Installation view, Seen in the Mirror: Things from the Cartin Collection, David Zwirner, New York, 2021
Installation view, Seen in the Mirror: Things from the Cartin Collection, David Zwirner, New York, 2021
Seen in the Mirror: Things from the Cartin Collection
David Zwirner is pleased to present Seen in the Mirror: Things from the Cartin Collection, on view at the gallery’s 537 West 20th Street location.
Since he began collecting in the 1980s, Mickey Cartin has assembled a remarkable and singular collection of works—including paintings from the last six centuries, drawings, sculptures, illuminated manuscripts, early printed books, artists’ books, and old master prints—that reflects his own expansive curiosity and his interest in the philosophical nuances he often discovers in them. Cartin’s thoughtful approach to collecting is informed by his fascination with beauty, knowledge, and the miraculous, as well as what curator Luke Syson calls the “taxonomies of the subjective and the irrational.”1 A general focus on certain genres, such as portraiture and self-portraiture as well as landscape painting, establishes links between works from disparate periods, as do conceptual and philosophical throughlines, such as numerology and seriality, which make for exciting and unexpected connections.
Image: Giorgio Morandi, Natura morta (Still Life), 1946 (detail)
1 Luke Syson in conversation with Mickey Cartin, 2021
Dates
November 4—December 18, 2021
Artist
Including, Josef Albers, Giorgio Morandi, Joseph Cornell, Forrest Bess, Sol LeWitt, Charles LeDray, Rembrandt van Rijn
“Collections are … acts of autobiography. They chart the collector’s encounters and flowing enthusiasms, their crazes perhaps, their passions always, whether permanent or fleeting. Thus they’re cabinets of a person’s own curiosities, in the metaphorical sense of the word. They’re both private and revealing, mirrors of the self.”
—Luke Syson, from his essay “Seen in the Mirror: Things from the Cartin Collection,” 2021. The text throughout is excerpted from Syson’s essay, unless otherwise noted. Read the full essay here.
Josef Albers, Self-Portrait III, 1917 (detail)
Josef Albers, Self-Portrait III, 1917 (detail)
Vilhelm Hammershøi, Self Portrait, 1895 (detail)
Vilhelm Hammershøi, Self Portrait, 1895 (detail)
Otto Dix, Selbst (Self Portrait), 1934 (detail)
Otto Dix, Selbst (Self Portrait), 1934 (detail)
Giorgio de Chirico, Autoritratto, 1948 (detail)
Giorgio de Chirico, Autoritratto, 1948 (detail)
Mickey Cartin’s organized, disorganizing self-portrait contains many self-portraits. I find a useful starting point, a kind of center to the collection, in the works by Max Liebermann (1847–1935), Peder Krøyer (1851–1909), Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864–1916), Josef Albers (1888–1976), Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978), and Otto Dix (1891–1961). These are all pictures that are about much more than mirroring mere physical appearance. They are self-analyses, acts of significant self-revelation. A painting of an artist is not just a surface image; it can be an opening up. These pictures reflect but they penetrate too.
Vilhelm Hammershøi
Self Portrait, 1895
Oil on canvas
13 1/8 x 11 1/8 inches (33.3 x 28.2 cm)
Framed: 16 1/8 x 14 1/8 inches (41 x 35.9 cm)
Framed: 16 1/8 x 14 1/8 inches (41 x 35.9 cm)
“I see things in these [self-portraits] that make me think: ‘Ah, I know this person,’ or if I don’t, I like what I’m thinking and imagining. That’s what attracts me to artists' ways of seeing themselves. I somehow identify with each of these attempts to talk about themselves. I just ‘feel’ something and see them as something that immediately matters to me. And I realize that after looking at each of them so often—over so many years—their importance continues on a scale from impenetrable to complete familiarity.”
—Mickey Cartin, 2021
Cartin Residence, New York, 2021. Courtesy the Cartin Collection
Cartin Residence, New York, 2021. Courtesy the Cartin Collection
Sometimes his choices are less than obvious. The two prints that have caught Cartin’s eye show a more mystical Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528), as he envisages the ways in which the miraculous can be interwoven or sit alongside the apparently workaday. In one print, the appearance of a crucifix between the antlers of a stag, encountered while out hunting, seems mythical. In the other work, the birth of Christ happens in a corner, tucked away under peeling paint and crumbling plaster, while someone draws water from a well outside.
