OLD NEWS

PLANTS IN MOTION
<https://tinyurl.com/38xd9dpd> _IndianaU/Youube

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EMILY CARR'S AFFINITY WITH NATURE
<https://tinyurl.com/68tzmk65>
“I think Carr is a remarkable Modernist landscape painter who has been largely overlooked in the wider history of Modernism, Her intense commitment to art, despite sexist assumptions about her potential as a woman artist and her geographic isolation from the mainstream art world, are a story I think many people would find fascinating if given a chance to hear it and see the work.”
Carr “was both a careful observer and someone who sought spiritual transcendence in communion with nature”, The artist once termed it “that green ideal”,
Carr often wrote about this process in her journals,
<https://tinyurl.com/2ufw2psw>
Born in Victoria in 1871, Carr studied art in both San Francisco and London before later spending time in France, where she developed a distinctive post-Impressionist style with a Fauvist-inspired palette, which would define much of her later work.
In 1912 Carr undertook an ambitious sketching trip to the Haida Gwaii islands, off the coast of British Columbia, where she created a significant body of watercolours and canvases. According to the museum, these works fused her French training “with her deep engagement with the monumental forms of totem poles and village sites”. But a subsequent exhibition met with a mixed reception and Carr set aside painting for almost 15 years while she ran a boarding house in the city of Victoria. Carr’s professional resurrection came in 1927, after the inclusion of her work in the Exhibition of Canadian West Coast Art: Native and Modern at the National Gallery of Canada and recognition from the Group of Seven, a Canadian collective of landscape painters.
<https://tinyurl.com/yc5eb4a6>
The Vancouver show will also include key works on paper from a period when Carr was developing a new approach after meeting the Group of Seven. “One of the challenges of Carr’s mature practice is how many important works are on paper and have to be limited in their exposure to light,” Hill says. “In particular, we have an amazing collection of charcoal drawings that we don’t often get to show, and over the course of the exhibition we’ll get almost all of them on display.” The gallery will change the display halfway through the run of the show, to limit light exposure. “They are stunning,” Hill adds. “Likewise, the very expressive paintings on paper she did later in her career, mixing oil paint with gasoline to create a very fluid style,” which will also be shown.
Hill says that recent criticism from the Haida scholar Marcia Crosby, of Carr’s conflation of Indigenous culture with nature, will also be included in the exhibition. The show will examine “the sources of this idea in the Modernist primitivism/vitalism that she was exposed to in France and then via [the Canadian artist] Lawren Harris and [the anthropologist] Marius Barbeau”. Hence, Hill says, “the change in her final works from attempting to achieve spatial proximity to nature to imagining herself at one with nature” ._Hadani Ditmars _ArtNewspaper

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JUST
<https://tinyurl.com/28m355np> _DavidShrigley

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ROBT. WILLIAMS IN LONG BEACH by William Poundstone
<http://tiny.cc/5ary001>
Born in Albuquerque in 1943, Robert Williams skipped town as a juvenile delinquent and landed in Los Angeles at the age of 19. There he briefly attended the Chouinard Art Institute, forerunner of Cal Arts. By the mid 1960s Williams was working for hot rod maestro Ed "Big Daddy" Roth, helping to imagineer the "Ratfink" meme. He teamed with Robert Crumb, among others, in launching Zap Comix and the underground comics movement. Another project was Juxtapoz magazine, devoted to the Lowbrow zeitgeist. Meanwhile Williams was scoring exhibitions at New York's Tony Shafrazi Gallery and places in MOCA's Paul Schimmel-curated "Helter Skelter" (1992), and the 2010 Whitney Biennial. LACMA has a Williams painting <http://tiny.cc/6ary001> (donated by Ed and Danna Ruscha, no less). The latest item on Williams' long resume is a show at the Long Beach Museum of Art,"Robert Williams: Fearless Depictions" It's a survey of 54 paintings, plus some watercolors and sculptures, spanning 2007 to the present.
Williams has an avid following, and his collectors don't necessarily collect the sort of contemporary art you see at MOCA. Williams' paintings are hermetic allegories trading in body horror, psychedelia, science fiction, and dad humor. You cannot relate to Williams in the default modes that apply to other artists. Is Williams even an artist at all? It would be easy to peg him as an illustrator, had he stuck more to comics and magazines, like Crumb or Norman Rockwell for that matter. Likewise, had he been a self-taught artist whose oeuvre was discovered without explanation in a storage locker somewhere, he'd be the king of all outsiders. Williams reminds us that "fine" art is not, after all, the big tent it pretends to be. The issues Williams raises are particularly pertinent as George Lucas opens the Pandora's box of "narrative" art.
At 82, Williams has no late style that I can discern. At various times in his career he explored less meticulous styles in order to increase his output and income. He always seems to trend back to the illusionistic, illustrational style that the started with.
Williams supplies essays describing each work, and LBMA uses them rather than a curator's take. That's a mixed blessing. Williams' grandiloquent descriptions are satire, much in the spirit of the paintings themselves. It's not easy for a curator to compete against that, but a little more context—from a more reliable narrator—might be welcome.
<http://tiny.cc/aary001>
<http://tiny.cc/dary001>
Williams' The Spirit of Malfeasance… is an homage to Basil Wolverton's cover for MAD magazine #1 . While Williams name checks Wolverton, and the MAD cover is shown elsewhere in the exhibition, a more helpful label might trace Wolverton's influence on Williams.
<http://tiny.cc/hary001>
<http://tiny.cc/lary001>
<http://tiny.cc/mary001> _LosAngelesCountyMuseumOnFire

