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Descriptif du lot
Warm Broad Glow II (2011) is one of the American artist Glenn Ligon’s most iconic works. Spanning more than six metres across, it spells out the words ‘negro sunshine’ in large neon lights. The neon tubing has been painted black on the front and mounted on a white structure, leaving the dark letters haloed by the light glowing from their reverse. Ligon, whose art deals deftly with questions of identity, appropriation and representation, took ‘negro sunshine’ from a description of a Black character in Gertrude Stein’s 1909 novella Three Lives. ‘Rose laughed when she was happy, but she had not the wide, abandoned laughter that makes the warm broad glow of negro sunshine’, wrote Stein. ‘Rose was never joyous with the earthborn boundless joy of negroes.’ Ligon reclaims the phrase as a statement of resistance. Removed from Stein’s stereotyped context, he says, ‘it has a totally different kind of connotation and meaning and resonance. Black joy exists, now and historically, despite the history of this country. There is such a thing as “negro sunshine,” “negro joy,” “Black joy.” And that feels very of-the-moment, even though that text is 100 years old’ (‘Glenn Ligon on “Warm Broad Glow II”, 2011’, Glenstone Museum, video online).
The idea began with a visit to a lighting fabricator, who, when Ligon asked if he made black neon, showed the artist a white tube with the front painted black. Stein’s ‘negro sunshine’—which had struck him for its literary juxtaposition of darkness and light—flashed to his mind. Ligon created his first wall-mounted neon work, Warm Broad Glow, in 2005. Warm Broad Glow II was conceived in 2011, on the occasion of his mid-career touring retrospective Glenn Ligon: AMERICA, which opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York that year. It is larger in scale, and its white backing means that it can be installed hanging in space. One work from the edition was shown in the Whitney’s front window onto Madison Avenue, and remains in the museum’s collection. Others are held in The Broad, Los Angeles and the Glenstone Museum, Potomac. The present work has itself been exhibited in the major solo show Glenn Ligon: Post-Noir at the Carré d’Art in Nîmes (2022), and in Gertrude Stein and Pablo Picasso at the Musée du Luxembourg, Paris (2024).
Ligon first came to prominence for his black-and-white text paintings, which he began making in 1990. They restage the words of celebrated African-American authors such as James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston and Ralph Ellison, jokes performed by the comedian Richard Pryor, and quotes from other writers including Jean Genet and Mary Shelley. In one series, ongoing since 1996, Ligon has ruminated extensively on Baldwin’s essay ‘Stranger in the Village’ (1953), which tells of the author’s experiences as an outsider in Switzerland, as well as his feelings of alienation as a Black man in the United States. Beautiful and formally subtle, Ligon’s paintings—many of them stencilled in glittering coal-dust, with letters piled up or disintegrating into darkness—play masterfully between abstraction and figuration, legibility and obscurity, and material physicality versus the disembodied text.
The neon works, Ligon explained in 2013, exist in dialogue with the more abstracted approach to language seen in his painterly practice. ‘The neons I make—which are all text-based—do not want to be abstract, even as I play with the way the words appear in order to move them towards abstraction. The simplicity of the neons allows me to be clear, but in a complicated way’ (G. Ligon quoted in A. Maerkle, ‘Glenn Ligon Pt. I: Ecriture/Erasure/Ecstasis’, ART iT, 12 December 2013, online). This conceptual clarity is exemplified in Warm Broad Glow II, which enfolds pain, joy and paradox into its elegant dark-light form.
The font Ligon used in Warm Broad Glow II is known as ‘American Typewriter.’ The very letterforms invoke a national identity that is entangled with the subjugation and negative portrayal of Black humanity. At the same time, Ligon sees his reclamation of Stein’s text—a rewriting of the story—as a distinctly American act. ‘Gertrude Stein wrote about Black people, but she didn’t write with them in mind as an audience’, he reflects. ‘We’re always rereading, rethinking things that weren’t meant for us … And making something out of it. That’s very American. That is kind of the American way. Particularly as an artist of colour, particularly as an Afro-American in this country, what Black people have always done is taken what’s there and turned it. So, taking this little fragment of Stein, “negro sunshine”, out of the context of that novel, was a kind of turning. Taking something and making it joyous’ (‘Glenn Ligon on “Warm Broad Glow II”, 2011’, Glenstone Museum, video online).
The idea began with a visit to a lighting fabricator, who, when Ligon asked if he made black neon, showed the artist a white tube with the front painted black. Stein’s ‘negro sunshine’—which had struck him for its literary juxtaposition of darkness and light—flashed to his mind. Ligon created his first wall-mounted neon work, Warm Broad Glow, in 2005. Warm Broad Glow II was conceived in 2011, on the occasion of his mid-career touring retrospective Glenn Ligon: AMERICA, which opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York that year. It is larger in scale, and its white backing means that it can be installed hanging in space. One work from the edition was shown in the Whitney’s front window onto Madison Avenue, and remains in the museum’s collection. Others are held in The Broad, Los Angeles and the Glenstone Museum, Potomac. The present work has itself been exhibited in the major solo show Glenn Ligon: Post-Noir at the Carré d’Art in Nîmes (2022), and in Gertrude Stein and Pablo Picasso at the Musée du Luxembourg, Paris (2024).
Ligon first came to prominence for his black-and-white text paintings, which he began making in 1990. They restage the words of celebrated African-American authors such as James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston and Ralph Ellison, jokes performed by the comedian Richard Pryor, and quotes from other writers including Jean Genet and Mary Shelley. In one series, ongoing since 1996, Ligon has ruminated extensively on Baldwin’s essay ‘Stranger in the Village’ (1953), which tells of the author’s experiences as an outsider in Switzerland, as well as his feelings of alienation as a Black man in the United States. Beautiful and formally subtle, Ligon’s paintings—many of them stencilled in glittering coal-dust, with letters piled up or disintegrating into darkness—play masterfully between abstraction and figuration, legibility and obscurity, and material physicality versus the disembodied text.
The neon works, Ligon explained in 2013, exist in dialogue with the more abstracted approach to language seen in his painterly practice. ‘The neons I make—which are all text-based—do not want to be abstract, even as I play with the way the words appear in order to move them towards abstraction. The simplicity of the neons allows me to be clear, but in a complicated way’ (G. Ligon quoted in A. Maerkle, ‘Glenn Ligon Pt. I: Ecriture/Erasure/Ecstasis’, ART iT, 12 December 2013, online). This conceptual clarity is exemplified in Warm Broad Glow II, which enfolds pain, joy and paradox into its elegant dark-light form.
The font Ligon used in Warm Broad Glow II is known as ‘American Typewriter.’ The very letterforms invoke a national identity that is entangled with the subjugation and negative portrayal of Black humanity. At the same time, Ligon sees his reclamation of Stein’s text—a rewriting of the story—as a distinctly American act. ‘Gertrude Stein wrote about Black people, but she didn’t write with them in mind as an audience’, he reflects. ‘We’re always rereading, rethinking things that weren’t meant for us … And making something out of it. That’s very American. That is kind of the American way. Particularly as an artist of colour, particularly as an Afro-American in this country, what Black people have always done is taken what’s there and turned it. So, taking this little fragment of Stein, “negro sunshine”, out of the context of that novel, was a kind of turning. Taking something and making it joyous’ (‘Glenn Ligon on “Warm Broad Glow II”, 2011’, Glenstone Museum, video online).