BGuthrie Photos: DC -- Natl Gallery of Art -- East Wing -- Exhibit: The Double: Identity and Difference in Art since 1900

DC -- Natl Gallery of Art -- East Wing -- Exhibit: The Double: Identity and Difference in Art since 1900:

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Description of Pictures: The Double: Identity and Difference in Art since 1900
July 10 – October 31, 2022
When two forms or images are presented together, our eyes can’t help but compare them. We “see double” and identify differences and similarities. The art of the double causes us to see ourselves seeing.
The Double is the first major exhibition to consider how and why modern and contemporary artists have employed doubled formats to explore perceptual, conceptual, and psychological themes. From Matisse, Duchamp, and Gorky to Rauschenberg, Johns, Warhol, Truitt, and Hesse, this multimedia presentation features works by many of today’s leading artists, including Kerry James Marshall, Glenn Ligon, Roni Horn, and Yinka Shonibare.
Through art, The Double explores enduring questions of identity and difference, especially self-identity as defined by our own unconscious, by society, and by race, gender, and sexuality.

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Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks including AI scrapers can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.

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Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. DOUBLE_220807_0005.JPG: The Double: Identity and Difference in Art Since 1900 Jul 10–Oct 31, 2022
2. DOUBLE_220807_0020.JPG: JOSIAH McELHENY Walking Mirror I and Walking Mirror II 2012 cedar wood, mirror, cloth straps, metal hardware, wood pedestal, china marker drawing, performance instructions, periodic performance Courtesy of the artist and James Cohan, New York McElheny’s Walking Mirror I and Walking Mirror II, like Robert Morris’s nearby Two Columns, function as both sculptures and props. When the works are activated, the open sides reveal two performers who stand inside, harnessed by nylon straps. Unable to see ahead, the dancers follow a line drawn on the floor, eventually returning the props to their pedestals. Viewers see not only the dancers as each other’s double, but also their own doubles in the moving mirrors.
3. DOUBLE_220807_0033.JPG: ROBERT MORRIS Two Columns 1961/ 2018 painted plywood, two units Collection of the Estate of Robert Morris, courtesy of Castelli Gallery A first Column was constructed in a loft with a low ceiling and had to be laid on its side. This inspired the idea of exhibiting it vertically and horizontally at six-month intervals, as well as a performance piece, where the work stood upright for 3� minutes before tumbling to the floor, where it lay for another 3� minutes. During the dress rehearsal, the artist stood inside Column and pushed the wood structure over with his body weight. A bloody nose caused a change of plan; during the actual performance, Morris pulled the Column down with a string. This iteration of the work shows both positions simultaneously. Identical in size and color, yet oppositely placed, the elements prompt us to consider that they are both alike and distinct.
4. DOUBLE_220807_0043.JPG: The Double: Identity and Difference in Art since 1900 Doubling involves combining forms or motifs that appear both alike and unalike. The presentation of two shapes, images, or bodies forces us to compare them — to perceive something and another thing, two individuals, two selves. The art of doubling echoes our own binocular vision, the way two images — one from each eye — together give us the perception of depth. The art of the double challenges our perception, causing us to see ourselves seeing. Works of doubling also explore questions of identity — how we distinguish one form, object, or person from another; how we perceive likeness and unlikeness, resemblance and difference. Organized during a period of widening social divisions around national, racial, ethnic, sexual, and gender identity, this exhibition challenges rigid models of selfhood that limit identity and reinforce our differences by inhibiting our capacity to identify with others. Artists have long explored doubling, but developments in modern literature, film, photography, and psychology since 1900, and the emergence of abstraction in modern art, have created especially fertile conditions for artistic doubling. Presenting works in a wide range of media by more than ninety artists, the exhibition examines the perceptual, conceptual, and psychological implications of the double in four sections: Seeing Double, a comparison of like and like that invites us to look closely; Reversal, involving forms mirrored, rotated, or turned upside down; Dilemma, a difficult choice between two possibilities; and The Divided and Doubled Self, including split and shadowed selves, personae, and fraternal, romantic, or artistic pairs. The art of doubling challenges us to look and look again. The exhibition is organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington. The Robert and Mercedes Eichholz Foundation has provided major support for the exhibition. It is also generously supported by Dr. Mihael Polymeropoulos and Mrs. Mahy D. Polymeropoulos. Additional funding is provided by the Tower Project of the National Gallery of Art. The exhibition is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.
5. DOUBLE_220807_0047.JPG: JASPER JOHNS Two Flags 1962 oil on canvas, two panels Collection of Irma and Norman Braman Johns has explored many kinds of doubling during a storied career spanning almost seven decades. Beginning with his paintings of the US flag in the 1950s, he often made two representations of the same motif. Remarkably alike, the stacked canvases of Two Flags yield their differences slowly (note the variations in the brushwork and tone of the stripes, and the drips at the top and bottom of the lower panel). Although Johns has denied that his Flags possess political significance, fifty years after he painted this diptych, its evocation of a divided America could not be timelier.
6. DOUBLE_220807_0054.JPG: GLENN LIGON Double America 2012 neon and paint National Gallery of Art, Gift of Agnes Gund The philosopher W. E. B. Du Bois spoke of the “veil” of racial difference that imbues African Americans with “double consciousness”: “One ever feels his twoness . . . an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings. . . . ” Combining two formats of doubling, repetition and reversal, Double America is a visual analogue of Du Bois’s description of an American consciousness that is both defined and divided by the color line. The white neon letters spell “AMERICA,” but the letters are backwards, a reversal evident in the E, R, and C. The black “AMERICA” is upside down, its dark glow dissolving in whiteness. Positioning white “AMERICA” above black “AMERICA,” Ligon visualizes the way race has defined power in America.
7. DOUBLE_220807_0079.JPG: I. Seeing Double What does it mean to paint or photograph the same motif twice, to lay down two lines of identical width or two squares side by side, to make a copy of one’s own work — or copy the work of another? How can artworks cause us to perceive two moments in time at once? Most of all, what is the experience of seeing something twice? As the composer John Cage wrote about Robert Rauschenberg’s apparently identical works Factum I and Factum II, “Hallelujah! The blind can see again. Blind to what he has seen, so that seeing this time is as though first seeing.”
8. DOUBLE_220807_0098.JPG: MARCEL DUCHAMP Chocolate Grinder (No. 2) 1914 oil, graphite, and thread on canvas Philadelphia Museum of Art: The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, 1950 Duchamp painted Chocolate Grinder (No. 1) after seeing this mechanism in the window of a confectioner’s shop. Depicted from above and sharply lit, the chocolate grinder casts deep shadows. In Chocolate Grinder (No. 2), pieces of thread sewn into the canvas define the cylindrical rollers, contradicting a sense of depth and solidity. Unlike the first, the second Chocolate Grinder appears to float on the canvas. Painting the device a second time, Duchamp ensured that this version was no copy, as if to suggest that a double is never a perfect replica, nor is the “original” more unique than its double.
9. DOUBLE_220807_0103.JPG: MARCEL DUCHAMP Chocolate Grinder (No. 1) 1913 oil on canvas Philadelphia Museum of Art: The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, 1950
10. DOUBLE_220807_0105.JPG: The Modernist Double The works in this gallery represent the “two traditions” of modern art: modernist painting — an art that acknowledges the flatness of the canvas or sheet of paper — and the avant-garde impulse that challenged conventional definitions of a work of art. Traversing boundaries of material, historic period, and artistic movement, the art of doubling forces us to perceive these two narratives as inextricably intertwined. Both Henri Matisse and Marcel Duchamp — the most notorious figures of the 1913 Armory Show in New York City, the exhibit that shocked American audiences and introduced modern art to the United States — explored doubling throughout their careers, as did Ren� Magritte. Artists as distinct as Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian, Marlow Moss, Josef Albers, and Barnett Newman embraced doubling at major inflection points in their careers. Arshile Gorky executed the two versions of his emblematic The Artist and His Mother over the course of many years.
11. DOUBLE_220807_0111.JPG: HENRI MATISSE Still Life with Oranges (II) c. 1899 oil on canvas Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Sydney M. Shoenberg Jr., 1962
12. DOUBLE_220807_0121.JPG: HENRI MATISSE Still Life with Compote, Apples, and Oranges 1899 oil on canvas Baltimore Museum of Art: The Cone Collection, formed by Dr. Claribel Cone and Miss Etta Cone of Baltimore, Maryland, BMA 1950.224 These still lifes are among Matisse’s earliest paired works. As a student in Paris, the academically trained Matisse copied Old Master pictures in the Louvre. Doubling eventually became a technique to capture the “feeling” of a scene. The artist described the first version as a sketch to record his initial response and the second version as carrying the feeling further. Scholars have debated the order in which Matisse completed these works. While the flat disks of orange and yellow and planes of ochre and white in the St. Louis painting foretell the artist’s decorative style of 1905 – 1906, the more traditional modeling and relative finish of the Baltimore picture may suggest that this was the later work.
