Anthony Verot paints portraits in Paris. I first saw his work in 2004 at Maison d’Art Contemporain Chaillioux, in Fresnes, a suburb of Paris known primarily for its prison. Maybe the dedicated and tireless director of MACC, Marcel Lubac, intended a sly reference to mugshots. More likely he was drawn to the painter’s exacting formal and conceptual rigor. Amazingly, Verot, now 40, had hardly shown before, though he had piled up an impressive stack of canvases.

My friend, Shirley Jaffe, took me to the opening in Fresnes. I found Verot to be dedicated, earnest, singleminded, and determined to create a space for deadpan, distinctly unsensational representations in oil paint of ordinary people with a lurking dark side. Think August Sander with a dash of Ingmar Bergman tossed with Ingres, and drizzled with Lucien Freud. With shavings of Alfred Hitchcock.

Parc Monstouris in the 14th Arrondissement, Paris

A few years ago I visited his studio in the 14th arrondissement, not far from the Parc Montsouris. Despite the proximity to this lush garden, there’s not the slightest whiff of greenery to be found in what Verot paints. He was working on a 24-panel portrait of a woman, 8′ x 12′ altogether. He had filmed her with a movie camera turning her head, and the sequence of paintings corresponded to the images produced on film in a single second. The nearly identical 60cm x 60cm (about 2′ x 2′) canvases were arranged in four rows of six each, stacked one on top of the other. I was mystified by the effect. How crazy, how obsessive, how meticulous, how ridiculously simple and riveting!

Anthony Verot, Une Seconde de Cinema (Nathalie), 2005

Warholian in it’s Jackie-esque repetition, it dazzles the eye because of the progression of almost imperceptible changes in the course of the sequence. Hardly seductive, the woman is seen moving from what might have been modesty toward a direct confrontation with the viewer’s gaze. It is the contemporary embodiment of Manet’s Olympia with her famously unsettling self-possession. As Eunice Lipton put it about the model Victorine Meurent in that work, “she could say yes, or she could say no.”

Edouard Manet, Olympia, 1863

Verot’s paintings draw on heavily on canonical masterworks. Flatly painted, distinctly modern, they feel timeless. Very little situates them in the present moment. Wardrobe is nondescript, though vaguely today. Backgrounds are either monochromatic or minimally descriptive of bland interiors. Despite the fact that there is little joy in Mudville, these people are thoughtful, intensely present, curiously confrontational, often stern. You recoil as much as you are drawn to them. Nothing is idealized about their appearance.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Monsieur Bertin, 1832

One, an homage to Jean-Baptiste Ingres’ 1832 portrait of Monsieur Bertin, is a portrait of Monsieur Piquiaud, from 2004. Verot’s Monsieur is every dignified head of state, unforgiving father, French philosopher, retired insurance company CEO, befuddled grandfather, frustrated diplomat all rolled into one. Neat!

Anthony Verot, Monsieur Piquiaud, 2004

His most recent paintings double up the subjects by including images of their backs seen in mirrors. Verot heightens the intimation of reality, paradoxically, by including a reflection of the person painted. I get the feeling I know more about the person because I’m getting more of them. These doubled images (the one on the right below is a self-portrait)  seem to suggest that the artist is trying to reveal more even than his subjects will allow, by “going behind their backs.”

Anthony Verot, Installation view at Centre régional d’art contemporain de Montbéliard, France, 2010

You can find Verot’s work at the Galerie Vielle du Temple in the Marais in Paris.

Richard Kalvar, Magnum Photos, Man talking to sleeping friend, Paris, 1974

The repainter has been reposing in Paris. Racing to finish the portraits for my exhibition at James Graham and Sons knocked the paint right out of me. I’m slowly finding my way back to work, though, in my studio in the 10th arrondissement.

Paris is my perfect repainter city. I can waltz out the door of my studio and in 15 minutes be wandering the galleries of the Louvre, where one can find a lifetime worth of top-notch material for new paintings of old. And if the 19th or 20th centuries beckon, it’s a hopstop to the Centre Pompidou or the Musee d’Orsay  (the Louvre is reserved for pre-mid 19th c. for the most part). Over the years I’ve taken paintings from all these museums back to my studio.