Albrecht Dürer
St. Eustace, c. 1501
Engraving on paper
14 7/8 x 10 1/4 inches (37.8 x 26 cm)
Framed: 24 x 19 7/8 inches (61 x 50.5 cm)
Framed: 24 x 19 7/8 inches (61 x 50.5 cm)
Albrecht Dürer
The Nativity, 1504
Engraving on paper
7 1/4 x 4 5/8 inches (18.4 x 11.7 cm)
Framed: 16 x 13 inches (40.6 x 33 cm)
Framed: 16 x 13 inches (40.6 x 33 cm)
Cartin’s collection proposes taxonomies of the visionary, the illusory, the prophetic, the dreamt, the monstrous, and the miraculous. Cartin’s mid-Quattrocento manuscript by Joachim di Fiore is illustrated with the impossible made real.
Psuedo Joachim di Fiore
Vaticinia sive Prophetiae et Imagines Summorum Pontificum, 1447-1464
Illuminated manuscript on vellum
9 5/8 x 6 7/8 inches (24.4 x 17.5 cm)
The presence in the collection of a Resurrection of Christ by the anonymous Master of the Virgo inter Virgines (active 1483–1489) reminds us of the enormous miracle inherent in this much-painted, taken-for-granted scene. They’re the historical preface to all kinds of vision in the collection.
Master of the Virgo Inter Virgines
The Resurrection of Christ, c. 1483-1498
Oil on panel
34 3/4 x 20 inches (88.3 x 50.8 cm)
Framed: 40 1/2 x 26 inches (102.9 x 66 cm)
Framed: 40 1/2 x 26 inches (102.9 x 66 cm)
This is a collection that is carefully calibrated to bring out the marvelous, the exceptional, and the portentous in works that in more ordinary contexts might be seen as small acts of artistic peculiarity.
Michele Pace del Campidoglio’s (1625–1669) monumental hound becomes odder, larger in our memory and imagination.
Michele Pace del Campidoglio
A Hound in a Landscape, 1665-1666
Oil on canvas
56 x 63 inches (142.2 x 160 cm)
Framed: 73 3/4 x 82 1/8 inches (187.3 x 208.6 cm)
Framed: 73 3/4 x 82 1/8 inches (187.3 x 208.6 cm)
Cartin Residence, New York, 2021. Courtesy the Cartin Collection
Cartin Residence, New York, 2021. Courtesy the Cartin Collection
Cartin Residence, New York, 2021. Courtesy the Cartin Collection
Cartin Residence, New York, 2021. Courtesy the Cartin Collection
Cartin Residence, New York, 2021. Courtesy the Cartin Collection
Cartin Residence, New York, 2021. Courtesy the Cartin Collection
This is a way of looking, of understanding otherwise mundane things as all separately extraordinary. In these prints, Rembrandt’s elderly sitters are imbued with such an intensity that they become more than themselves.
Rembrandt van Rijn
The Artist's Mother: Head Only, Full Face, 1628
Etching on paper
2 1/2 x 2 5/8 inches (6.4 x 6.7 cm)
Framed: 10 1/4 x 10 1/8 inches (26 x 25.7 cm)
Framed: 10 1/4 x 10 1/8 inches (26 x 25.7 cm)
Myron Stout
Tiresias II, 1965
Graphite on paper
Image: 6 x 5 inches (15.2 x 12.7 cm)
Sheet: 11 1/4 x 10 5/8 inches (28.6 x 27 cm)
Framed: 12 3/4 x 11 3/8 inches (32.4 x 28.9 cm)
Sheet: 11 1/4 x 10 5/8 inches (28.6 x 27 cm)
Framed: 12 3/4 x 11 3/8 inches (32.4 x 28.9 cm)
Highlights from the Cartin Collection
Mickey Cartin shares personal insights and recollections about selected works and his meetings with artists over the years
Giorgio Morandi
Natura morta (Still Life), 1946
Oil on canvas
14 15/16 x 18 1/8 inches (37.9 x 46 cm)
Framed: 19 5/8 x 22 9/16 inches (49.8 x 57.3 cm)
Framed: 19 5/8 x 22 9/16 inches (49.8 x 57.3 cm)
“I had seen many Morandi still life paintings before I ever thought about buying one. I had visited the Museo Morandi in Bologna, read aImost every entry in the English bibliography, and realized that I was intimidated by the intense effect these little pictures of everyday jars and vessels were having on me. What was I missing? How could such bashful, unimposing, soft-textured pictures be so challenging to me? I’ve yet to answer this question, but he has provided me with the most life-changing experience in my life of curiosity-driven voyeurism.”
