OLD NEWS

DIED (ALAS!) ON THIS DAY IN 1631, IN MADRID,
still-life painter Juan van der Hamen y León.
He was 34.
Here,
deceptively simple arrangement of sweets and pottery from 1627.
<https://tinyurl.com/4tjd4948>
The incredibly careful simplicity of a still life
by Juan van der Hamen.
<https://tinyurl.com/ybnm9f7b>
Each individual item
in this perfectly balanced arrangement is exquisite,
but the green glass vessel is sublime.
Painted in 1627 by Juan van der Hamen y León of Madrid,
<https://tinyurl.com/mvnu88kc>
A jar was so green
that the eye seemed sucked up through a funnel by its intensity
and stuck to it like a limpet. vw, The Waves
<https://tinyurl.com/2ywntvuf>
An explosion, a firework, of flowers.
<https://tinyurl.com/5dc9phuk>
Spring!
Basket of peas & cherries,
plus roses & lilies, from Juan
<https://tinyurl.com/mr27y6fc>
Flowers. Declarative.
By Juan Van der Hamen y León
<https://tinyurl.com/ykcmze9b>
Cat v excited about the fish in this jolly arrangement
by a follower of Juan van der Hamen.
Just couldn't resist the cat!
<https://tinyurl.com/3t5d56ub>
Fascinating double basket arranged with fruits and an artichoke in 1627.
Returning to peace and order with Juan van der Hamen,
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Margaret of Austria, looking v. Habsburgian,
with her excellent dog
<https://tinyurl.com/389cxf6b>
Infanta Maria Ana of Austria
is just a wee bit swamped by her clothes.
But they were very important!\
By Juan van der Hamen y León.
<https://tinyurl.com/3763aav3>
Perfectly balanced, subtly precarious: still life with fruit and vessels
<https://tinyurl.com/2w23st59>
Careful arrangement of vessels & sweets, laid out & painted by Juan
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Cardoon & basket of apples.
And some hanging things. 1622.
<https://tinyurl.com/22w8z6x9>
Still life w/ cardoon, poised before a snowy landscape in 1623.
Or is it a painting of a snowy landscape
Only Juan van der Hamen y León knows for sure,
<https://tinyurl.com/yc79asbt>
Puppy w/ flowers.
<https://tinyurl.com/4ufrzu3c>
Dog w/ flowers.
<https://tinyurl.com/2fvftc3j>
Who knew the Spanish Golden Age
could be so stately yet so cute?
Very cuddly pup with his ball
<https://tinyurl.com/38taxbeb>
Sweets in a basket on the table,
plus some oddly truncated flatware.
<https://tinyurl.com/2x9n8p8t>
Simple plate of plums and cherries by Juan
painted in 1631--
year he died on this day --
so perhaps his last work.
<https://tinyurl.com/3m2xf755> _Dr.PeterPaulRubens

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CECILY BROWN: ‘I WAS TOO SHY TO TALK TO ALL THESE SUPER COOL KIDS
<https://tinyurl.com/3sw8c9jj>
People say that Cecily Brown left London in the early 1990s because of the YBAs – as if, she laughs, she wanted to get away from them. “I actually had great admiration for the art being made, I just wasn’t in sync with them.” While Damien Hirst was dunking dead animals in formaldehyde and Sarah Lucas was devouring bananas in front of the camera, Brown was wielding a palette and brush. “There was this feeling in London at the time that if you were a painter, you were a loser. I didn’t feel like a saddo for being a painter in New York.”
You would think, then, that she’d be returning triumphant. She was taken on in her 20s by mega-gallery Gagosian, and has works in MoMA and the Tate. Recent shows include a survey at the Met in New York. Her paintings, slippery and complex canvases that are richly allusive and reward slow looking, sell for millions, making her one of the most valuable living female artists.