Sturtevant, Warhol Flowers, 1969-70

Returning to Paris I had hoped to see a major museum exhibition by another repainter, Elaine Sturtevant, that opened while I was in New York. Her entire long art career has been devoted to remaking mostly sixties and seventies American artworks by the likes of Stella, Lichtenstein, Johns and Warhol. Once, reportedly, she convinced Andy to let her have the silk screen he used for a series to make her own versions. I’ve seen the works, Johns flags, Warhol poppies, etc. They are indistinguishable from the originals. The Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris exhibition of her work, “The Razzle Dazzle of Thinking,” closed, turns out, just before I arrived.

How many of her collectors regard her work as low-cost knock-offs? When she was showing at the same gallery as I in SoHo, NY, our dealer at the time told me “Whatever works!” with a wink and a nod. This question set me thinking. You copy a work of art. You present it as a new work of art. The new work carries new meaning, apart from its source: “I was NOT made by Jasper Johns,” it announces emphatically (if the viewer is aware of who actually made it). Perhaps it continues, “I am a simulation of a work by a famous male artist, by a woman artist named Elaine Sturtevant. As a result, you the viewer look at me as….  A fake? A sign of just how crazy sexist the art world continues to be? The clairvoyance of a young artist who knew whom to copy before they got famous? A meditation on the unstable value of an artwork? A provocation about the ($) value of originality?”

Where does this take you beyond the slimier aspects of the art biz? Does the work stay smugly inside the narcissistic regions of the art world today? Is it just another reason for those not enthusiastic (nor informed) about contemporary art to dismiss it as snake oil?

Here’s Sturtevant with the last word (jump ahead to 3 min. 10 sec. in…).

Ken Aptekar, Recent Portraits installation view, James Graham & Sons, NY, 2010

Some months ago I launched Repainter Diaries with the back stories behind paintings I was making for an upcoming gallery show (Ken Aptekar: Recent Portraits, March 11 – April 17, 2010, James Graham & Sons, NY). My encounters with my portrait subjects brimmed with juicy material, certainly more that I could contain in each of their portraits. I didn’t bolt the glass panels that carry my texts to the painted panels until two days before installing in the gallery, so I couldn’t include images of the actual paintings in those early posts. But I also admit to heating up a little suspense about the final results.

Now, of course, the exhibition is over. So I thought it might be a good idea to post a virtual gallery visit for those who couldn’t make it. Also included in the exhibition (but not here) was a series of works based on a historical portrait of Queen Charlotte, and now being installed in the new Mint Museum in Charlotte, NC. Those will be the subject of a later post.

I’m thinking now about new portraits, and hereby open the floor to any and all suggestions! If it’s someone famous, I would appreciate a personal introduction; celebrities can be so elusive! Anyone close friends with Michelle O?

Ken Aptekar, PORTRAIT OF ARLETTE L'HOPITAULT, 2010, 30" x 60"

PORTRAIT OF ARLETTE L’HOPITAULT, 2010, 30″ x 60″, after (right) Jean-Baptiste Chardin, Saying Grace, 1740, and (left) Young Man with a Violin, or Portrait of Charles Theodose Godefroy, c.1738, Louvre, Paris

Text on glass:

To Arlette the woman is not the mother.

The parents are absent. Life in this French home

is sweet. She hears a violinist off to the left.

A servant, a musician, two obedient children.

The sweet harmony of family.

But the woman is trapped. Arlette understands;

every time she slipped up Maman wrote it down

for Papa. Then he would drag her out to the edge

of the wheat field and beat her. She left home

when she was fourteen.

Six months after marrying an abusive butcher,

Arlette begins plotting her getaway. Sixteen years,

one child, and a few finance courses later, she

and Delphine pack their bags and get out.

Later she marries Sammy, the love of her life.

She’d prefer to see the painting without the

protective glass.

Ken Aptekar, PORTRAIT OF IRA GLASS, 2010, 35" x 70"

PORTRAIT OF IRA GLASS, 2010, 35″ x 70″, after Jennifer Bartlett, 5AM (from the series, AIR: 24 Hours), 1984, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Text on glass:

Why the children’s drawing in Jennifer Bartlett’s

painting? Ira evades my question, then gives in.

