Richard Pettibone, Artist Who Appropriated Others’ Artwork, Dies at 86

Richard Pettibone, a painter whose enigmatic work concerned copying famed modern artworks after which exhibiting these smaller-scale lookalikes, died on August 19 at 86. A consultant for New York’s Castelli Gallery, which has proven Pettibone since 1969, mentioned he died following a fall.

In the course of the Sixties, effectively earlier than the heyday of appropriation artwork twenty years later, Pettibone started making replicas of work by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Frank Stella, and others. In contrast to Sturtevant, one other artist well-known for duplicating well-known items by giants of up to date artwork, Pettibone produced objects that have been clearly totally different in measurement from the originals.

A lot of Pettibone’s work have been far smaller than their supply supplies. This alternative was a part of Pettibone’s conceptual recreation of figuring out what constitutes worth. Notably, he started this undertaking throughout the ’60s, at a time when the artwork market was drastically increasing.

The work was solely partially supposed as parody. “Stella thinks I’m mocking him, and he’s proper, I’m mocking him,” Pettibone as soon as informed Artwork in America. “However I additionally drastically admire him. However I’ve to surprise, if he actually thinks {that a} murals has no which means, that it’s simply paint on a canvas, then how come his is a lot extra useful than mine?”

Afterward, Pettibone went on to additionally copy sculptures, exactingly producing miniature variations of Warhol’s Brillo bins and Duchamp’s readymades. Duchamp, critic Ken Johnson as soon as famous, “was trendy artwork’s nice sorcerer, Mr. Pettibone one in every of his craftiest apprentices.”

Pettibone was born in 1938 in Los Angeles and went on to attend the Otis Artwork Institute. His first main exhibition was staged in 1964 on the trendsetting Ferus Gallery, the place, two years earlier, Warhol had proven his Campbell’s soup can work, riling up critics and artists alike. “Many, lots of the different artists who noticed it actually hated it,” Pettibone informed A.i.A. “They have been pounding the tables with anger, screaming, ‘This isn’t artwork!’ I informed them, this can be the worst artwork you’ve ever seen, however it’s artwork. It’s not sports activities!”

The Warhol present was formative to Pettibone, who went on to make his personal Campbell’s soup can work. These have been so loyal to Warhol’s work that they even contained the Pop artist’s title rubber-stamped onto them. The one distinction was that Pettibone’s title was stamped alongside it.

When not imitating latest masterworks, Pettibone was obsessing over the poet Ezra Pound, whose ebook covers he loyally copied for one collection made within the ’90s. Pettibone additionally made Photorealist work throughout the ’70s.

Though not precisely under-recognized in New York, the town the place he was based mostly for a part of his profession, Pettibone is maybe not fairly as effectively generally known as artists resembling Sherrie Levine and Louise Lawler, two Footage Technology artists identified for that includes photos of famed artworks of their images. However Pettibone did obtain his due institutionally within the type of a 2005 retrospective that originated at Philadelphia’s Institute of Up to date Artwork; the present was organized by the Tang Museum and Artwork Gallery at Skidmore School in collaboration with California’s Laguna Artwork Museum.

“Mr. Pettibone is a connoisseur and cautious explorer of the chief wellspring of art-making: the straightforward love of artwork,” Roberta Smith wrote in her New York Instances overview of that exhibition. “His work makes clear the complicated combination of discernment, admiration and competitors that spurs artists to make one thing they will name their very own.”