—Mickey Cartin, 2021
Installation view, Seen in the Mirror: Things from the Cartin Collection, David Zwirner, New York, 2021
Installation view, Seen in the Mirror: Things from the Cartin Collection, David Zwirner, New York, 2021
Joseph Cornell
Untitled, 1956-1958
Mixed media in wooden box
9 1/2 x 14 1/4 inches (24.1 x 36.2 cm)
Joseph Cornell
Untitled (Le Grand Chien), c. 1930
Mixed media on paper
11 3/4 x 9 1/8 inches (29.8 x 23.2 cm)
Framed: 11 3/4 x 9 1/4 inches (29.9 x 23.5 cm)
Framed: 11 3/4 x 9 1/4 inches (29.9 x 23.5 cm)
“I first noticed a Joseph Cornell shadow box at the Wadsworth Atheneum in the 1970’s, when I knew absolutely nothing about the artist. It was first presented by Cornell to the Atheneum’s legendary director Everett “Chick” Austin in the early 1930’s as a table-top still life composed of various mysterious elements and Austin passed. Cornell returned with the same elements arranged in a box—his very first—and Austin acquired it. This came at a time before the war when Austin, armed with the funds if not always the confidence of the of the very wealthy insurance industry founders and heirs on "his” board, would make annual summer trips to Europe to buy for the museum in my hometown. He returned with for example, Caravaggio’s great St. Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy, 1595, a magnificent Fra Angelico Gold ground in 1928, and Cranach’s magnificent The Feast of Herod, 1531. In that same moment he acquired Mondrian’s Composition in Blue and White, 1935. So... Fra Angelico to Mondrian…Caravaggio to Cornell. I didn’t realize until much later how important it was to look at everything, and my curiosity never let me down. I’m still looking at everything.”
—Mickey Cartin, 2021
Cartin Residence, New York, 2021. Courtesy the Cartin Collection
Cartin Residence, New York, 2021. Courtesy the Cartin Collection
Wunderzeichenbuch (Book of 167 watercolors), c. 1552
167 drawings, gouache, watercolor, and inscriptions on paper
Each painting: 5 7/8 x 11 7/16 inches (14.9 x 29.1 cm)
Exceptional Works: Wunderzeichenbuch (Book of Miracles)
A page from the Wunderzeichenbuch (Book of 167 watercolors), c. 1552
A page from the Wunderzeichenbuch (Book of 167 watercolors), c. 1552
A page from the Wunderzeichenbuch (Book of 167 watercolors), c. 1552
A page from the Wunderzeichenbuch (Book of 167 watercolors), c. 1552
A page from the Wunderzeichenbuch (Book of 167 watercolors), c. 1552
A page from the Wunderzeichenbuch (Book of 167 watercolors), c. 1552
Adolf Wölfli, Die Himmels Leiter, 1915 (detail)
Adolf Wölfli, Die Himmels Leiter, 1915 (detail)
Adolf Wölfli, Die Himmels Leiter, 1915 (detail)
Adolf Wölfli, Die Himmels Leiter, 1915 (detail)
Adolf Wölfli, Die Himmels Leiter, 1915 (detail)
Adolf Wölfli, Die Himmels Leiter, 1915 (detail)
Adolf Wölfli (1864–1930) drew intensively, minutely, insanely. The lunatic as artist. The artist as lunatic. Is there always real space between them? In Cartin’s example, Wölfli describes a ladder to heaven—as intricate as any medieval jewel, and perhaps containing another self-portrait in place of the expected Jacob.
Adolf Wolfli
Die Himmels Leiter, 1915
Graphite and colored pencil on paper
39 1/4 x 28 1/4 inches (99.7 x 71.8 cm)
Framed: 45 1/2 x 34 1/2 inches (115.6 x 87.6 cm)
Framed: 45 1/2 x 34 1/2 inches (115.6 x 87.6 cm)
For Joseph Yoakum (1890–1972), once a circus runaway, providing multiple unreliable origin stories, and only working intensively toward the end of his life in the late 1960s, Nature and God were the same thing. He had traveled, or at least that’s what he said, and his landscapes are identified with real places. But they are fantastic, conjured, the names taken from his atlas and his Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Joseph Yoakum
Mt. Legal cap in Wallowa Mtn Range near Enterprise Oregon, n.d.
