OLD NEWS

PRELUDE 1 ORANGE
<https://tinyurl.com/4d5cek9u> _ON&ON / Jeff Weiss

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PIONEERING SCULPTOR MELVIN EDWARDS HAS DIED AGED 88
<https://tinyurl.com/mpmnahdd>
Melvin Edwards, whose distinctive sculptures in welded steel, barbed wire, chain and machine parts masterfully engaged with the history of abstraction and modern sculpture, has passed away at the age of 88. He died peacefully at his home in Baltimore on 30 March 2026. Edwards’s work is born out of the social and political turmoil of the civil rights movement in the United States with themes of race, the African diaspora and protest permeating throughout his practice.
Born in Houston, Texas, in 1937, Edwards grew up during a time of racial segregation. He developed an early affinity for metalwork, which he pursued through studies at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Although his formal training was in painting, he learned to weld in 1959. His breakthrough came in 1965, the year he graduated, with a solo exhibition at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art inspired by jazz music.
<https://tinyurl.com/3u5dcxm7>
Edwards is predominantly known for his series ‘Lynch Fragments’ (1963–2026), a collection of small, wall-mounted relief sculptures created from found steel objects – chains, hammers, railroad spikes and padlocks – arranged in dense, compact compositions. The works span three distinct periods of the artist’s life. In the 1960s, they documented Edwards’s response to racial violence in the United States. In the 1970s, his sculptures became acts of protest against the Vietnam War. From 1978 onward, his practice evolved into a means of honouring individuals, reflecting on past, and deepening his engagement with African culture and artifacts. In a 2017 interview, Edwards said: ‘I’ve always thought that art should ultimately be personal. […] It may be validating for other people to find that your work reminds them of something else, but it’s much more important for me to keep myself alive creatively, to have the point of departure for whatever I develop be personal.’
<https://tinyurl.com/9cvj8npw>
A key figure in African American avant-garde art, Edwards was the first Black sculptor to have a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1970. His influence extended beyond the U.S., and his lifelong engagement with Africa deeply shaped his practice. His travels to Ghana, Nigeria, Togo and Benin informed his understanding of sculpture as a form of cultural continuity, leading him to create public works that fused African traditions with contemporary abstraction​.
<https://tinyurl.com/y2d9vt93>
Edwards was not only a sculptor but also an educator. After moving to New York in 1967, he taught at Orange County Community College (1967–69), then at the University of Connecticut (1970–72), and finally at Rutgers University, where he stayed for over three decades before retiring from teaching in 2002. He played a crucial role in mentoring generations of artists, fostering a community of creative resistance against the institutional marginalization of Black artists​.
<https://tinyurl.com/ykp2r5rp>
Despite the weight of his themes, Edwards’s work also exuded joy, humour and experimentation. His kinetic sculptures such as Good Friends in Chicago (1972), Avenue B (Rocker) (1975) and Memories of Coco (1980) from his ‘Rocker’ series, which swayed gently when nudged, exemplified his interest in movement and balance. The artist’s major 2021 survey, presented by the Public Art Fund at New York’s City Hall Park, features large-scale outdoor works, such as Song of the Broken Chains (2020), reaffirming his belief in sculpture as a communal and political act​.
<https://tinyurl.com/4d9cyvsu>
In 2024 the artist enjoyed international recognition with his first comprehensive institutional solo exhibition in Europe, . : ‘Edwards’s emotionally complex practice ensures that this exhibition reverberates far beyond the gallery walls, leaving audiences to confront the weight of history and the ongoing struggle for justice.’ The show went on to tour
<https://tinyurl.com/2t9vv386>
Edwards’s works are featured in many prominent collections internationally
He survived by his wife, Diala Touré, and his three daughters and stepson.
<https://tinyurl.com/3mzfp4pb> _Frieze/ ARTnews

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CONVERSATION
<https://tinyurl.com/ybn9w8n2> _DavidShrigley