13. DOUBLE_220807_0137.JPG: KAZIMIR MALEVICH Suprematist Elements: Squares 1923 pencil on paper The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1935 acquisition confirmed in 1999 by agreement with the Estate of Kazimir Malevich and made possible with funds from the Mrs. John Hay Whitney Bequest (by exchange) This drawing presents two black squares of equal size side by side, a format known as bilateral symmetry. It recalls a now-lost painting of matching black rectangles included in Malevich’s installation in the 0,10 exhibition in Petrograd, Russia (now St. Petersburg) in 1915, which heralded a new kind of abstraction known as Suprematism. Depicting two vertical black rectangles on a white ground, the canvas hung next to the painter’s iconic Black Square in the upper corner of the gallery. Like the missing painting it is based on, this drawing causes us to perceive the identical shape twice.
14. DOUBLE_220807_0142.JPG: JOSEF ALBERS Familiar Front 1948 – 1952 oil on Masonite The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation Part of a series known as Variants or Adobes, this work was inspired by the architecture of Oaxaca, Mexico, familiar to the artist from his many sojourns there. The composition recalls the double portals framed by the region’s brightly colored jambs and adobe walls painted in contrasting hues. To make this work, Albers applied oil paint directly from the tube with a palette knife, working from preparatory sketches. He used colors of the same middle intensity in similar amounts to produce intense optical reverberations. Inset in two pink rectangles on opposite ends of a gold field, the burgundy “doors” of Familiar Front invite us to concentrate on both these focal points — which read almost as eyes staring back at us.
15. DOUBLE_220807_0162.JPG: PIET MONDRIAN Composition (No. 1) Gray-Red 1935 oil on canvas The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Mrs. Gilbert W. Chapman
16. DOUBLE_220807_0172.JPG: MARLOW MOSS White, Black, Red and Gray 1932 oil on canvas Kunstmuseum Den Haag, The Hague, The Netherlands Moss moved from London to Paris in 1927, where she cofounded the group Abstraction Cr�ation with Mondrian and others. She soon adopted the Dutch artist’s vocabulary of square and rectangular planes painted in the primary colors, white and gray, bounded by black lines. In 1930 – 1931, Moss developed the double line, interrupting the balance and repose of Mondrian’s style. Moss’s White, Black, Red and Gray resembles and subverts Mondrian’s art. The two horizontal lines establish a tension in the center of the canvas, disrupting the harmony that Mondrian aimed to represent. In 1932 Mondrian himself adopted the double line. In his Composition (No. 1) Gray-Red, he complicated this format, doubling the double line. The optical flicker caused by the paired lines is most intense where they intersect. The white and gray planes bound by single lines at the lower right establish a zone of relative calm.
17. DOUBLE_220807_0177.JPG: BARNETT NEWMAN The Promise 1949 oil on canvas Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Gift of Adriana and Robert Mnuchin The Promise is one of Newman’s double “zip” works — his term for the vertical bands in his paintings. Here, Newman used masking tape to preserve two vertical strips of equal width. Then he applied a ground wash of red and layers of black paint to the full canvas. Removing the tape while the surface was wet, he filled in the two strips with off-white paint, then applied blue-gray atop the right, using a palette knife to soften the edges. Newman kept the left stripe hard-edged. Together, the bands induce a perception of likeness and unlikeness. A retinal after-image of the two “zips” may be perceived on the black ground.
18. DOUBLE_220807_0187.JPG: ARSHILE GORKY The Artist and His Mother c. 1926 – 1936 oil on canvas Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Gift of Julien Levy for Maro and Natasha Gorky in memory of their father
19. DOUBLE_220807_0192.JPG: ARSHILE GORKY The Artist and His Mother c. 1926 – c. 1942 oil on canvas National Gallery of Art, Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund These paintings were inspired by a photograph of Gorky and his mother, Shushan, taken in 1912 in Van, an eastern province of the Ottoman Empire. Gorky discovered the photo sometime after his 1920 arrival in the US, where he sought refuge from the Ottoman Turkish government’s genocidal policies toward its Christian Armenian citizens. The year prior his mother had died of starvation in Gorky’s arms, a victim of such policies. Although strong similarities between the two canvases exist, there are discernible differences. The Whitney painting, for example, possesses a cooler tonality, in contrast to the warmer shades of the National Gallery work, and appears more finished. We may never know why Gorky painted this image twice, which canvas he began first, or whether the National Gallery portrait is unfinished. (He was still at work on it as late as 1942.) The artist’s restless reworking of the paintings implies that, for Gorky, no representation could give a definitive form to their traumatic subject matter.
20. DOUBLE_220807_0210.JPG: PABLO PICASSO Head of a Man with a Hat 1912 pasted paper, charcoal, and ink The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase, 274.1937 Picasso completed this work in late 1912, when he explored the novel medium of the papier coll� (pasted paper) discovered with his friend Georges Braque. Two rectangular paper fragments, one blue, the other a piece of newspaper, define two sides of a man’s head. Figurative emblems establish the motif: two charcoal dots stand for eyes, a semicircle a mouth, another curved line the top of the man’s hat. The double curves on the right may represent an ear; the black curve may suggest the side of his head or the contours of a violin or guitar. The newspaper fragments may evoke the man’s face and neck, or the newspaper he is reading. A syntax of doubling beginning with the division of the man’s face yields any number of interpretations.
21. DOUBLE_220807_0216.JPG: VARVARA STEPANOVA Untitled from Gaust chaba 1919 collage on book page The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of Harvey S. Shipley Miller in honor of Christophe Cherix Stepanova produced Gaust chaba in the recently established Soviet Union, where the Lithuanian-born artist became a pivotal figure of the Russian avant-garde. Adapting the Cubist technique of collage to the Futurist principle of Zaum (“beyond the mind,” a mental state that exceeds rational thought), Stepanova combined dissimilar elements to evoke unexpected associations. Along with newspaper fragments is a book page with images of the conjoined “Siamese twins” Chang and Eng. Born in Bangkok, Chang and Eng Bunker (1811 – 1874) were trafficked to the West as teenagers. Initially featured in “freak shows,” they became prosperous enough to settle in North Carolina, where they became slave owners, married two sisters, and fathered separate families. They died within hours of one another at age sixty-two.
22. DOUBLE_220807_0227.JPG: MARCEL DUCHAMP Apolin�re Enameled 1916 – 1917 gouache and graphite on painted tin, mounted on cardboard Philadelphia Museum of Art: The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, 1950
23. DOUBLE_220807_0235.JPG: MARCEL DUCHAMP Apolin�re Enameled 1965 editioned replica 5/8 Collection of Aaron and Barbara Levine, promised gift to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden Apolin�re Enameled is an assisted readymade, an industrially produced object that Duchamp has selected and modified. To make the initial version, Duchamp adjusted the lettering on a tin sign for Sapolin brand enamel paint to spell APOLIN�RE, a pun on the name of poet Guillaume Apollinaire. Likewise, he added the letters ED to ENAMEL. He then adjusted the name and location of the sign-maker, GERSTENDORFER BROS, NEW YORK, U.S.A., to create the nonsensical phrase ANY ACT RED BY HER TEN OR EPERGNE, NEW YORK, U.S.A. Paintbrush in hand, the girl is a witty reference to the figure of the artist and the concept of artistic labor, a central concern of the readymade.
24. DOUBLE_220807_0244.JPG: MAN RAY Untitled c. 1924 collage of two gelatin silver prints Centre Pompidou, Paris, Mus�e national d’art moderne /Centre de cr�ation industrielle, purchased in 1998, AM 1998-157 Duchamp resumed his investigation of stereoscopy, the technique of viewing two similar images next to one another to create the perception of depth, in a collaborative film with Man Ray in 1925. Man Ray had a keen interest in doubling, as suggested by this double collage of a woman’s breasts that appeared in the debut issue of the journal La R�volution surr�aliste. A work completed by Man Ray after Duchamp’s death, Frames from an Uncompleted Stereoscopic Film recalls an unfinished anaglyph (3D) film shot by both artists in 1925 using two cameras with red and green film stock focused on a rotating spiral disk. A viewer can perceive two frames printed from the unfinished film mounted inside a stereoscope.
25. DOUBLE_220807_0248.JPG: MARCEL DUCHAMP, MAN RAY Frames from an Uncompleted Stereoscopic Film 1925 / 1973 stereoscope containing two frames of photographic film in a wooden box Private collection
26. DOUBLE_220807_0263.JPG: MARCEL DUCHAMP Bo�te en Valise 1961 light green cloth-covered case containing miniature replicas, photographs, black‑and‑white and color reproductions of works by Marcel Duchamp, including a facsimile of Handmade Stereopticon Slide, c. 1918 – 1919 National Gallery of Art, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Burton Tremaine Bo�te en Valise (Box in a Valise) is a collection of Duchamp’s artworks, reproduced in miniature and assembled in a portable case. Inside, one discovers copies of several works exhibited nearby, including both Chocolate Grinder paintings and a facsimile of Duchamp’s Handmade Stereopticon Slide (1918 – 1919). Viewed through a stereopticon, two photographic prints shot from slightly different points of view combine into a single image with an enhanced perception of depth. Duchamp drew a double, inverted pyramid in graphite on both prints. Viewed inside a stereopticon, the pyramid assumes volume and appears strangely real.