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THE MOUNT WASHINGTON POST
<https://tinyurl.com/yxkc8a2v> _LisaAnneAuerbach

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ANDY WARHOL FILMS, LEFT UNDEVELOPED FOR DECADES, COME TO LIGHT
<https://tinyurl.com/2s4c7r7d>
A trove of previously undeveloped films shot by Pop icon Andy Warhol and his team has been recovered. These videos, never-before-seen by even Warhol himself, will be made public during a special, one-time-only screening at New York’s Museum of Modern Art
In the near decade between 1963, when Warhol acquired a 16mm Bolex, and 1972, he produced more than 600 films. This prolific output provides important evidence of the artist’s pioneering creative vision and brings to life his avant-garde cultural milieu.
The newly discovered moving image work—totaling over an hour in length—includes eight new Screen Test portraits of Warhol collaborators and unused footage shot for his films Batman Dracula, Sleep, and Couch. The most significant find is several rolls of pornographic footage that shed new light on Warhol’s ambitions in the 1960s. They prove that the artist had been capturing explicit scenes on the couch of his famous Factory studio long before making Blue Movie, the salacious 1969 feature that would inspire a “porno chic” phenomenon.
<https://tinyurl.com/5exkw97s>
The long-forgotten rolls of film were discovered by chance in 2015, around the time that many of Warhol’s fragile film gems were being digitized. MoMA’s film archivist, Katie Trainor, and Greg Pierce, former director of film and video at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburg, were looking through an archive of Warhol films held by MoMA at a facility in Pennsylvania. When they first stumbled on the box labelled “raw stock,” they assumed the rolls would be empty, but on closer inspection they found evidence that they had been used.
It wasn’t until 2024, however, that 86 undeveloped rolls were finally processed at Colorlab in Washington, some 60 years after they were first shot. Of these, 38 were still full of remarkably well-preserved imagery.
<https://tinyurl.com/bdew4j2y>
The eight new additions to Warhol’s Screen Tests series—black-and-white filmed portraits that are each about four minutes long—feature various Warhol followers, including Dennis Hopper and Jane Holzer, of whom portraits already exist in the other 472 Screen Test films. However, one subject, Naomi Levine, an artist and actress that appeared in multiple Warhol films, is entirely new to the series.
Among other highlights is a short film of a couple cavorting blissfully in Central Park that archivists believe was one of Warhol’s earliest experiments with his new camera from the summer of 1963.
<https://tinyurl.com/yyvvz7dm>
Some of the films offer an insight into Warhol’s day-to-day life during the height of his Pop art fame. One example from 1964 records a show by the minimalist Frank Stella at Leo Castelli Gallery, an epicenter for new happenings in art. In another video from March 12, 1966, Warhol and members of the band Velvet Underground can be seen packed into a rented R.V. on the road to Ann Arbor, where they were due to perform at the University of Michigan.
One of the legendary parties Warhol threw at the Factory was captured on March 8, 1966. The studio is also the setting for several erotic films that are only now coming to light. One labeled “Jerry & Girl,” shot for Couch, sees Warhol’s assistant Gerard Malanga and a woman make good use of the titular piece of furniture. A threesome, fellatio, and masturbation are among the acts caught on film.
<https://tinyurl.com/evnayv4z>
These recovered works back previously unfounded suggestions that Warhol was a “pornoisseur,” as Pierce put it. He plans to use them as the basis for a new essay exploring Warhol’s ambitions as a pornographer, which may have been suppressed until now because of legal issues around the highly explicit footage.
_Jo Lawson-Tancred _artnet

