Caballo Blanco’s Last Run
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/21/sports/caballo-blancos-last-run-the-micah-true-story.html?hp
1 week ago
Behind the Scenes of Power : SF MoMA to show previously unpublished Winogrand work.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/04/22/magazine/winogrand-look.html?hp
Sizing Up the Curious New William Eggleston Lawsuit: Can a Collector Really Stop Him From Making More Art?
Published: April 8, 2012
Is it possible to create a new photograph from an old negative? That’s the question at the center of a bitter legal dispute between collector Jonathan Sobel and photographer William Eggleston. On April 4, Sobel filed a complaint against the artist in federal court, alleging that Eggleston diluted the value of Sobel’s collection by printing larger, digital versions of some of his best-known works and then selling them for record prices at Christie’s.
“The commercial value of art is scarcity, and if you make more of something, it becomes less valuable,” said Sobel, who owns 190 Eggleston works worth an estimated $3 to $5 million. “I feel betrayed.” The Whitney Museum trustee and former Goldman Sachs executive is a committed collector of Eggleston’s work: He frequently lends photographs from his collection to museum exhibitions and even helped finance the photographer’s 2008 retrospective. But if he had known Eggleston would someday make digital reprints of works from his collection, he never would have bought them in the first place, he said.
When Eggleston decided to print his photographs in limited editions in the 1970s and 1980s, digital technology didn’t exist yet. But according to Eggleston’s lawyer, John Cahill, the artist has the right to explore this new medium today — even if he is only using it to make larger versions of earlier, limited-edition photographs. “A limited edition is a collection of physical objects, but the artist owns the copyright for the image itself,” Cahill told ARTINFO. “There is no law that prevents an artist from creating additional works with the same image.”
The Christie’s sale featured 36 poster-size, digital prints of images that Eggleston had shot in the Mississippi Delta more than 30 years ago. Some, like a wistful image of a car trunk, were created from negatives he had never printed before, while others were based on iconic works, such as the famous “Memphis (Tricycle).” Sobel owns a 17-inch version of that photograph — he told the Wall Street Journal he bought it two years ago from a collector for roughly $250,000. Last month, the 5-foot-wide digital version sold at Christie’s for $578,500, the highest price ever paid at auction for an Eggleston photograph. By the time the sale was over, digital versions accounted for seven of the artist’s top 10 prices.
It is, of course, too soon to determine whether the large-format prints will indeed decrease the value of the original photographs, as Sobel fears. On Thursday, one of the original dye transfer prints of “Untitled (Peaches)” — a 1973 photograph of a painted “Peaches” sign perched on a tin roof — sold at Christie’s for $242,500, well over the high estimate of $90,000. (The five-foot digital version sold in March for $422,500.) Seven of 15 Eggleston prints in Thursday’s sale, however, were bought in.
This isn’t the last we’ll be seeing of these digital images either. In October, Cheim & Read will present a selection at the next Frieze Art Fair in London. Gagosian Beverly Hills is also planning an exhibition of the digital works.
Though it’s too early to discern the market outcome, lawyers say Sobel’s case hinges on a different question: Are the digital works different from the original prints? In a statement, Christie’s called the digitals “a completely new addition” to Eggleston’s oeuvre; the house’s photography specialist told PDN they were marketed as works of contemporary art designed to appeal to contemporary art collectors, not photography traditionalists. But Sobel’s lawyer disagrees: “They think making it bigger makes it different, but that’s not true,” saidThomas Danziger.
Photography dealers have a different take. “Clients are cognizant of the difference between dye transfer prints and digital prints. They have a very different appeal,” Julie Saul, president of an eponymous photography gallery in Chelsea, told ARTINFO. “Eggleston’s work is all about color, and the dyes have a richness you don’t get in other kinds of prints. It is my understanding that the dye transfer process is the most archival of the color processes.”
Perhaps Sobel’s claim is more interesting as an ontological question than a legal one. What does it mean to create a new work of art in the digital age? According to Virginia Rutledge, an art historian and consultant to Eggleston’s legal counsel, the vintage and digital prints “are entirely different, as objects — viewers experience these prints quite differently, and the market clearly has placed a high value on both experiences.” In today’s plugged-in world, audiences frequently see images of artwork reproduced online and believe “they’ve ‘got it,’ but that is reducing the artwork to merely an image. These new prints are an affirmation that the particular tangible expression of an idea, the physical life of an artwork, has a unique power.”
GOOD BYE JAN GROOVER
The American photographer Jan Groover, who died in France over New Year’s weekend at age 68, trained as a painter and in many respects never ceased to be one. Even after she decided in the early 1970s that her primary artistic tool would be the view camera, the startling pictures she made with it over the next half-century bore more of a kinship with the work of Cézanne, Morandi and Corot than with anything emerging from the darkrooms of her contemporaries.
