THENEWYORKER, SEPTEMBER 2, 2019 23
making prints there in the early eight-
ies. The fantastically intricate task of re-
producing the eleven stones took five
years. (She was doing other things as
well.) Working with the smallest brushes
and acrylic paint, she matched the col-
ors and every speck and marking on the
found stones, so precisely that even she
has trouble telling the original from the
copy. Celmins believes that, if you spend
enough time on a work, something else
might come into play, “some subtlety that
my brain was not capable of figuring
out.” Like Johns, she is interested in test-
ing the margins between art and reality.
“Vija’s different from other artists I
know, who go into the studio and really
enjoy it,” Happy Price told me. “Vija has
struggles.” When Celmins was working
on her rock piece, Price remembers her
saying, “I’m crazy, why am I doing this?”
Two identical entries in her diary reflect
Celmins’s anxiety about the piece: “The
stones OVER IMAGINED.” She consid-
ers the work a long meditation on na-
ture. It is also “a little bit humorous,” she
told me. “They look like turds, I know.”
Celmins’s career flourished during
the five years she worked on the stones.
Her first retrospective exhibition opened
in 1979, at the Newport Harbor Art
Museum, in California, and travelled to
three others, including the Hudson River
Museum, in Yonkers, New York, and
the Corcoran Gallery of Art, in Wash-
ington, D.C. She won a Guggenheim
Fellowship in 1980, specifically to work
on her stones piece, and that year she
joined David and Renee McKee’s gal-
lery in New York, which represented
Philip Guston, one of her idols, and
would represent Celmins for the next
thirty-five years. In 1981, she moved from
Los Angeles to New York City, and
gradually found her way back to paint-
ing. Using paint on the stones was a first
step; oil on canvas, after eighteen years
of working in pencil or charcoal, was
more difficult. “When I started paint-
ing again in the mid-eighties, I couldn’t
finish anything,” she told the artist
Chuck Close. “I felt like a baby crawl-
ing on my hands and knees.” She re-
sumed painting, she said, because “I
wanted the work to carry more weight.”
Her move to New York had a simi-
lar motivation. Celmins and her family
had spent three months there in 1948, on
their way from Europe to Indiana. They
had stayed in a hotel on East Twenty-
third or Twenty-fourth Street (she’s not
sure which), and her clearest memory is
of the used comic books that she per-
suaded her father to buy for her from
sidewalk venders—they helped her learn
English words. A dozen years later, on
a summer scholarship to the Yale School
of Music and Art, in Norfolk, Connecti-
cut, she met a number of East Coast art
students who were headed for the M.F.A.
program at Yale. Celmins had been ac-
cepted by Yale, but U.C.L.A. offered her
a bigger scholarship. What would it have
been like, she sometimes wondered, if
she had gone to Yale and then to New
York, as so many of the Norfolk students
did? In the summer of 1981, she was in-
vited to teach at the Skowhegan School
of Painting & Sculpture, in Maine. While
there, she went to New York and nego-
tiated a temporary studio swap with the
artist Barbara Kruger—Celmins’s new
studio near Venice Boulevard for Kru-
ger’s loft on Leonard Street. The artists
she spent time with in New York that
fall ( Joel Shapiro, Chuck Close, and
Richard Serra, among others) impressed
her as being more focussed and more
ambitious than the L.A. variety. Within
a few weeks, she had decided to stay and
began looking for a place of her own.
Her first New York show was in 1983,
at the McKee Gallery, on Fifty-seventh
Street. Celmins kept putting it off be-
cause, David McKee said, “she could
never finish those damn stones.” The
show included pencil drawings of Sat-
urn with its encircling rings, and new
star fields, larger than the galaxies she
had done in the seventies—some of them
coupled with an image of Marcel Du-
champ’s “Rotary Glass Plates,” a mech-
anized sculpture, made in 1920, that she
had seen reproduced in a book when she
was at U.C.L.A. (“Both are spinning
things, trying to find their bearings, like
me,” she explained.) In the middle of the
room was a large plaster slab holding the
eleven stones and their painted bronze
duplicates, which she had finally finished.
They were laid out in carefully random-
ized order. In two places a matched pair
were close together, but the rest were
separated. The piece puzzled and in-
trigued viewers. “Some people thought
she had travelled the world and found
eleven identical stones,” McKee told me.
The work’s quiet power—its ability to
capture and hold people’s interest—was
never in doubt, and Celmins’s title for it,
“To Fix the Image in Memory: I-XI
(1977-1982),” was every artist’s ambition.
Edward Broida, a major Celmins collec-
tor, bought the piece and donated it in
2005, along with sixteen other works, to
the Museum of Modern Art. Everything
else in the show was sold, to museums
Celmins makes her spiderwebs in charcoal, creating images through erasure.
VIJA CELMINS, “WEB #5”, 1999.
© VIJA CELMINS, COLLECTION OF RENEE AND DAVID MCKEE