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TINY’S BAR MARINETTE, WI
<https://tinyurl.com/mr32mwp8> _RuralIndexingProject

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27. FANEUIL HALl by Rainey Knudson
<https://tinyurl.com/mwnyycrm>
In the videos, the old meeting hall is packed with people taking the Oath of Allegiance as they become American citizens. They come from all over the planet, clearly, and their faces shine with gratitude and hope for their future in our country. Many of them weep, clutching American flags.
Boston’s Faneuil Hall is called the “Cradle of Liberty,” and has been the site of countless speeches, meetings, and protests on every side of every issue—health care, gay rights, women’s suffrage, the horrors of the Civil War, the horrors of slavery—going all the way back to the Revolution itself, when the bodies of Crispus Attucks and James Caldwell, victims of the Boston Massacre, lay in state there in 1770. The venerable building, funded by a slave trader, has served many, many times to house passionate defenses of freedom. Frederick Douglass himself delivered his famous speech “Do Not Send Back the Fugitive” there in 1850.
Fresh waves of activists have continued to gather in Faneuil Hall, each generation’s call for liberty shocking to the previous generation. There was a time when abolitionists were regarded as fringe radicals; women suffragists were hysterical extremists; gay marriage was ludicrously unthinkable. And here we are. The building has stood through it all, a testament to how our democracy, in all its messiness and struggle, is designed for resilience and rebirth. The newly minted citizens who gather in Faneuil Hall remind us: freedom is always in our grasp if we want it badly enough. _TheImpatientReader

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FOR SUPERBOWL SUNDAY,
a thread of superb owls by artist Morris Graves.
First up: Morris Graves, "Owl on a Stone," 1968
<https://tinyurl.com/tuss7k9j>
Morris Graves, "Owl," 1957
<https://tinyurl.com/nue3r4j8>
Morris Graves, "Owl," 1957
<https://tinyurl.com/a6mkkhm4> _MichaelLobel

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PSA
<https://tinyurl.com/ycm9vxa9> _RabihAlameddine

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IN HONOR OF BAD BUNNY, ONE OF MY FAVORITE STILL LIFES
(because it contains my three favorite food groups: eggs, potatoes, avocados),
by Arecibo-born painter José R. Oliver.
"Bodegón del huevo frito," 1963,
<https://tinyurl.com/ynfs2nhf> _CarolinaAMiranda