“You’re in love, giddy, you’re dancing in the

kitchen at 5AM. You feel like a child and that

child part of you is alive. If you’re lucky you

have relationships where you can express

yourself as you are at every age. The 5 year-old,

the 10 year-old, the 20 year-old in you comes

alive again with certain people, when you’re

in love, most of all. You want every part of you

to live. The seven year old is right there making

the painting. That’s what expresses just how

in love they are.” Ira glances at me. “Alright,”

he laughs, “you dragged it out of me.”

Ken Aptekar, PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST'S FATHER (MILTON APTEKAR), 2010, 30" x 60"

PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST’S FATHER (MILTON APTEKAR), 2010, 30″ x 60″, after Peter Bruegel the Elder, The Wedding Feast, 1568, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Text on glass:

“Chicken soup,” he thought. “Bagpiper at your wedding?” I ask.

“No way.  Sam Barnett on tenor with a trio. Supper at the synagogue,

nothing fancy.”  Sam introduced Milt to Anne three years before.  “Your

mother and I,”  my Dad recalls, “always liked a lot of people having a good

time at a party.  Live music, that was it.”  Sixty-five years later in 2005, Sam

played at Anne’s funeral.  Milt bought the Bruegel print at the museum in

Detroit for their first house, picked up a raw wood frame for two, three dollars at

Hudson’s.   “I had to come up with a finish,”  he told me recently before he died.

Ken Aptekar, PORTRAIT OF JULIA PEYTON-JONES, 2010, 35" x 35"

PORTRAIT OF JULIA PEYTON-JONES, 2010, 35″ x 35″, after Thomas Gainsborough, Self-portrait, 1758-59, National Portrait Gallery, London

Text on glass:

They were a sign of her family’s history of art patronage. After her parents

moved out of Hengrave Hall in Suffolk, her mother thought about

whom to leave what. Julia asked for the Gainsborough drawings.

Her sister wanted the jewels. Later in London, her mother, a drinker and

chainsmoker, started a fire in the living room. She was lucky to escape

unharmed.  Not so, the Gainsboroughs. Julia left for Florence at 19,

met and fell in love with Art, became an artist. Later, she took over a former

tea pavilion in Kensington Gardens. Twenty years on, it’s the world-renowned

Serpentine Gallery, where as Director she presents the work of numerous

artists and architects amidst the greenery. The fire destroyed three of the

four drawings. Julia has the fourth. When I ask how she felt about her mother’s

explanation for why she didn’t save them, she replies, “I took it quite

literally, rather as if she had said, ‘The wall is green.’” In fact her mother

told her, ‘I didn’t want you to have them so I burned them.’ ”

Ken Aptekar, PORTRAIT OF JULIE & PETER CUMMINGS, 2010, 30" x 60"

PORTRAIT OF JULIE & PETER CUMMINGS, 2010, 30″ x 60″, after Freidel Dzubas, Towards Darkness, 1978, Collection Peter Cummings and Julie Fisher Cummings, New York

Text on glass:

She likes the blue speeding

like a comet out of the dark into

the light. He sees it going

into the darkness. She lingers

at the side of the painting,

preferring small spaces. He feels

cramped by them, and breathes

in the painting’s airy center.

After they met, he told her

he probably wasn’t going to

get married again, but if he did,

“it would be to you.” Her parents

gave them the Dzubas canvas

for a wedding gift. Together

thirty-two years later, they love it

each in their own way.

Ken Aptekar, PORTRAIT OF SAIED AZALI, 2010, 60" x 30"

PORTRAIT OF SAIED AZALI, 2010, 60″ x 30″, after Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, Two Women at a Window, c. 1655/1660, and Sir Anthony van Dyck, Head of a Young Man, c. 1617/1618, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

Text on glass:

If not for the Revolution, I would have become a doctor. My

parents sent me abroad to study before it began. Both of

them were doctors. They were never around.

We had cooks at home. Under the new regime,

my father, an Anglican convert, was sent to prison. Shortly

after he got out, he died. With school finished, I stayed away

and partied. Got into the club scene, opened the restaurant

in DC. I was never close to my parents. Two years ago, just

before my mother died, I went to her and tried to understand.

She’s happy to see me. If I walk up to the window, she’ll talk

to me. I can’t read him. His mind is grinding. He looks

bruised, distant, reminds me of my brother in Australia.

If my parents said Sit, he’d sit, and be miserable obeying.

I don’t want to be there.

