Man Bartlett

“The place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it.”

James Baldwin.

Henry Moore’s studio.

Celebrity Homes II, 1981

unfortunately no eclipse photography can ever outdo the waffle house one from 2017

[x]

i have goals

Somebody boop me

Philip Johnson built the Brick House next to the Glass House, and quickly converted it from a 3br guest house to a sex shack. It has never been open to the public, but it's been restored now to its butch boudoir glory, so you can visit, and if you're rich, you can stay the night. Spencer Bailey has the hilariously arch scoop for Town & Country.

this sent me back to an old post about La Nuit, an Alberto Giacometti sculpture Philip Johnson had on the coffee table in the Glass House. In the 60s he returned it to Giacometti for repair, but the artist died before he got to it, and it was left as a stripped wire armature. [n.b. it had originally been a figure of a walking woman, the only walking woman in Giacometti's oeuvre, which may be why he stripped it? idk.]

There were some attempts in the 70s to get Diego to finish it, but nope. The Fondation Giacometti put it in a show at the Pompidou in 2007—two years after Johnson's death.

Images: Ezra Stoller photo of the living room of the Glass House c 1949?; a scan showing two incomplete/damaged Giacometti sculptures, from catalogue of the Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti show at the Pompidou in 2007

*And noted Nazi sympathizer

via

my dream is to run into bob dylan somewhere and pretend i dont know who he is so we can vibe and then maybe something catastrophic happens like a natural disaster and we r forced to band together with others to survive and maybe its a tsunami or something so i save everyone with my oceanographic knowledge and then every year he calls me or something after yeah

Noted Dylanologist Scott Warmuth posted this story from curator-turned-Gagosian-consultant John Elderfield about Dylan meeting the great sculptor/asshole Richard Serra, from The Double Life of Bob Dylan Volume 2: 1966-2021: ‘Far Away from Myself’

[John Elderfield: For the first one, Larry talked Bob into coming to the opening, sa[ying], 'The only way I'm gonna do it is if you come to the opening'…He was in a private room, and then people can come and talk to him. It had its really funny moments. The funniest one was Richard Serra…this really tough, no-nonsense, abrasive guy. But he comes in to see Bob and he blushes…And Bob says, 'Pleased to meet you. What do you do?' 'I'm a sculptor.' 'Oh, I'm a sculptor. I drive around in my truck and collect scrap-metal.' And Richard says, 'So, do you weld all that together?' 'Yeah, I do that What about you? Do you do that yourself?' 'Well, it's not like that, I have people who do that for me.' And Bob says, 'Well, you can do it yourself. I could show you how to do it.' There was something so priceless about it. The timing was so perfect. He didn't push it beyond the point he needed to, he just stopped there. He left Richard totally bewildered, whether he was being tugged along—which, of course, he was—or not.]

Vija Celmins

Night Sky 12

oil on canvas

not gonna lie they had me in the first half

The Guggenheim Museum bought back Brancusi's Muse in 1985, after years of litigation and out of a vortex of the worst art world murder and torture cases this side of Ana Mendieta. The dealer who got away with everything but the tax evasion, Andrew Crispo, died in February 2024, three weeks after Carl Andre.

Josef Koudelka made surreptitious photos of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, which were smuggled out of the country. This image from January 1969 is of a public mourning of the death of Jan Palach, a 21-year-old student who set himself on fire in the center of Prague. It is crushing af to see this now in the wake of Aaron Bushnell's own self-immolation, in my country, not far from my house.

image: josef koudelka/magnum via newyorker.com

For future references:

This does not explain how to give credit to the extradimensional being who bestowed the vision upon you, but APA is a bit limited as a citation format.