PHOTOGRAPHS OF PAINTINGS BY EDGAR TRANSUE

Appropriating & Remixing John Baldessari

by Pea Hicks

I make a big chunk of my living digging through dead people’s stuff, buying things cheaply at estate sales, and selling them on eBay. I’ve been doing this for about 20 years. I specialize in various categories of junk, but art is one that I’ve only ever really dabbled in. I’m not a serious art dealer. But I’m an artist myself (a musician), and I have a good eye, so I take chances on interesting things when I stumble upon them.

In early 2012, I was digging around at a garage sale in La Jolla, CA, when I came across several decent acrylic-on-canvas paintings of desert landscapes. The frames had been removed from some of them, so the edges were a bit tricky to negotiate, with framing nails sticking out at odd angles. I asked the guy how much he wanted, and he said $5 apiece. So, since I liked them, and they were reasonably old (1950s-60s era), I bought them all. Often, a big part of my decision to buy paintings is whether they’re signed legibly, and the name is at least somewhat unique, making it easy to look up. The signature on these clearly read “Transue,” a sufficiently odd name.

When I got home, I googled the name. Not much came up. There was a vague reference to an Edgar Transue in the San Diego area who had a connection with conceptual artist John Baldessari, but I couldn’t quite get my head around what they had to do with each other. Still, it was something, so I put the framed ones on eBay, noting the Baldessari connection. I almost always start my auctions off at $9.99 and let the chips fall where they may. Three of them sold for about $10 each, and one sold for $132.50 (that one had a cowboy in it- popular subject matter). Given the hassle of packing and shipping paintings, this result was disappointing. So, even though I liked the remaining unframed ones, I didn’t currently have any room left on my walls for more garage sale art, so onto the “reject” pile they went.

Every year, in the fall, I gather up my eBay rejects, load up my car, and head down to the swap meet to liquidate. Gotta make room for more junk! But I had no luck with these at the swap meet, even at $10 per painting. I took them home, and brought them back the next year, finally selling them back into the wild for the $5 per painting I had originally paid for them. I promptly forgot about Edgar Transue and whatever he may or may not have had to do with John Baldessari.

Fast forward a couple of years to 2014, back in the trenches at the local estate sales. At a house in Chula Vista, I came across some paintings that caught my eye. They were all signed with a familiar name: “Transue.” I scanned my memory for details. “Wasn’t that the guy who had something to do with John Baldessari?” I looked through the paintings and found a few that I liked. But having been down this road before, I was very cautious when I asked about the price. “Oh, those are Mr. T’s old paintings. He used to live here. He died years ago. You can have those for $10 each.” I had stumbled upon Transue’s own archive! And even though I knew I wasn’t going to be able to sell them for anything, I paid the asking price for my favorites, and went on my way.

When I got home, I again googled “Edgar Transue.” This time, I got more detailed information about the Baldessari connection via a Sotheby’s catalog listing.

John Baldessari

B.1931

COMMISSIONED PAINTING: A PAINTING BY EDGAR TRANSUE

oil and acrylic on canvas
59 1/4 x 45 in. 150.5 x 114.3 cm.
Executed in 1969.

Aesthetically reductive and piercingly intelligent, John Baldessari’s Commissioned Painting: A Painting by Edgar Transue from 1969 is a seminal benchmark for the evolution of conceptual and appropriation art that has defined our artistic landscape for the past half-century. The present work is an extremely early and particularly witty model of the razor-sharp Baldessari’s perennial questioning and radical re-evaluation of accepted notions of authorship, originality and aesthetic judgment. Included in two of the artist’s major travelling retrospectives, A Painting by Edgar Transue represents the apogee of Baldessari’s series of paintings collectively entitled Commissioned Paintings, considered a foundationally important corpus within the artist’s oeuvre. Inspiring a tectonic shift in the course of art history, the present work perfectly embodies Baldessari’s emphatic statement, “The purpose of art is to keep us perpetually off balance.”

The genesis of Baldessari’s idea for his series of Commissioned Paintings sprung from the hard-edge painter Al Held’s alleged pronouncement, “All conceptual art is just pointing at things." Drily parodying Held’s criticism through its literal manifestation, Baldessari took photographs of his friend George Nicolaidis pointing out random, mundane objects that caught the pair’s attention as they strolled through town. After recording these documentary encounters with everyday minutiae, Baldessari brought a selection of the resulting 35mm slides to various local sign painters. Baldessari paid his professional hires—whose skilled technique rivaled many of the conceptual photorealist painters gaining momentum at the time—a fee to copy the images as faithfully as possible. A limited project, the entire series of Commissioned Paintings consists of only 14 canvases, each executed by different painters whose names are each prominently identified on the canvas and in the work’s titles. The complete set of 14 pictures was exhibited in 1970 at Eugenia Butler Gallery in Los Angeles and Richard Feigen Gallery in New York. Thirteen, including the present work, were exhibited in the 1990-1992 travelling retrospective that opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Realized near the beginning of Baldessari’s career in a finite series, never to be revisited or later re-executed, the present work is an exceedingly rare reflection of a seminal moment; namely, the legendary artist’s inception of the conceptual wordplay and pictorial tomfoolery that would come to exemplify his prolific body of work.