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AI ANALYSIS CASTS DOUBT ON VAN EYCK PAINTINGS IN ITALIAN AND US MUSEUMS
<https://tinyurl.com/yc4xf2va>
Once again, A.I. and human experts are butting heads over the authenticity of a world-famous painting. A Belgian art historian has refuted claims made by Swiss company Art Recognition that two paintings have been falsely attributed to the Northern Renaissance master Jan van Eyck.
The paintings in question are versions of Saint Francis of Assisi Receiving the Stigmata (ca. 1428-32) belonging to the Royal Museums of Turin and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The dispute over their authenticity raises questions about the proper use and limitations of A.I., as well as the nature of authorship in Renaissance art.
An analysis of two paintings in museums in the US and Italy by the 15th-century Flemish artist Jan van Eyck has raised a profound question: what if neither were by Van Eyck?
Saint Francis of Assisi Receiving the Stigmata, the name given to near-identical unsigned paintings hanging in the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Royal Museums of Turin, represent two of the small number of surviving works by one of western art’s greatest masters, revered for his naturalistic portraits and religious subjects.
The only problem is that neither version may actually be by his hand.
Scientific tests involving artificial intelligence on the paintings conducted by Art Recognition, a Swiss company that collaborates on research with Tilburg University in the Netherlands, has been unable to detect any of Van Eyck’s brushstrokes. It has concluded that the Philadelphia picture was “91% negative” and that the Turin version was “86% negative”.
<https://tinyurl.com/yxz2359r>
Till-Holger Borchert, one of the leading Van Eyck scholars and director of the Suermondt-Ludwig-Museum in Aachen, said the Van Eyck findings supported scholars who had suggested that both versions were studio paintings – produced in the artist’s workshop but not necessarily by him.
He said that, although he was “surprised” by the analysis, it posed further questions that needed to be explored.
Dr Carina Popovici, Art Recognition’s chief executive, said that such high negative percentages for the paintings were particularly dramatic. In contrast, an analysis of another Van Eyck – The Arnolfini Portrait, which is among the most popular paintings in the National Gallery in London – said it was 89% likely to be authentic.
<https://tinyurl.com/yjhwpekx>
She said she had also been taken aback by the findings: “I expected that, if one painting was negative, the other would be positive. But no, both came out negative.”
“I’m guessing that the Philadelphia and Turin museums won’t be happy. It’s not good news on these paintings.” The Philadelphia and Turin museums have been contacted for comment. Critics have contended that a paintings’ condition and later restorations may affect such AI-based brushstroke analysis.
Dr Noah Charney, an art historian who discussed the initial Philadelphia painting’s findings on his podcast, described Art Recognition’s previous analyses as “remarkably accurate” and said that the negative result for both pictures had been so surprising that deeper tests had been conducted to confirm the results.
He said he had expected that the Turin picture would be confirmed as by Van Eyck, and that the Philadelphia version would emerge as a copy, whether from the artist’s workshop or later.
“The negative results suggest that both of these pictures are studio works, which may mean that we have a lost original that was more fully by Van Eyck’s hand than these two,” he said.
“If a work comes out of Van Eyck’s studio, it doesn’t necessarily mean that he actually physically painted the surface level of all aspects of it,” he said on his podcast. “That’s a misconception that people get from this 19th-century idea of the lone artist in a garret in Paris drinking absinthe, smoking cigarettes, wearing a beret and doing every aspect of the work themselves.”
Van Eyck is regarded as one of the pioneers of oil painting. “[Van Eyck] didn’t invent oil painting, but he perfected it so thoroughly that everyone else seemed to be working in his shadow for centuries,” Charney said. “His surfaces shimmer with light in detail so fine you need a magnifying glass to take it all in. Every stone, hair, reflection, and a glint seems to be rendered with a kind of supernatural clarity.
“That ability to make the everyday luminous is why many consider him not only a great painter, but one of the great observers of reality in all of western art. And yet for all his fame, Van Eyck’s surviving oeuvre is small: fewer than 20 paintings are universally accepted as by his own hand.” _GuardianUK

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AGNOLO BRONZINO, PORTRAIT OF A BABY BOY,
probably one of the sons of Cosimo de' Medici and Eleonora da Toledo, 1540-1549,
<https://tinyurl.com/5y7vpu3x> _JesseLocker