You had to go back to Paul Strand’s Cubist-inspired abstractions or László Moholy-Nagy’s experiments at the Bauhaus to find photographs comparably austere, intricate, humble, perplexing and sensual as Groover’s table-top still-lifes of kitchen utensils or her displays of colored pots and bottles. For much of her career she seemed like an eccentric school of one.
Among the first photographers to be embraced in the late ’70s and early ’80s by New York galleries (Sonnabend and Robert Miller) previously more disposed toward painters and sculptors, she also became in 1987 one of a handful of women to ever receive a solo show of her photographs at the Museum of Modern Art.
This honor surprised Groover herself, for MoMA’s mighty director of the Department of Photographs, John Szarkowski, was commonly believed to favor the spontaneity and realism of social documentary and to disregard tightly controlled picture-making in a studio setting.
Whatever prejudices may have existed seem to have been overcome by Groover’s craft and old-fashioned convictions. In his catalog essay, Szarkowski wrote that he sympathized with her insistence “that a work of art lives and has its meaning exclusively within the chalk-lines of its own playing field, not the journals or saloons in which it is discussed.” He was “interested in her work because she is so fastidious about excluding from her art any overt reference to autobiographical, much less confessional, materials.”
Indeed, one of Groover’s mottos was “form is everything.” Her photographs explore the spatial ambiguities possible with a view camera. Adjustments to the bellows and the focal plane of the plate holder can, in combination with lighting and artful placement of objects, enable the conjuring up of an off-kilter dreamscape the equal of anything in a De Chirico or a Léger.
She didn’t seem to mind (or at least couldn’t help) that some viewers reacted coldly to a photograph of a knife, fork and spoon, or a set of nesting cake tins, or fruits and vegetables on a cutting board. To get Groover, you had to learn to find warmth in the heat emanating solely from tensions inside the picture, from the shadows and voids she orchestrated out of lines and volumes, and the luxurious array of tones in her platinum and color prints.
Her approach was by normal standards extreme. It was as if she sought to purge photography of the anecdotal, narrative, utilitarian or representational associations that others cherished or found helpful. Asked why she had put a toy dog or a gun in a still life, she didn’t know how to answer. The object itself was insignificant in her mind apart from the forces that held it in place. Even when venturing outdoors, as she did in the late ’70s, photographing suburban homes and streets, or storefronts around New York City, she emphasized the spaces between things more than the things themselves.
“Untitled” (1974) is typical. A three-panel photograph of three trucks passing on a roadway in what may be her native New Jersey, it’s about the colors and shapes linking the vehicles, nothing else. Inspection reveals that the band of brown on the broad side of the middle truck is repeated by a stretch of wall behind a yellow truck on the left and this horizontal zip is in turn carried over to the bands on the side of the red van on the right. With the utmost delicacy three random images were hereby forged into a work of art.
Neither in her photographs nor in her gruff, taciturn manner did Groover signal to strangers that she might possess a sense of humor. As a teacher at the State University of New York, Purchase, in the late ’80s, she had a reputation as a brutal critic who often reduced students to tears.
But among those who appreciated her lack of pretense and arty jargon she inspired tremendous loyalty. Matthew Whitworth, an ex-student and now an associate at the Janet Borden Gallery, which represents Groover, recalls how she would fortify herself for class by arriving with packs of cigarettes and a stack of four coffees that would be arranged on her desk like one of her still lifes. Discussions were often intense, but sometimes about anything but photography.
Groover and her husband, the abstract painter Bruce Boice, lived in a loft on the Bowery before anyone imagined the area could support boutique hotels or a museum. In 1991 they moved to the Dordogne in southwest France because, friends were told, they wanted to smoke in bars and restaurants. Both had personalities ill-suited to competition and networking. Neither the New York nor the Paris art world held any interest to them. They had their work and each other.
As younger photographers have turned sharply away from formalism, Groover has seemed easy to ignore. Perhaps when the art world is less consumed with cynical fun and games, both she and Mr. Boice will receive another look.
The resistance of her images to glib interpretation should keep winning admirers. An underrated show in 2003 of small ink-jet prints at Janet Borden indicated Groover was learning how to make digital color that resembled the thick, chalky substance of pastel. It may be her destiny to be one of those artists who is perennially neglected and then, with fanfare and incredulity, reclaimed.
Mr. Woodward is an arts critic in New York.
If you make a print larger does the picture have more meaning?
AnonymousI thought having more meaning in your work was a bad thing.