27. DOUBLE_220807_0271.JPG: MARCEL DUCHAMP 50 cc of Paris Air 1949 glass ampoule Philadelphia Museum of Art: The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, 1950 Duchamp completed the first version of this work in 1919. Asking the manufacturer to make an ampoule containing “50 cc of Paris air,” Duchamp received a seemingly empty glass container holding 125 cc of Parisian atmosphere. Apparently pleased by the mistake, Duchamp kept the inaccurate title. He subsequently made a second version, exhibited here, and several others. Slightly taller and thinner than the original, this iteration also contains 125 cc of “Paris air.” Ironically, the smaller ampoule made for the Bo�te-en-Valise contains 50 cc — the correct volume.
28. DOUBLE_220807_0278.JPG: REN� MAGRITTE La condition humaine (The Human Condition) 1933 oil on canvas National Gallery of Art, Gift of the Collectors Committee This work is an example of a “meta-picture,” a work that refers to itself and to the act of representation. A painting of a landscape rests on an easel in front of a window looking out on the same image. Various clues — the exposed side of the stretcher punctured by nails, the slender section of canvas overlapping the brown curtain — remind us that we are looking at a picture, and that every picture is a double of what it depicts.
29. DOUBLE_220807_0288.JPG: "Everything is so much the same, one becomes acutely aware of the differences, and quickly." -- John Cage, On Robert Rauschenberg, Artist, and His Work
30. DOUBLE_220807_0290.JPG: The Double after Modernism Doubling reemerged as a pivotal technique of art making during the late 1950s and the 1960s. Embracing repetition, artists Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, and Mario Schifano subverted notions of uniqueness and personal expression prized by the abstract expressionists. Frank Stella explored symmetry and mirroring in his Black Paintings, Eva Hesse infused her mysterious sculptures with repetition, and Vija Celmins produced meticulous copies of manmade and natural forms. Postmodernists Sturtevant and Sherrie Levine appropriated other artists’ works, challenging distinctions between the original and the copy. In recent decades, multimedia artist Roni Horn and painters Jacqueline Humphries and Bernard Piffaretti have mined the double’s inexhaustible potential in other formats.
31. DOUBLE_220807_0303.JPG: ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG Factum I 1957 oil, ink, pencil, crayon, paper, fabric, newspaper, printed reproductions, and printed paper on canvas Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, The Panza Collection
32. DOUBLE_220807_0305.JPG: ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG Factum II 1957 oil, ink, pencil, crayon, paper, fabric, newspaper, printed reproductions, and painted paper on canvas The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Purchase and an anonymous gift and Louise Reinhardt Smith Bequest (both by exchange) This pair of combines (paintings containing collaged or sculptural elements) brings the concept of doubling to an extreme seldom achieved before or since. All the elements — the pieces of fabric, newspaper clippings, printed reproductions, calendar sheets, the bravura brushstrokes — are placed in approximately the same areas of the canvases. Yet, looking closely, we notice subtle differences: the red “T” at the lower right is closer to the picture’s edge in the first Factum than in the second; the pieces of fabric glued to each canvas have been cut in slightly different ways; and no two brushstrokes or drips are alike. Rauschenberg executed these works simultaneously, a procedure involving a back-and-forth application of materials and painterly marks. Thus, Factum II is not a copy of Factum I; nor is Factum I more “original” than its double.
33. DOUBLE_220807_0312.JPG: MARIO SCHIFANO Aut Aut 1960 enamel on paper mounted on canvas Galassi Ferrari Collection, Modena, Italy Aut Aut is a single canvas twice stretched and divided by a channel. To make this work, Schifano glued sheets of paper onto the canvas in an off-grid arrangement. He then soaked the creased and bunched sheets in glossy yellow enamel and stenciled the word AUT— Latin for “or”— in black enamel on both sides. An initial impression of sameness is dispelled when we consider the work’s tactile surface. Each AUT is composed of three letters stenciled onto the soaked paper, the letters hewing closer together and shifting slightly off-center on the right panel. Painted in Rome in 1960, this work reflects the trans-Atlantic fascination with doubling among avant-garde artists during the period, suggested by the works of Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, and Eva Hesse in this gallery.
34. DOUBLE_220807_0319.JPG: EVA HESSE One More Than One 1967 acrylic, papier-m�ch�, wood, plastic, and rope Sammlung Fischer/Fischer Collection From 1965 until her death in 1970, Hesse produced a significant body of work exploring doubling and serial formats. Two hollowed-out circles of identical circumference are punctured by dangling chords of the same length. Yet what is the “one” in One More Than One? The concave circle? The chord that becomes darker as it falls to the floor? The “ridiculous” form that Hesse establishes by combining hollow and string, absence and flimsy presence? There is no “one” in Hesse’s work, and no one double.
35. DOUBLE_220807_0327.JPG: STURTEVANT Study for Stella Arundel Castle 1989 black enamel on canvas Courtesy Estate Sturtevant, Paris, and Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, London, Paris, Salzburg, Seoul Sturtevant was a trailblazer of appropriation, a type of doubling involving the reproduction of a found image or another artist’s work. Sturtevant’s copies resemble the originals, yet are not perfect replicas. To make Study for Stella Arundel Castle, a work approximately one fifth the size of Stella’s work, she altered the composition ever so slightly (note the variation in the disposition of the middle stripes) and painted her version in the style of the later Black Paintings, where the bands are hard-edged, separated by strips of white canvas. In Stella’s original, the stripes bleed into one another, effacing the divisions between these bands.
36. DOUBLE_220807_0336.JPG: RONI HORN Things That Happen Again 1986 solid forged and machined copper (Class 2), 2 units Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland Horn describes Things that Happen Again as a “pair object,” a format of sculpture that explores the concept of twoness. The matching one-ton copper truncated cones may be installed in four distinct arrangements. As “Things That Are Near,” the units are placed so close to one another that they appear to be one entity. As “A Here and A There,” the elements are arranged so as to appear identical, while as “For Two Rooms” they are installed in separate galleries. Displayed here as “A This and A That,” the elements are meant to “appear as different things.”
37. DOUBLE_220807_0347.JPG: SHERRIE LEVINE After Walker Evans: 4 1981 gelatin silver print Lent by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of the artist, 1995 (1995.266.4) This portrait of Allie Mae Burroughs became one of Evans’s most celebrated works when it was published in James Agee and Evans’s book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), an account of a summer that Agee and Evans spent living with tenant farmers in Alabama during the Great Depression. Capturing the hardship of the lives of three families who did not own the land they tilled nor the houses they lived in, the book indicted the exploitative system of sharecropping then prevalent in the American South that kept tenant farmers in a state of penury. After Walker Evans: 4 is a copy of Evans’s portrait of Burroughs, which Levine photographed from a photo-reproduction. A postmodernist appropriation of a modernist work, Levine’s copy is smaller and darker in tonality than the Evans original. Evans’s signature and dedication on his print establishes the work’s authorship and authenticity, which Levine’s work subverts. Yet even Evans’s original, a positive print of a negative, is already a copy. After Walker Evans: 4 contemplates this essential fact.
38. DOUBLE_220807_0353.JPG: WALKER EVANS Allie Mae Burroughs, Hale County, Alabama 1936 gelatin silver print Sandra Christenberry
39. DOUBLE_220807_0358.JPG: VIJA CELMINS Blackboard Tableau #14 2011 – 2015 one found object and one made object: alkyd oil, acrylic, and pastel on wood Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland This work is from a series consisting of an old blackboard Celmins paired with another she meticulously made. Unlike the many examples of doubled objects in this exhibition that overtly reveal their ifferences, the tablets in this work resemble one another with extraordinary exactitude. A viewer is hard put to say which is the found object, and which the copy.
40. DOUBLE_220807_0372.JPG: JACQUELINE HUMPHRIES Untitled (blue) 1996 oil on board Courtesy of Scott and Marilynn Ono Elias Humphries created her first doubled work in 1989, when she attempted to paint identical patterns of colored dots on two same-sized panels. As in that work, the panels of Untitled (blue) were painted simultaneously and thus neither is the original. “I would make a mark (a pour) on one panel, then try to duplicate it on the other and lose track of which was ‘first,’” the artist recalls. The quickly applied marks and drips are similar yet distinct. “Is the painting two things, or really just one? Are they the same or are the differences between them in any way significant?”
41. DOUBLE_220807_0378.JPG: BERNARD PIFFARETTI Untitled 1999 acrylic on canvas Courtesy of the artist and galerie frank elbaz Beginning in the 1980s, Piffaretti adopted a doubled painting format, which he has explored ever since. The artist follows three essential steps. First, he paints a stripe down the middle of the support, dividing the canvas. He then paints one side (typically the left) freely. The final step is the most challenging: Piffaretti attempts to create the same composition on the other side from memory, sometimes failing in the effort. More than an attempt to achieve an exact copy (as if this were possible), his aim is to reconstruct the process that yielded the first arrangement. Specifically chosen by the artist for this exhibition, Untitled was inspired by the photo of Marcel Duchamp’s 11, rue Larrey (1927), an installation of a single door between two portals, exhibited in the Dilemma section of this show.
