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Neuberger Museum of Art

backstory: Richard Pettibone

If Pettibone painted an image based on a reproduction of one of our Vasarelys, but upside down, should we exhibit it the way he painted it or should we hang his work upside down to match the Vasarely, which would also be hanging in the show.

Years ago, when I first worked with our Richard Pettibone paintings—works based on reproductions of objects in the collection by artists like Kandinsky, Malevich, and Albers given to the Neuberger by George and Edith Rickey—I was running an exhibition seminar and the students wanted to know this:

If Pettibone painted an image based on a reproduction of one of our Vasarelys, but upside down, should we exhibit it the way he painted it or should we hang his work upside down to match the Vasarely, which would also be hanging in the show.

Hmmm. I don’t know. What do you think?

We debated and then decided to ask the artist. I called him and he said: “That’s up to you.” 

I took this to mean, not that he didn’t care about his work, but that his approach to appropriation art was both rigid and straightforward. He wasn’t copying the Vasarely. He was working from a reproduction and if the reproduction from which he worked was upside down, so be it.
 
Tracy Fitzpatrick
Director, Neuberger Museum of Art

Miniaturizing Modernism: Richard Pettibone Paints the Neuberger’s Rickey Collection  opens January 23.  

Here are some shots of the show being installed:

01-16-19 backstory: Richard Pettibone