Wright Auction

I Want to Know All of You features two lots with conceptual works from the first and only edition of 500 published by American Place, New York comprised of Richard Prince’s The Catcher in the Rye. Given that Jason Polan was a devoted fan of J.D. Salinger, these conflations of literature and art represent an important part of his collection. Other lots in this offering include grouped copies of actual books by J.D. Salinger, including The Catcher in the Rye, Franny and Zooey, and Nine Stories.

In 2011, artist Richard Prince sparked debate and elicited general bemusement with an audacious act of literary appropriation, replacing J.D. Salinger’s name with his own in the timeless, coming-of-age novel, The Catcher in the Rye, 1951. Writing in a subsequent review for the Poetry Foundation’s blog, poet Kenneth Goldsmith explained: “The premise of the book was achingly simple: a reproduction of the first edition of The Catcher In The Rye, identical in every way except the author’s name was swapped from J.D. Salinger to Richard Prince. The production value of the book was astonishingly high, a perfect facsimile of the original, right down to the thick, creamy paper stock and classic typeface.”

Since the late 1970s, Prince has challenged and reshaped ideas of authorship and ownership by drawing on mass media, advertising, and entertainment. His work reflects a deep understanding of representation’s intricate dynamics, and he has crafted a distinctive style that echoes others while remaining uniquely his own. From exploring various subcultures to dissecting mainstream humor and American icons like cowboys, Prince’s work delves into societal issues and pop cultural allure, including his controversial, pulp-inspired Nurse paintings. Initially celebrated for his radicalism, Prince has faced recent criticism for what some deem too commercially driven projects, in certain cases flirting with sexism, such as his large-format, artistic recreations of Instagram posts of female models and celebrities, like Pamela Anderson, showing Prince’s own performative, playful comments underneath.

The fact that Jason Polan remained a fervent admirer of J.D. Salinger in adulthood attests to his refusal to cast off a text that many dismiss as part of the adolescent canon. Polan’s sincerity as a reader and curiosity as a collector allowed him to be fascinated with Prince’s blatant artistic co-opting of Salinger’s cultural cachet. As opposed to feeling threatened, Polan was perhaps inspired as he likewise incorporated many pre-established characters, symbols, and themes into his own compositions.

As someone who circulated freely through the urban environment of New York City, Jason Polan’s work as an artist was intimately connected to experiencing all that the metropolis had to offer—and fondly, sometimes obsessively, cataloging its ceaseless variety. Polan moved to New York in 2005 and passed away at the start of 2020. Because his time there spanned the post-9/11 to pre-COVID era, he absorbed the city during the slow reconstruction of lower Manhattan, amid the shock of the Great Recession of 2008, and prior to the dramatic shutdown brought on by the global pandemic.

Both ambition and optimism are inherent in Polan’s embrace of New York's sprawling physical terrain and masses of people, who are without fail rendered as distinct individuals by Polan’s hand. Above all, his artistic project suggests freedom of movement and proximity to others, along with the importance of noticing and carefully documenting, while evoking in retrospect our shared loss of spatial innocence.

“[Jason] died before the pandemic,” Sadie Stein noted in her opinion piece for The New York Times in early 2021, “when most of us still had yet to learn that those occasional breaks from urban anonymity, those small moments of connection—wordless, spoken, odd, quotidian—are a tremendous luxury.”

Apart from regularly sharing a table with friend and artist Stefan Marx at Printed Matter’s annual New York Art Book Fair in recent years, Polan did not exhibit widely or have his work shown by major galleries. Among the exceptions were his first-ever solo show, Living and Working, at Chelsea's Nicholas Robinson Gallery in 2011 and an exhibition featuring some of his works at the Parisian retail boutique Colette in 2013. Nevertheless, Polan’s prolific nature and egalitarian approach made him both a well-known and beloved artist, someone who imbued rare warmth and humanity into his art and everyday interactions, which were ultimately inextricable from each other.