42. DOUBLE_220807_0385.JPG: RONI HORN Things That Happen Again 1986 solid forged and machined copper (Class 2), 2 units Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland Horn describes Things that Happen Again as a “pair object,” a format of sculpture that explores the concept of twoness. The matching one-ton copper truncated cones may be installed in four distinct arrangements. As “Things That Are Near,” the units are placed so close to one another that they appear to be one entity. As “A Here and A There,” the elements are arranged so as to appear identical, while as “For Two Rooms” they are installed in separate galleries. Displayed here as “A This and A That,” the elements are meant to “appear as different things.”
43. DOUBLE_220807_0397.JPG: FELIX GMELIN Color Test (Red Flag #2) 2002 two-channel digital video installation, transferred from 16mm film, projected, silent, color 10:28 minutes Courtesy of the artist The original 16 mm film, Die Rote Fahne (The Red Flag), on the left, was filmed by Gerd Conradt in 1968 when he was a film student in Berlin. It shows Conradt (the blond man who appears toward the end), his classmates, and their professor Otto Gmelin running through the streets of West Berlin carrying a red flag, a symbol of Maoism embraced by radicalized young people in West Germany who were opposed to the Vietnam War and the Federal Republic of Germany itself, whose political and corporate leadership included many former Nazis. The film concludes at the West Berlin City Hall, where President John F. Kennedy delivered his famous “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech seven years earlier. In 2002 Otto Gmelin’s son Felix reenacted Conradt’s film using a digital camera. Involving the artist’s students in Stockholm, the remake included women, who were absent from the original film; other details, such as the students’ haircuts and dress, locate the film in the 2000s. Whereas the 1968 Berlin performance caused a small scandal, the reenactment met with indifference.
44. DOUBLE_220807_0405.JPG: BARBARA PROBST Exposure #31: N.Y.C., 249 W. 34th Street, 01.02.05, 4:41 p.m. 2005 two inkjet prints The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fund for the Twenty-First Century
45. DOUBLE_220807_0411.JPG: Temporal Doubling Many works of doubling cause us to “see” time. Photography, video, and reenactments — the recreation of a historical event at a later moment — are especially suited to doubling. Peter Liversidge’s paired snapshots of a swimming pool, Barbara Probst’s portrait of a couple from different viewpoints, and Wallace Berman’s montage of the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald each split in two a historic or mundane instant. Nam Jun Paik’s paired videos of speeches by President Richard Nixon manipulate live broadcast news to subvert presidential authority. Felix Gmelin’s and Mary Kelly’s reenactments of 1960s and 1970s political events, and Zoe Leonard’s photos of a snapshot of her mother during the 1950s, force us to hold two historical eras simultaneously in our minds.
46. DOUBLE_220807_0414.JPG: PETER LIVERSIDGE Upstate New York Swimming Pool 2014 chromogenic prints Steve Elmendorf
47. DOUBLE_220807_0440.JPG: WALLACE BERMAN Untitled (Jack Ruby) 1964 positive Verifax (wet process photocopy) with poem Courtesy of the Estate of Wallace Berman and Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles Berman produced this photomontage after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963. Berman used a Verifax copying machine to reproduce mass media images, such as Jack Beers Jr.’s photo of assassin Lee Harvey Oswald’s murder by nightclub owner Jack Ruby on November 24, 1963. The photo shows Detective James Leavelle, the man in the tan suit and hat, escorting Oswald just before Ruby, seen in the foreground with his arm extended, fired his revolver. Doubling the figure of Leavelle, Berman splits the fatal instant in two. His transcription of a poem by Beat writer Michael McClure references the “double murder” of the president and his assassin.
48. DOUBLE_220807_0443.JPG: ZOE LEONARD Untitled 2016 two gelatin silver prints Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth The two photos depict a snapshot of the artist’s mother in the early 1950s walking in London, where Leonard’s family moved after surviving World War II in Nazi-occupied Warsaw. Taken at different instants and at slightly different angles, Leonard’s work references two historical eras at once — the moment more than sixty years before when the snapshots were taken, and the moment when Leonard photographed the photographs. Both snapshots are askew, implying that even the most precious familial memories are fragile and unstable.
49. DOUBLE_220807_0453.JPG: NAM JUNE PAIK Nixon 1965 – 2002 video, two single-channel monitors, sound, black-and-white and color, and magnetic coils 10:51 minutes Tate: Purchased with funds provided by Hyundai Motor Company, the Asia Pacific Acquisitions Committee and Tate Americas Foundation, 2015 Paik presents a selection of President Richard Nixon’s televised speeches playing concurrently on two monitors. Magnetic coils attached to the screens frame Nixon’s head. As the magnetic current is increased, the president’s face contorts. A switching device on the shelf below causes the magnetization to jump between the monitors. These two Nixons — the powerful leader of the free world and a ghostly, diminished presence — change places as we listen to the president’s justifications of the Vietnam War, his defensive remarks about the Watergate scandal, and his resignation speech. Our usual experience of watching broadcast television is continuously interrupted.
50. DOUBLE_220807_0461.JPG: MEL BOCHNER Study for Double Solid Based on Cantor’s Paradox 1966 fiber-tipped pen and graphite on graph paper The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of the Irving Stenn Jr. Drawings Collection
51. DOUBLE_220807_0465.JPG: MEL BOCHNER Cantor’s Paradox (Double) 1966 paint on cardboard on balsa wood The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Stenn Family Collection; through prior gift of Lucille E. and Joseph L. Block The open and closed triangular volumes in Study for Double Solid Based on Cantor’s Paradox diminish in size by one third from row to row. Bochner’s depiction in contrasting shades of white and black causes them to read as both concave and convex. Cantor’s Paradox (Double) combines the two structures. Built of cardboard and balsa wood, this modest sculpture references a very big idea: the mathematician Georg Cantor’s proposal that infinity, an endless number of sets, could be contained by a single superset, known as Cantor’s Paradox. Bochner shows two negative infinity sets proceeding in opposite directions.
52. DOUBLE_220807_0473.JPG: MAN RAY Luisa Casati (Marquise Casati) 1922 positive in silver gelatin bromide on celluloid Centre Pompidou, Paris, Mus�e national d’art moderne/Centre de cr�ation industrielle, donated by Mr. Lucien Treillard in 1995, AM 1195-281 (1136), Neg. b Everything went wrong during Man Ray’s photo session with the Marquise Casati. A blown fuse on the photographer’s flash forced him to use everyday house lamps. Extra-long exposures compensated for the uneven light, producing multiple exposures of Casati’s dramatic eyes and hair that read as doubled in the positive print. Producing both positive and negative versions of the portrait, Man Ray reveals the material nature of the analog photograph, a medium predicated on reversal.
53. DOUBLE_220807_0475.JPG: MAN RAY Luisa Casati (Marquise Casati) 1922 negative in silver gelatin bromide on celluloid Centre Pompidou, Paris, Mus�e national d’art moderne/Centre de cr�ation industrielle, donated by Mr. Lucien Treillard in 1995, AM 1995-281 (1136), Neg. a
54. DOUBLE_220807_0481.JPG: II. Reversal The works in this section invert, flip, and rotate images, forms, and texts. Reversal is doubling with a twist: the reversed image is a double of another image and its diametrical opposite. A reversal is both truth teller and distorter; it resembles what it inverts. It makes the familiar unfamiliar, the ordinary uncanny. An analog photograph is a positive print of a negative, embedding reversal within the representation. When mirrored, ordinary words become unfamiliar. (The books in Lewis Carroll’s Looking-Glass Land “are something like our books, only the words go the wrong way,” Alice remarks.) Reversal disrupts our perception of a seamless reality as well as rationalist models of a unified and intact self.
55. DOUBLE_220807_0485.JPG: BRASSA� A Happy Group at the Four Seasons, rue de Lappe, Paris 1932 gelatin silver print Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, The Ralph M. Parsons Foundation Photography Collection Roaming Paris after hours, the Hungarian-born photographer took pictures of the city’s streets, its parks, and its inhabitants, including the homeless and streetwalkers, society figures, and ordinary Parisians. Often featuring mirrors, his caf� scenes stage what has been described as “a sequence of duplications.” The revelers in this picture are perceived by other patrons glimpsed in the mirror and perceive their own mirrored reflections.
56. DOUBLE_220807_0493.JPG: JOSEF ALBERS To Monte Alban 1942 lithograph National Gallery of Art, Gift of Josef Albers One of Albers’s Graphic Tectonics series, this work was inspired by the stepped pyramids of Monte Alban, an ancient Zapotec site located near Oaxaca, Mexico. The repeated, continuous lines, drawn in ink with a ruler on a zinc plate, alternate between vertical and horizontal, thick and thin. The junctions of the lines suggest interlocking figures or architectural forms, one left, one right, one up, one down, one receding as the other comes forward. We read the white rectangles either as the flat top of a pyramid or as a vertiginous chasm, likely inspired by the site’s ball court.
