Publications

Richard Pettibone’s appropriations are best described by his interpretation of Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, in his words “a translation of the eleventh book of the Odyssey by Homer, so he has already appropriated and he is always quoting Confucius, Dante, Ovid, Sappho, Sophocles, all the great writers. He just steals them, or rather he doesn’t steal them, he quotes them and says this is my work, my art.”

Pettibone is the quintessential craftsman. His work pioneered a devotion to the realistic, meticulous strictness of photo-reproduction while also embracing observable differences in variation due to the malleable mediums he used. His appropriations with silkscreens often carried a degenerated quality as a result of photo-copying the original silk-screen painting of a photograph. Pettibone’s signature trademark is the small scale of is his miniature reproduction paintings, which were inspired by admiration for Jasper Johns’ primary color palette, Marcel Duchamp’s ‘La-boîte-en-valise’ (Box in a Suitcase) stylistic format, and Andy Warhol’s focus on themes of repetition.

If Sturtevant is the mother of appropriation art, then Pettibone would be the movement’s father, as the two ushered in the second wave of pop art. What sets Pettibone’s repetition apart from Sturtevant’s was the use of art magazine images as his original source to create the deliberately minimized scale of individual collections or linking artists together as in the case of Frank Stella, “Yazd II,” 1968 (two times); and Roy Lichtenstein, “Trigger Finger,” 1963, 1969.