In Iran there are boundaries you don’t cross. She told me,

We did our best with you kids, we aren’t perfect. Even last

week I picked up the phone to call her.

Ken Aptekar, PORTRAIT OF SUSAN WHITEHEAD, 2010, 60" x 60"

PORTRAIT OF SUSAN WHITEHEAD, 2010, 60″ x 60″, after (left) J. M. W. Turner, The Slave Ship, 1840, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and (right) Vincent Van Gogh, The Ravine, 1889, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Text on glass:

WITNESS SEES BRUTAL SLAVE MASSACRE AT SEA

VAN GOGH TAKEN IN BROAD DAYLIGHT

CHAOS GOES UNNOTICED BY MOST

BOSTON WOMAN: “PEOPLE KNOW….”

Ken Aptekar, PORTRAIT OF NINO ALCOCK-BOSELLI, 2010, 30" x60"

PORTRAIT OF NINO ALCOCK-BOSELLI, 2010, 30″ x60″, after (left) Jacques-Louis David, General Bonaparte, c. 1797-98 and Portrait of Gaspar Meyer, 1795-96, Louvre, Paris

“Vague, vague, vague. It’s not done.

He’s ugly, his hair reminds me of a

bad teacher. They should give it away

or maybe sell it,” says Nino, a 7 year-old

Parisian. Nino can get to the Louvre in

ten minutes on the Metro.

As for Jacques-Louis David’s Portrait of

Gaspar Mayer, he’d take that one home

with him. He likes “the funny curls of

Gaspar’s hair, the blue and the white

and the red” of his clothes. Plus

it’s all colored in.

Ken Aptekar, PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST, 2010, 60" x 60"

PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST, 2010, 60″ x 60″, after (clockwise from upper left):

Charles Demuth, Love Love Love [Homage to Gertrude Stein (?)], 1929, Fundacion Coleccion Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Charles Demuth, Poster Portrait: O’Keeffe, 1923-24, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven

Charles Demuth, I saw the figure five in gold (Poster Portrait: William Carlos Williams), 1928, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Francois Boucher, Young woman with a bouquet of roses, Private collection

Text on glass: NOW SHOWING K.A.!

Ken Aptekar, TAKE MY HAND (Portrait of Mme de Pompadour), 2009, 35" x 35"

TAKE MY HAND (Portrait of Mme de Pompadour), 2009, 35″ x 35″, after Francois Boucher, Portrait of Mme de Pompadour, 1759, Wallace Collection, London

Text on glass: take my hand

I am the repainter. Does that mean I must be a serial father killer? Do I need to knock off all my Old Master Dads? Did I became the repainter to fulfill some gruesome destiny?

Milton Aptekar, 1915-2010

I loved my Dad, who died at 94 last August. Recently, I made a portrait of him for my show at James Graham & Sons. He was a loving husband and father, full of appetite, a much adored music teacher, a talented trumpeter. Early on, my Dad and Gene Fenby, his partner in the Fenby-Carr Quintet (“The Singing Schoolteachers”), decided not to go out to Hollywood to try to make it big. They chose instead to continue teaching  in Detroit, while moonlighting with the band. When I got my first NEA grant, I called him, trembling, to ask what he thought of my quitting the locksmith business to become a full-time artist. I  thought he’d be angry if I made such an “irresponsible” and risky choice.

Fenby Carr Quintet, "The Singing Schoolteachers"

I was in Paris painting, when I got him on the phone.

“Great,” he said. “Go for it!”

I didn’t kill my Dad by going to New York. His orchestra prospered in Detroit, became well-known local entertainers for many years. My father enjoyed the family life he and my mother created, and fifty years worth of grateful high-school students with whom he shared his love of music. Greek tragedy? More like Ozzie and Harriet. Not to say that there was no drama–my father could be mighty judgmental, and I had to learn to live with it.

So with the subject of artists and fathers in mind, here is a short, idiosyncratic, personal selection of works by artist friends, me, and a few others. I’ll update periodically with your suggestions if you pass them along.

