions beyond billboard painting, so he moved to New York to study at the Art Students League. He continued to paint in New York, joining a billboard painter's union, painting bottles of booze on the sides of buildings all over Brooklyn. He made a good living doing this, and in Painting Below Zero, he never hints that he might have thought of this as a job without a future (as it most certainly was). His desire to leave billboard painting behind had everything to do with his artistic ambitions and nothing to do with the fact that billboard painting was about to go the way of the dodo.

His fine art painting in this period (the 50s) was abstract. He worshiped de Kooning and Franz Kline, and for serious contemporary artists of the time, that was what was in the air. But he also new that he wanted to make his own mark in his own style. But he started meeting a younger group of painters who in time would revolt against abstract expressionism. It started with Ray Johnson (who really seems like he was a "connector" in that world), and got to be friends with people like Agnes Martin, Ellsworth Kelly, and others. When he was looking for loft space to paint, he met Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. It was their work that showed Rosenquist a way out of Abstract Expressionism.

The interesting thing about Rosenquist was that he used his billboard experience extensively in his art. I'm not just talking about the large scale of his paintings and the "creamy" painting surface--although those are important. He wanted viewers to overwhelmed by the images, and to see them in fragmentary ways, like he did when he painted a billboard. Hence the overlapping, truncated images in his work. This is one reason why reproductions of his work are so inadequate--they make all the fragments instantly visable and comprehensible. A full-size Rosenquist painting is virtually impossible to see all at once, unless it's in a huge room. And that's intentional.

Ironically, he didn't even meet the two biggest pop artists, Warhol and Lichtenstein, until 1964. This reuse of banal imagery was just in the air. Rosenquist doesn't even quite see it that way--he always had an emotional connection with what he was painting. Obviously there was irony in his art, but that wasn't the main point. He loved the objects he painted (or hated them when he got around to painting F-111).

What I like about this kind of book is the description of the social scene in which the artist operated. How did people meet; how does a kid from Minneapolis find other artists? How do they entertain themselves (lots of drinking, apparently). Rosenquist is quite amusing in talking about the bars they hung in. It was OK to hang at the Cedar Tavern or Max's Kansas City, but if a bunch of painters showed up at Elaine's, they might end up getting booted. The centrality of drinking is kind of intense. I think it damaged a lot of creative people at that time--de Kooning certainly. And for an artist to "network" with his peers, he had to drink.

After Rosenquist moves away from New York, his life is a lot less interesting and more stable. He still has his friends (he was very close to Rauschenberg his whole life), but now he had a family and property and success. He still was doing big bold work. Now he is one of the survivors of his generation, and his memories are welcome. Painting Below Zero was a thoroughly entertaining book.

The Obamas Have Good Taste in Art

Presidents get to decorate the White House with art from national collections. The Obamas apparently chose work by Mark Rothko, Jasper Johns, Giorgio Morandi, and this hilarious Ed Ruscha:



According to the New York Times,

In the weeks before the inauguration, Michael Smith, the Obamas’ decorator, paid a visit to Harry Cooper, curator of modern and contemporary art at the National Gallery in Washington. Mr. Smith was not there to see the latest exhibition, but rather to talk about what art he could borrow.

“We have one rule: We won’t take anything off public display,” Mr. Cooper said in a telephone interview. Nor will the museum lend a work likely to be requested for an exhibition anytime soon. “That limited us to looking at things in storage,” Mr. Cooper added. “But there’s quite a bit.”

Hmmm. Sounds like we have have an elitist in the White House. Good.