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The hallmark of John Baldessari’s work is irony. A 1968 piece, Born to Paint, presents multiple images of the artist. The pictures are on canvas, but careful examination reveals them to be not painted but printed photographically on emulsion that has been applied to the canvas (a photograph on paper, taped to the canvas, has faded away over the years). Notes on photographic technique are scribbled in the margins, reinforcing the message that this self-portrait of a man “born to paint” has been produced by mechanical means. The piece is closely related to the artist’s famous work Wrong, 1967, which presents an image of the full negative of the Baldessari portrait, complete with a palm tree “growing” out of his head in violation of a central tenet of amateur photography.

Originally trained as a painter, Baldessari turned to the exclusive use of photographs in the mid-sixties as a way to approach the intellectual purity of the work of Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol. He says he made the transition when he compared his work to theirs and realized, “if they are right, then I’m wrong.”¹

1. Quoted in Robert Pincus, “Quality Material…’: Duchamp Disseminated in the Sixties and Seventies” in Bonnie Clearwater, ed., West Coast Duchamp (Miami Beach: Grassfield Press,1991), 90. ↩︎