ROBIN TEWES, Father and Son, 2001, oil on birch, 20" x 20"

RON MUECK, Dead Dad, 1996-97, installation view, Brooklyn Museum

DAVID HUMPHREY, Dad, (text reads "I'm") 1987, oil on canvas, 70" x 80" (installation view)

PAULA REGO, The Family, 1988, acrylic on canvas-backed paper, 213 cm x 213 cm

KEN APTEKAR, Milt Ken Paris, 1987, oil on wood, 30" x 90" triptych

DENNIS KARDON, Roughhousing (with the Inner Child), 1997, oil on canvas, 45" x 54"

Mark Rothko, Seagram commission paintings on view at Tate Modern, London

Saw the new play, Red, on Broadway last weekend. Tragic, unnerving, brilliant, it’s a portrait of a terrifying bully, Mark Rothko, unbearably trapped by the impossible demands he places on his work. If you care about what Art does, how artists work, and the ways that changes over time, see this play. Not to mention the dazzling performances of Alfred Molina (Rothko–used to be Rothkowitz) and Eddie Redmayne (Ken (!), his assistant). Ninety minutes without intermission disappear in a red flash as Rothko hurls, in addition to red paint, insults at Ken, whose youth, intelligence, and emotional endurance allow him finally to break loose and fly.

Alfred Molina and Eddie Redmayne in John Logan's new play, Red, now on Broadway

We’re in Rothko’s Bowery studio. He’s working on a series commissioned for the then massive sum of $35,000 for the Four Seasons restaurant in Philip Johnson’s Seagram’s Building. He’s poured a Red Sea’s worth of artistic intention into the paintings, all red and black. He bludgeons Ken with the symbolism of the palette he’s chosen for the commission: red for life, black for death. Though that’s not the whole story, there’s something to it. (I saw them last year in a recent and brilliant show curated by Achim Borchardt-Hume.) At one point Rothko talks about the moment he first saw Matisse’s Red Studio at MoMA. It took me right back to 1973 when I first arrived in NY for graduate school and saw the painting. I don’t think I had ever seen so much red.

Henri Matisse, Red Studio, 1911, Museum of Modern Art, NY

I had no idea then that Matisse’s “re-paintings” in this image would later suggest the path I took. In 1979 I grabbed Matisse’s Red Studio for my own. It was one of the first paintings I sold in a gallery (Barbara Flynn’s and Ed Rath’s Art Galaxy in Little Italy). The many monochromatic red paintings I’ve made over the years–even a suite of prints titled “Red Read”–is some indication of just how much that Matisse got under my skin too.

Ken Aptekar, Red Studio, 1979 Collection David Savran

For Rothko, black won when he ended his own life in 1970. Much as I respect Rothko’s work, its moral weightiness, universal aspirations, and aesthetic purification up a black hole for him. He couldn’t find his way out of the dark loneliness of the Great Artist. I thought that bringing others along with me in my work through their responses to paintings might make my work more fun. I need their lives. I was the youngest of four kids and the love I got from my older siblings I expect.

When I was a boy, people noticed the color of my hair. I’ve always been “Red.”

Portrait of Ken Aptekar, 1952, Edward Skinner

Still from Kevin Rodney Sullivan's 2005 film, Guess Who

I never intended to make a self-portrait for my show at James Graham & Sons. In fact I was relieved to be thinking about other people. The repainter’s work is all so self-portrait-y as it is. Enough!

So when I was telling Joe and Wanda over dinner late last year about working on a portrait show, Joe’s suggestion that I include one of myself irritated me. It’s been a rough year, first financially, but most of all because of my father’s decline and death in August. Did I want to look inward? Could I make a self-portrait that said something about my current state but wasn’t just a downer? A painting that people would enjoy, would want to look at and that declared my conception of a portrait as a picture that showed how people look–at paintings?

Also, I’d been thinking of my portrait project as a guest list for a fabulous dinner party. Did I want to miss out by not being there?

Joe and Wanda were both professors at Stanford until their recent retirement. In Wanda’s book, The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915-1935, she had focused on key works like Charles Demuth’s “I saw the figure five in gold,” a painting that mattered to me. It’s a “Poster Portrait” of his friend, the poet William Carlos Williams. A few years ago, I repainted it as a portrait of the Dalai Lama.

Charles Demuth, I saw the figure five in gold, 1928, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY

Over the gold “5” that in Demuth’s painting represents Fire Engine No. 5 clanging down a Manhattan street in Williams’ poem, I layered on a big number 14 (1+4=5) sandblasted on glass. (The current Dalai Lama is the 14^th re-incarnation of the Tibetan Buddhist leader.) I pushed the colors toward the saffron and burgundy red associated with Buddhist monks. Then I replaced William and Bill with the Dalai Lama’s various names, Kundun and Lhamo.