<https://tinyurl.com/mrwbz3kw>
But a few days ahead of her first big museum show back home, at London’s Serpentine Gallery, she’s a bag of nerves. “The thing I’m really afraid of is critics, because they’ll say it’s overhyped. I feel I’ve got to prove myself. I want each show to improve on the last, which of course isn’t going to happen – it’s not linear. As I get older I’m more aware because I think, God, I’ve been so lucky …” She stops, casts around for a piece of paper and a pen, takes a breath. “Sometimes it’s helpful to doodle.”
Brown talks how she paints: energetically, her thoughts and opinions revealing themselves before dissolving, layering like the rhythmic brushstrokes on her dense, roiling canvases. “I tend to ramble,” she tells me, apologetically. We’re drinking tea in an upstairs meeting room at the Serpentine after looking at the exhibition being installed below, and though she’s nothing but warm and friendly, I can tell she’s itching to get back to it.
<https://tinyurl.com/328tt9fp>
Picture Making brings together new and old paintings, as well as recent monotypes and drawings, all with a nod to the green and pleasant land of her youth. The meandering canvases inspired by Kensington Gardens are a riot of energy and movement. With streaks of sunshine yellow, mud brown and spring green, they seem lighter than the early works, like they’ve gulped fresh air; during the painting process, she was looking at children’s picture books. In signature Brown style, recognisable details emerge amid a tangle of abstract strokes before melting away: blink and you’ll miss the dog, tree, bird box. “It’s celebrating nature, colour and light,” she tells me, “but at the same time, inevitably, there’s instability.”
Now 56, Brown was born in London, before moving with her family to Surrey when she was a toddler. “It was idyllic,” she says. “We walked to school, there was a village green, it was chocolate boxy – at least on the surface.” Her mother is the novelist Shena Mackay. Aged 21, Brown learned that her father wasn’t the man who raised her, but the influential art critic and curator David Sylvester. A family friend, he’d been taking her to exhibitions since she was a teenager, and introducing her to artists including Francis Bacon. He encouraged her ambitions. In 1989 she enrolled at the Slade School of Art.
<https://tinyurl.com/mfdwm5zv>
It’s tempting to say that it was the Sylvester-shaped connection to great artists that gave Brown the confidence to borrow from them. Throughout her career, she’s pilfered colours and details from paintings of the past (as well as books and television), breaking them down and making them new again. I tell her it was a bold thing for a young woman to do, lifting fragments from famous art by famous men. “Yeah, I know,” she replies, with a girlish grin. Did it feel bold at the time? “Not at all. When I started looking at art seriously, looking just wasn’t enough. I wanted to copy it as a way of understanding it.” She pauses. “Plus, there was this sense that it was all there to be stolen, I might as well use it.”
She moved to New York in 1994, a year after graduating. Back home, everyone was talking about the death of painting; across the pond, people had moved on. “There were so many more galleries that I felt I could fit in somewhere. In London, I was never going to be a part of it.” But there was more to the move than the fuss over the YBAs. “I had a confidence in New York that I didn’t have at home. I felt oppressed by the class system here. You know that line in My Fair Lady, about it being impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman despise him? Back then, I either felt too posh or not posh enough for every situation.”
Was she also conscious, because of who her father turned out to be, that she didn’t want to be seen as a … “nepo baby, 100%. If I was with my dad, I could hang out with Nick Serota or Howard Hodgkin. But if I went to an opening, I was too shy to talk to all these super cool kids like Sarah and Damien.”
<https://tinyurl.com/murn6mf8>
Despite the warm welcome in New York, when she arrived she tried to shrug off her identity as a painter, dabbling in video, photo-based stuff, “terrible assemblages”. Like most young people, she says, she wanted to do something new. “I think one reason a lot of people don’t end up making art once they leave art school is because of the realisation that you can’t. You just can’t. I mean, maybe 1% of artists every 10 years do.”
Within a few years, she’d picked up her paintbrush again, first finding recognition with pictures of hedonistic bunnies emerging from whorls of colour. Orgiastic images of a more human nature followed, along with classical themes such as still lifes and shipwrecks. In the early 2000s, she introduced the English landscape into her work, and the natural world has remained a focus ever since.
