Richard Pettibone, a leading figure of appropriation art, passed away at 86 on August 19th after a fall. Castelli Gallery in New York, which has represented Pettibone since 1969, confirmed his death.
Born in 1938 in Alhambra, California, Pettibone emerged as a critical voice in the West Coast art scene in the 1960s. There, he attended the Otis Art Institute (now the Otis College of Art and Design), where he earned his MFA in 1962.
In 1965, Pettibone presented his first major exhibition at Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles—the same gallery where, in 1962, Andy Warhol presented a seminal exhibition of Campbell’s soup can paintings. Pettibone admired these works so much that he recreated them, stamping his name on the nearly identical paintings in one of his first acts of appropriation. Over the years, Pettibone replicated works by Roy Lichtenstein and Frank Stella on small “dollhouse” canvases and stretchers.
Many of Pettibone’s replications differed in scale from the originals. For instance, he recreated some of Warhol’s Brillo boxes and Marcel Duchamp’s readymades in miniature form. He often changed and manipulated the original works slightly. Pettibone’s sources of inspiration were wide-ranging and included various figures and movements across history, from Ezra Pound’s poetry to Photorealism. In the 1990s, Pettibone imitated several of Pound’s book covers for a series. His work was driven by a lifelong interest in notions of authorship and the process of replication.
In 2005, Philadelphia’s Institute of Contemporary Art mounted the first major institutional retrospective for Pettibone, organized by the Tang Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College in collaboration with California’s Laguna Art Museum. Pettibone’s work is featured in collections such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, as well as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.
