Elizabeth Catlett, I am the Black Woman, 1946-47/1989, 9. My role has been important in the struggle to organize the unorganized, 6 1/8×9 in., ed. 9/20, selling in October 2026 at Swann
A rare complete set of Elizabeth Catlett’s iconic linocut portfolio, I am the Black Woman, is coming up for sale at Swann Galleries on October 1st.
Catlett’s first edition, published in Mexico City 1946-47 as I am the Negro Woman, had fifteen prints. The second printing was made in 1989 with the surviving 14 blocks. MoMA bought the last complete set to come up in 2021.
14. My right is a future of equality with other Americans, 9 1/8 x 6 1/8 in., ed. 9/20 via Swann
Even the set in the National Gallery’s Catlett retrospective was assembled from various sources. I don’t know if it’s complete or matching, but the DC public high school Catlett attended and later taught at had an original set in rough condition, which strikes me as the most historically important. For this set, I imagine museums will be competing against themselves to catch up.
Jeff Koons, Puppy, 1992, oil inks on canvas, 120 x 165 in. or so, AP from an ed. of 1, selling at Rago Arts in September 2026
Speaking of unstretched canvases and flowers, this 10-by-14 foot printed canvas edition is hands-down the best way to own Jeff Koons’s Puppy: you still need some space, but it also rolls up; you don’t have to spend $75,000-100,000/year on gardening; and you don’t have to be Peter Brant.
This “oil inks” print is made the same way, I think, as the billboard-sized liquor and cigarette ad canvases from the earlier Luxury & Degradation series. Rago’s calling it a painting, the AP from an edition of 1, and low-key wildly, it’s being sold unstretched, with the original stretcher included. So if you win, you could even just drive out to New Jersey in a Sprinter van and bring it home yourself.
Not sure why the estimate is barely the $274,000 it sold for in 2002. But the money that people spend on Koonses has always confounded me, so why should this be any different?
composite image of John Singer Sargent’s Still Life, Daffodils, 1891-94, oil on canvas, 28 x 33 1/2 in,. collection Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum
I’m not such a John Singer Sargent superfan that I retreat into his work for solace, but maybe a little for distraction.
In 1937, years after his death, Sargent’s sister gave the Fogg Museum at Harvard a bunch of stuff from his studio, including his palette, some brushes, some tubes of paint, and an unstretched little tabletop still life of daffodils that had spent way too many years rolled up somewhere.
John Singer Sargent, Tailor’s Shop, Cairo, 1905, watercolor on paper on board, 10 5/8 x 14 1/2 in., sold at Sotheby’s in 2014
Frankly, I cannot quite believe this exists, but here it is, one of the wildest, almost abstract Sargent watercolors there is.
According to the inscription on the back, John Singer Sargent made this little sketch, Tailor’s Shop, Cairo, in 1905. But it’s written in the hand of his sister Emily, and seems not to have been shown anywhere. Maybe it’s something Sargent kept, but didn’t like.
Like maybe the way that black in the center and right takes over and spreads was a bit too much of a mess for him.
Which reminds me of one of the Sargent watercolors at the Met visited recently by YouTuber Vijay Surendra. [s/o Wayne Bremser’s wife for the link]. It was a canalscape from Venice that the artist had folded in half, not good enough to show, but too good to throw away.
Sargent gave it to Ena Wertheimer, a friend and frequent portrait subject, who later sold it to the 6th Earl of Harewood after he got Veronese’s study for the Apotheosis of Venice, the big oval painting on the Grand Council ceiling.
John Singer Sargent, An Interior in Venice, 1899, oil on canvas, 23 x 32 7/8 in., collection Royal Academy
But what’s most interesting is how it presages An Interior in Venice, the painting Sargent made the next year while staying with the family of his friend/cousin Ralph Curtis at the Palazzo Barbaro. Sargent really did love a dramatically lit Venetian salone. Mrs. Curtis didn’t like the painting, though, so Sargent submitted it for his diploma at the Royal Academy, who claims copyright on it and its 18th century frame lol.
Luc Tuymans, The Temple, 1996, portfolio of 8 aquatints, 33 x21 in., ed. 35+2AP, published by Peter Blum Editions and rearranged to reflect the order the artist explained them in one time
I didn’t post The Temple, Luc Tuymans’ 1996 portfolio of aquatint etchings, in 2017 because I’d tried but couldn’t figure out the source of his images. Also, unlike his painting and his Edition Schellmann sandblasted photo edition of Altar (2002), related to the second image above, of a sealing room in the Salt Lake City LDS Temple, I hadn’t ever seen The Temple in person.