57. DOUBLE_220807_0501.JPG: ROBERT SMITHSON Enantiomorphic Chambers 1965; reproduced 2003 steel and mirror Holt / Smithson Foundation Smithson’s chambers are upside-down versions of one another, enantiomorphs (from the Greek for “opposite forms”). Like Marcel Duchamp, Smithson was fascinated by the stereoscope, a viewing device that causes two nearly identical photographs placed side-by-side to converge into a single image of enhanced depth. Smithson’s chambers, however, do not have a single vanishing point, but stage different viewing positions. Standing directly between the elements, visitors have the uncanny experience of seeing the left and right sides of their faces mirrored and reversed.
58. DOUBLE_220807_0514.JPG: WILLIAM WEGMAN Madam I’m Adam 1970 gelatin silver prints Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland Known for his photographs of his dogs Man Ray and Fay Ray, Wegman has long explored tactics of doubling. Madam I’m Adam consists of two gelatin silver prints of seemingly identical appearance. Wegman sits at a table, his left hand covering his face. He wears the same ring on his index finger, and the same watch. The title, a well-known palindrome (a phrase that can be read the same way in both directions) hints otherwise. To make the second photo, Wegman reversed the positions of his arms and ring, and the part in his hair. He then took a second exposure, flipping the negative to make a reversed print that resembled the first. The inverted watch dials are a clue that the second image is a reversal of the first.
59. DOUBLE_220807_0524.JPG: GUY DE COINTET Do I See Right? c. 1983 ink and pencil Collection of Carol Greene Part of a series of drawings with inverted lettering by the Los Angeles-based, French-born artist, Cointet’s Do I See Right? is both a double and reversal. Elaborately calligraphed and twice reversed, and inscribed on a sheet covered with yellow diamonds, the title is hard to make out. To read the words properly, viewers would need to hold the drawing in front of a mirror upside-down, which they cannot do. Seeing “wrong” is the “right” way to see Do I See Right?
60. DOUBLE_220807_0527.JPG: MARIO GARC�A TORRES Today (Latest News from Kabul) 2006 graphite on wall variable dimensions Courtesy of the artist, Jan Mot, Brussels and neugerriemschneider, Berlin This work is inspired by Alighiero Boetti’s two-handed drawings, as seen in the nearby video. Garc�a Torres’s work is part of an ensemble, including two films, in which he explores Boetti’s activity in Kabul, where the Italian artist lived and worked during the 1970s, a period of relative stability and liberalism cut short in 1979 when Soviet forces invaded Afghanistan. The text of Garc�a Torres’s work, taken from newspaper reports describing events in Kabul, changes each time it is made. Thus, the words here are from the first line of a newspaper article published the day the artist visited the National Gallery to install his work. Both a double of Boetti’s work and a work of reversal, Today (Latest News from Kabul) links two historical eras, two generations of artists, and two capital cities, Kabul and Washington, DC, less than a year after US troops evacuated the country at the conclusion of yet another war.
61. DOUBLE_220807_0535.JPG: RASHID JOHNSON The New Negro Escapist Social and Athletic Club (Emmett) printed 2022 chromogenic print National Gallery of Art, Gift of Funds from Ryan E. Lee and Lee Group Holdings (LGH), Heather and Jim Johnson Fund, Kend Family Fund, and Peter Edwards and Rose Gutfeld Fund Johnson’s photo series The New Negro Escapist Social and Athletic Club portrays a fictional men’s club of members from different historical eras. Many of these images enlist double exposure and reverse printing, as seen in this depiction of a model whose parted hair, goatee, and formal dress recall portraits of abolitionist Frederick Douglass. The work’s title refers to The New Negro, a term popularized by critic Alain Locke in 1925, and Emmett Till, the fourteen-year-old Black boy whose execution by white racists in Money, Mississippi, in 1954 catalyzed the Civil Rights Movement.
62. DOUBLE_220807_0554.JPG: JANINE ANTONI Mom and Dad 1994 mother, father, makeup, Cibachrome triptych Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York
63. DOUBLE_220807_0576.JPG: III. Dilemma Adilemma is a difficult choice between two alternatives. In its more extreme form, known as a double bind, the dilemma cannot be solved. Whereas psychologists have observed the distress derived from no-win situations, the French theorist Roland Barthes saw the non-choice in a more benign light. The neutral, as Barthes described it, is a refusal to assert one meaning or identity in opposition to another, a resistance to binary thinking. In not selecting one word or idea over another — such as color versus non-color, black versus white, or a particular gender — we refuse to choose one definition and exclude another. This gallery features artworks that maintain opposites in a state of suspension. Only Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s “Untitled” encourages us to choose between two opposing options, although it also grants us the freedom not to choose.
64. DOUBLE_220807_0579.JPG: "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." -- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up
65. DOUBLE_220807_0582.JPG: WALTER DE MARIA A: Walk to Sign B, B: Walk to Sign A 1961 oil on canvas and plastic The Menil Collection, Houston
66. DOUBLE_220807_0587.JPG: FELIX GONZALEZ-TORRES “Untitled” 1989 / 1990 print on paper, endless copies 26 inches at ideal height � 29 � 56 inches overall (original paper size: 29 � 23 inches) Collection of Rosa and Carlos de la Cruz, Key Biscayne, FL A visitor may choose to take a sheet from one stack or the other, or both — or none at all.
67. DOUBLE_220807_0600.JPG: MARCEL DUCHAMP Door, 11 rue Larrey 1927, printed 1963 – 1964 chromogenic print Private collection, Paris Duchamp made this work in his Paris apartment where the entrances to his studio and bathroom were adjacent to one another. The artist commissioned a carpenter to hang a single door between the portals. Duchamp “managed to construct a door that was at the same time open and closed,” the Surrealist Andr� Breton observed. This iconic photo presents Duchamp’s work as a kinetic sculpture awaiting a decision — whether to leave the door in this tenuous state or close it one way or another. Whatever choice one makes, there is no satisfying solution.
68. DOUBLE_220807_0610.JPG: WALTER DE MARIA A: Walk to Sign B, B: Walk to Sign A 1961 oil on canvas and plastic The Menil Collection, Houston
69. DOUBLE_220807_0617.JPG: GIORGIO DE CHIRICO The Double Dream of Spring 1915 oil on canvas The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of James Thrall Soby A mannequin in a white suit, left, stands at the edge of an empty space behind a wooden platform looking out at a blue sky. A second mannequin, right, with bulbous head gazes at a sharply receding plane defined by the lines of the wooden planks and gatherings of ever more minute figures who cast long shadows. Black lines sketched on the second mannequin’s head suggest both a compass and eye. A canvas on an easel — a picture within a picture — divides the mannequins and spaces. Two “dreams” of spring coexist; neither is truer or more real than the other.
70. DOUBLE_220807_0627.JPG: EVA HESSE Metronomic Irregularity I 1966 graphite, acrylic paint and papier-c�ch� over Masonite panels with cotton-covered wire Museum Wiesbaden, Germany Two wood panels flank an interval of the same height and width. Hesse drew grids of faint graphite on panels covered in masking tape, drilling holes at the intersections of the 244 squares. She then threaded cotton-covered wires through many of the holes, connecting the wires to the punctures in the other panel in no apparent order. The individual wires disappear in the tangle; their exit points are challenging to discern. Metronomic Irregularity I combines the structural formality of the grid and randomness, order and disorder, binding these states together.
71. DOUBLE_220807_0638.JPG: JASPER JOHNS False Start I 1962 11-color lithograph National Gallery of Art, Gift of the Woodward Foundation, Washington, DC JASPER JOHNS False Start II 1962 11-color lithograph National Gallery of Art, Gift of the Woodward Foundation, Washington, DC Executed at the ULAE (Universal Limited Art Editions) print workshop, False Start I and False Start II were printed from the same lithographic stone. Motif, handling, size, title — almost everything is identical but for the palettes, which are blatantly opposite. The eleven hues of False Start I, including the primaries red, yellow, and blue, are matched by the eleven shades of black, white, and gray of False Start II. The spectrums of color and value, exhibited side by side, are alike and radically unalike, while the words in both works only sometimes describe what we see.
72. DOUBLE_220807_0644.JPG: MEL BOCHNER Seven Properties of Between 1971 felt-tip pen Mel Bochner Resembling a mathematical proof, Bochner’s drawing explores an absurd logic. The “between” (identified as X) occupies different points on a horizontal line marked by the endpoints A and B. A second position, Y, joins X, adding a second “between.” The stated conclusion —“If nothing is between A and B, they are identical”— introduces another “between,” AB, located at the midpoint of the line and displacing X and Y. A seemingly logical exposition of “between” ends in the collapse of this concept.
73. DOUBLE_220807_0651.JPG: ALIGHIERO BOETTI Rosso Gilera 60 1232, Rosso Guzzi 60 1305 1967 industrial paint on metal, two parts Private collection Boetti presents two shades of red applied to metal plaques. Developed by the leading motor scooter manufacturers in postwar Italy, Gilera and Guzzi, the colors are identified by their patent numbers. Brand identity is sustained by offering a menu of comparable yet unique commodities; consumerist desire depends on maintaining this fiction of choice. Rather than incite a buyer’s interest, Boetti’s redundant reds inspire indifference: the distinction between one brand and another is revealed to be meaningless.