Lampooning the very notion of “high” art, Baldessari’s cutting-edge output topples the institutional structures narrowly governing the production of art, throwing the definition of art-making open to broad and exciting new interpretation. A Painting by Edgar Transue epitomizes his desire to undermine art’s overwhelmingly didactic impulse, critiquing the hegemonic rhetoric permeating the art world: the gesture of pointing at a banal group of prescription pills set against a stark white background, accompanied by a self-reflexive caption that describes the work, pokes fun at pedagogy. Baldessari is interested more in the function, communication and reception of art, rather than its form. In the present work, he deconstructs our desire to constantly label and designate artworks; when exhibited together, the sameness and repetition of the Commissioned Paintings comically brings to light our own proclivity for judging a work based exclusively on the renown of its author.

Baldessari’s Commissioned Paintings draw compelling parallels to Martin Kippenberger’s landmark early body of paintings Lieber Maler, Male Mir (Dear Painter, Paint for Me) that saw Kippenberger employ a painter of film-posters, known as Werner, to execute billboard-size paintings based on the artist’s instructions. Both artists investigate implicit hierarchies of painterly veracity, each explicitly naming the painters they hire—Kippenberger attributes his paintings to the nom de plume “Werner Kippenberger”, an amalgamation of their names, whereas Baldessari prominently places each painter’s name in bold letters on the canvas. The painting characterizes Baldessari’s ardor for linguistic gymnastics and acerbic one-liners, aligning him within the illustrious tradition of conceptual punsters Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Kosuth. Teaching at the renowned California Institute of the Arts in the 1970s alongside experimental titans such as John Cage and Nam June Paik significantly influenced Baldessari’s artistic development and allowed him to shape the following generation of conceptual image-makers; students of his included David Salle, Jack Goldstein and Troy Brauntuch.

The rise of Pop and Conceptual art practices of the 1960s led to the pre-emptive pronouncement of painting’s death, a reproach that inspired Baldessari—in a spell of artistic dissatisfaction—to bring most of his paintings executed between 1953 and 1966 to a mortuary to be burned, displaying the ashes as 1970’s Cremation Project. Having literally decimated any evidence of his painterly hand, Baldessari fixed his concentration on the gestures of conception, delegation and examination. Unambiguously distanced from any evident authorship by the works' declarative attributions to the hired painters, the Commissioned Paintings were the most cogent and instantaneous expression of this thought. Proceeding from Frank Stella’s famous 1964 credo that “What you see is what you see,” Baldessari sardonically lays out the mechanics of the image’s making and exposes the economic transaction that underlies its creation, marvelously encapsulating the artist’s savvy for cultural subversion. Baldessari eschews the traditional impenetrability associated with Conceptual art for astonishing clarity, peppering his complex commentary on twentieth-century artistic production with his signature wry humor.

Commissioned Painting: A Painting by Edgar Transue marks the inauguration of the genre of text paintings that Baldessari is most renowned for: semiotic wordplays that combine text and image to an elegantly bracing effect. At once poetically parading Baldessari’s intellectual rigor and aesthetic economy, the present work is a stunningly original abnegation of originality. Peter Schjeldahl notes, “On the one hand, there is great art, which fills the ambitious soul with longing. On the other hand, there is one's tatty, funky self. Like a hobo Cynic in the agora, dissecting people's comfortable self-deceptions, Baldessari won't let either horn of the permanent dilemma recede from sight for a second. Paying attention to his work won't make you better or happier, but it will remind you what truth tastes like.” (Peter Schjeldahl, “Wonderful Cynicism: John Baldessari,” Village Voice, February 10, 1998)

Now, this was an auction which had recently completed. The hammer price? $2,517,000.

I immediately hopped back in my car and sped down to Chula Vista. When I arrived at Transue’s house, all the paintings I’d left were still there. “How much for all of them?” I asked. “All of them? There’s more in the shed out back if you want to go have a look.” She led me back to the shed, where there were several more paintings, some of the best of the bunch. “How about $125 for everything? We need to unload this stuff.” SOLD!

In all, there were 25 paintings, mostly from the 1960s era. Subject matter varied. There were more landscapes similar to the ones I’d had before, but there were also some abstracts, some florals, and one large nude.

My first thought was to write to Sotheby’s to ask their opinion of the value of these pieces. Yes, I understood the concept of the Baldessari original, but I thought surely there must be at least some considerable novelty value in owning an original painting by the same guy who painted a painting that sold for $2.5 million! I already suspected what they were going to say, but I wanted to hear it from the horse’s mouth anyway. I received responses from two different representatives:

Dear Pea,

Thank you very much for this email. I'm afraid that the result was Baldessari specific, as Edgar Transue was one of twelve artists commissioned to do one of the radical "commissioned" paintings. Sadly, neither Edgar, nor the other "commissioned" artists engaged by Baldessari to do this, have international secondary markets.