Pen and colored pencil on paper
2 x 19 inches (30.5 x 48.3 cm)
Framed: 20 1/2 x 27 inches (52.1 x 68.6 cm)
Framed: 20 1/2 x 27 inches (52.1 x 68.6 cm)
Joseph Yoakum
Saxonia A Passenger Ship To Europe And Phillipene Islands From New York, 1969
Colored pencil and ink on paper
11 3/4 x 18 3/4 inches (29.9 x 47.6 cm)
Framed: 20 1/2 x 27 inches (52.1 x 68.6 cm)
Framed: 20 1/2 x 27 inches (52.1 x 68.6 cm)
Thierry de Cordier
F.F. Could be a Seascape, 1998
Acrylic, china marker, and ink on photograph
11 5/8 x 16 3/8 inches (29.5 x 41.6 cm)
Framed: 19 x 25 5/8 inches (48.3 x 65.1 cm)
Framed: 19 x 25 5/8 inches (48.3 x 65.1 cm)
Thierry De Cordier (b. 1954) is setting out to paint something much bigger than simply what waves, water, and sea-foam look like—that this is an emotional and imaginative representation of the great forces of nature. Lucas Arruda (b. 1983) paints, he says, states of mind rather than landscapes as such.
Lucas Arruda
Untitled (from the Deserto-Modelo series), 2017
Oil on canvas
12 x 13 3/8 inches (30.5 x 34 cm)
“Lucas Arruda’s pictures astounded me at first sight. I thought I was seeing some kind of undiscovered miracle when I first looked at these and I still feel that way.”
—Mickey Cartin, 2021
Cartin Residence, New York, 2021. Courtesy the Cartin Collection
Cartin Residence, New York, 2021. Courtesy the Cartin Collection
Cartin Residence, New York, 2021. Courtesy the Cartin Collection
Cartin Residence, New York, 2021. Courtesy the Cartin Collection
Algernon Newton
Spring Morning, Campden Hill, 1940
Oil on canvas
33 7/8 x 48 inches (86 x 121.9 cm)
Framed: 42 1/4 x 56 1/2 inches (107.3 x 143.5 cm)
Framed: 42 1/4 x 56 1/2 inches (107.3 x 143.5 cm)
I would not have expected to re-encounter Algernon Newton (1880–1968) here. And yet his description of strong shadows in a wide street is revealed as beautiful and strange. There is beauty to be found everywhere, even in a gasometer, he thought, depending on the artist’s vision. Vision again—and still used in a way that can contain the visionary.
Peder Balke
Fra Nordkapp, 1853
Oil on paper on board
14 1/4 x 19 7/8 inches (36.2 x 50.5 cm)
Framed: 20 x 25 1/2 inches (50.8 x 64.8 cm)
Framed: 20 x 25 1/2 inches (50.8 x 64.8 cm)
Cartin’s collection reveals artists as players within a continuum, successors to painters like the extraordinary nineteenth-century German Carl Gustav Carus (1789–1869) or Peder Balke (1804–1887), a Norwegian urban idealist and creator of intensely worked panels of sea and cliffs, of moonlight bursting through clouds, of Scandinavian Sturm und Drang. Carl Jung stated that it was Carus who originated the idea of the unconscious as an essential part of the human psyche. He also invented the concept of Erdlebenbildkunst—the pictorial art of the life of the earth—in which the inner workings of geology were to be expressed as a more than Romantic vision. The results are thrilling.
Installation view, Seen in the Mirror: Things from the Cartin Collection, David Zwirner, New York, 2021
Installation view, Seen in the Mirror: Things from the Cartin Collection, David Zwirner, New York, 2021
Installation view, Seen in the Mirror: Things from the Cartin Collection, David Zwirner, New York, 2021
Installation view, Seen in the Mirror: Things from the Cartin Collection, David Zwirner, New York, 2021
Installation view, Seen in the Mirror: Things from the Cartin Collection, David Zwirner, New York, 2021
Installation view, Seen in the Mirror: Things from the Cartin Collection, David Zwirner, New York, 2021
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