74. DOUBLE_220807_0660.JPG: FRANK STELLA Jasper’s Dilemma 1962 – 1963 alkyd on canvas Collection of Irma and Norman Braman
75. DOUBLE_220807_0669.JPG: MEL BOCHNER Imagine The Enclosed Area Blue 1969 self-adhesive vinyl and blue pigment on wall Collection of Michael Straus
76. DOUBLE_220807_0689.JPG: REN�E GREEN Color I 1990 mixed media: latex paint, paint chips, Plexiglas, rubber-stamped ink on vellum, and wood Courtesy of the artist, FAM, and Bortolami Gallery Color I explores the social meaning of color and the words we use to describe it. Two framed texts from the Jim Crow era of segregation hang on opposite ends of a chart of commercial paint chips with gendered and exoticized names. The text at the left is an excerpt from author Frances E. W. Harper’s novel Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted (1892) describing a racist exchange between two physicians, the white Dr. Latrobe and mixed-race Dr. Latimer, who passes as white. In the other text, from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), the wealthy white character Tom Buchanan espouses the white supremacist arguments of a pseudo-scientific book. Artist Ren�e Green prompts the viewer to consider the intersection of language and color, and the persistence of racist terms in contemporary discourse.
77. DOUBLE_220807_0705.JPG: "The appearance of the Double is an aspect of man's eternal desire to solve the enigma of his own identity. By seeking to read the riddle of the soul in its myriad manifestations, man is brought face to face with his own mysterious mirror images, an image which he confronts with mingled curiosity and fear." -- Sylvia Plath, The Magic Mirror
78. DOUBLE_220807_0709.JPG: ENRIQUE GUZM�N Reflejo 1974 oil on canvas Colecci�n Isabel y Agust�n Coppel (CIAC), Mexico City Born in Guadalajara, Mexico, Guzm�n is associated with a group of neo-Surrealist painters who emerged during the 1970s and 1980s known as New Mexicanists. Reflejo shows a man reflected in two mirrors pitched at oblique angles gnawing his own face. A viewer cannot say which is the “real” person and which is the copy; the self and its double have merged into a single, monstrous entity.
79. DOUBLE_220807_0714.JPG: EL LISSITZKY Kurt Schwitters 1924 – 1925 gelatin silver print The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 95.XM.39 The Russian Lissitzky produced this portrait during a stay in Hanover, Germany, at the invitation of fellow artist Schwitters. The layered exposures of this photomontage achieve the kind of reversible space explored in Lissitzky’s abstract paintings of this period. The somewhat restrained figure at right, his mouth stuffed with a parrot, bleeds into the enlarged head of the extrovert at left with raised eyebrows and open mouth. The word MERZ — a fragment of the word “commerz” (commerce) and title of Schwitter’s journal and multimedia practice — connects these two selves.
80. DOUBLE_220807_0724.JPG: GEORGE PLATT LYNES Portrait of Ren� Crevel 1928, printed later gelatin silver print From the Collections of the Kinsey Institute, Indiana University Platt Lynes’s portrait of writer Ren� Crevel evokes the mythical Narcissus — the beautiful youth of Greek mythology who wasted away gazing at his reflection, a theme that enjoyed great currency in Surrealist and queer artistic circles during the 1920s and 1930s. A homoerotic tribute to Crevel’s youthful good looks, Platt Lynes’s portrait may also evoke the internal conflict experienced by the bisexual Crevel as he contended with the homophobic attitudes of his family and fellow Surrealists, a theme explored in his 1926 novel Un mort difficile (A Difficult Death). Like the novel’s protagonist, Crevel eventually took his own life.
81. DOUBLE_220807_0728.JPG: WALKER EVANS Cary Ross’s Bedroom, New York 1932, printed later gelatin silver print The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 84.XM.129.3 William Cary Ross Jr. was a poet and translator. Living in Paris, he befriended such literary figures as F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein; in New York he worked at the newly founded Museum of Modern Art and at photographer Alfred Stieglitz’s An American Place gallery. Ross’s penchant for avant-garde art and design is on display in Evans’s photo of his bedroom, where every object — the tubular beds, the pillows and blankets, and identical prints by Georges Braque — is doubled.
82. DOUBLE_220807_0733.JPG: FLORENCE HENRI Margarete Schall 1928 gelatin silver print mounted on paperboard National Gallery of Art, Patrons’ Permanent Fund
83. DOUBLE_220807_0739.JPG: ILSE BING Self-Portrait with Leica 1931, printed c. 1988 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Art, Gift of Ilse Bing Wolff Frankfurt-born Bing first photographed herself in a mirror as a teenager with a Kodak camera in 1914. Acquiring a sophisticated Leica 35 mm camera and relocating to Paris in 1930, she built a successful career working in avant-garde, commercial, and journalistic formats. Bing’s practice came to a halt in 1940 when she was imprisoned at the Gurs internment camp in southern France with several thousand other German-born Jews, until she was released through the efforts of her husband and emigrated to New York in 1941. Bing took this mirrored self-portrait when she was in her early thirties but reprinted the work a year short of her ninetieth birthday.
84. DOUBLE_220807_0745.JPG: JOHN DEAKIN Portrait of Pegeen Vail Guggenheim 1950s, printed later gelatin silver print The John Deakin Archive, UK Deakin is best-known for his portraits of British artists and writers during the 1950s and 1960s. His mastery of double exposure, a photographic technique achieved by exposing a negative or print twice, yielded such images as this affecting portrait of artist Pegeen Vail Guggenheim, daughter of the art collector and dealer Peggy Guggenheim. Depicting the sitter in her cluttered studio facing the camera and in profile, her chin twice cupped in the palm of her hand, submerged in a sea of books, paint brushes and jars, Deakin achieves a sympathetic portrayal of a person in the throes of depression.
85. DOUBLE_220807_0750.JPG: ALISON SAAR Mirror Mirror; Mulatta Seeking Inner Negress I 2014 woodcut and chine coll� on found sugar sack Private collection Saar depicts a light-skinned woman gazing into a hand mirror at an African self or ancestress. Printed on a sack from a Puerto Rican sugar refining company — its name and location seep through the woman’s dress and skin — the woodcut evokes the brutal history of Black people’s enslavement in the production of sugar in the Caribbean and United States. The light-skinned “mulatta” (a contested term for a woman of mixed European and African descent) is the genetic bearer of that history, which involved systematic abuse, including sexual exploitation, of enslaved women and girls.
86. DOUBLE_220807_0756.JPG: ALIGHIERO BOETTI Gemelli (Zwei) 1974 – 1975 photomontage on paper Courtesy of Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels This self-portrait, a photomontage, shows Boetti photographed from below and twinned. According to Boetti, it evokes the split personality of the contemporary artist, a figure who is both a “private, mysterious, creative” maker of things — a “shaman,” represented by the figure at the left — and an extroverted careerist, a “showman,” evoked at the right. The first version of Gemelli was a postcard sent to fifty recipients announcing that the artist was no longer one person but two, “Alighiero e Boetti” (Alighiero and Boetti.) This print was included in Boetti’s show of doubled works, Zwei (Two), held at the Galerie Area in Munich in 1975.
87. DOUBLE_220807_0763.JPG: SYLVIA PLATH Self-Portrait in Semi-Abstract Style c. 1946 – 1952 ink and gouache Estate of Robert Hittel Plath completed this work as a student at Smith College in Massachusetts, where she wrote her senior thesis on the double in Dostoyevsky’s novels. Half ochre and yellow, half purple and pink, with desperate, upturned hands, Plath’s self-portrait is split in two — a blond Sylvia who must perform the schizophrenic gender roles of pin-up girl, dutiful wife, and mother expected of an American middle-class woman of her generation, and an introspective, ambitious, brown-haired Sylvia (Plath the academic star, literary aspirant). The theme of twoness explored in this self-portrayal would be amply explored in Plath’s character Esther Greenwood, the troubled narrator of her autobiographical novel The Bell Jar (1963), and in the extraordinary Ariel poems completed in the months prior to the poet’s suicide.
88. DOUBLE_220807_0769.JPG: CHRISTINA FERNANDEZ Untitled Multiple Exposure #4 (Bravo) 1999 digital archival pigment print Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Luisotti, Los Angeles, CA Fernandez superimposed a portrait of herself over a picture of an indigenous woman by the Mexican modernist Manuel �lvarez Bravo. An example of the technique of appropriation, the image derives from a photographic reproduction of Bravo’s work. Appropriation may also be seen in Sherrie Levine’s After Walker Evans: 4, on view in this exhibition, but where Levine copies the entire picture, Fernandez alters Bravo’s composition by layering her own likeness on top. The work also recalls the Chicana photographer’s divided sentiments after a visit to Oaxaca, feeling at once connected to her Mexican roots and troubled by the racist attitudes she witnessed directed at the city’s indigenous population.
