YouSaid · the spoken record

Courtney Kremers

lines on the record
14
first
2026-03-21
most recent
2026-03-21
sittings or episodes
1
sources
podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

  1. “So it isn't one thing, it's many little things that together create this magical explosion, shall we say, this chemistry that elevates a work from something that is just ordinary or even good into something that is exceptional, great, and iconic.”

    2026-03-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Specialist | From Canvas to Canon: Joan Mitchell’s King of Spades, with Courtney Kremers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “And I loved getting to know our team, spending so much time with specialists across so many categories and hearing these stories from their perspective and listening to what they thought was the most iconic thing in their category and deserved a place as one of these 100. I thought a lot about what makes an icon. Clearly, I've had a lot of time to think about that. I sum it up with one word, chemistry. You think about like why do two people fall in love? Why do two people connect? There are so many different components and ingredients that go into the making of an icon that it's really impossible to sum it up with one clean, easy, like, it's iconic because of who owned it or it's iconic because the public loved it because honestly at different points in history, things that we consider icons now, people didn't like when they were first made or they didn't appreciate.”

    2026-03-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Specialist | From Canvas to Canon: Joan Mitchell’s King of Spades, with Courtney Kremers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “I think one of the wonderful things I learned in the process of co-editing the icons book is that there is not one way for a work to become an icon. There are certainly factors that are more common and you think about quality. Many of the works have some sort of rarity component. And then provenance. A lot of these works were owned by exceptional people. And in some cases, that's entirely why the object is included. There were so many other incredible stories and the story of an object is also part of what made some of these things so iconic. So whether it's the Rembrandt, the young girl and the gold trim cloak that was recovered after a museum heist in the 1970s, where you think about Giacomo Herman's Roman Baroque cabinet that was rediscovered outside a men's restroom in a pizza parlor in England. It was really fun to examine all of these stories, to figure out.”

    2026-03-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Specialist | From Canvas to Canon: Joan Mitchell’s King of Spades, with Courtney Kremers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “We're way beyond that now. In 2004, it was a record by more than a million dollars. But by 2014, Mitchell breaks the $10 million mark. And in the last three years, we've broken the $20 million mark three times. So her market is in an entirely different place than it was 20 years ago, which is great and deserve it.”

    2026-03-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Specialist | From Canvas to Canon: Joan Mitchell’s King of Spades, with Courtney Kremers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “9, 2004 in New York. It was lot 43 out of 66 lots. And Joan was one of five female artists. The estimate was 750 to a million dollars, which was a notch above the estimate where it had gone unsold at Christie's five years prior. There were at least four bidders in the competition. And the final hammer price was $2.4 million, which was more than three times the low estimate and was a new record for Mitchell by more than a million dollars. In addition to this achieving a new record and breaking the last record by more than a million dollars, it was only the second time that a Mitchell painting had broken the $1 million mark. It put Joan on the same playing field for the first time in terms of price as the male artists of her generation. It's the start of her ascent. 2.6 million.”

    2026-03-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Specialist | From Canvas to Canon: Joan Mitchell’s King of Spades, with Courtney Kremers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “I think you can attribute this to the Whitney retrospective that was held in 2002. So this was the first major retrospective that Joan Mitchell had had in the United States since she passed away in 1992. Something we often say in specialists speak is we talk about the retrospective effect and how retrospectives can be moments where certainly scholarship galvanizes around an artist and therefore the public does. They educate people and they create a buzz around artists that may not have existed prior to that. So what happened in 2004 when this comes up? The market was primed, the public was primed, there was a new excitement around Joan's work. She had been recontextualized as one of the most important ABEX artists of her generation, not just as an important female artist. Auction took place on November 9th.”

    2026-03-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Specialist | From Canvas to Canon: Joan Mitchell’s King of Spades, with Courtney Kremers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “When actually King of Spades first appeared at auction. And at the time it sold for about 450,000 dollars, I think at an estimate of $180,000 to $250,000. And then it came up again 10 years later at an estimate of $7,000 to $900,000 and actually went on sold. So when it came up at auction in 2004, that it estimated $750 to a million dollars, it did come with that prior record of as we like to say, or we sometimes say, having been bought in, which is usually considered a stain on the history of an artist's work. And I imagine that we set the estimate in 2004 at $750,000 to acknowledge partly that history of it having gone unsold. So why did this not sell in 1999 and then sell spectacularly and set a new record in 2004?”