I ask if she still has fond feelings for the New York art world. “Oh my God, if you get me started on the art world … It’s so hard to talk about as someone who’s benefited from the ridiculousness, but I think greed has overtaken creativity. There will always be real artists, but what we’ve got at the moment is a very commercial art world where a lot of artists are making work directly for the market. Sometimes I think people have forgotten what art is.” She winces. “I’m imagining the comments: Oh, shut up, you’re so spoiled in your cashmere sweater while you tell people not to …” She doodles.
Since moving to the US aged 25, the longest time she’s spent outside Manhattan was the six months she and her husband and their daughter lived in Hudson Valley during the pandemic. Would she ever move back to London? “I have a fleshed-out fantasy of living in England. When the weather’s nice I want to move here immediately. But when it’s not … I spent too many hours standing at bus stops in the rain in my youth to ever do that again. But I’ve never lived here solvent. And obviously that makes a huge difference, if you can jump in a cab.”
As for the London art scene, does she feel a part of it now? “Well, the art world has become so much about money. My paintings are expensive, so …” She smiles. “I don’t feel shy walking into an opening any more, put it that way.” _Chloë Ashby _GuardianUK

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LOOKING AROUND
<https://tinyurl.com/4bwxkv69> _ON&ON / Jeff Weiss

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PAIGE POWELL CAPTURED WARHOL’S FINAL DAYS UP CLOSE
<https://tinyurl.com/c8k3zxp9>
It wasn’t Paige Powell’s intention to become the unofficial documentarian of the 1980s New York art scene, but she was embedded in it. Powell worked in ad sales at Interview magazine and would become its associate publisher. She was one of founder Andy Warhol’s closest confidantes during the final years of his life.
“I just took photographs, but I wasn’t obsessed,” she said. “It was Andy who encouraged me. I was in my environment with all these different artists. They were just my friends. So it didn’t have a purpose. But basically, Andy was so comfortable with me and my camera—it was just a part of my body. It was like a limb or something.” Just as her mentor was “married” to “Sony,” his tape recorder, Powell became inseparable from her camera.
<https://tinyurl.com/yxkpsjrb>
Powell’s new exhibition, “Private Andy: Religious Services comprised of a 1986 series of Warhol volunteering at a Bronx church to serve meals to the homeless during the holidays, alongside a series of accidental double exposures made during a 10-day period in February 1987. The images span from a fashion show at the Tunnel nightclub, where Warhol was one of the models, to the artist’s funeral and burial; laughing friends from the week prior are overlaid upon mourners. The intimate shots capture Warhol’s final days while echoing many of his enduring themes: spirituality, chance, devotion, and the strange overlap of life and death.
<https://tinyurl.com/mpxw3ft8>
A film component—a collaboration with EarthCam and the Andy Warhol Museum—links the gallery to a live feed of the Pop artist’s grave in Pittsburgh. It may seem grim, but Powell attested, “Andy would have loved it.”
Not A Fly on the Wall
Powell was at the nexus of various New York creative scenes, documenting these artists and moments, but she was also a creative force within them. It was Powell who helped instigate projects behind the scenes, from pairing artists for the iconic Absolut ads through the vodka brand’s agency, to facilitating moments like Warhol’s early experiments with digital portraiture, including the now-famous 1985 Debbie Harry image <https://tinyurl.com/447pmu88> made on a Commodore Amiga. A familiar name across the vast canon of Warhol literature, such as The Andy Warhol Diaries, Powell can come off as a kind of normie foil to the Factory crowd, when in fact she was a quirky Pacific Northwest character—bringing with her Oregon-bred fixations on exercise and health food—and a connective lynchpin, as much instigator as muse. Spend even a short time with her and it becomes clear: she is largely devoid of judgment, deeply interested in the people around her, and as responsible for shaping the scene as she was for capturing it.