Nothing’s changed on those fronts, but seeing the original version of Altar yesterday, the [stolen] 1996 painting The Heritage X, relit the blogging fire. And while I still don’t know the source of the “European TV” documentary about Mormonism Tuymans photographed, I know some facts, which feels like the diametric opposite of Tuymans’ project here.
and Alicia Inez Guzmán, Julia Halperin, Jan Tumlir, and Sarah Lewis
Beyond the recognition and the money, the Rabkin Foundation has been working to connect and support art writers for going on ten years. It’s been an honor to be part of the discussions they’re fostering, and I’m psyched to welcome this new cohort into the Rabkin community.
And I, for one am seated for their conversations with Mary Louise Schumacher, which start dropping next week. Stay tuned.
Has it really been ten years since I poked through the FBI’s National Stolen Art File? Yes, yes it has. What’s been stolen—or reported stolen—in the mean time?
Have you seen me? Luc Tuymans, The Heritage X, 1996, oil on linen, 33 x 74 1/2 in., stolen from David Zwirner Gallery in 1996,via FBI/NSAF
Starting with the biggest heists, believe me when I say if this 3×6 foot Luc Tuymans painting from 1996 of a stealth photo of a marriage altar in the Salt Lake City Temple had been included in the FBI database in 2016, I would have written about it.
Lucien Smith, Smashed Pieta, 2015, oil on linen, 6 1/2 x 8 in., stolen in 2015, 📷 luciensmithstudio
As his friends and admirers rush forward with an outpouring of grief after the too-early death of Lucien Smith, a lot of folks might be wondering what to do in the face of loss.
One thing, of course, is to reach out to friends and see how they’re doing, especially if you know they’ve had a tough time. In the case of artists who got exploited to hell by the art speculation and celebrity system when they were young, maybe don’t make that experience or that work—or the art world itself—the point, especially right now. And if you could get past all that while they’re still around, all the better.
Lucien Smith, Monkey in Cage, 2015, oil on linen, 8 x 10 1/2 in., stolen in 2015, 📷: luciensmithstudio
Another thing one could do to mitigate loss, specifically in this case, is to help recover the ten Lucien Smith paintings stolen in late 2015, soon after they were made. [Thanks in these difficult times to Yoshi Hill for the heads up on the theft.]
You can change the color On The Couch: Alexandra Fairweather & Sasha Bikoff on On The Couch via youtube
It’s like being a nepo-baby, having a John Chamberlain couch: it takes a lot of work to keep it from being your entire personality. And even then you’re still not going to escape it entirely. So you just acknowledge it and carry on. And maybe make a podcast about it.
Think pink: Alexandra Fairweather and Akari Endo-Gaut on On The Couch via youtube
Not every episode of Season 1 of On The Couch, the John Chamberlain Estate’s new podcast, begins with Estate director and Chamberlain’s stepdaughter Alexandra Fairweather asking her guest if they’ve ever sat on a John Chamberlain couch before? What do they think? I grew up on this couch.
I guess we know that Warhol screenprinted fabric so Sarah Dalton and Suzanne Moss could make dresses to wear to the April 1964 Stable Gallery afterparty at the Factory.
I was visiting Andy at the Factory when out of the blue he proposed that I make a dress to wear at the Brillo Box Exhibition after-party. Wow! I raced to the Garment District and returned with the lightweight canvas he’d requested. He and Gerard Malanga immediately screened the Brillo images onto the material and off I went to create the dress. Andy was speechless upon my arrival! I felt like a New York City Cinderella, dancing the night away in my Box dress, wolfing down hot dogs from an umbrella cart man Ethel Scull had dragged in from the street…
Off I went, Andy was speechless, sure sounds to me like Warhol saw the dress for the first time at the party. The dress which is actually a skirt and a top, is pieced together from eight printed panels in two separated tiers. The yellow Brillo Box (3¢ off) is smaller and rectangular, not square, so it has two sides 13 x 16 inches, and two sides 13 x 11 inches, a configuration Moss did not follow.
Warhol Foundation x Avant.Arte Brillo Box Collectables, 2026, starting at 7 x 7 x 5.75 in., $978., via
Beyoncé. Louis Vuitton. The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Truly we are in a WTF thousand-dollar limited edition box moment.
