Richard Pettibone, a painter whose enigmatic work concerned copying famed modern 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, mentioned he died following a fall.
Through the Nineteen Sixties, nicely earlier than the heyday of appropriation artwork twenty years later, Pettibone started making replicas of work by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Frank Stella, and others. Not like Sturtevant, one other artist well-known for duplicating well-known items by giants of latest artwork, Pettibone produced objects that had been clearly totally different in dimension from the originals.
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A lot of Pettibone’s work had been far smaller than their supply supplies. This alternative was a part of Pettibone’s conceptual sport of figuring out what constitutes worth. Notably, he started this undertaking throughout the ’60s, at a time when the artwork market was drastically increasing.
The work was solely partially supposed as parody. “Stella thinks I’m mocking him, and he’s proper, I’m mocking him,” Pettibone as soon as instructed Artwork in America. “However I additionally drastically admire him. However I’ve to surprise, if he actually thinks {that a} murals has no which means, that it’s simply paint on a canvas, then how come his is a lot extra priceless 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 certainly one of 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, most of the different artists who noticed it actually hated it,” Pettibone instructed A.i.A. “They had been pounding the tables with anger, screaming, ‘This isn’t artwork!’ I instructed them, this can be the worst artwork you’ve ever seen, but it surely’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 latest 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 throughout the ’70s.
Though not precisely under-recognized in New York, the town the place he was based mostly for a part of his profession, Pettibone is probably not fairly as nicely often known as artists corresponding to Sherrie Levine and Louise Lawler, two Footage Era artists identified for that includes photographs 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 Up to date Artwork; the present was organized by the Tang Museum and Artwork Gallery at Skidmore School in collaboration with California’s Laguna Artwork Museum.
“Mr. Pettibone is a connoisseur and cautious explorer of the chief wellspring of art-making: the straightforward love of artwork,” Roberta Smith wrote in her New York Instances overview of that exhibition. “His work makes clear the complicated combination of discernment, admiration and competitors that spurs artists to make one thing they will name their very own.”