Welcome back to Wall Power. I’m Marion Maneker.

Tonight, I want to share some interesting art world reporting from my colleagues at Air Mail. First, there’s Peter Saenger’s profile of Midwestern architectural master and Frank Lloyd Wright protégé Bruce Goff; then Spike Carter’s look at Buddhist ceramicist JB Blunk; and, finally, a quick assessment by Tobias Grey of a Caravaggio on view at London’s Wallace Collection. All that below the fold. (And you can see all of Air Mail’s offerings here.)

Also, it probably goes without saying at this point. But if you’re not a subscriber, and you’re reading this newsletter, you need to get right with the lord. And remember, if you have a tip, just want to vent, or take exception with something I’ve written, always feel free to email me at Marion@puck.news or contact me at +1.917.825.1391 on SMS, WhatsApp, or Signal.

Also mentioned in this issue: Roger and Josette Vanthournout, Max Ernst, Pablo Picasso, René Magritte, Robert Mnuchin, Agnes Gund, Alison Fisher, Mies van der Rohe, Laura Andreson, Shoji Hamada, Nancy Waite, Mariah Nielson, Christine Nielson, Francesco Maria del Monte, Cecco Boneri, Helen Langdon, and many more…

Let’s get started…

Now, let’s read some work from my new colleagues at Air Mail…

Photo: The Art Institute of Chicago, Bruce A. Goff Archive

A house by the architect Bruce Goff was not for the faint of heart. In 1949, in Aurora, Illinois, for instance, Sam and Ruth Van Sickle Ford—a civil engineer and an artist—commissioned a Goff home whose central structure would eventually resemble a pumpkin. Deciding they’d had enough criticism from neighbors, the Fords put up a sign at the construction site that read, We Don’t Like Your House Either.

Today, plenty of people love Goff and his houses for the way they burst out of modernism’s stern functionality. Working mostly from the 1940s to the 1980s, largely in the Midwest, Goff produced hundreds of designs for homes and public buildings, with around 150 of them built. The more than 200 works in “Bruce Goff: Material Worlds”—an exhibition that opened in December at the Art Institute of Chicago—include architectural drawings and models, slideshows of the finished buildings, and examples of Goff’s abstract, rather mystical watercolors. For personal style, there are pieces of his own furniture, objects, and clothing. The fact that this is Goff’s first major show in more than 30 years suggests that his position as an architectural superstar remains a work in progress.

He was born in Kansas in 1904. When the family moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma, Goff was apprenticed at age 12 to the architectural firm of Rush, Endacott and Rush. Several years later, the firm was assigning him commissions and his champion Frank Lloyd Wright was urging him to skip a university degree, afraid it might stifle his unique talent. Goff’s gift lay partly in making almost every home unique, while binding the client’s wishes to his own artistic sensibility—often expressed in unexpected materials such as unprocessed glass chunks, cellophane, and surplus rope. The houses often seem to be frozen snapshots of some motion-filled moment in Goff’s restless, inventive mind.

Alison Fisher, a curator of architecture and design at the Art Institute, organized the exhibition with Craig Lee, an assistant curator of architecture and design at the museum. Fisher values two Goffian characteristics in particular: He insisted his practice include projects that were modest as well as luxurious, and he made listening to clients a priority. In contrast, to paraphrase the architectural historian Penelope Dean, Mies van der Rohe might tell them they couldn’t have closets.

Among those more modest projects was Goff’s 1948 Hopewell Baptist Church in Edmond, Oklahoma, which used steel pipe donated by a local oil company to form a 90-foot conical sanctuary. The top was dominated by an ecstatic, 12-pointed star-shaped skylight, and a hanging sculpture was made from aluminum cake pans. The churchgoers, many from the oil industry, helped build the church.

Goff loved to re-purpose things. In 1970, for Glen Harder and his family, turkey farmers in Mountain Lake, Minnesota, Goff created a house evoking Japan, its deeply scalloped eaves suggesting the house might float off the ground entirely if it weren’t for the red-orange Astroturf covering the roof. (Pipettes that aid turkey reproduction ended up strung with beads as decorative items inside.) To build the Ford house in Aurora, Goff used ribs from a Quonset hut, a prefabricated staple for military use during World War II, to create the pumpkin-like central dome.

Goff, who died in 1982, had his share of reversals. In 1955, he resigned his leadership of the University of Oklahoma’s architecture school in the wake of a sting operation organized by local police. It was the early days of the “Lavender Scare,” a homophobic panic, and it was clear to Goff, a homosexual, Fisher said, “that the local community was hell-bent on removing him” from his post. In 1996, a fire destroyed what Fisher considers his magnum opus, an elaborate family home for the Asian art collector Joe Price. And Goff’s 1961 design for the Viva Casino & Hotel in Las Vegas, a space-age fantasy complete with medieval turrets, never got off the ground. But overall, enough remains of his creations to see that Goff, who also wrote poetry, did not merely do so on paper.

Photo: Jan Watson/Courtesy of the JB Blunk Estate

“I think life is a series of beginnings,” said the sculptor JB Blunk, who lived from 1926 to 2002, “and the one who feels they are always a beginner is the one who has the best chance.” A student of Zen Buddhism, Blunk saw work as a source of infinite inspiration, a medium, if you will, unencumbered by the constraints of time. “When you’ve created something that makes a difference to someone, that juice, that energy, occurs through us. See, I think all the discoveries, all the essence is already in existence.”

Born in Kansas, James “JB” Blain Blunk moved to California when he was 20. At U.C.L.A., he initially studied physics, then switched majors to ceramics, where he came under the tutelage of Laura Andreson, who had created the program. A class field trip to see work by the esteemed Japanese potter Shoji Hamada proved revelatory for Blunk. “It was a shock,” he recalled. “I walked into the room and something went ping! I have to figure out a way to get to Japan.”

