John Baldessari valuation
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 a work by John Baldessari is worth
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Bio
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.
The Cremation Project, and Pure Beauty
In 1970 Baldessari and five friends burnt every painting he had made between 1953 and 1966. The ashes were baked into cookies and placed in an urn, and the work consists of the urn with a bronze plaque recording the paintings' dates and the recipe. Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line, from 1973, is typical of the rule-bound photographic sequences that followed.
His retrospective Pure Beauty opened at Tate Modern in 2009 before travelling to Los Angeles and New York, and the Venice Biennale gave him a Golden Lion for lifetime achievement the same year. He died in January 2020. For a multi-part work, the number of parts and their arrangement, as set out in the certificate, are part of what is being sold.
Sign painters, the Post Studio class and Prearo's book
Baldessari's mother was a Danish nurse and his father an Italian salvage dealer. He took his BA and MA at San Diego State, taught in San Diego schools from 1959, and in 1968 was among the founding faculty at the University of California, San Diego. For the text paintings of 1966 to 1968 he took his own hand out of the work: sign painters lettered the sentences in a plain black face, as in A Two-Dimensional Surface Without Any Articulation Is a Dead Experience, of 1967. For the Commissioned Paintings of 1969 he paid amateur painters to copy photographs of a pointing hand and captioned each with the painter's name.
At CalArts from 1970 he taught the Post Studio class, and his first students included David Salle, Jack Goldstein, Mike Kelley, Tony Oursler, James Welling and Matt Mullican; he moved to UCLA in 1986 and taught there until 2008. His first print was I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art, of 1971. Throwing Four Balls in the Air to Get a Square (Best of 36 Tries) was published as a book by Giampaolo Prearo in 1973 in two printings, one of 2,000 copies and a scarcer one of 500 kept by the publisher. In the Double Bill prints of 2012 he paired two artists in one image, Giovanni di Paolo with David Hockney among them, and named only one along the bottom edge.
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