Sturtevant valuation
Made close repetitions of other artists' work, often before they were famous, and called it her own.
Elaine Sturtevant (1924–2014), who worked under her surname alone, was born in Lakewood, Ohio.
What a work by Sturtevant is worth
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Bio
Elaine Sturtevant (1924–2014), who worked under her surname alone, was born in Lakewood, Ohio. From the mid-1960s she repeated the work of her contemporaries by hand — Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Frank Stella, and later Joseph Beuys, Félix González-Torres and Keith Haring — closely enough to be mistaken for the originals, but largely from memory and with her own technique, so that the repetition was the work and its subject was how art becomes an image. Warhol lent her one of his own silkscreens for the Flowers. The early repetitions were met with hostility, and she stopped exhibiting for about a decade from the mid-1970s, returning in the 1980s when a younger generation of appropriation artists had made her questions central. She was awarded the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the Venice Biennale in 2011.
Her repetitions share their titles with their sources — Warhol Flowers, Johns Flag, Lichtenstein Frighten Girl — so the first job is to separate a Sturtevant from the work it repeats, which her inscriptions, her galleries and the exhibition history settle. The Warhol Flowers are silkscreen and synthetic polymer on canvas, made in several sizes and colourings. Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac showed her for decades, and a provenance through the gallery or the Estate of Sturtevant is usual.
Warhol's screens and the Golden Lion
In later years her repetitions extended to video, film and installation, and she lived and worked in Paris from the 1990s.
Double Trouble, a retrospective, opened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in November 2014 and travelled to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.
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