Soon after graduating, Blunk was drafted to serve in the Korean War, which became the perfect way to visit Japan and meet Hamada. After his discharge, he apprenticed under two revered Japanese potters—first, Kitaoji Rosanjin, in Kamakura, and later Kaneshige Toyo, in Bizen. These immersive studies essentially made Blunk the first American to absorb the country’s tradition of unglazed, woodfired stoneware. “I’d like to show the people in the States this material and way of using just earth, water, and fire,” he wrote.

In 1955, Blunk moved to Northern California, where he and the British-born painter Gordon Onslow Ford bonded over their shared reverence for Japanese aesthetics—and Zen Buddhism—a friendship that would last both of their lifetimes. When Onslow Ford and his wife acquired a large plot of virgin woodlands in the unspoiled hills of Inverness, Blunk helped them build a house and studio that was integrated into the mountainous landscape. In 1958, when construction was completed, Onslow Ford gave Blunk and his wife, Nancy Waite, an acre of the land on which to build their own home.

Comprising salvaged materials and built by hand over several years, Blunk’s house in the woods, said Onslow Ford, “was his first masterwork. It was built with wholehearted dedication stone by stone, beam by beam, and plank by plank.” Just about everything inside—from candleholders and mezcal cups to the doors and furniture—was handmade by Blunk and Waite.

In his Inverness home studio, where cypress and redwood were added to his arsenal of materials, Blunk produced explosive pieces. Weighing in at two tons, for instance, with a 13-foot diameter, his 1969 seating sculpture The Planet was carved out of a single mammoth ring of redwood burl. Today it lives at the Oakland Museum and is referred to as “one of the most touched pieces of sculpture” in America.

Since Blunk’s death, his “back to the land,” “made by hand” legacy has only grown. Mariah Nielson, his daughter with second wife Christine Nielson, a textile artist, is the director of the JB Blunk Estate, of which Blunk Shop and Blunk Space are a part. Located nearby in Point Reyes Station, the shop offers artisan-made reproductions of Blunk’s original objects, and the space, founded by Nielson in 2021, presents exhibitions like the one that opens this Saturday—“100 Candleholders.” Modeled on Blunk’s own 1981 exhibition, “100 Plates Plus,” and following 2023’s “100 Hooks,” this show features work by more than 100 international artists and designers. Their brief? “To create a candleholder of any material inspired by JB Blunk, his work, or the Blunk House.”

Photo: Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Looking at Caravaggio’s Victorious Cupid for the first time, it’s hard to escape the feeling that the instant one’s back is turned, the naked young boy in the picture will jump down out of the frame and run riot. Downright shocking in its life force, Caravaggio’s allegorical painting is unlike anything that came before or after. Indeed, it seems to bespeak some kind of Faustian pact.

Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte, an early patron of Caravaggio’s, perhaps best captured his protégé’s artistry when he described it as “natural magic,” particularly in the way light and shadow were used to conjure the profundities of human nature. In Victorious Cupid, Caravaggio demolished Renaissance ideals of the chubby, celestial putto by depicting a young god with the body of an Adonis and the face and feet of a cheeky street urchin. On loan from Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie, and never before publicly on view in the U.K., this work is now the centerpiece of the exhibition “Caravaggio’s Cupid,” at London’s Wallace Collection.

It has long been believed that the model for Victorious Cupid, completed in Rome in 1601 or 1602, was Caravaggio’s young assistant and bedmate Cecco Boneri. The face certainly appears to be that of Boneri, who was also the model for two other Caravaggios. But while the luminous flesh tones of the body achieve a rare naturalism, the extraordinary physique echoes ancient sculpture and the attributes of an older boy. “I think it’s partly this juxtaposition which creates the picture’s shock value,” said the show’s curator, Helen Langdon, author of the seminal biography Caravaggio: A Life (1998).

Langdon believes that the widely held contemporary view of the painting as a manifesto of Rome’s homosexual demimonde, with Caravaggio at its center, is overdone. Too often overlooked is the part that Caravaggio’s erudite patron Vincenzo Giustiniani played in commissioning the work and advising on its literary theme of love conquering all. “There is no way Giustiniani would have been interested in showing in the very center of aristocratic Rome a painting about homosexual subculture,” Langdon told me. “That doesn’t seem to me to be remotely convincing.”

When Victorious Cupid was completed, it took pride of place among the paintings and sculptures at the Palazzo Giustiniani, which became an opulent showcase for one of the most extensive art collections of the Baroque era. Giustiniani’s curator, Joachim von Sandrart, wrote about how he decided to put it behind a green silk curtain. “He was very precise about it,” explained Langdon. “He wanted it not to obliterate the pictures around it, which were great paintings by people like Titian. He also, I think, wanted to increase its incredible presence with a flourish at the end of his tour.”

Several years after Caravaggio died under mysterious circumstances in 1610, at the age of 38, Giustiniani wrote a letter to his lawyer Teodor Amideni asserting that Caravaggio had told him that it took “just as much effort to make a good painting of flowers as it was to make a picture of figures.” This gift for still life is made gloriously apparent in Victorious Cupid, where the young god has symbols of architecture, music, and warfare scattered at his feet. But there is no paintbrush or palette to be seen. “It makes me think that this is not just a painting about Cupid’s triumph,” Langdon said. “It is also about the triumph of Caravaggio himself and of naturalistic painting.

Thanks to my various Air Mail colleagues. On Sunday, I’m going to have another great piece from Air Mail. This time, Elaine Sciolino sits down with the Louvre’s embattled director, Laurence des Cars.

See you then,
M