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RARE LEONORA CARRINGTON SKETCHES OF HER INNER TURMOIL RESURFACE
<https://tinyurl.com/3nhskzrs>
Rarely seen sketches created by the celebrated Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington during her stay at a psychiatric hospital have gone on display in London.
While being treated for a serious mental breakdown in 1940, Carrington passed her days by filling sketchbooks with art that reimagined the hospital as an “underworld” inhabited by strange, hybrid beasts. These drawings would eventually inspire her 1940 painting Down Below.
Long scattered across private collections, works and letters from this period have been reunited for an exhibition at the Freud Museum, the one-time London home of Sigmund Freud, legendary founder of psychoanalysis.
Born in northern England in 1917, Carrington broke free from the constraints of her privileged upbringing by moving to Paris in 1938 to be with her lover Max Ernst. It would not be long, however, before war broke out across Europe, forcing Ernst to flee to the U.S. and leaving a heartbroken Carrington to find refuge in Spain. There, her mental state deteriorated rapidly and, after experiencing psychosis, she was admitted into an sanatorium in Santander where she underwent brutal Cardiazol shock therapy.
<https://tinyurl.com/2fax5f82>
Luis Morales, the doctor who administered this treatment, also encouraged Carrington to draw obsessively during her stay. Several works of art, as well as a memoir published in 1972, reflect on this experience of being trapped “down below.” As is typical of her oeuvre, Carrington used symbolism from the occult, mythology, and tarot to probe the depths of her psyche and process a time that she later described as “very much like having been dead.”
The sketchbooks contain two preparatory drawings for Down Below, revealing how she first conceived some of the hybrid human-animal beasts that would populate the painting. Horses also appear frequently across the pages, “in shifting and unstable forms,”
Soon after being discharged from the sanatorium, Carrington spent a brief stint in New York before moving to Mexico, where she lived most of her adult life. While in the U.S., the artist gave her Santander sketchbooks to the collector Julien Levy, who looked after them for 60 years. . They were eventually auctioned in 2004 and dispersed across several private collections.
<https://tinyurl.com/mr2xj5n5> _artnet

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SPHERES OF INFLUENCE: THE BAUHAUS’S RADICAL FEMALE PHOTOGRAPHERS – IN PICTURES
<https://tinyurl.com/5cmh9uey> _GuardianUK

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O – ORIENTALISM
<https://tinyurl.com/32d869h6>
In his book Orientalism (1978), Edward Said defined the titular term as an institutionalized program of assumed Western superiority over the East. He describes the roots of these assumptions as stemming from three main areas: European colonization; the East as the ultimate source of Western civilization and language; and problematic representations of the East in Western imagination.
The book’s powerful choice of cover art was Jean-Léon Gérôme’s The Snake Charmer (1879), which forever linked the French artist’s legacy to exoticized representations of the Orient and subjected him to rigorous postcolonial critique. Gérôme was prominently criticized for his mass-produced images, notably by the French writer Émile Zola. But stateside, Gérôme was well received by several notable American art patrons, including Sterling and Francine Clark, the founders of the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts. His work was also acquired by the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, among others. Gérôme’s racialized images soon became something of a blueprint for mid-20th to early 21st-century films, news, games, memes, and other forms of mass media. In 2019, Gérôme’s Slave Market (1866) was used by the German far-right party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) for anti-immigrant and Islamophobic posters. The painting features an imaginary slave market and centers on a nude, pale-skinned enslaved woman undergoing an assessment by a group of men, one of whom is crudely examining her teeth with his finger. Atop this image, AfD ran the slogan: “So that Europe Won’t Become Eurabia!” Slave Market, like The Snake Charmer, is one of the most recognizable and racist examples of the imaginary East.
“Part of the strategy of an Orientalist painter like Gérôme,” Linda Nochlin wrote in a 1983 essay for this magazine, “is to make his viewers forget that there was any bringing into being at all, to convince them that works like these were simply reflections, scientific in their exactitude, of a preexisting Oriental reality.” Elsewhere, Griselda Pollock adds that “if slavery and colonialism are the historical conditions for Orientalist representation, they were ideologically displaced by the mythic structures of representational Orientalism.” Which means that, in order to dismantle the field of Orientalism for the 21st century, one must disrupt the supremacist optical system atop of which it sits. —Sara Raza _ArtInAmerica