Ken Aptekar, I saw the figure fourteen in gold, 2005, 60" x 60"

There are words and images and nobody’s face in Demuth’s portrait. He uses the visual language of advertising to represent a person. With my portraits, I add people’s perceptions of–and remarks about–paintings to embody a portrait of who they are.

The repainter needs to decide whom to repaint for his self portrait. Who better for the job? He’s delightful, he’s delicious, he’s delectable, he’s delirious, he’s de limit, he’s deluxe, he’s Demuth! And if he’s good enough for the Dalai Lama, he’s good enough for me. But do I want to repaint only one artist to speak for me? How about a nod to my pal Frank?

Francois Boucher, 1703-1770

I’ve repainted him for years. He’s never let me down. He’s French; I live in Paris part of the year. And Frank’s initials (FB) might remind people of everyone’s favorite pastime these days: FaceBook!

With Boucher’s inquiring woman’s face in my self-portrait, I slipped across the gender line.

Francois Boucher, Young Woman with a bouquet of roses

I want my self portrait to be raucous, fractious, elusive. If it shouted, Over here, take a look! all the better.

I made a series of self-portraits in 1978. They were part of my first exhibition in New York, at Franklin Furnace, a place for performance and artist’s book exhibitions founded by Martha Wilson. I was working at the time at Barton’s Bonbonniere, designing candy packaging. To make the mockups of candy bar wrappers, I used fine sable brushes and gouche. The work was boring. I found ways to amuse myself. On my lunch break I would stop by a Woolworth’s nearby where there was a photo booth. I’d come back to the office with a strip of four photos of myself, and paint over them. If someone came into my office, I quickly tucked my work in progress under a candy bar wrapper.

Ken Aptekar, Extensions, 1979, ink on paper, gouache on machine photo (detail)

As I continued repainting machine photo after machine photo, I found myself morphing into other characters. These people were me and more. I stuck the photos to a sheet of paper and added a short statement written by my extended selves. In one I became an obsessive compulsive who turned the presence of roaches in his apartment into a sick source of pleasure (above). There were twelve in all at the Franklin Furnace exhibition. My return to self portraiture now thirty-three years later, picks up on themes of fragmentation and extension that I first played with while scarfing down  Almond Kisses at Bartons.

Cindy Sherman, Untitled, 2008

Can a portrait be a portrait if it doesn’t show the person’s face? And if it does show the face, is it necessarily a portrait? When Cindy Sherman photographs herself as an upper east side dame, what is that?

Go Jack, go!

The repainter is repainting as fast as he can. Will he make it in time?

Glass sandblasted with texts for all the portraits is scheduled to arrive at my studio momentarily. Holes need to be drilled, the entire video edited. Not to mention hours lost to the Oscars.

And Obama thinks he has his hands full.

Crazy in love

Gotta get Ira Glass for my portrait show. His amazing radio program, This American Life, portrays real life characters with snippets of sound. My portraits rely on what the subjects say and how they say it, no image of them. Perfect fit.

I send him an email asking if he’s game. One of my oldest friends, Joel Kostman, read several of the locksmith stories from his book, Keys to the City, on This American Life. I have a connection.

I suggest in the email that we meet up at the Met and wander around, find a painting or two he’d like to talk about and that I can repaint for his portrait. Ira emails back, says yes. Amazingly, he indicates the exact painting he wants to use: Jennifer Bartlett’s 1984 canvas, 5AM from her series titled 24 Hours. In it, there’s a couple kissing while dancing, against an orderly grid of a space. I call the Met.

The painting’s in storage. Can we arrange a viewing, I plead, no more than an hour? I need to videotape Ira Glass–you know, This American Life?–talking about it. Difficult, they respond, security issues. What are they, crazy??? How can they say No to this? I ask to come in and see the painting, first, to figure out my line of questioning, but then to see if there’s any wiggle room.