The Warhol Foundation has licensed three of its copyrighted and trademarked versions of AbEx painter James Harvey’s iconic Brillo Box design to Avant.Arte, which has turned them into three collectable cardboard boxes, framed flat or ready to assemble, each in a limited edition of 1,000. Yellow Brillo boxes were rare. Green ones were non-existent [this colorway is from a poster for a 1970 show in Pasadena.] But churning out hundreds of boxes, in slightly varied dimensions, fabricated by someone else, at a distance, with vague authorization, were definitely the norm for Warhol’s Brillo Boxes.
Warhol Foundation x Fab Brillo Pouf, 2013, 39 x 39 x 39 cm, via Fast Company
And it turns out to be the norm for Warhol Foundation Brillo Boxes, too. In 2013 there was the Brillo Pouf, produced for Fab in coated foam [by Quinze & Milan, the marketing studio whose commercially produced Burning Man pavilion turned out to be part of an ongoing Lexus campaign to debut a new model at Art Basel Miami Beach.]
Plywood Brillo Box with actual lid, 40 x 40 x 39 cm, amidst the plywood splendor of Dope!’s Shanghai showroom or whatever idek
Just look at the IP maneuvering required to bring the 12 x 12 x 12 in. Warhol Foundation X kidrobot plush Brillo Pillow – LARGE ($90, $81 for members) to your MCA Chicago shopping cart.
Any of Avant.Arte’s boxes are too small to hold the Warhol Foundation x kidrobot Brillo Plush – LARGE, but they probably fit one of kidrobot x Warhol Foundation’s 2017 Brillo Blind Boxes. Each Brillo tin holds one of sixteen Warhol Foundation plush or vinyl mini collectibles. According to this rarity ratio, 1/12 were white vinyl mini Brillo Boxes, and 1/48 were yellow.
24 KIDROBOT x ANDY WARHOL BRILLO BOX MINI-SIZED BLIND BOXES WITH COLLECTIBLE ANDY WARHOL OBJECTS IN DISPLAY CASE, $219.95 from ebay seller Couture Supreme (4551)
Unlike the Warhol Foundation, I’m just going to stop.
[FEW MINUTES LATER UPDATE] I can’t stop. @ware.ian just pointed out there are also 100 “lifesize” cardboard Warhol Foundation Brillo Box Collectables, which simultaneously evokes and has no relation to the 500 actual cardboard Brillo boxes Pontus Hulten shipped to Stockholm for Warhol’s 1968 show at the Moderna Museet. Hulten went on to fabricate entire generations of Brillo Boxes after lying about having received Warhol’s authorization to do so in 1968. I, for one, would like to see a Stockholm-Type cardboard Brillo box.
1968 installation at Moderna Museet of actual Brillo boxes, photo: Nils-Göran Hökby
Cardboard Louis Vuitton Jewelry Box, 1989, 22 x 11 x 14 cm, ed.300/850, selling at Christie‘s
I don’t know what I was expecting with an edition of 850, but I was still surprised to see how many Louis Vuitton cardboard jewelry boxes there are out there.
They were made as invitations for the opening of a Vuitton building in 1989, and contain actual cardboard jewelry: brooches by Arman and César, and a necklace by Ben Vautier. The Arman is a stack of cardboard keys in resin; the César is a scrunched stack of gold-painted cardboard; and the Vautier is a cardboard mystery box on a cord that says “it might contain a diamond.”
The example coming up at Christie’s this month is a little rough, so if you’re in it for the whole pristineness of it all, you might as well look around or wait—or spend your money on a Beyoncé wooden box instead. Or maybe this is exactly the cardboard box to buy for the jewelry itself, which, franchement, seems more interesting. More people should wear cardboard jewelry, even if it is from Arman.
And then you make a post about artworks with arrows, and someone laughs about their thwarted plot to steal Louise Lawler’s sign and sends you images they saved from a five-year-old instagram post.
[Oh wait, do we know that Bacher was actually there? Her not going and there just being a Lutz Bacher-related pizza party sounds almost better.]
[next morning update] SHE WAS THERE AT THE PARTY, SERVING PIZZA
![a yellow warhol brillo box copy in plywood with a lid sits on a plywood rietveld zigzag chair copy, with half a dozen other zigzag chairs in the background in a variety of minecraft block ass paint textures, and a wall of yet more plywood cubes, some with arty doors, all from the plywood paradise that is dope! art [sic] gallery](https://greg.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/dope-warhol-brillo-box-1024x1024.jpeg)