89. DOUBLE_220807_0775.JPG: LORNA SIMPSON Untitled (Two Necklines) 1989 two gelatin silver prints and 11 plastic plaques National Gallery of Art, Gift of the Collectors Committee Permeated by doubles, reversals, and split identities, Simpson’s photos inhabit an undefined past and present. References to binocularity, like the two lens-like photos of a woman’s lower face and collarbone in this work, cause us to see ourselves seeing as we consider the disturbing associations evoked by the column of word plaques.
90. DOUBLE_220807_0793.JPG: IV. The Divided and Doubled Self Modern art and literature abound in divided and doubled selves. The appearance of the double in ancient myth and modern fiction — in works such as Edgar Allan Poe’s “William Wilson,” Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde — often foretells a character’s mental decline and imminent death. In the artworks in this section, the body is mirrored, distorted, split, or trailed by a shadow. A stable, autonomous self is displaced by a doppelg�nger or persona. Other works examine a self that has been defined by or challenges binary models of identity. The final galleries of the exhibition — representations of or by fraternal duos and artistic and romantic pairs — explore the shared dynamic of the double.
91. DOUBLE_220807_0796.JPG: FELIX NUSSBAUM Organ Grinder 1942 / 1943 oil on canvas Felix Nussbaum-Haus at Museumsquartier, Osnabr�ck, on loan from the Nieders�chsische Sparkassenstiftung A German Jewish victim of Nazi persecution, Nussbaum made magical realist works drawn from personal experience, many of which explore a bifurcated identity. He completed this work after his escape from an internment camp in southern France, when he and his wife, the painter Felka Platek, went into hiding in Belgium. Here, apocalypse has arrived in Brussels’s rue Archim�de, where the artists lived prior to their arrest and deportation to Auschwitz in June 1944. The organ grinder is Nussbaum’s persona, a stand-in for the itinerant Jew, the artist, the creative act. Bones have replaced the organ’s pipes. A cloth covers his shuttered instrument. There is nothing to play.
92. DOUBLE_220807_0802.JPG: FRANK MOORE Easter Basket 1986 oil on canvas mounted on wood Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin, Gift of the Gesso Foundation, 2018 Moore portrays himself in front of a hallucinatory basket-weave pattern of orange, gray, and lavender, split into two selves that are askew. The left side of his face is darker than the right. Vision is pulled in multiple directions — up and down, left and right, to the front and rear. Losing his partner to HIV in 1992, Moore eventually developed an allegorical style of painting with allusions to the AIDS epidemic, homophobia, racial difference, and the natural world. He succumbed to the virus in 2002.
93. DOUBLE_220807_0810.JPG: MARCEL DUCHAMP Fresh Widow original 1920, fabricated 1964 painted wood, glass, black leather, paper, and transparent tape National Gallery of Art, Gift of Deborah and Ed Shein This is the first work “by” Rrose S�lavy, Duchamp’s female persona and the co-author of the Bo�te-en-Valise in this exhibition. (The name of this character is a pun on the French “Eros, c’est la vie”: “Sex is life.”) Where the 1920 version assigns the work’s copyright solely to S�lavy, the version exhibited here was “co-authored” by Duchamp and his double. A miniature French window containing sheets of black leather inserted in the panes, Fresh Widow induces the viewer to walk around the two-faced sculpture to take in the front and back. The authorship assigned to S�lavy on the front is supplemented by the secondary attribution of the work to Duchamp, whose ink signature and the sculpture’s title, edition number, and yet another signature incised in a brass plaque appear on the back.
94. DOUBLE_220807_0823.JPG: ANDR� KERT�SZ Self-Portrait as Woman early 1920s gelatin silver print National Gallery of Art, Gift of The Andr� and Elizabeth Kert�sz Foundation
95. DOUBLE_220807_0830.JPG: PATRICK IRELAND / BRIAN O’DOHERTY Twenty Dot Drawing 1970 / 1971 colored felt-tip pen National Gallery of Art, Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection The Irish-born artist Brian O’Doherty invented his alter ego “Patrick Ireland” to protest the massacre of Catholic demonstrators by British soldiers in Derry, Northern Ireland, on January 30, 1972, an event known as Bloody Sunday. Named for the artist’s native land and its patron saint, this persona embodied the split identity of O’Doherty, who emigrated to the US in 1957. Many of O’Doherty/Ireland’s works avoid reference to politics, such as this conceptual drawing of colored dots that grow larger in number from left to right. On May 20, 2008, the artist “buried” his persona during a mock funeral behind the Irish Museum of Modern Art in recognition of the improved relations between Ireland and the UK.
96. DOUBLE_220807_0846.JPG: ADRIAN PIPER The Mythic Being: Look But Don’t Touch 1975 oil crayon on gelatin silver print The Collection of Eleanor Heyman Propp This work depicts Piper wearing dark sunglasses, a droopy mustache, and an Afro wig, evoking a stereotypical image of urban Black masculinity that circulated in mass media during the 1970s. The “Mythic Being,” as Piper called this persona, appeared in photos, newspaper ads, performances, and drawings with texts. In Look But Don’t Touch, Piper alludes to white anxiety directed toward Black men. Her character gazes provocatively at an imagined white female viewer; his ruminations appear in a thought balloon.
97. DOUBLE_220807_0851.JPG: ELEANOR ANTIN Portrait of the King 1972 one from a set of five black-and-white photographs mounted on board edition of 2 (A3) Courtesy the artist and Ronald Feldman Gallery, New York Instead of a single persona, Antin invented several: an African American ballerina and film star, a character based on social reformer Florence Nightingale, a rediscovered Jewish Russian film director, and, shown here, the bearded, gender-ambiguous King of Solana Beach who wandered through a Southern Californian town in a cape, boots, jeans, and ruffled shirt. Antin’s art of personae challenges what the artist describes as “tyrannical” definitions of the self that limit our capacity to come to terms with the complexity of identity.
98. DOUBLE_220807_0857.JPG: The Persona The adoption of a different public persona or alter ego unsettles conventional notions of authorship and gender assignments. Marcel Duchamp’s female alter ego Rrose S�lavy, the Organ Grinder alter ego of painter and Holocaust victim Felix Nussbaum, or the platinum-blonde art student of Howardena Pindell’s Free, White and 21, show the range and adaptability of this format.
99. DOUBLE_220807_0859.JPG: CHRISTOPHER MAKOS Lady Warhol 1981 gelatin silver print Courtesy of the artist Makos’s portraits of “Lady Warhol” were inspired by Man Ray’s portraits of Marcel Duchamp’s female alter ego, Rrose S�lavy. Warhol appears in his street clothes — jeans, button-down white shirt, checkered tie — styled with women’s makeup and wigs. In this portrait, Warhol attempts to resemble the society women who regularly commissioned his silkscreen portraits.
100. DOUBLE_220807_0866.JPG: The Shadow The shadow is one of the most ancient manifestations of the double, representing the soul or guardian spirit in literature and myth. The shadow is both benign and threatening, its presence or absence a favorable or dark omen. Drawing from the experiments of 19th-century amateurs, modern photographers explored the medium’s capacity to record the shadow images of bodies and things. Training their cameras on their own shadows, they developed formats of self-portraiture in which the photographer’s silhouette is misshapen beyond recognition. The most compelling shadow images vacillate between naturalistic depiction and abstraction, realism, and distortion. A negative figure projected onto a background is an object of mystery, undefined and ambiguous.
101. DOUBLE_220807_0871.JPG: ALFRED STIEGLITZ Shadows in Lake 1916 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Art, Alfred Stieglitz Collection To make this photograph, Stieglitz stood at the edge of a dock with a friend and pointed his camera down. The silhouettes of the men on the lakebed are so diffuse as to be unrecognizable as those of Stieglitz and the artist Abraham Walkowitz, whose hands appear almost inhuman, like claws. Stieglitz’s work shifts between naturalistic depiction and abstraction, realism and distortion — an ambiguity secured by his control of light/dark contrast and superimposition of shadows, sunlight, water, and sand.
102. DOUBLE_220807_0879.JPG: ANDR� KERT�SZ Self-Portrait 1927 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Art, Gift of Mary and Dan Solomon and Patrons’ Permanent Fund Kert�sz produced this self-portrait during his early years in Paris, when the Hungarian photographer took pictures of pedestrians, trees, garden furniture, and objects accompanied by their shadows. The silhouettes of the photographer’s face and body and that of the tripod camera are connected by the shadow of his hand pressing the button of a cable release that opens the shutter. This marks the instant when Kert�sz took the exposure, elevating the image into an allegory of the photographer’s art.
103. DOUBLE_220807_0885.JPG: LEE FRIEDLANDER Self-Portrait 1964 / 1969 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Art, Patrons’ Permanent Fund
104. DOUBLE_220807_0890.JPG: VIVIAN MAIER Untitled, Self-Portrait no date gelatin silver print, printed later Courtesy of Maloof Collection and Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York The daughter of a portrait photographer, Maier developed her artistic practice in secret while working as a nanny and caregiver. She never showed her work, leaving behind an archive of some 100,000 negatives, most never printed. Posthumous fame came in the form of a documentary, Finding Vivian Maier (2013), codirected by the archive’s owner John Maloof, and the publication of several books. A posthumous print of a Maier negative, this image shows the shadow of the photographer in her characteristic hat.
