Richard Pettibone, an American artist known for his miniature paintings of modern and contemporary art, has died at the age of 86. His practice blurred the lines between originality and reproduction, and he was considered one of the first pioneers of appropriation art. From the 1960s onward, Pettibone’s use of other artists’ material as a medium influenced countless A-list artists, including Richard Prince and Gavin Turk.
Born in 1938 in Los Angeles, Pettibone emerged during the 1960s as a fierce critical figure of the West Coast art scene. Delighted by both Campbell’s Soup Cans by Andy Warhol and Boîte-en-valise by Marcel Duchamp, Pettibone’s fascination with the act of reproduction fell in a direction whereby he would hand-paint minute versions of the works of artists he admired. He made copies of works by Jasper Johns, Frank Stella, and Roy Lichtenstein, among others; he often reduced them to the size at which they had appeared in such magazines as Artforum.
“I wished I had stuck with the idea of just painting the same painting like the soup can and never painting another painting. When someone wanted one, you would do another one. Does anybody do that now?” Andy Warhol, 1981
Pettibone’s copies are much more than copies: he signs them, minimises and changes the works, but with due respect for the authors. He worked precisely and could spend hours in his New York studio creating what he called “handmade readymade.” This was his way of connecting to the art he loved while questioning the notions of originality and authorship.
Though Pettibone was associated with appropriation art, his work didn’t receive the critical edge that some of his contemporaries, including Sherrie Levine received. He approached the artist with admiration and aesthetic appreciation rather than critique. He never undermined the myth of the artist’s originality and paid homage throughout his career.
Pettibone continued to revisit subjects across art history, from European modernists like Picasso to American postwar artists. In the 1970s, he expanded his repertoire into Photorealist works. In the 1980s and 1990s, he moved on to even newer turf, appropriating visual art and works of literature, such as Ezra Pound’s poetry. His sources were heterogeneous, but he treated each the same, often inserting the original artist’s name in his title.
For Pettibone, the copy was not just a double act but an intimate engagement with the art. He liked the laborious replication process; after it was finished, he was happy with the work, and he enjoyed his time in the studio just being close to the paintings. His works allowed him to create a private museum full of the art he admired. Pettibone was a craftsman in a period when conceptualism increasingly dominated. He refused to think of art as an illustration of an idea and insisted on the beauty of the material object.
Pettibone loved Duchamp, who was simultaneously an intellectual deity and a maker of well crafted objects. This speaks volumes about Pettibone and his most ardent idealism: his belief in the power of aesthetics. Pettibone remained aloof from the contemporary scene, isolating himself in his upstate New York studio. He never cultivated the artist’s public persona and let the work speak for itself.
It wasn’t until the new millennium that he gained recognition and became the subject of a major museum retrospective in 2005-2006 at the ICA, Philadelphia, which travelled to the Tang Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College and Laguna Art Museum in Laguna Beach, California. that presented his massive oeuvre. His works celebrated the intellectual rigours of appropriation combined with the hands-on craftsmanship of a master artist that continued to challenge the viewer’s perceptions about art, originality, and reproduction.
Richard Pettibone 1938- 2024