Sincerely,

Gabriela

Thanks for your email. I'm afraid the interest was all about Baldessari - indeed, it was precisely a piece about the hand of the artist not being relevant, only the concept. I'm afraid that Edgar Transue does not have a market, at least in the auction world.

Best,

Lisa Dennison

Nevertheless, I gave it one more shot on eBay. I listed one of my favorites- a modernist abstract study dated 1962. This time I was armed with my secret weapon: this guy’s handiwork sold for $2.5 million! And while the $274.00 closing price wasn’t exactly a total disappointment, I was definitely disabused of the notion that these paintings were likely to have any more significant value than that. To add insult to injury, the guy never responded to my invoice. I relisted it again about a month later, and it failed to sell even for the opening bid price of $9.99.

I realized that if I were to make any significant profits from the sale of these paintings, I was going to have to put in a bit more work in raising awareness about them. I thought “What would Baldessari do?” The answer was right in front of my nose: make “real” art! I could once again use Transue’s handiwork as a component in a meta-art piece. Where Baldessari started with images of mundane found objects, I would treat Transue’s paintings as mundane found objects. After all, that’s exactly what they were to me. Instead of taking photographs and having them painted by hired hands, I would hire a series of professional photographers to take photos of the paintings (complete with a pointing hand intruding from outside the frame), have large prints made and framed, and hire a sign painter to paint “A Photograph by [photographer’s name] of a Painting by Edgar Transue” onto each one. Artist’s credit for each finished piece would go to me. A gallery showing would be arranged, and the photographs would be explicitly for sale. The Transue originals, however, would stay in my shed, just as the pile of pills that were the subject of Transue’s painting for Baldessari remained obscure, likely discarded, and in any event definitely not for sale. However… for the right price, I just might be persuaded… I know full well from my eBay sales that, often, all you need to create an effective mystique around an item is to take a picture of it, which effectively puts the actual item at a tantalizing arm’s-length. Kind of like how a scantily-clad figure can be so much more alluring than a full-frontal nude.

The idea here was very meta. Basically, I was appropriating not only Transue, but Baldessari himself- the master of appropriation. If Baldessari could act as a choreographer of others' artistic talents and claim the result as his own work, then certainly I could choreograph my raw materials in the same way. After all, “The purpose of art is to keep us perpetually off balance.” I suspected Baldessari would heartily approve, so I tracked down an email address for him and sent him a message. Whether he ever received it or not, he didn’t write back.

In addition to functioning as a remix of and response to Baldessari, my piece would also offer an additional commentary about the art market itself. The bulk of the monetary value of any given work of art has to do with the identity of the artist, rather than the inherent aesthetic value of the art itself. Sure, it always helps for the art to have aesthetic merit, but when it comes right down to it, if Picasso scribbled an “X” on a napkin, that napkin would suddenly be worth a considerable amount of money. Baldessari himself had this to say, ironically, about the art market:

Now, this may be true for an artist of Transue’s stature (there’s a reason that painting with the cowboy fetched a premium), but the above painting by Baldessari himself (or, rather, a sign painter hired by Baldessari to paint a found text) is certainly worth a considerable sum, despite featuring none of the qualities or subjects it suggests.

Keep in mind that my ulterior motive all along has been to increase the value of the Transue paintings so that I can make a decent profit from them. Given this, it only makes sense to follow Baldessari’s obviously successful model. But I’m lazy and cheap. After hiring a couple of photographers and paying them whatever rate they quoted me to deliver large prints and sign all ownership of their images over to me, I hit a stumbling block with the framing aspect, which turned out to be really expensive for the museum-quality work I was looking for. Basically, I just couldn’t afford to go ahead with the project as originally envisioned, so it has sat on the back-burner with a million other unfinished art projects until now. So I’m taking the easy way out by just taking the photos myself and posting them here in this online gallery. Something tells me Baldessari would never artistically cop-out this way, but hey, life’s too short, and maybe this site will function as a springboard to facilitate a gallery show in the future.

In 1970, only a year after his “Commissioned Paintings” series debuted, Baldessari famously burned all of his paintings dating from 1953-1966 in a ritual cremation- a bit of performance art. Those paintings, were they to still exist, would surely be collectively worth a large sum of money today, probably regardless of their aesthetic merit or craftsmanship. Transue’s archive, from the same time period, was not burned, destroyed, or lost. It was duly kept safe in storage, as “safe” as the artistic nature of the paintings themselves. And now they’re essentially worthless, commercially speaking. I suppose for now, the net result is the same: Baldessari won’t be making any money off his priceless (but destroyed) paintings, and I’m not making any money off these worthless Transue paintings currently taking up space in my “reject” shed.

View Photographs of Paintings by Edgar Transue