105. DOUBLE_220807_0897.JPG: MARVIN NEWMAN Shadow, Chicago 1951 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Art, Robert B. Menschel Fund
106. DOUBLE_220807_0905.JPG: GRACIELA ITURBIDE Highway 308: From Golden Meadow to Grand Isle, Louisiana. [Self-Portrait]. American South Project: Flatlands Portfolio 1997 – 1998 platinum / palladium print Courtesy of ROSEGALLERY
107. DOUBLE_220807_0912.JPG: My Sister, My Brother The psychoanalyst Otto Rank distinguished two kinds of doubles in literature. First, he identified the double that exists as an “independent and visible cleavage of the ego (shadow, reflection),” described here as a divided self. Second are “actual figures of the double,” two distinct individuals, typically siblings, who bear a striking resemblance to one another — twins in folklore and myth or in authors as diverse as William Shakespeare and Mark Twain, who introduce themes of rivalry, moral comparison, and mistaken identity. Visual representations of twins reveal the uncanniness of doubled identity, troubling Western notions of individuality and autonomy.
108. DOUBLE_220807_0915.JPG: LOUIS FAURER Fifth Avenue, New York, New York c. 1948, printed 1980 gelatin silver print National Gallery of Art, Joshua P. Smith Collection
109. DOUBLE_220807_0921.JPG: SEYDOU KE�TA Untitled 1953 – 1957, printed later gelatin silver print Courtesy of Danziger Gallery Working in Bamako, French Sudan in West Africa, Ke�ta developed a distinctive and widely admired style of portraiture as his country, present-day Mali, emerged from colonialization. Using natural light and a single exposure for each sitting, Ke�ta photographed his subjects elegantly attired in traditional and Western dress posed in front of patterned backgrounds. In this work, Ke�ta photographed twin infants on matching chairs. An initial impression of likeness is quickly dispelled as we compare the babies’ faces and clothing: already in infancy their distinctive personalities are implied.
110. DOUBLE_220807_0927.JPG: ROTIMI FANI-KAYODE Half-Opened Eyes Twins 1989, printed 2018 gelatin silver print Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Purchased with funds contributed by an anonymous donor 2018.71 Born in Lagos, Nigeria, Fani-Kayode was the son of a Yoruba priest. He was forced to move to England in 1966 to escape the Nigerian civil war and eventually came to Washington, DC, to attend Georgetown University. Fani-Kayode’s photographs frequently refer to Yoruba traditions; this double composition evokes Yoruba �re �bej� (twin sculptures), represented by the nearby examples. Here identical twin brothers sit side by side, their arms mirroring each other’s. Produced while Fani-Kayode battled an HIV infection, Half-Opened Eyes Twins replaces these effigies of mourning and the afterlife with living male nudes, reimagining a classical African form.
111. DOUBLE_220807_0932.JPG: YORUBA ARTIST Female figure (�re �bej�) Male figure (�re �bej�) mid-20th century wood, glass beads, twine, and blue pigment National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, gift in memory of Nancy E. MacDonald, 2015-7-4.1 and 2015-7-4.2 �re �bej� are a sculptural form invented in Yorubaland in Nigeria during the 19th century. Matched wood carvings of twins often decorated with beads and indigo dye, �bej� represent the spirit doubles of siblings in a region where the incidence of twin births is the highest in the world and twoness is a fundamental cosmological concept. Developed at a time when incidents of child mortality were frequent, �bej� were commissioned when one of the twins died prematurely. The effigy representing the dead child was treated equitably with its living twin, often dressed and presented with food offerings. This pair of sculptures represents fraternal twins, here a sister and brother.
112. DOUBLE_220807_0936.JPG: ANNE TRUITT Two 1962 wood with acrylic Yale University Art Gallery, Given in memory of Cord Meyer, B.A. 1943, and his twin brother, Quentin Meyer, B.A. 1944, by Cord Meyer’s sons Quentin and Mark Meyer Produced in the artist’s Twining Court studio in Washington, DC, Two is named for identical twin brothers who fought in World War II. Quentin Meyer died at the Battle of Okinawa in the Pacific; his brother Cord lost an eye yet survived the war, eventually becoming an official in the Central Intelligence Agency. Embedding asymmetry within symmetry, this elegiac work recalls the shared experiences and divergent fates of the brothers.
113. DOUBLE_220807_0942.JPG: The Pair Pairs are persons or things that are “coupled, doubled, mated, (screwed), matched,” the artist Roni Horn has observed. Pairs are bound together by a bond — formal, physiological, emotional — that causes us to perceive them as both a single and a double entity. This gallery includes works by LGBTQ artists and others that suggest the queerness of the pair concept, of matching like with like. The sculptural works in this gallery suffuse geometry and doubling with feeling and allusion. We encounter a double that embraces humor, collaboration, friendship, and same-sex desire.
114. DOUBLE_220807_0945.JPG: FELIX GONZALEZ-TORRES “Untitled” (Lovers – Paris) 1993 light bulbs, porcelain light sockets, and electrical cords two parts; overall dimensions vary with installation Glenstone Museum, Potomac, MD
115. DOUBLE_220807_0950.JPG: JORGE MACCHI Parallel Lives 1998 two sheets of glass Colecci�n Patricia Phelps de Cisneros The Argentine artist Jorge Macchi offers us the miraculous sight of two sheets of glass that appear to have been broken in exactly the same way. In fact, the sheets were altered through very different processes. To make the first component, Macchi shattered the glass by placing a hammer under it and bringing another hammer down on top. A glass cutter produced the second unit by following the lines of the first. Where the first element was the haphazard result of an instantaneous action, the second was painstakingly realized. A viewer cannot say which came first. The differences that lurk within repetition are impossible to see.
116. DOUBLE_220807_0957.JPG: "You search for the differences, no matter if the pair is identical — and interestingly enough, you find them." — Roni Horn
117. DOUBLE_220807_0960.JPG: GILBERT & GEORGE G and G 1973 30 framed gelatin silver prints Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland
118. DOUBLE_220807_0963.JPG: RONI HORN Gold Mats, Paired — For Ross and Felix 1994 / 1995 two mats, pure gold The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Muriel Kallis Newman in honor of James Cuno Horn produced her first gold mat, made by heating the precious metal through a process known as annealing, in the early 1980s. Years later, the artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres (whose sculpture composed of two strands of lights dangling from the ceiling is on view nearby) and his partner Ross Laycock encountered the work in a museum as Laycock battled an HIV infection. Gonzalez-Torres recalled that he and Laycock were “blown away” by the “heroic, gentle and horizontal presence” of Horn’s mat. Learning of the lovers’ admiration for her work, Horn completed this sculpture after Laycock’s death. “This time it is two sheets,” marveled Gonzalez-Torres, who saw the work before he, too, succumbed to AIDS in 1996. “Two, a number of companionship, of doubled pleasure, a pair, a couple, one on top of the other. Mirroring and emanating light. When Roni showed me this new work she said ‘there is sweat in between.’ I knew that.”
119. DOUBLE_220807_0984.JPG: MAN RAY Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein 1922 gelatin silver print National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Gift of Isabel Wilder One of the 20th century’s most famous and enigmatic couples, the authors Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas lived together in Paris, where they collected artworks by leading modernists and maintained an important literary salon. This portrait by Man Ray is an unapologetic representation of queer pairing: Stein and Toklas, two women of independent means engaged in a same-sex relationship that would have seemed shocking to many then, enjoy the bourgeois comforts of their drawing room, surrounded by works of art by Picasso and an important painting by C�zanne.
120. DOUBLE_220807_0990.JPG: HARMONY HAMMOND The Meeting of Passion and Intellect 1981 mixed media On loan from the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC, Gift of Lily Tomlin and the artist To realize this soft sculpture relief, the artist wrapped wooden armatures with donated fabric and the discarded remnants of clothing manufacturers. She then covered these forms with latex, acrylic paint, and other materials. The left element is notably taller than its double, while the right unit is more tightly wrapped. The two entities are adjacent but remain distinct, evoking the dynamics between intimacy and independence. Perhaps alluding to the temperaments and physical attributes of a particular couple known to Hammond, an artist at the forefront of lesbian expression, the sculpture’s title evokes the ancient binary of feeling and rationalism.
121. DOUBLE_220807_0998.JPG: SAMUEL FOSSO Self-Portrait, 15 November 1976 gelatin silver print greengrassi, London Born into an Igbo family in Cameroon, Fosso spent his early childhood in Nigeria, moving to the Central African Republic in the aftermath of the devastating Nigerian-Biafran War (1967 – 1970). This work shows Fosso, with his leg crossed, and a friend crowded onto a bench. An impression of uncanny sameness is suggested by the two teenagers wearing wristwatches and striped shirts. Other details hint at their distinctive personalities: Fosso’s friend appears bored with his magazine and wears plain shoes, while Fosso, apparently absorbed in his reading, wears flashy boots with white stripes and thick heels. Fosso’s double portrait captures the emulative 1970s dynamic of African teenagers who donned hip Western Black fashions to look stylish and modern.
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