It’s Friday, and I’m in a fluorescent lit space with painting racks, empty frames, a Picasso here, a Picasso there. Several art handlers are milling about with a sweet young woman from Modern Art who’s arranged the visit. The Bartlett has been pulled out. After a few moments, the Collection Manager arrives. I explain my project while she listens sympathetically. She says, Have a look at the painting, I’ll be back. After speaking with the head of security, she returns to inform me they’ll never let me videotape in a storage room. I’m dying. What to do? “You know what a difference it makes to look at the actual work rather than a repro,” I whine. She’s softening. Perhaps we can arrange to wheel it out on a dolly in the adjacent gallery on Monday, she offers, when the museum is closed but handlers are here. I’m thinking, Ira’s on a tight production deadline, tied up every weekday. This won’t work.

El Quijote Bar and Restaurant, Chelsea Hotel, NYC

I print up a repro from the internet. It’s Sunday and now or never. I meet Ira at the bar at El Quijote in the Chelsea Hotel. He helpfully grabs a pile of cocktail napkins to prop up the lens on my videocam, which I’ve pointed at him from the bar, and then adds his wallet for extra height. Ira worries aloud about the muzak in the background (“from a radio point of view this couldn’t be a worse environment”), but I love it. His music producer could easily have picked the song: “You must remember this….” As Time Goes By, from Casablanca. Handing him the repro, I ask, When did you first see the painting? Ira begins. For twenty five minutes without pause, he parses his attraction to a painting as though he had thought about nothing else in the 9 years since he first saw it. Where the hell does he get this insight to an art form about which, by his own admission, he knows next to nothing?

I tell him that when I asked the Met to let him have the Bartlett painting for helping me with my project, they refused, but they might just agree to letting me cut it in two so he can take home half. “Just tell me which half you want and why,” I ask him. “Where did you get this question???” he cries, “this is CRAZY! The painting’s already in me! I don’t want the responsibility!” I say, What would a destroyed Jennifer Bartlett be worth? Don’t worry.

Two hours later I jump on the E train back to my studio in Jackson Heights with pure Glass on a DV casette.

Next stop, Roosevelt Avenue, Jackson Heights

Jacques Mesrine (left), played by Vincent Cassell in Jean-François Richet's recent film "Mesrine"

The economic crisis and bank bailout are all over the news. Who better than a Wall Streeter with a Hollywood pedigree? Ivan Boesky! The first of the big insiders to go down in the 80′s and the model for Gordon (“Greed is good!”) Gecko in Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street.”

Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko

I learn that, like me, he’s from Detroit and went to the University of Michigan. When his ambitions were too big for the Motor City, where his parents owned a Russian deli we used to go to called Boesky’s (bo-ES-keys back then), he left for New York. Graduate school at Pratt Institute was my lure.

Boesky's Delicatessen, Detroit

Wall Street worked out pretty well for Ivan. He even donated $20 million to the Union Theological Seminary for a new library. And then the axe fell. Prison, divorce, Oliver Stone. Who do you become after all that, and how is it revealed through one’s response to art? What painting, I wonder, would he fancy looking at with me at the Met, or perhaps at the Getty in LA; I hear he’s living in La Jolla, nearby. Now years after he served his time, what might he say to priceless paintings by Rembrandt or Vermeer, or Hubert Robert?

Hubert Robert, Hermit Praying in the Ruins of a Roman Temple, 1760, Getty Museum, LA

I write Ivan a pitch letter, including this paragraph:

Yes, you committed a crime. And yes, that interests me as someone who tries hard to do the right thing but doesn’t always, but also as a Jew from Detroit, an alumni of the University of Michigan, and someone drawn to NYC out of his ambitions. Obviously, you are more than the crime you committed and paid for, and it is that whole person who I am interested in portraying in a portrait. Twenty three years later people on Wall Street are getting rich off ever more sophisticated scams. Seems like a good time to think again about Ivan Boesky, maybe from a new angle. Yours?

But where to send the email? I google. Lots of breaking news items from the 80s, the 90s, then the trail goes cold. I email the director of a Chelsea gallery owned by his daughter, Marianne Boesky. No response. Marianne herself. Ditto. I write friends from Detroit, including one with vaguely criminal connections, hoping for old family ties. Nothing.

Even in the age of Facebook, if you want to hide, no problem.

Charlotte's Crown in Sir Allan Ramsay's Coronation Portrait, 1761

While Barack Obama was working at getting elected, I was occupied with a series of paintings. I had been commissioned by the Mint Museum in Charlotte, NC, to make work based on their portrait of Queen Charlotte by Sir Allan Ramsay.

