Mary Heilmann

Is the subject of cover stories in both Art in America and Artforum this month, and I received both magazines on the same day. Many of the same images are used in her stories in both magazines -- in fact, the cover image from Art in America is reproduced at almost the same size in Artforum. I almost never read stories straight through in these magazines, even stories about painters, so what's interesting for me at the moment is wondering whether the two stories might not even be identical -- I do remember the phrase "painter's painter," actually the phrase "painter's painter" itself already enclosed in double quotation marks, being found in both stories. But even if the two stories were the same word for word, I'd probably take them differently because of their subtly different contexts: the Art in America story being one that would present a less-known artist to the general "art public," whereas the Artforum story (which does have an additional article of objets "curated" by Heilmann to distinguish it) presents the painter as a source of both painting practice and conceptual theory. I could read the first story as an introduction to Heilmann's work, and then read the second one as an inculcation into her intentions, and disregard the fact that the words were the same in each story...