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WHILE WAYNE THIEBAUD IS BEST KNOWN FOR HIS
bright, colorful California Pop paintings of cakes, pies & the like,
I'm curious what was going on in his life in 1972
that prompted him to make so many images of knives.
They convey a taut, psychological intensity, like "Knife," 1972
<https://tinyurl.com/3k3zwh7x>
Wayne Thiebaud, "Knife, Cheese, Apple," 1972
<https://tinyurl.com/hmytpkne>
Wayne Thiebaud, "Eclair," 1972
<https://tinyurl.com/26u2fmjn> _MichaelLobel

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GETTY GETS A DAZZLING DE HEEM by William Poundstone
<http://tiny.cc/5v51101>
The Getty Museum has acquired two Dutch still lifes by Pieter Claesz. <https://tinyurl.com/3tprscbz> and Jan Davidsz. de Heem, plus an erotic genre scene by Marguerite Gérard in collaboration with Jean-Honoré Fragonard. <https://tinyurl.com/mvuvsmj7> The de Heem has just been placed on view. I'll say more about the Claesz. and Gérard/Fragonard in a future post.
Jan Davidsz. de Heem's Glass Vase with Flowers and Fruit was owned by an Italian-German family for over a century. Measuring 34-3/8 by 26-7/16 in., the painting was auctioned by Lempertz (Cologne) on May 17, 2025. The lot essay hailed it as "an exciting and most important addition to the known oeuvre of Jan Davidsz. de Heem… completely unrecorded until recently." It sold for 3.162 million euros, more than doubling the high estimate.
That got less attention than it might have, for it was eclipsed just four days later in New York. On May 25, Sotheby's auctioned the collection of investment banker Thomas Saunders III. Saunders had a similar de Heem, a few inches bigger than the Cologne picture. Given a 27-word title cataloging almost everything in it—Still Life of Roses, Tulips, Lilies, Poppies, Honeysuckle…—it sold for $8.834 million. That set the record for a Dutch still life not by van Gogh.
De Heem's pronk still lifes are big and painterly in the Flemish tradition. His later flower pieces adopt botanical precision and the refinement of late 17th-century Dutch art. The Getty and Saunders pictures are part of a group of four exceptional still lifes with a sunflower at the top of the bouquet, probably executed in Antwerp about 1673-1674. Another "sunflower" de Heem is on long-term loan to the U.K. National Gallery. Each has vivid colors except for the sunflowers, now a muted yellow due to the fading of orpiment yellow pigment.
<http://tiny.cc/lv51101>
<http://tiny.cc/nv51101>
Art historian Fred G. Meijer theorizes that the Getty painting was the last of the four sunflower paintings. The treatment of the water-filled vase, with its refracted stems and reflected window, is especially virtuosic. Not only does de Heem paint the window's reflection, but he includes a glass bottle and other objects on the ledge—a still life within a still life—and a cloudscape beyond.
The Getty collection traces Northern still lifes from illuminated manuscript borders and German Renaissance nature studies onward. De Heem is arguably the most influential Dutch/Flemish still life artist, and Glass Vase with Flowers and Fruit becomes a capstone of the collection. Director Timothy Potts called it "the exceptional flower still life the Getty Museum has been seeking for over two decades" and "the most consequential addition to our collection of northern Baroque paintings since we acquired Rembrandt Laughing in 2013."
The new de Heem is on view in West Pavilion gallery W107.
<http://tiny.cc/uv51101>
<http://tiny.cc/zv51101>
<http://tiny.cc/0w51101>
De Heem often included wheat (symbol of the Eucharist) in his flower arrangements. Unusual is the inclusion of maize in the Getty picture. In de Heem's time American corn was cultivated in Europe, though the ears were tiny by 21st-century standards.
<http://tiny.cc/5w51101>
All the painting's insects and flowers are identifiable. The relatively harmless European garden spider has a white cross on its back.
<http://tiny.cc/8w51101>
This is an eyed hawk moth, whose camouflage "eyes" are visible only in flight. De Heem must have worked from a preserved specimen. _LosAngelesCountyMuseumOnFire

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MAX OVER 55 CLUB MAX, ND
<https://tinyurl.com/498w2596> _RuralIndexingProject