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‘DECORATIVE BUT NOT GREAT by greg
<https://tinyurl.com/5n76spj6>
On Tuesday, November 7, 2017, a Christie’s executive wrote, “Dear Jeffrey [Epstein], will you be coming into view our upcoming sales? Lots of exciting works worth viewing.”
Wednesday morning, he said he’d adjust his New York schedule, and she emailed right back, Great come before the weekend, “There is a large Twombly [Lot 15B] that is suitable for your large wall!”
On Thursday evening, ◼️◼️◼️◼️◼️◼️, the International Director of Impressionist & Modern Art at Christie’s, emailed a dozen in-line images, and three attachments—hi-res images, a condition report, and a catalogue scan—and some bullet points about the Twombly, Untitled (2005):
“Dear Jeffrey, Lovely to see you, as always,
…
” Untitled is over 10 feet tall, sixteen feet in length —it is the largest format canvas from the Bacchus series (only Untitled from the Pinault Collection is the same size)
…
“This painting part of set titled Bacchus Psilax Mainomenos (presented under this title in the 2005 Gagosian show): psilax means “wings,” referring to aspect of Bacchus that lifts spirit to heights of sensual pleasure/intoxication; mainomenos invokes raging Bacchus, signifying violence, rage, fury, the description of the god used by Homer in his first appearance in the Iliad“
<https://tinyurl.com/828xsk4j>
On Friday afternoon, still in 2017, Lesley Groff, an Epstein assistant, actually emailed the Christie’s specialist, “Hi ◼️◼️◼️◼️◼️◼️, Jeffrey is asking if you have a transparency of the Twombly? (Hope I am spelling that correctly!)”
To which she responded, “Here is the high-res image and catalogue spread!” which Lesley forwarded to Jeffrey Friday night.
On Saturday afternoon, November 11, Epstein emailed ◼️◼️◼️◼️◼️◼️ to say sorry, “leon said the twombly was decorative but not great”.
Leon is presumably Leon Black, the MoMA trustee who would become chairman of MoMA’s board in 2018, and who also owns Phaidon Press, Monacelli Press, and Artspace, and whose family office, in 2017 worked with Epstein to arrange $500 million loans against certain works in his $2.7 billion art collection, and who consulted with Epstein about seemingly every art transaction they made.
On November 15, the Twombly sold for $46,437,500, presumably to neither Epstein or Black, or we’d have heard about it.
<https://tinyurl.com/4tvzb8rz>
Even under the negligent non-enforcement of the criminally lax terms of Epstein’s house arrest following his secret sweetheart plea deal for underage sexual assault and exploitation, Epstein seems not to have traveled to the Vienna State Opera in 2010 or 2011, and so did not see an image of the other 10×16 Bacchus painting, so the one owned by Pinault, was blown up 12x, cropped, and printed on a 176-square meter mesh curtain mounted on the safety wall of the Vienna State Opera.
After a time at Sotheby’s, I believe ◼️◼️◼️◼️◼️◼️ moved over to Gagosian. _greg.org

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HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO GERHARD RICHTER!
Untitled, lithograph, 1969:
<https://tinyurl.com/2tvwdhe4> _‪PeterHuestis‬

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FRANCE’S EX-CULTURE MINISTER JACK LANG RESIGNS AMID EPSTEIN REVELATIONS
<https://tinyurl.com/4wz7kmpw>
The former French culture minister Jack Lang resigned as the president of the L’Institut du Monde Arab (Institute of the Arab World,) over his ties with Jeffrey Epstein. Lang, 86, who has led the Parisian institution since 2013, vigorously denies any wrongdoing, following the latest revelations from the Epstein files, where his name appears 673 times.
France’s foreign minister, Jean-Noël Barrot, “took note” of the resignation and announced that the IMA board, composed of representatives of France and Arab states, will choose a successor within seven days.
In a letter to the minister, published by news agency AFP, Jack Lang criticised “the current climate of personal attacks, unfounded suspicions and amalgams”. “It revolts and disgusts me,” he said, adding that he is resigning in order “to preserve the magnificent institution that is the IMA” and “to be able to refute all the accusations” against him.
Initially, Jack Lang stated he felt “he had no reason to resign”. He acknowledged his long “cordial relationship” with Jeffrey Epstein, whom he says he met around 15 years ago through the film director Woody Allen. Lang claims, however, that he knew nothing of his sex crimes.
“I am not accustomed to asking for the criminal records of my friends,” Lang said. He said that the Epstein he knew was a “generous sponsor” and “a very nice man”.
Lang denies any involvement in Prytanee, an offshore art dealing company in the Virgin Islands which, according to the website Mediapart, was set up by Epstein with Lang’s daughter Caroline, with a $1.4m deposit.
Jack Lang’s lawyer, Laurent Merlet, told radio RTL that his client “might have given his opinion on works of art” but never received a cent from the company. Caroline Lang, who resigned as the director of the independent film and TV producers’ union, said she too “never benefited from the company” and was “unaware that her name figured on Epstein’s will” leaving her a sum of $5m that she “never received”. _ArtNewspaper

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PLANTS IN MOTION
<https://tinyurl.com/2s3ny7mr> _IndianaU/Youube