SPEAKING AT NEW YORK UNIVERSITY in January 1968, the artist Chryssa detailed a disposition toward creative practice that she described as the “cool mind.”1 The term served to telegraph, via contrast, her disdain for certain endeavors aimed at bridging art and life all of which, in her view, simply reproduced the disordered flux of the “human pattern.” Of particular concern was what she cast as the fundamentally regressive credo of Happenings, with their freewheeling yet ultimately pointless amalgams of things and deeds: “Let us let things happen.” The cool mind makes things happen, eschewing “
On 17 November, Phillips will offer Francis Bacon’s ‘Pope with Owls’ as the star lot of the New York Evening Sale of 20th Century & Contemporary Art. Executed circa 1958, the work .