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A WALL BY GEORGE NAKASHIMA by greg
<https://tinyurl.com/3znkk86y>
The Nakashima Compound in New Hope, Pennsylvania feels well-loved, impressive when visited, and very haphazardly documented. Probably because it is and has been in near constant use and change since George Nakashima built his first workshed in the 1940s. Maybe also because Nakashima did all the designs, and though he was trained as an architect, he was most known by the photographing and publishing classes, at least, as a woodwizarding furnituremaker.
<https://tinyurl.com/5yreb88p>
Whatever the situation, it has been difficult to find the photos I need to understand something that fascinates me in the Arts Building https://tinyurl.com/3sf4cvr3(1965 or 1967), first known as the Minguren Museum, the pointy, triangular-looking open structure with a hyperbolic paraboloid roof made of plywood. [There is also a poured concrete paraboloid roof structure, the Conoid Building, and the slatted, curved ceilings look similar inside, which is confusing. Also, did Nakashima really name buildings after his furniture lines as part of the marketing? I think a trip to the Compound/showroom/workshop was part of many large commissions, when clients came to select a tree or whatever. Maybe it all makes sense on the ground.]
In this Pennsylvania Historic Preservation blog post, it says this experimental roof was, in 2021, the subject of a Getty-funded conservation project undertaken by the University of Pennsylvania. After it had been flagged by the World Monuments Fund. So maybe there’s documentation after all. [Also, as someone from Raleigh, a town whose pioneering concrete hyperbolic paraboloid roof house masterpiece was neglected and destroyed by absolute idiots, I have to say the potential longer term viability of the Nakashima plywood roof gives me new hope.]
<https://tinyurl.com/bdcnns2w>
But that’s not the point right now. Look inside the Arts Building or Minguren Museum, or the Nakashima Foundation for Peace. Entering at the building’s apex into a coffered concrete and fieldstone foyer, and discovering the space opening up, yes, and then the Loft definitely not floating above you.
<https://tinyurl.com/yrj9n8mh>
When I saw @denbeers’ tumblr of the cantilevered stairs, I wanted to lose twenty pounds, but first I wanted to know what in the world is going on with that concrete wall at the top. It is thin as can be, and angled. And the top looks just a little crumbly, or imperfect. But again, what is that wall? Why does it transfix me? I don’t care, I just want to know its story. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, I have found no one who visits the Nakashima Woodworkers Compound in the forest of New Hope who leaves writing about the concrete.
<https://tinyurl.com/ywtp8bph>
So I’m trying to intuit it. I think it’s the angle from the exterior wall behind it. I think it’s the angle of the edge of much thicker—but lower, and topped with a floating shelf—parapet. Is it the angle of recline of the Conoid chairs surrounding that table? Is it the angle of the keystone-shaped slabs under the Minguren dining tables <https://tinyurl.com/3e6szkyn> ?
<https://tinyurl.com/3aea256d>
It’s not just he angle, but the thinness, and the imperfection, that all belie the purported nature of concrete. Maybe I’d just come from seeing Isa Genzken’s show at Buchholz and had a refreshed, visceral appreciation for concrete in space? _greg.org

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THE DEVIL AUTOMATON,
<https://tinyurl.com/yc7kn6xx>
Sforza Castle, Milan, Italy.
<https://tinyurl.com/58v9tz2t> _‪Dr Ian McCormick‬

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63. POODLE SKIRT by Rainey Knudson
<https://tinyurl.com/2pz9bc57>
Two years after WWII, women were hungry for fashion that didn’t feel like grim wartime deprivation. In 1947, Christian Dior’s New Look reshaped the fashionable silhouette—nipped waist and extravagantly full skirt—and set the dominant style for 1950s dresses.
That same year, an out-of-work actress in Los Angeles, Juli Lynne Charlot, was invited to a holiday party and had nothing to wear. She had little money and only rudimentary sewing skills—but her mother owned a small children’s wear factory and gave her a sheet of white felt. Charlot cut a circle, used her brother’s slide rule to calculate the hole for her waist, and appliquéd green felt Christmas trees onto it. It was a hit. Charlot took the skirt to a Beverly Hills boutique, which requested non-holiday designs. Poodles were in the zeitgeist, the breed regarded as fancy and French amid a wave of postwar dog mania.
The trend quickly spread among teenage girls. The skirt was simple enough to make at home, and more importantly, to alter. Girls could appliqué records, hot rods, jokes, or anything else that appealed to them, personalizing a standard shape. They were designing the clothes they wore. It was, arguably, the first teenage fashion trend.
The poodle skirt answered the same cultural hunger that Dior’s New Look did, but in a homegrown, democratic version. Where Dior imposed corsets, Charlot’s skirt was made for dancing. It translated the full-skirted silhouette into something accessible, joyful, and distinctly American: couture reborn as craft. _TheImpatientReader

