John Baldessari
Burned his own paintings, then spent forty years putting coloured dots over people's faces.
John Baldessari was born in National City, California in 1931 and in 1970 gathered every painting he had made between 1953 and 1966 and had it cremated, keeping the ashes in an urn and calling the result the Cremation Project. What he did instead was conceptual art with a comedian's timing: canvases on which a sign painter had lettered a sentence about art, photographic sequences governed by absurd rules, and above all the appropriated film stills with the faces obscured by flat coloured dots. He taught at CalArts for decades and the list of artists who passed through his classes is close to a history of the following generation. He died in 2020.
The output is dominated by photography, print and photo-based work in editions, which is the market most sellers encounter, and edition size ranges from very small to several hundred. Many works combine several panels or parts, and a set separated over time is worth substantially less than a complete one, so establishing that everything is present is the first job. The lettered canvases from the late 1960s are unique and scarce. Signature is usually on the reverse or on a label rather than the face.
If you own a work by John Baldessari
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.