Sir Allan Ramsay, Coronation Portrait of Queen Charlotte, 1761, Mint Museum

Queen Charlotte, for whom the city was named, was married to King George III. The two ruled England when the colonies decided enough was enough. Now, you may wonder what Obama has to do with an English royal. And if you’re anything like me, the near certainty that Queen Charlotte was of mixed race escaped you. If you live in Charlotte, however, it wouldn’t have. Charlotteans, as they call themselves, have strong feelings about their namesake. For the 33% who are African-Americans, she is the Black Queen. For most of the rest, she’s British, by which they mean white. She looks white in her portrait hanging in the museum. More or less. Maybe her hair’s a bit frizzy, her lips somewhat thick and her nose broad, but Black is not the first thing that springs to mind when you see her. Stuart Jeffries, reporting on my project in the Guardian in London, writes:

Charlotte is intrigued by its namesake. Some Charlotteans even find her lovable. “We think your queen speaks to us on lots of levels,” says Cheryl Palmer, director of education at the Mint museum. “As a woman, an immigrant, a person who may have had African forebears, botanist, a queen who opposed slavery – she speaks to Americans, especially in a city in the south like Charlotte that is trying to redefine itself.”

Jeffries continues:

…[Aptekar] started by conducting focus group meetings with people from Charlotte to find out what the Queen and her portrait meant to citizens of the US city…. Among those who attended is congressman Mel Watt, one of very few African-Americans in the House of Representatives and who represents the 12th district of North Carolina that includes Charlotte. “In private conversations, African-Americans have always acknowledged and found a sense of pride in this ‘secret’,” says Watt. “It’s great that this discussion can now come out of the closet into the public places of Charlotte, so we all can acknowledge and celebrate it.”

I fly down to Charlotte.  Why should I care about this Queen Charlotte, I’m wondering? OK, so she was a precocious seventeen year-old plucked from obscurity out of the Duchy of Mecklenberg-Strelizia in the north of what was to become Germany and she was crowned Queen of England. An idealistic teenager, she was upset by the number of her countrymen returning home in caskets or wounded from a senseless war. She wrote King Frederick of Prussia a passionate letter urging him to end the war. Though he ignored it, others didn’t and her humane gesture made the rounds of royals all over Europe, including King George’s mom who was trying at that very moment to pry her son away from a hot commoner. She invited Charlotte up to the palace.

I ask the groups to imagine Charlotte writing her letter today, in Charlotte, NC. To whom is she writing, and about what? Someone suggests she’d have a blog about the pathetic public education and crushing poverty effectively killing young people in Charlotte. Another proposes a green agenda–she was wild about horticulture and founded Kew Gardens in London. The bird of paradise, originally from Brazil, was given its botanical name, Strelizia de la Reine, to honor her for first cultivating it in England.

Bird of Paradise (Strelitzia Reginae)

Viewers notice her vulnerability in Ramsay’s painting. Despite all the regal trappings, the throne, the crown, the heavy drapes, the lavish Queen get-up, when you focus just on her face, you find the 17 year-old who doesn’t know what hit her.

DETAIL Sir Allan Ramsay, Coronation Portrait of Queen Charlotte

Much beloved as Queen of England, Charlotte offered something for everyone in in this southern city–a touch of English class, a black heroine, an anti-war activist, a nature lover, the founder of the first orphanage in London, plus an ad for luxury textiles, a major industry in North Carolina.

When I get on the plane to NY that night, at the end of a very long day made easier by Contemporary Curator Carla Hanzal who had commissioned me, I leave with four hours of videotape, and I am reeling from all the Charlottes revealed to me. Soon after, I set out formulating what will become six separate panels each revealing a facet of this Queen. Together, these six paintings equal the surface area of the original portrait. They will hang in the new Mint Museum building now under construction in the Charlotte business district, and will link its collections to those remaining in the original historic Mint building more off the beaten path. Before they leave for Charlotte I will show them in New York as part of an upcoming portrait show.

I am bringing Charlotte, the Queen of England with African blood, back to life in new paintings just when Barack Obama becomes the first mixed race President of the United States. Palette change.

Barack "Barry" Obama, second row center, seen with his junior varsity basketball team, 1977, Punahoe School Yearbook, Honolulu