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CY TWOMBLY, POLAROID
<https://tinyurl.com/34z8z9mz>
from the series 'Le Temps Retrouve', ca. 2005
<https://tinyurl.com/yesvvprn> _RabihAlameddine

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THE WORLD'S 100 MOST VISITED ART MUSEUMS IN 2025
<https://tinyurl.com/2s4uhhys>
As the distorting impact of the Covid-19 pandemic fades, we can start to see more clearly how it changed the museum landscape, and how the near-complete drops in museum attendance in 2020 have obscured deeper trends.
The annual visitor-numbers survey compiles figures from art museums around the world for the preceding calendar year. Our data for 2025 shows that, on the whole, art museums are as popular as they have ever been, with many of the biggest museums continuing to welcome millions every year. More than 200 million visits were made to the top 100 museums in our list—still a little off the 230 million recorded in 2019, but a long way from the 54 million in 2020.
A raft of new museums have opened in the last few years to great success—not just in the Middle East and East Asia, where demand seems almost unlimited, but also in highly museum-dense cities like London and New York. However, the growth is not spread evenly, with some museums that used to dominate our list still struggling to get back to their pre-Covid glory days.
Generally speaking, there has been an explosion of visitors to museums in Asia and South America. At the same time, institutions in Europe and the US are largely seeing steady numbers—at least in the absence of natural and political disasters. And while 2024 was all about immersive exhibitions, the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists appeared to be back in full force in 2025. _ArtNewspaper

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JEFF KOONS DESIGNS TWO BOTTLES FOR EVAIN’S 200TH ANNIVERSARY
>https://tinyurl.com/yn9nj54z _ARTnews

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THE SISTINE CHAPEL IS COMING TO A MALL IN SUBURBAN NEW JERSEY
<https://tinyurl.com/3du7czc2>
Citizens of New Jersey rejoice, Michelangelo (yes, that one) is coming to a shopping center near you. Westfield Garden State Plaza in Paramus, to be precise, with “Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel: The Exhibition” opening ahead of an indefinite run.
From God’s outstretched fingertip in The Creation of Adam to faces wracked with shock and desperation in The Flood, the exhibition presents all 34 of the Michelangelo’s ceiling and altar masterpieces recreated using what the organizer, See Global Entertainment, calls “an advanced printing technique.”
<https://tinyurl.com/59jmb5ce>
The result is a series of dramatically lit spaces in which replicas of the works first commissioned by Pope Julius II in 1508 are on offer close-up and often at eye-level. There’s little straining of the neck required to see, for example, God separating light from darkness, or Adam being jabbed by an angel as he’s cast out of Eden with a cowering Eve.
Other benefits include no heaving crowds, no surly guards ushering visitors through the space, and no time limits. This means visitors can spend nine hours chewing over The Last Judgement, except for on Sundays when they’ll have to make do with six. The kicker, as advertised by the organizer? There’s no trip to Rome needed.
“We are thrilled to bring this immersive experience to New Jersey,”
Priced at $28 per ticket, “Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel” is evidence of a trend that emerged out of 2020 lockdowns that brought high-definition, tech-enabled “immersive” exhibitions to audiences around the world.
The Michelangelo exhibition made its debut in Dallas, Texas, in 2016 and has toured China, Germany, Australia, and Canada, among other countries. More than three million visitors have rated the experience 4.8 stars out of five,
<https://tinyurl.com/564pd3d9> _artnet

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THE MOUNT WASHINGTON POST
<https://tinyurl.com/mumrcx85> _LisaAnneAuerbach