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Powell moved back to Oregon in 1994 to devote most of her time to animal activism. “After Andy died, it was horrible on so many levels,” Powell said. “I wanted to just move out of the city. Rumors were going around that Interview was folding because of competition. We had a big drop in advertisers, and I thought, I’m not leaving this magazine. I was compelled to stay until whatever it took to leave on a high note.”
Auspicious Beginnings
When Powell first arrived in New York from Portland in 1980, she was no ingénue. Her varied CV included stints at Blue Ribbon Sports (which would later become Nike) and as the public affairs director at the Washington Park Zoo, as well as working in the zoo’s nursery and teaching chimpanzees sign language.
She knew she wanted to work at Interview. “I didn’t think that the real Andy Warhol would be at the place where I was going to apply for a job,” Powell said. “I looked up the address in the phone book and took the bus down to Union Square, where they had daily shootouts. Everybody gets up really early in Portland, so I showed up at 860 Broadway at 8 a.m., and no one answered the door.”
<https://tinyurl.com/3mxekddw>
She went to a coffee shop on the corner and returned every half hour until some staff arrived at 10:30. “Ronnie Cutrone, one of Andy’s technical assistants, opened the door,” Powell said. “Because Andy had been shot, the door was bulletproof. Ronnie was being really flirty. And I said, ‘I want to apply for a job,’ and he started laughing and said, ‘Come on in.’ He walks me into a room and there are three people sitting around a table, and Ronnie goes, ‘Here’s someone to see you,’ and then he runs away.”
It was the ad director Barbara Colacello and editors Gail Love and Robert Hayes. “I said, ‘I came to apply for a job,’ and they said, ‘Are you kidding? Celebrities do the interviews or Andy does. Have you ever sold anything before?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, elephant manure for gardens.’ And they just started screaming.”
“They thought that was crazy,” Powell said. “I said they didn’t get it. It was a way to make money for the zoo. It was really great fertilizer. We had the largest herd of Asian and African elephants in North America.”
Then they asked how she sold it.
<https://tinyurl.com/4sp3br2d>
“We sold it by the truckload, or you could buy it by the pound,” Powell said. “And then I pointed out that you have to let it aerate first, because fresh elephant manure is very high in nitrogen and ammonia. If you put it straight on a garden, it’s too strong and can burn the plants. I got it into Sunset Magazine and all these other publications.”
“They said, ‘Well, if she can sell doo-doo, she could probably sell ads.’”
Powell got the job. She explained, “This was the philosophy: We don’t sell any ads to people who are mean, and if we don’t like the aesthetics, we’ll offer a free redesign.” It was a close-knit team where work and life and art blurred.
Archiving the Archivist
Later that day, we drove to see Powell’s archive, housed in the top story of her friend’s cast-iron building downtown.
“Paige’s memory is intact because she never did drugs, and she’s the only one who’s still around,” said Thomas Mack Lauderdale, who met her through Gus van Sant when she returned to the city. “I’d go over to her house and slowly became aware of these 40 boxes of stuff in her garage. None of it was organized—Polaroids separated from contact sheets, separated from negatives. It was a huge mess. Eventually, we brought them here and <https://tinyurl.com/5n7tpapf>
“We were a family,” Powell said of working at Interview. “All of a sudden you hear rumors, and you hear people are getting sick. And then it became real at the office. You didn’t even say AIDS back then. It was some other terminology. I lost so many friends.” It is this pall that also hovers over the banquet-sized worktable crammed with halcyon images in front of us: breakdancers showing Warhol some moves at the Factory; an after-hours get-together at art critic Edit DeAk’s loft.
Some of the most striking are of Jean-Michel Basquiat—color-saturated portraits of him painting en plein air upstate and ecstatically blowing soap bubbles in the back seat of a car. One of the most striking is from the series “Jean-Michel Reclining Nude.”
<https://tinyurl.com/mhwf3s8c>
“Jean-Michel had no body issues at all,” Powell said. “There is no sexual connotation. It was just to show him as a dude. This was on a Sunday evening. He was watching cartoons. He was smoking some pot. He was painting, and he had a stack of records that he had just bought off Columbus Avenue. He was lounging like a regular person and not in this light of being a god or something.”
