Carl Andre, igned handwritten card: "PICASSO WOULD HAVE BEEN A GREAT ARTIST IN ANY AGE, BUT I WOULD HAVE TRIED TO BE AN ARTIST ONLY IN A TIME OF ABSTRACTION"

CARL ANDRE

igned handwritten card: "PICASSO WOULD HAVE BEEN A GREAT ARTIST IN ANY AGE, BUT I WOULD HAVE TRIED TO BE AN ARTIST ONLY IN A TIME OF ABSTRACTION"

Handwritten and hand signed card sent by the artist to his sister Joan Balerna, with original stamps and postmark
The card depicts an image of a Picasso work
On the front, Carl Andre writes in black marker:
"The painting is much brighter than the card. I believe that the figure on the right is sculpture and the one on the left is painting".
On the verso, Andre writes from Dusseldorf:
"DEAR JOAN,
HOW ARE YOU & YOUR FAMILY? ALL ARE WELL I HOPE. AT PRESENT, I HAVE A LARGE SCULPTURE ON DISPLAY ON THE FLOOR IN FRONT OF THIS PAINTING. AT THE KUNSTSAMMLUNG. THEY MAY POSSIBLY BUY IT. IT IS THERE ONLY ON APPROVAL, BUT IT IS A GREAT PLEASURE TO HAVE MY WORK IN SUCH EXALTED COMPANY. PICASSO WOULD HAVE BEEN A GREAT ARTIST IN ANY AGE, BUT I WOULD HAVE TRIED TO BE AN ARTIST ONLY IN A TIME OF ABSTRACTION. LOVE @"

This work has been elegantly floated with pocket corners in a museum quality wood frame under UV plexiglass - and is double sided to reveal Andre's text on the front ahd back.
Measurements:
Framed:
13 inches vertical by 11.5 inches horizontal by 1.5 inches
Card
6 inches (vertical) x 4 inches (horizontal)
For those keeping score, the letter was written about half a decade after Ana Mendieta's death. And we should note that his signature @ foreshadows the twitter handles of decades later. He should have copyrighted it.

CARL ANDRE BIOGRAPHY
Born in 1935 in Quincy, Massachusetts, Carl Andre is most closely associated with minimalism, cultivating over the course of his career a sculptural interest in site-specific, modular works that emphasize the placement and mass of such everyday materials as bricks and wooden beams. His innovative explorations also developed new possibilities for the spectator’s role in sculpture, especially in works consisting of a grid of flat metal squares placed directly on the floor, inviting viewers to walk upon it.

Early travels in Europe and work in Army Intelligence brought Andre into contact with neolithic art, Stonehenge and elements of Japanese aesthetics, all of which exerted a formative influence upon him. His early artistic influences included Frank Stella’s Black Paintings, the work of his childhood friend, the experimental filmmaker Hollis Frampton, and the sculpture of Constantin Brancusi. Of the last of these, Andre reflected, “All I’m doing is putting Brancusi’s Endless Column on the ground instead of the sky.”2 In addition to sculpture, Andre throughout his career produced critical texts, concrete poetry, and conceptual magazines. His radical departures from accepted art practices and insistence upon a non-hierarchical use of material and space have contributed to his continued centrality in Minimalist and late Modernist sculpture.

After working as a freight brakeman and conductor on the Pennsylvania Railroad in New Jersey from 1960 to1964, Andre had his first solo exhibition at New York’s Tibor de Nagy Gallery in 1965 and participated in a number of that decade’s most important group shows, including Primary Structures: Younger American and British Sculptors, Jewish Museum, New York (1966), Documenta 4, Kassel, Germany (1968), and Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form, Kunsthalle Bern (1969), culminating in his first retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1970, when he was thirty-five years old. In 2014, the Dia Art Foundation presented the retrospective exhibition Carl Andre: Sculpture as Place, 1958-2010, which traveled to cities in the US and Europe.

In 2010, he stopped making art. On January 24, 2024, Andre died in Manhattan at the age of 88.