The Ghostly Door Painting That Set Glenn Ligon's Auction Record

Glenn Ligon's Untitled (I Was Somebody) (1990) sold for $3.97m at Sotheby's in New York on November 11, 2014. The oilstick, graphite and gesso on panel work had been traded once in the past. Signed, titled and dated 1990 on the reverse, it was executed in 1990 and 2003. It had not been traded before.

Ligon's text work, painted on a door panel, is a complex of raised letters that emerges from the painting's ghostly surface. For the text the artist selected passages by writers who negotiated being black in America, including James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, to make an eloquent statement about racial visibility.

Ligon began using readymade wooden door panels as a painterly support in 1990. He first realized their potiential while moving a discarded door out of his way in his lower Manhattan studio. Three were featured in the 1991 Whitney Biennial, impressing the critics and helping to establish the artist's reputation.

He first primed the surface of a door with gesso mixed with marble dust. Ligon then pressed an oilstick through a stenciled template, letter by letter and line by line, to produce a braille-like relief.

Another early door painting, Black Like Me No. 2 (1992), was acquired by the Hirshhorn Museum the year it was created. It hung in the White House when Barack Obama was the US President, on extended loan from the Smithsonian from 2009-13.

His record-breaking work featured in “Glenn Ligon: AMERICA”, the artist's mid-career retrospective, which opened at the Whitney in 2011 and then traveled to LACMA and the Fort Worth Museum of Modern Art.

The sale beat the artist’s previous auction record by $1.34m, a 51% rise in only six months. His previous record was set by Untitled #1 (Second Version) (1990), which sold for $2.63m at Christie's on May 12, 2014.

A Brief History of Glenn Ligon at Auction