Powell dated Basquiat, and The Andy Warhol Diaries detail the couple’s ups and downs. “Our relationship was off and on,” she said. “We always got back together again, and then it would be off and then back on.” Eighteen of Powell’s images were included in 2023’s “Basquiat x Warhol” at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris.
“Jean-Michel was so young at the time—he liked to portray himself as someone who lived out on the streets and that his father was a tyrant. Well, that’s not the way it was. He loved his father, but there was a jealousy—that’s how I interpreted it—and they antagonized each other. Even though his father knew he was incredibly talented from a very young age, he came from a difficult background. They had to leave during the revolution in Haiti, and he lost many relatives there.”
<https://tinyurl.com/24wyre4b>
Powell got to know Basquiat when she produced a group show in a friend’s apartment on the Upper West Side, including him alongside graffiti legends like Rammellzee and Lady Pink. Atop the table in the archive is a hand-signed visitor list that reads like a who’s who of the New York art world in the 1980s, the dealer contract between Powell and the artist (Basquiat signed his portion with his crown symbol), and the original price list (works generally in the $8,000–$9,000 range), along with slides and Polaroids of the works and the collectors who acquired them.
This is just part of the gold mine of imagery and ephemera. An early devotee to video, Powell frequently shot with a camcorder. “I never looked at the tapes,” she said. “I’d just put them in a box.” She screened me clips from her work; one was Warhol on a shopping outing looking for a new pair of glasses, ending at dinner with Keith Haring. Another stunning video shows Haring in shorts, gracefully painting an elephant statue as the sun sets behind him, set to the artist’s own boombox soundtrack of hip-hop, house, and the Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer.” At one point, Warhol and his love interest, Jon Gould, enter and begin dancing, before the scene shifts to the group dining together on the Upper East Side.
There are boxes Powell has yet to open. She estimates that about 70 percent of the archive has not yet been scanned. From this stockpile, an idea she is considering: “I really want to do a Harlem, 1981 to 1994 book,” she said. “It was very neighborly up there. There was no pretentiousness. It was like Portland.”
It’s a sentiment that still defines her time in the city. Ever indefatigable, Powell reflected, “I was never bored. Not for a second when I was living in New York.” _William Van Meter _artnet

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ADOLPH VON MENZEL (GERMAN, 1815 - 1905), CHURCH INTERIOR WITH WOMAN AT PRAYER, ND
<https://tinyurl.com/3kuysh45>
Pieter - Jansz Saenredam St. Bavo, Haarlem, ca 1635
<https://tinyurl.com/5384yncb>
Pieter - Jansz Saenredam St. Bavo, Church of St Odulphus, Assendelft, 1649
<https://tinyurl.com/4jm7ppsy>
Pieter - Jansz Saenredam St. Bavo, Church of St Bavo in Haarlem, 1648
<https://tinyurl.com/8tf9za78>
Léon Spilliaert, Vertigo, 1908
<https://tinyurl.com/bd4tnb3m>
Jean Dieuzaide (photographer), Provence, Le Lubéron, La Bergerie de Marenon, 1968
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Grand Central Terminal, New York. Unidentified photographer, 1910
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Imre Kinszki, Bridge And Fog, Budapest, 1930
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Bill Brandt, Early Morning, Shad Thames, Southwark, London, 1939
<https://tinyurl.com/49uv9yhh>
Ezra Stoller, Eero Saarinen's TWA Terminal at Idlewild (now JFK) Airport, NY, 1962,
<https://tinyurl.com/cz9e4vvh>
Jakob Tuggener, (Swiss, 1904 – 1988), Fabrik
<https://tinyurl.com/y6ycdwfk>
Workers at the Central Social Institution of Prague, Czechoslovakia, April 26th, 1937
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Yakov Chernikov, (Ukrainian, 1889 - 1951), Architectural Fantasy no. 20, USSR, 1920s
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Francisco Ribas Barangé’s office building, Barcelona, 1968
<https://tinyurl.com/57duptbx>
Margaret Bourke-White, George Washington Bridge, Hudson River, N.Y.C., ca.1931.
