When the painter and sculptor Richard Pettibone was in art school in Los Angeles in the early 1960s, he was taught that there were two things he should never do.
One, he said, was “copy other people’s work.” The other was “repeat myself.”
He soon changed his mind about both and became a prankish virtuoso of appropriation art, with a twist: He created miniature copies of works by modern and contemporary masters, usually no bigger than baseball cards or pictures of the paintings he clipped from Artforum and other publications.
“He had a commitment to working on a small scale, which didn’t change over the years,” said his wife, Nancy (Becker) Pettibone, a toy designer. “The scale thing came quite naturally to him. He was a miniature railroader, so he was used to thinking in teeny-tiny land.”
He did not use a magnifying glass to study the originals as he painted, she said. “He had extraordinary eyesight.”
Mr. Pettibone’s miniatures offered a skewed way of looking at the originals that he borrowed (and credited), including Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup cans, flowers, Brillo boxes and Marilyn Monroe silk-screen paintings; Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase”; Roy Lichtenstein’s “Woman With a Flowered Hat”; Frank Stella’s striped paintings; and Jasper Johns’s “Three Flags.”
“What happens to visual experience when previously large, famous paintings are reduced to the size of the viewer’s face, while, at their best, looking mind-bogglingly like the real thing?” Roberta Smith of The New York Times asked in her review of a Pettibone retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia in 2005.
Her answer: “A new transformative, maybe original sense of intimacy and ownership that is unusually empowering. It is rather amazing to see art cut down to size with its integrity intact.”
In his assessment of the same show, Edward J. Sozanski of The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote that Mr. Pettibone redefined “the essence of creativity, and especially, originality.”
Mr. Pettibone died on Aug. 19 in Cobleskill, N.Y., about 45 miles west of Albany. He was 86.
Ms. Pettibone said the cause of his death, at a hospital where he was undergoing physical therapy after hip replacement surgery, was complications of a fall at his home in Charlotteville, N.Y., as he was preparing for bed.
Richard Herbert Pettibone was born on Jan. 5, 1938, in Alhambra, Calif., near Los Angeles, to Walter and Helen Pettibone. One of Richard’s earliest appropriations, when he was 14, was a drawing of a Wonder Bread wrapper that his teacher accused him of tracing.
He received an associate degree from Pasadena City College in 1959, then earned a master of fine arts in painting from the Otis Institute of Art (now the Otis College of Art and Design) in Los Angeles in 1962. That year, he saw the groundbreaking exhibition of Warhol’s paintings of 32 soup cans at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles.
“Many, many of the other artists who saw it really hated it,” Mr. Pettibone told Art in America magazine in 2011. “They were pounding the tables with anger, screaming, ‘This is not art!’ I told them, ‘This may be the worst art you’ve ever seen, but it’s art. It’s not sports!’”
Warhol’s appropriation of the soup can — and Lichtenstein’s use of existing comic-book imagery — inspired Mr. Pettibone’s career.
“He said, ‘I was told in school to be original, but you guys aren’t inventing anything,’” said Barbara Bertozzi Castelli, who runs the Castelli gallery in Manhattan, which her husband, Leo Castelli, founded in 1957, and which represents Mr. Pettibone. “He said, ‘I’m going to copy you.’”
And for most of the next 60 years, he did. Sometimes he combined a few reproductions into an assemblage (like one of a Warhol, a Stella and a Lichtenstein); sometimes he tweaked the originals a little bit (like changing the colors of Warhol’s soup cans); sometimes he had fun at his masters’ expense.
In one 8 ½-by-6 ⅜-inch painting, he used acrylic, oil and a rubber stamp to create the image of a locomotive, a Warholian can of pepper pot soup and the words “Train Destroys Valuable Art Object.”
Mr. Pettibone also crafted miniature sculptures, reproducing works like Constantin Brancusi’s “Endless Column” and “Bird in Space” and Duchamp’s “Bicycle Wheel.”
Mr. Pettibone’s marriage to Shirley Allen ended in divorce. In addition to his wife, he is survived by a daughter from his first marriage, Claire Pettibone, a fashion designer; a stepson, Peter Becker; and two granddaughters.
Near the end of his life, Mr. Pettibone lost the sight in his right eye and could no longer paint miniature reproductions. His final works were three 5-by-7-inch canvases onto which he rubber-stamped dialogue in red and black ink from the film “Barbie.”
“He fell in love with the movie,” Ms. Pettibone, his wife, said. “He’d sit there with a pad and pencil and write down the dialogue he liked. Interspersed through the painting, it says, ‘Hi Barbie, Hi Barbie.’”
“In observing him for 50 years,” she said, “I never though it would end up with ‘Barbie.’
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