Heart (Do I have to give up me to be loved by you)

When at her most arresting, Barbara Kruger expresses anger and violence atop the very surface of her canvas. Startlingly transfixing the gaze and the mind, Heart (Do I have to give up me to be loved by you?) illustrates the biting commentary characteristic of Kruger’s celebrated oeuvre. Transposed upon the grotesquely visual silkscreen of a split-open human heart, her eye for the potent, provocative image is overtly present on the dramatically scaled canvas (measuring almost 3 x 3 meters). Bisecting this ventricular landscape with a thin line of white text, the word “me” is situated at the very heart of Heart, constituting “a muffled yet whining plaint, a moan of interpersonal neurosis.” Reflecting on Kruger’s show at Mary Boone Gallery in 1989 (in which the present work was included) David Rimanelli noted: (‘Barbara Kruger’, article in Mary Boone Gallery, New York, 1989):

Barbara Kruger has always insisted on the presence of the body in her work, not merely as a representational element but as a critical wedge in the edifice of power. Refusing the putatively transcendental subjects and objects of traditional art and their often hidebound histories, she cuts directly to the ravages of sexual politics and patriarchal authority. Nameless linguistic shifters —the persistent “you’s” and “we’s” of her most characteristic work— nonetheless point directly to arenas of historical and material conflict. The accusatory we is feminine; the accused you, masculine.

Two years prior to this show, Kruger became the first female artist to be represented by Mary Boone’s eponymous gallery; shortly thereafter, the large-scale appropriated images she would showcase poignantly reflected the deliberate subversion of her practice. Executed in 1988, Heart (Do I have to give up me to be loved by you?) is a potent example of Kruger’s reliance on the pronominal agon. Violently destabilizing the anatomical and sentimental significance of the heart, Kruger constructs a fictional scenario which forces us to consider what becomes of hearts sacrificed to love. As shrinking attention spans collide with the voyeurism and narcissism that define contemporary life, Kruger’s directive pictures and words invite us to reconsider how we relate to one another.

Firestorm Foundation acquired Heart (Do I have to give up me to be loved by you?) from the Fisher Landau Center for Art, a private foundation located in Long Island City, Queens, New York City, United States. The center, established in 1991, offered regular exhibitions of contemporary art, until it closed to the public in November 2017. The 25,000-square-foot (2,300 m2), three-story facility is devoted to the exhibition and study of the contemporary art collection of Emily Fisher Landau (1920 – 2023). The core of the 1,500-work collection is art from 1960 to the 2000s, and it contained key works by artists who had shaped the most significant art of the prior 50 years, including Agnes Martin (1912 - 2004), Richard Artschwager (1923 - 2013), Andy Warhol (1928 – 1987), Cy Twombly (1928 - 2011), Jasper Johns (born 1930), Ed Ruscha (born 1937), Barbara Kruger (born 1945), Jenny Holzer (born 1950), Donald Baechler (1956 - 2022), Donald Judd (1928 - 1994) and Robert Rauschenberg (1925 - 2008).

Collecting art had always been an interest of Landau’s who, despite not having any formal art historical background, demonstrated discerning taste as well as doggedly independent approach to acquisition. Her first big art purchase came in 1968, when she bought a three-foot-tall Alexander Calder (1898 – 1976) mobile which, Landau later recalled, she brought back to her apartment on a crosstown bus and “carried up [...] like a Christmas tree”. This passion for Modernism led her to the work of Josef Albers (1888 – 1976): “Albers was my beginning point as a collector”, she said in a Whitney catalogue interview, “I’ve never collected something because it was fashionable. It was always about what I instinctively liked.”

Working closely with Pace Gallery founder Arne Glimcher, Landau, between 1969 and 1976, amassed a trove of art by modern art legends including Henri Matisse (1869 – 1954), Piet Mondrian (1872 – 1944), Paul Klee (1879 – 1940) and Mark Rothko (1903 – 1970). After taking a hiatus from collecting, Landau met theater designer Bill Katz, whom she commissioned to redecorate her apartment on Park Avenue in 1980. Katz went on to become her art consultant, advising her to look beyond the more historically inclined collection she had built. With an eye on more contemporary fare, Landau became a regular at artists’ studios in the 1980s and 90s.

A longtime trustee of the Whitney Museum of Art in New York, USA (which named the 4th floor of its Madison Avenue building in her honour in 1994, the year she established an exhibition endowment for the museum), she pledged almost 400 pieces, valued at nearly $75m, to the institution in 2010. She also sat on committees at the Museum of Modern Art, New York and on the boards of the SITE Sante Fe museum and the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in New Mexico. The French government named her a chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters as recognition of her arts patronage.

When Emily Fisher Landau passed away, New York dealer Barbara Gladstone told the Times: “She typifies pre-2000 collectors who made an avocation out of refining their collections. She was not just buying because it would go up in value. That’s a wonderfully old-fashioned tradition”.

Provenance

Mary Boone Gallery, New York, USA, Barbara Kruger New York, January 1989.

Private collection (acquired from the above in January 1989).

Sotheby’s, New York, USA, The Emily Fischer Landau Collection: An Era Defined – Day Auction, 9 November 2023, lot 143.

Firestorm Foundation.

Exhibitions

Mary Boone Gallery, New York, USA, Barbara Kruger New York, January 1989.

Duke University Museum of Art, Durham, North Carolina, USA, The Art of Barbara Kruger, January – March 1990.

Fisher Landau Center for Art, New York, USA, Material Matters, May 1992 – March 1993.

Nassau County Museum of Art, Roslyn Harbor, USA, Image Makers, October 1993 – January 1994.

Fisher Landau Center for Art, New York, USA, Articulations: Forms of Language in Contemporary Art, Whitney Museum I.S.P. Program, May – June 1995.

Fisher Landau Center for Art, New York, USA, Barbara Ess, Barbara Kruger, Neil Jenney: Recent Acquisitions, December 1995 – October 1996.

The Museum of Contemporary Art, The Geffen Contemporary, Los Angeles, USA & Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA, Barbara Kruger, October 1999 – October 2000.

Mary Boone Gallery, New York, USA, Barbara Kruger: Back to the Future, October 2004 – January 2005.

Fisher Landau Center for Art, New York, USA, Five Decades of Passion Part Two: The Founding of the Center, 1989 – 1991, November 2009 – April 2010.

Fisher Landau Center for Art, New York, USA, Altered Appearances, July 2015 – January 2016.

The Art Institute of Chicago, USA, BARBARA KRUGER: THINKING OF YOU, I MEAN ME, I MEAN YOU, September 2021 – January 2022.

Literature

Kate Linker, Love for Sale, 1990, p. 87 and p. 89, illustrated in colour.

Barbara Kruger, exhibition catalogue, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, USA, 1999, p. 179.

Mark Sanders, ‘Barbara Kruger. Use only as directed…’, article in AnOther Magazine, Spring/Summer 2004.

Legacy: The Emily Fisher Landau Collection, exhibition catalogue, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA; Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, USA; Ashville Art Museum, North Carolina, USA; Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, USA; Grand Rapids Art Museum, Michigan, USA and San Jose Museum of Art, California, USA, February 2011 – September 2014, pl. 4, p. 24, illustrated in colour (in installation view). 

Copyright Firestorm Foundation