<https://tinyurl.com/4fc56v8y>
Marc Riboud, The Forbidden City, Beijing, 1957
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Edward Hopper, Night Shadows, Etching, 1921
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Daido Moriyama, Tomei Expressway, Japan, 1969
<https://tinyurl.com/y96v2u34>
Eric Dufour, Stairs, (Denmark, nd)
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Eugène Atget - Grand Trianon, Versailles, ca. 1903
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Eugène Atget Hotel du Marquis de Lagrange - 1901
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Kees Scherer, The Louvre, Paris, ca. 1954-1955
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Laure Albin-Guillot, Packing the Venus de Milo ready for storage, The Louvre, Paris, 1940
<https://tinyurl.com/cwc69pkf>
Kansuke Yamamoto, Rome, 1971 [Musei Capitolini, The foot of Emperor Constantine the Great]
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Giorgio de Chirico, The Evil Genius of a King, 1914–15,
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Giotto, The Exorcism of the Demons at Arezzo , c. 1297-1299
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John Singer Sargent, Staircase in Capri, 1878
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Théo van Doesburg, Staircase for the Café de Aubette, Strasbourg 1926-1928
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Lyonel Feininger, Blue Skyscrapers, New York, 1937.
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Kazumasa Yamashita, The Face House, Kyoto, Japan
<https://tinyurl.com/24xk6j98>
Marianne von Werefkin (Russian-Swiss, 1860 - 1938), Gasthaus, late 1920s
<https://tinyurl.com/5ayyepuv>
Hans Baluschek, Arbeiterstadt, Germany, 1920
<https://tinyurl.com/42j8rt5h>
Junichiro Sekino (Japanese,1914-1988), Rooftops,
<https://tinyurl.com/bdfbwkhj>
René Burri, Luis Barragán's Satellite City Towers, Mexico City. The figure in the doorway is Barragán himself
<https://tinyurl.com/3vk3nwbc>
Le Corbusier's Notre-Dame du Haut in Ronchamp, photographed by Rene Burri
<https://tinyurl.com/354sajr3>
Hans Poelzig, Sulphuric acid factory in Luban, Poland, 1911-1912
<https://tinyurl.com/5ckezaus>
Bernd & Hilla Becher, Lime kilns at Harlingen, Netherlands, 1960s
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Idris Khan, Homage to Bernd and Hilla Becher, 2007 Jul 19, 2025
<https://tinyurl.com/w7f9k2wx>
Bernd and Hilla Becher, Water towers (1980)
<https://tinyurl.com/33zcz2rk>
Diane Arbus, House on a Hill, Hollywood, 1961
<https://tinyurl.com/nhkce56t>
Martin Lewis - Little Penthouse, New York, 1931.
<https://tinyurl.com/mw59bmfm>
Manhattan Bridge and Statue, New York City, 1930s. by Dr. Mitchel A. Obremski
<https://tinyurl.com/482f4sfx>
Edward Steichen, The Flatiron Building, New York City, 1904
<https://tinyurl.com/2hbn8mst>
Léon Spilliaert, Dam at night, light reflections, ca. 1900-1905
<https://tinyurl.com/2s3a9zw3>
Alfred Eisenstaedt, Dam, Marathon, Greece, 1934
<https://tinyurl.com/3pwmetmr>
Michael Kenna - Hillside Fence, Study 2, Japan, 2002
<https://tinyurl.com/4syr5t99>
Michael Kenna, Twenty Fences, Obira, Hokkaido, Japan, 2004
<https://tinyurl.com/ysjupf6d>
Georges Braque, Houses at L'Estaque, 1908
<https://tinyurl.com/33pba5ct> _RabihAlameddine