Richard Pettibone, a painter whose enigmatic work concerned copying famed up to date artworks after which exhibiting these smaller-scale lookalikes, died on August 19 at 86. A consultant for New York’s Castelli Gallery, which has proven Pettibone since 1969, stated he died following a fall.
In the course of the Nineteen Sixties, effectively earlier than the heyday of appropriation artwork 20 years later, Pettibone started making replicas of work by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Frank Stella, and others. In contrast to Sturtevant, one other artist well-known for duplicating well-known items by giants of up to date artwork, Pettibone produced objects that had been clearly completely different in dimension from the originals.
Lots of Pettibone’s work had been far smaller than their supply supplies. This selection was a part of Pettibone’s conceptual recreation of figuring out what constitutes worth. Notably, he started this challenge through the ’60s, at a time when the artwork market was drastically increasing.
The work was solely partially meant as parody. “Stella thinks I’m mocking him, and he’s proper, I’m mocking him,” Pettibone as soon as advised Artwork in America. “However I additionally drastically admire him. However I’ve to surprise, if he actually thinks {that a} murals has no that means, that it’s simply paint on a canvas, then how come his is a lot extra precious than mine?”
In a while, Pettibone went on to additionally copy sculptures, exactingly producing miniature variations of Warhol’s Brillo containers and Duchamp’s readymades. Duchamp, critic Ken Johnson as soon as famous, “was trendy artwork’s nice sorcerer, Mr. Pettibone one among his craftiest apprentices.”
Pettibone was born in 1938 in Los Angeles and went on to attend the Otis Artwork Institute. His first main exhibition was staged in 1964 on the trendsetting Ferus Gallery, the place, two years earlier, Warhol had proven his Campbell’s soup can work, riling up critics and artists alike. “Many, lots of the different artists who noticed it actually hated it,” Pettibone advised A.i.A. “They had been pounding the tables with anger, screaming, ‘This isn’t artwork!’ I advised them, this can be the worst artwork you’ve ever seen, however it’s artwork. It’s not sports activities!”
The Warhol present was formative to Pettibone, who went on to make his personal Campbell’s soup can work. These had been so loyal to Warhol’s work that they even contained the Pop artist’s identify rubber-stamped onto them. The one distinction was that Pettibone’s identify was stamped alongside it.
When not imitating current masterworks, Pettibone was obsessing over the poet Ezra Pound, whose e-book covers he loyally copied for one collection made within the ’90s. Pettibone additionally made Photorealist work through the ’70s.
Though not precisely under-recognized in New York, the town the place he was primarily based for a part of his profession, Pettibone is maybe not fairly as effectively generally known as artists akin to Sherrie Levine and Louise Lawler, two Photos Era artists recognized for that includes pictures of famed artworks of their pictures. However Pettibone did obtain his due institutionally within the type of a 2005 retrospective that originated at Philadelphia’s Institute of Modern Artwork; the present was organized by the Tang Museum and Artwork Gallery at Skidmore Faculty in collaboration with California’s Laguna Artwork Museum.
“Mr. Pettibone is a connoisseur and cautious explorer of the chief wellspring of art-making: the easy love of artwork,” Roberta Smith wrote in her New York Occasions assessment of that exhibition. “His work makes clear the advanced combination of discernment, admiration and competitors that spurs artists to make one thing they will name their very own.”
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