    2026-03-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Specialist | From Canvas to Canon: Joan Mitchell’s King of Spades, with Courtney Kremers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “Joan would have painted King of Spades in her studio in Paris at 77 Rue daguerre that she was subletting that summer from the Austrian sculptor Deschnavel. And at that time she was primarily bringing her canvases then back to New York because she had a couple of galleries. So Joan would have rolled this up probably still wet and brought it back to New York, to Eleanor Ward of the Stable Gallery. In 1966, it was included in an exhibition part of the Arden Embassies program organized by MoMA. So it was shown in Bucharest in 1966 publicly for the first time. And then Xavier for Cod, her prominent French dealer held a show in 1980 about Mitchell in the 50s, and it was likely from this exhibition that the famed collector in Boston, Graham Gund, would have acquired King of Spades. Graham had it until 19”

    2026-03-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Specialist | From Canvas to Canon: Joan Mitchell’s King of Spades, with Courtney Kremers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “New York. I think best exemplify that appreciation of the Titans of artists that have come before her and are working around her at the time, but are entirely unique and exultant in their own beauty and stature.”

    2026-03-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Specialist | From Canvas to Canon: Joan Mitchell’s King of Spades, with Courtney Kremers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “She treats both as negative space, but it's also there in a really muscular way and very much a part of the composition. Joan Mitchell was very much influenced by what she saw in the work of Jackson Pollock and the way that he used his body around the canvas. This is an all over surface where every corner sort of has to hold its own. Joan was fairly prolific, but in terms of this scale and in terms of the complexity of the composition, by our estimation there are only about 23 canvases that she painted between 1955 and 1957 that match this one in terms of quality and scale. Over half of those today are in museum collections. 1955 is a defining moment for Joan because it's when she finds her own voice and these canvases between 55 and 57 when she's moving back and forth quite frequently between Paris and”

    2026-03-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Specialist | From Canvas to Canon: Joan Mitchell’s King of Spades, with Courtney Kremers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “Because Joan was a synesthette. So all of her senses combined. When she saw color, she felt an emotion. When she listened to music, she saw color. So everything kind of converges in her canvases into these worlds that she creates. King of spades is an oil on canvas. It's just over 90 inches tall and 78 inches wide. So it's a really large canvas. And when you stand in front of it, there's a physicality to it because of its scale. I think you have at least five different shades of green, a beautiful range of blues. You have these incredible slashes of cardinal red. But what holds this composition together is her use of white. You can see when you're looking closely that there are these layers back and forth between the white, between the green, and the blues and the color, of course. So the white is something that really...”

    2026-03-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Specialist | From Canvas to Canon: Joan Mitchell’s King of Spades, with Courtney Kremers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “Expansive canvases, the post war American era that was redefining what we had thought of painting up until that time, which before had been led by, dominated really by Paris. Joan takes in all of these lessons, but then she cuts her own path. She does start to bounce back and forth to Paris quite a bit. Joan absorbs the color of Matisse, the structure of Mondrian, Cezanne, but then their bravado and the physicality of painting that she's experiencing amongst the artists in the New York school. And at that moment, it's like Joan Mitchell as we know her comes into being in 1955, we say, is like a defining moment in her career when she finds her own voice and creates her own language that marries a lot of these influences, but then is something entirely of its own. It's this like all-encompassing feeling that I think Jones canvases deliver, which makes sense on some level.”

    2026-03-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Specialist | From Canvas to Canon: Joan Mitchell’s King of Spades, with Courtney Kremers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “Joan Mitchell was really a ferociously independent painter who transformed memories, landscape, emotion into these raw lyrical abstractions, and she did this without ever diluting her voice or trying to fit into what was then really this like male dominated abstract expressionist canon. She came to New York in the late 1940s and there she encountered the New York School of Artists really getting into full swing. So this is the era of Willem de Cooning of Jackson Pollock, of Franz Klein, of Barnett Newman, of Adolf Gottlieb. This is almost entirely a male-dominated universe at this time. But Joan falls right into step with them. She's absorbing the lessons that she's seeing really in terms of the physicality of painting. There's this bravado that comes with the painting of these artists. These are big canvases.”

    2026-03-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Specialist | From Canvas to Canon: Joan Mitchell’s King of Spades, with Courtney Kremers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “I love the underdog nature of King of Spades. Certainly, it set a record at the time it was sold. It signaled the ascent of Mitchell as a serious artist. It had come up already twice on the market. It had most recently gone unsold, but then it goes on to set a new record, to redefine a market. It's sort of a story of resilience and quiet ascendance. So when we were thinking about this book, it was like, which Joan Mitchell painting deserves this spot? And for me, it was never a question that King of Spades would fill that place”

    2026-03-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Specialist | From Canvas to Canon: Joan Mitchell’s King of Spades, with Courtney Kremers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT