OLD NEWS

WHY IS THE SNOW YELLOW? by Mary Holland
<https://tinyurl.com/htfftfhj>
After snow had accumulated on the ground recently, temperatures rose and rain soaked the trees in the forest. At the base of some of the trees, the snow turned yellow to yellowish-brown. What causes this phenomenon?
Although dust, animal urine, pollen and pollution are sometimes credited with coloring the snow yellow, the main cause for this is tannins leaching from the tree’s bark. Some trees, especially oaks, have a lot of tannins in the bark — organic compounds that are acidic and protect the tree from bacterial and fungal infection (and are also found in tea, coffee, dark chocolate, and wine). Wet snow and/or rain on a tree can leach tannins out of the bark. They then run down to the base of the tree, where they accumulate and turn the snow yellow. _NaturallyCurious

>>>

WHO WAS EDITA SCHUBERT?
<https://tinyurl.com/knx9fmm6>
Croatian artist Edita Schubert graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb just one year ahead of fellow artist Marina Abramović. Following graduation, she exhibited widely throughout former Yugoslavia and Croatia, and in 1983 she represented Croatia at both the Venice Biennale and the Biennale of Sydney. Prolific, ambitious, and investigational, Schubert was a defining figure during her lifetime.
Despite her achievements, however, Schubert has largely been relegated to the margins of art history.
<https://tinyurl.com/4maj9ndd>
An assessment of Schubert by art historian and critic Ješa Denegri, who described the artist as a pioneer of Yugoslav art and wrote that her work was a “practice of profusion.” Schubert’s oeuvre is exceptionally materially diverse
Responding to both artistic trends such as the Italian Transavanguardia movement as well as lived realities like the horrors of war that accompanied the breakup of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, Schubert remained committed to creating works that contextualize the human body physically and psychologically.
<https://tinyurl.com/2283vnmc>
Born in 1947 in the city of Virovitica in present day Croatia, after graduating from the University of Zagreb where she trained in painting, Schubert was employed as a draftswoman by the university’s Institute of Anatomy of the Medical Faculty in Zagreb, where she worked until her untimely death in 2001.
Schubert’s earliest works were highly realistic, mirroring the precision of the anatomical drawings she completed for the Institute of Anatomy. Though not explicitly referenced in her work, even as her practice evolved and she tapped into new visual modes of expression, the technical foundations of scientific drafting proved a vital basis for her practice. The artist likened her work to scientific dissection—meticulous and exploratory, both her work and dissection seek to uncover the hidden terrains of the body.
<https://tinyurl.com/yc4759mz>
The artistic and scientific parallels are rife The poignant, multi-part Biography (1997) was made in the latter years of her life while undergoing cancer treatment and is comprised of glass test tubes with various self-portraits fastened to them. Elsewhere, the much earlier Self-Portrait Behind a Perforated Canvas (1977) was made by cutting through a canvas with a scalpel and securing the loose pieces with surgical tape. Through each perforation created by the scalpel, Schubert affixed an image of part of her body, like a nose, eye, or ear.
<https://tinyurl.com/3ubj2uk5>
Art historian and University of Zagreb professor Leonida Kovač noted in a lecture one of Schubert’s overarching preoccupations as “the relationship between the human … and what is not human.” This line of inquiry can be traced even into abstract paintings of the mid-1980s. Kovač explains that while Croatian critics of the time categorized these works as part of the neo-geometric conceptualism movement, unlike her British and American counterparts who were engaged with critiques of industrialization, Schubert instead developed a personal, highly stylized form of human figuration.
<https://tinyurl.com/5n6s4ez8>
Surveying Schubert’s creative output, what is most apparent was her deft ability to rapidly transition between mediums and genres of art without diluting her creative voice, or needing to rely on purely conceptual underpinnings, which was no small feat given the exploding popularity of conceptual art in the 1970s.
At the heart of her practice was a focus on the human body and its relationship to physical reality—as mutable as the latter tends to be. In the 1981 performance piece Torches, to which piles of torches allude, which occurred at Dubrovnik’s Summer Festival by a 15th-century fountain, the artist used her own body and movement as an element of her work to stage a torch ritual, integrating the local setting into the work. Less esoteric, Schubert’s later collages like War Image (1991) saw the artist engage with the brutal realities of the Yugoslav Wars. Obscuring the base image but leaving it legible with close looking, the work makes the viewer a physical participant.
<https://tinyurl.com/y25m2mht>
Schubert’s practice was pioneering not only for its formal diversity, but its clarity of purpose. Situated in a period defined by reappraisals of medium, her work largely prefigured leading theories of the post-medium condition, such as those by Rosalind Krauss which is still debated today. Through the incredible breadth of work brought together in “Profusion,” Schubert is revealed as a pioneer of post-medium approaches to artmaking, and in turn a pivotal figure within the development of 20th-century Western art.
_Annikka Olsen _artnet

>>>

FOUND
<https://tinyurl.com/4xpyj7y5> _DavidShrigley

>>>

2. BABE RUTH’S "CALLED SHOT" JERSEY by Rainey Knudson
People are still debating what happened that fine October day in 1932, but it hardly matters anymore. Babe Ruth’s exquisite moment of triumph is cemented in our national mythology.
They were playing Game 3 of the World Series in Chicago, and the hatred was so intense that Cubs fans actually spat on Ruth’s wife at the airport when she arrived. Throughout the game, the crowd was mercilessly jeering at Ruth, pelting him with lemons from the stands. Unbowed, he taunted Cubs pitcher Charlie Root with demands that Root throw strikes, not balls, relishing the catcalls and returning them. By the fifth inning, the entire stadium thundered with vitriol. It was then, with two strikes already against him, that Ruth paused, pointed at the stands, and hit the next pitch in what appeared to be the same spot, farther than anyone before had hit a baseball at Wrigley Field. In the parlance of billiards, he called the shot, and made it, brilliantly
Why do we revisit this moment in movies, paintings, and rec-league fields every summer all over the country? Why do we so love the spectacle of Ruth’s excellence? Because the haters, as they say, are going to hate, and we each get our own opportunity to step up and silence them. In his 1948 autobiography, Ruth wrote, “As I hit the ball, every sense I had told me I had never hit a better one, that as long as I lived nothing would ever feel as good as this.”
---
This post is part of The American 250, a series featuring 250 objects made by Americans, located in America, in honor of the country’s 250th anniversary. 250 words on 250 works, from January 1 to December 31, 2026.
_TheImpatientReader

>>>

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

>>>

SCULPTURES FOR BEING IN PUBLIC by greg
Art historian David J. Getsy has a new essay out, <https://tinyurl.com/mrx5ak6n> a long-brewing consideration of Scott Burton’s public sculpture practice in the context of the AIDS epidemic, and as a subtle, determined resistance to the silencing and erasure of people with AIDS. Everything was going down at once in the 1980s, and Getsy argues that Burton’s furniture-like public installations, readily overlooked, were an early example of an artist grappling with the communal and individual experience of AIDS.
What somehow caught me off guard was how at odds Burton’s public project was to the rest of the art world he was so enmeshed in, a world where the fearless artist’s place in public culture was being thrashed out in the battle over Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc.
In 1985, while speaking from within “this minority culture that is avant-garde art,” Burton told Richard Francis that, though he supported Serra’s effort, he saw things differently: “I feel the world is now in such bad shape that the interior liberty of the artist is a pretty trivial area. Communal and social values are now more important. What office workers do in their lunch hour is more important than my pushing the limits of my self-expression.”
This difference is central to Getsy’s analysis: “Burton relinquished the recognizability of his role as artist and creator—a role that was so central to Serra’s project and the art world’s defense of it.
This position of passivity (however critically engaged) clashed with the masculinist presumptions of sculpture as a space-dominating occupation.
<https://tinyurl.com/3sdu6z65> _greg.org

>>>

”JOE BRAINARD, UNTITLED (OWL CAT), 1971
<https://tinyurl.com/2arhcj7d>
Joe Brainard, Cat and Cone, 1976
<https://tinyurl.com/yttxyf92> _MichaelLobel

>>>

THE 1873 PAINTING THAT IS BEING SEEN FOR THE FIRST TIME IN 152 YEARS
<https://tinyurl.com/yc4aehb9>
Back in September 1873, the New York Herald announced that the Hudson River School painter Jasper Francis Cropsey had a new painting. Autumn in the Ramapo Valley, Erie Railway, which would be open to public viewing for “only a day or two longer” at the Wall Street office of Charles Day, the article said.
The painting was commissioned by investor James McHenry, who, with Day, was director of Erie Railway. McHenry, who had been a director of the Atlantic and Great Western Railway before that, had his eye set on the Erie Railway, which was founded in 1832.
In 1872, in what is best described as a corporate coup, McHenry ousted the railroad magnate Jay Gould and took full control over Erie Railway. In celebration, he commissioned the Cropsey painting, which, after those few days on Wall Street, made its way to McHenry’s home in London and remained in private collections, away from the public eye since.
Until now.
In 2024, philanthropists J. Jeffrey and Ann Marie Fox, who live in Bucks County, bought the painting and brought it back to the United States. It is on view at the Brandywine Museum of Art, some 150 miles away from the original setting of the painting, where flatlands west of the Hudson River meet steep hills near the town of Sloatsburg, N.Y.
Here, it can be seen by an American audience for the first time in 152 years.
The painting and the painter
It’s easy to miss the “Erie Railway” part in Autumn in the Ramapo Valley, Erie Railway. Cropsey paints an idyllic fall scene with the Ramapo Valley bathed in yellow, red, and, orange foliage. Bits of green peep out, the sky is clear and a light blue, a waterfall flows gently on the left, the Ramapo River sits still.
The smoke-billowing train chugs through the valley in the distance, but in the center of the painting. Black rails of the railway bridge run parallel to the river and disappear into the leaves.
The setting of the painting falls between what is New York’s Orange and Rockland County, on the western side of the Hudson River, and north of Suffern.
“This painting … really helps in telling a fuller story of the history of American art, and particularly, this brief moment, in the third quarter of the 19th century, when huge sums were being spent on huge paintings,”
“This is part of a larger story with artists like Frederic Church, Albert Bierstadt, and Thomas Moran.”
Cropsey, an architect who had designed several railway stations himself, was part of a line of artists who “engaged with the new fortunes being made from the transportation industry, making images of new railroads traveling through the landscapes,”
The artists enjoyed generous patronage and lived well. Cropsey lived in a mansion he built, called Aladdin, less than 10 miles away from the site of the painting. Here he built himself a studio that doubled as a gallery and art marketplace.
Cropsey had already made a name for himself painting Starrucca Viaduct, Pennsylvania (1865) —where, too, a distant train almost merges into the green slopes of the mountain behind it — when McHenry wanted an artist to commemorate his pushing Gould out of the Erie Railroad directorship in 1873.
“He had already gotten a national reputation for painting part of this exact railroad, and so James McHenry went to the railroad guy,” said Coleman, “and commissioned Autumn in Ramapo.”
Artists like Bierstadt and Sanford Robinson Gifford were also working on similar railroad commissions at the time.
“Most of their stock and trade are images that make use of the aesthetic value of the sublime, the power of the natural world against the small scale of human existence. So they give us that feeling of awe, of wonder,”
Landscape paintings, tell stories about belonging, about ownership, about your place in a wider society. … And they often risk being underestimated. These are pleasant, old pictures that we see on calendars and postage stamps, but they have a lot to tell us about how we became the nation we are today.” _PhiladelphiaInquirer.

>>>

NEWSPAPER MONTICELLO, UT
<https://tinyurl.com/4hdbj49w> _RuralIndexingProject

>>>

ERIE ART MUSEUM REFUSES TO RETURN ‘ABANDONED’ PAINTING TO DAUGHTER OF LATE LOCAL ARTIST
The Erie Art Museum has responded to a lawsuit filed on Nov. 7, 2025, by the daughter of a local artist, requesting the return of a watercolor painted by her late father. The artist, George C. Demiel, submitted the painting to be included in an annual juried show in 1966 at the museum, which was then known as the Art Center of Erie. The Art Center did not accept the painting, and Demiel—who died the following year at age 53—never reclaimed the artwork.
The museum’s December 12 response refers to the watercolor, titled House Boats, as “abandoned personal property.” The response continues to explain that “After Mr. Deimel did not return to retrieve the work and/or notify the Art Center of his intention to reclaim the same, the Art Center then took possession of what was then abandoned personal property, and placed the work in storage until it was formally accessioned to the now Art Museum’s permanent collection in 1983.” (The institution changed names that year.)
Demiel’s 82-year-old daughter Georgia Heynes learned that the museum still possessed House Boats in 2019, when she saw it hanging in an exhibition at the museum. The show, “Everything But the Shelves,” featured some 1,000 framed artworks that had been in storage at the museum, hung salon-style in the galleries.
At that point Heynes asked for the painting back, and, according to the suit, Joshua Helmer, then-CEO of the Erie Art Museum, wrote a letter in March 2019 saying the museum would give the painting to Deimel’s closest living relative when it was deaccessioned from the museum’s collection. (This apparently never happened, and the museum parted ways with Helmer, who was accused of sexual harassment, in January 2020.) The museum’s response to the November 2025 lawsuit argues that Heynes waited too long to file her suit, pointing out that the two-year statute of limitations to file a claim to recover an item that was taken has passed.
Joseph M. Walsh III, a judge on the Erie County Court of Common Pleas, has scheduled a conference for March 16 to review the details of the case. _ARTnews

>>>

JEAN-ÉTIENNE LIOTARD, STILL LIFE: TEA SET, ABOUT 1781–1783
<https://tinyurl.com/bdzaehxb> _JesseLocker

>>>

A NEW YEAR. A NEW DADDY.
<https://tinyurl.com/yeymhkc8>
Think of the art world in 2026 as vintage Real Housewives of New York, back when nobody was self-aware and everyone thought they were the adult in the room. Old money vibes. New delusions. Everyone is tired. Everyone is pretending they are fine. Cameras are rolling anyway.Bethenny is hustling and furious. Ramona is insisting she is calm while speed walking directly into chaos. Luann is correcting everyone’s manners as the table flips. Money is weird. Egos are loud. Everyone keeps saying “I’m just being honest” right before detonating the group chat.
<https://tinyurl.com/4kj88v2e>
That is exactly where we are. Institutions are declaring stability while ordering a second martini and whispering to legal. People are rebranding panic as vision and silence as professionalism. The confessionals are brutal, the alliances are flimsy, and someone is always about to say something they cannot take back. As Bethenny once reminded us, you can’t play smart and stupid at the same time, and 2026 is already proving that point.
<https://tinyurl.com/42uadxa5> _TheArtDaddy

>>>

HIGH FIVE!
<https://tinyurl.com/4dr4vn4p> _‪PeterHuestis‬

>>>

WORKS BY SALVADOR DALÍ, PIET MONDRIAN, AND MORE HAVE ENTERED THE PUBLIC DOMAIN
<https://tinyurl.com/2vya3hxv>
With each passing year, new artworks are shorn of their copyright protections and entered into the public domain, allowing them to be used freely, without express permission from the estates that steward these pieces. This year, pieces by Salvador Dalí, José Clemente Orozco, and others of note have officially joined the public domain.
There are some important exceptions about how these artworks can be used, however. In theory, in keeping with US copyright law, which states that a copyright lifts after 95 years unless it is renewed, any artwork produced in 1930 would now be rid of protections guiding it.
<https://tinyurl.com/37an6wfv>
Piet Mondrian, Composition with Red, Blue and Yellow, 1930
Piet Mondrian left a lasting mark on modern art with works such as this one, which is divided into squarish segments of unbroken color separated by thick black lines. The Dutch painter aspired to reach a form of “pure plastic art,” one that allowed its viewers to reach states of transcendence. The work is owned by the Kunsthaus Zurich in Switzerland; a very similar second version of the painting sold at Sotheby’s in 2022 for $51 million and is imaged above.
<https://tinyurl.com/ydpjch72>
Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, L’Âge d’Or, 1930
An essential work of Surrealism, this film is considered a landmark, both because it was one of the first sound movies and because its erotically charged imagery generated controversy in its day. Much like Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s earlier collaborative effort, Un Chien Andalou (1929), also in the public domain, L’Âge d’Or lacks a cohesive narrative and is instead more notable for the beguiling imagery it offers. One famed sequence features a woman fellating the toes of a statue.
<https://tinyurl.com/2hbjxwhf>
José Clemente Orozco, Prometheus, 1930
José Clemente Orozco had already cultivated a reputation as one of the most important muralists in Mexico by the time he painted Prometheus, his first fresco produced for a venue in the United States. Housed in a dining hall at Pomona College in Claremont, California, the painting depicts Prometheus, the ancient Greek god who ran contrary to Zeus’s wishes by providing humanity with fire. Orozco painted this nude without genitalia for fearing of offending some viewers.
<https://tinyurl.com/4mcsw85k>
Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Composition, 1930
Until a few years ago, when a traveling retrospective did much to reshape the public perception of her art, Sophie Taeuber-Arp was a lesser-known modernist. Now, the Swiss artist is beloved for the ways she translated her experiments with abstraction across multiple mediums, from paintings to textiles to clothes. Composition, a work owned by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, demonstrates her willingness to move beyond tradition, with oil paint used alongside metallic flakes that cause the work’s surface to sparkle.
<https://tinyurl.com/yzmhtpt7>
Photography by Edward Steichen
Edward Steichen blazed a new trail for many fashion photographers after him with his pictures for Vogue. He became the chief photographer of that magazine and Vanity Fair in 1923, and in the years afterward, he defined a new paradigm by embracing artificial lighting and stagy art direction that caused these shoots to look quite unlike life itself. Certain pictures shot for Vogue in 1930 are now in the public domain.
<https://tinyurl.com/jyjeyc2p>
Paul Klee, Tier Freund Schaft (Animal Friendship), 1930
Many of Paul Klee’s paintings involve mysterious symbols that hint at worlds beyond our own. This painting, <https://tinyurl.com/2kd6btre> owned by the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid, features a duckbilled creature and a bison-like animal interacting against a brushy backdrop. _Alex Greenberger_ARTnews

>>>

BRUNO LILJEFORS "WINTER LANDSCAPE WITH BULLFINCHES," 1891
<https://tinyurl.com/4bh4fzv5> _RabihAlameddine

>>>

TRUMP RINGS IN 2026 AT MAR-A-LAGO WITH AUCTION OF JESUS PAINTING
President Donald Trump rang in the New Year with an amateur art auction at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, where a freshly painted portrait of Jesus Christ sold for $2.75 million. He even shared his New Year’s resolution: “Peace on Earth.”
The painting was created on stage by Vanessa Horabuena, a self-described Christian “worship artist” whom the president described as “one of the greatest artists anywhere in the world”.
“To me, she’s one of the greatest. In fact, she did something last night that was incredible. She can paint, slowly, a beautiful portrait for the White House, or she can paint the most incredible painting in literally 10 minutes,” he said on video of the event broadcast on the right-wing media outlet Newsmax.
He carried this narration through the creation of Horabuena’s painting as a band played a slow rendition of “Hallelujah.” “Draw something really special. I don’t know what it is, but draw something really special,” he said to the artist, opening the bidding at $100,000 and explaining that half the proceeds would go to St Jude’s Children’s Hospital and half to the local sheriff’s department.
“These people are loaded with cash, just so you know,” he added. The painting ultimately sold for $2.75 million to a “woman in a top hat,” _ARTnews

>>>

WINTER FINCH FORECAST 2025-2026
<https://tinyurl.com/yc2rtzkz>
It looks to be a flight year for many species in Eastern Canada. With mostly very poor crops in the boreal forest from central Quebec westward to Manitoba, this has the potential of being the biggest flight year since 2020-2021.
In these very poor crop areas in the eastern boreal, significant food source species such as White Spruce, Tamarack and White Birch have a total absence of any new crop over large areas. The almost regularly dependent food sources, like Black Spruce and alders, are below average within these same areas. A very early movement of a small but widespread flight of Redpolls in eastern Canada is pointing to a possible poor seed crop in Northern Quebec and Labrador.
There are two areas with significant cone crops. The first area is from the Adirondack mountains in New York, east through New England, Gaspe Quebec, and the Maritime provinces to southern Newfoundland, where there is a widespread above-average cone crop this year. The second area, from Northeastern Manitoba through the Northwest Territories into parts of Alaska and southward into the mountains of Western Canada and United States, also has a widespread above-average multi-species food crop.
Spruce Budworm outbreaks from Manitoba eastward were widespread this summer, providing ample food sources to Evening Grosbeaks, Pine Siskins and Purple Finches as well as the “budworm warblers” during the breeding season.
Purple Finches and Red-breasted Nuthatches have been moving south in numbers since mid-August.
_TheFinchResearchNetwork