Petzel Gallery is putting on a show of Asger Jorn’s altered thrift store paintings and they’re putting them in the context of other artists who altered found objects to make art. Here’s how Petzel’s press release puts it:

Strategic Vandalism: The Legacy of Asger Jorn’s Modifications Paintings (through April 13) is situated in the context of the first thrift store paintings altered by Danish artist Asger Jorn. This group show features 30 prominent international artists and investigates multifarious appropriation methods spanning from the mid-1960s to the flourishing techniques of the 1980s, up to the present day.

But flashback to Paris, 1959: Asger Jorn exhibits a group of paintings at the prominent Galerie Rive Gauche. Not only has he re-worked these found paintings with his own brush, modifying their respective surfaces, but he also writes a text describing his technique as a recovery of certain iconographic archetypes. Instead of making a mockery of these kitsch paintings, he articulates some of their inherent folk-art values. The exhibition is not well received. However, it has since become legendary. Jorn’s modifications have long been a neglected chapter in the Danish artist’s biography. Yet from today’s perspective these high/low hermaphrodites are recognized by keen-eyed viewers as mirrors reflecting the historicity of modern painting.

Such “Modifications” are a painterly version of “détournement,” a Situationist technique, described in 1956 by Guy Debord and Gil Wolman as the systematic revaluation of “prefabricated aesthetic products.” For Jorn, who co-founded and financially supported the Situationist International, the 1959 Galerie Rive Gauche exhibition, showcased his implementation of a fundamental aesthetic critique in which he appropriates a relatively discredited artistic source as “his” own material, then applies his iconography, and his language to that particular prefabricated model.

Strategic Vandalism: The Legacy of Asger Jorn’s Modifications Paintings features works by Enrico Baj, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Vidya Gastaldon, Wade Guyton/Stephen Prina, Rachel Harrison, Ray Johnson, Jacqueline de Jong, Asger Jorn, Mike Kelley, Martin Kippenberger, Per Kirkeby, Lee Krasner, Albert Oehlen, Francis Picabia, Stephen Prina, R.H. Quaytman, Arnulf Rainer, Julian Schnabel, Jim Shaw, Gedi Sibony, Alexis Smith, Daniel Spoerri, John Stezaker, Betty Tompkins, and David Wojnarowicz.

A comprehensive book on Strategic Vandalism: The Legacy of Asger Jorn’s Modifications Paintings is forthcoming with texts written and edited by the curators, Axel Heil and Roberto Ohrt, as well as reprinted articles on the subjects of détournement, vandalism, and the relationship between modifications and appropriation art in the late 1970s.

Christie’s is still cataloguing the Mayer collection and there are likely to be a number of interesting works among the lots, including an early Larry Rivers painting  The Last Civil War Veteran, 1959-1960 ($300-500k), but along side the Rauschenberg announced this morning is Kiss III, a Roy Lichtenstein painting from 1962 that carries a $30m estimate.

In 1990, a companion painting to this work, Kiss II (1962), set a record for the artist when it sold for $6m at Christie’s to a representative of Fuji Gallery in Japan who was said to be buying the work for Mr. Wanibuchi. At the time, the $6m was a record price for the artist. Here’s Christie’s on the painting:

Painted by one of the foremost figures of American Pop Art, Kiss III, 1962 (in the region of $30 million) is a pivotal work from one of Roy Lichtenstein’s most lauded bodies of work. Painted the same year as the artist’s inaugural solo exhibition at the legendary Leo Castelli Gallery in New York, works such as this began pulling from the pages of comic books and enlarging the sampled imagery with meticulous detail. While effectively reproducing extant imagery, Lichtenstein was clear that his works should be viewed for their formal qualities rather than their enticing subject matter. Clearly depicted with bold black outlines, on the surface Kiss III depicts a man and woman sharing a close embrace. Both figures have their eyes closed as the man’s large hand presses down on the woman’s shoulder. Their lips are planted in a passionate kiss that is echoed in the energetic shapes making up the explosive background. In 1961, Lichtenstein broke with his earlier practice and began to reproduce the visual qualities of printed ephemera. Among his subjects were works based on advertisements and comics that featured war stories and romantic themes
(of which Kiss III is a prime example). “At that time,” Lichtenstein later recounted, “I was interested in anything I could use as a subject that was emotionally strong – usually love, war, or something that was highly charged and emotional subject matter to be opposite to the removed and deliberate painting techniques.

The first of the season’s big estates has been announced at Christie’s where Chicago’s Mayer family will be selling $125m in Pop art led by Robert Rauschenberg’s Buffalo II (1964) with an estimate of around $50m:

One of the largest of Robert Rauschenberg’s iconic Silkscreen Paintings, Buffalo II is a blockbuster painting, which unites the worlds of art and politics. At over eight-feet-tall this imposing canvas is filled with an ostensibly incongruent range of images ranging from the iconic to the mundane. Dominated by a large photograph of the then Senator John F. Kennedy, Rauschenberg assembles an eclectic range of motifs that, for him, define America; famous politicians, the space race, the military, iconic consumer products and patriotic symbols of America are interspersed with more innocuous images of the urban landscape and more personal objects. A pioneer of the silkscreen technique (along with Andy Warhol who had begun using the technique just a couple of months earlier), Rauschenberg appropriates images he collected from newspapers and magazines—along with his own photographs—to produce a portrait of a country during the social and political upheaval of the 1960s.

Yet this painting is much more than an historical snapshot of the 60s, it also marks a pivotal point in Rauschenberg’s development as an artist and bears witness to his own investigations in what it means to be an artist. By bringing together pre-existing images from popular culture with an array of drips and painterly gestures, Buffalo II also acts as a bridge between the now declining dominance of Abstract Expressionism and the new burgeoning world of Pop. Many smaller examples of the artist’s Silkscreen Paintings are included in major museum collections, making this one of the last major examples to remain in private hands. Exhibited at the XXXII Venice Biennale in 1964, Buffalo II was part of group exhibition of young American painters for which Rauschenberg was awarded the coveted International Grand Prize in Painting.