OLD NEWS

CECROPIA MOTH PUPAE: A NUTRITIOUS TREAT by Mary Holland
<https://tinyurl.com/kdvt3wkc>
Cecropia Moths spend approximately 10 months as pupae inside cocoons fortified with three layers of protection. These silk layers are tough enough to thwart most predators, but there are a number of birds present in winter that are equipped to reach the innermost chamber where the pupa resides. Chief among them is the Downy Woodpecker, which is responsible for up to 90% of raided Cecropia cocoons (see hole drilled in upper part of cocoon). Other birds, including Blue Jays, Red- and White-breasted Nuthatches, Ravens and an occasional Black-capped Chickadee also prey on these pupae. Eastern Gray Squirrels, White-footed Mice and parasitic wasps are responsible as well for preventing these moths from reaching adulthood. (Inset photo: male Downy Woodpecker) _NaturallyCurious

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LOVE
<https://tinyurl.com/mvsmhdfx> _DavidShrigley

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VICTOR VASARELY’S CRUMBLING AIX LEGACY TO BE RESTORED
<https://tinyurl.com/yc7ztvxh>
The hilltop building that now houses it celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. It is unmissable to visitors to Aix-en-Provence, with its striking concertinaed façade of circles within squares in black and white. But closer inspection reveals a decrepit sculpture in the garden shrouded in protective netting and monumental interior works in urgent need of attention.
A year ago, Fondation Vasarely auctioned works to raise funds to continue the restoration of both the iconic building and its many site-specific works. The foundation’s administrator, Caroline Vasarely, explained on TV that, since 2019, state funding had all but dried up. “The longer we wait,” she said, “the more difficult it will become to remedy the damage.”
This sits at odds with the building’s illustrious beginnings, when its 1976 inauguration was broadcast on national TV. After that, the foundation suffered local political strife and inheritance woes. When Victor fell ill in the 1980s, his sons were not able to take the building on, and it was put in the care of the director of the law school in Aix. After he died in 1997, legal wranglings over the works held in the foundation and the now-closed Museum Vasarely resulted in a dispute, still ongoing, between the foundation and the second wife of one of Victor Vasarely’s sons. It was not until Pierre Vasarely, the artist’s grandson, became chief executive of the foundation in 2009 that its fortunes started improving.
The Aix building was listed as a historic monument in 2013, but years of neglect have left their mark. “Nothing had been maintained,” Pierre Vasarely says. “There was no heating, no air-conditioning. The roof leaked.” Before conservators could get to work on the site-specific works of art, essential repairs were required. External cladding and the roof, with its 14 pyramidal skylights, was fixed; heating, air-conditioning and humidity control systems were installed.
Vasarely says the museum received unprecedented financial support, covering 85% of the €12m budget, from every level of government, with the foundation footing the remaining 15% of costs.
Work on the art has proceeded more slowly, as the impact of pandemic closures has been compounded by the subsequent tightening of public funds.
Of the 42 monumental wall pieces and two sculptures, the foundation has restored about half. This is no small feat: these diverse works are made with an array of materials and techniques and many are huge, up to 8m by 6m. “For the 20 remaining, we’re taking our time. Restoring each work costs between €100,000 and €120,000,” Vasarely says.
It is banking on 2026 being a big year. To mark the 120th anniversary of Victor’s birth and the 50th anniversary of the building’s opening, the foundation is putting on a large exhibition of the artist’s work
Pierre Vasarely says the recent opening of Cezanne’s family home nearby as a study and heritage centre should also help: “It repositions the foundation,” he says. His grandfather would agree. In 1973, he buried a message with the building’s cornerstone that reads “From Cezanne to Vasarely: we will be worthy.” _ArtNewspaper

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THE MOUNT WASHINGTON POST
<https://tinyurl.com/3cm4ncfu> _LisaAnneAuerbach

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WHY ROBERT THERRIEN IS A BIG DEAL
<https://tinyurl.com/pcraj62c>
Visitors to The Broad usually ask to see two works of art—the “infinity room” and the “big table and chairs”. The creator of the first work is a familiar name, Yayoi Kusama, but far fewer know who is responsible for the second: Robert Therrien (1947-2019). With the conceptual artist’s largest museum show ever, Ed Schad, the curator of Robert Therrien: This is a Story, hopes to change that.
“He’s an artist that was a major presence in Los Angeles art for almost 50 years, one of the best sculptors to emerge in this town,” When we look closer at Bob’s work, he was an artist that was a part of the discussion here in Los Angeles for a very long time.”
The retrospective features more than 125 works. Therrien’s Under the Table (1994), a 10ft-high hyperrealist rendition of a table and six chairs, was one of the first works moved into The Broad ahead of its opening in 2012. It still stands in its usual location on the third floor, while the current exhibition includes a different set, No title (folding table and chairs, dark brown) from 2007, Made of painted steel, aluminium, fabric and plastic, it replicates folding chairs and a matching card table, also large enough for people to walk under.
<https://tinyurl.com/yftfhkev>
Therrien was born in Chicago and moved to California with his family because of his asthma. He attended graduate school at the University of Southern California and in 1985 his career was jumpstarted by his inclusion in the Whitney Biennial, which prompted the legendary New York dealer Leo Castelli to take him on.
The artist often returned to familiar forms; one gallery here features a set of wall sculptures highlighting some of his favourites, No title (group cutout reliefs, ranch house, chapel, pitcher, and barn) (2019). Although identifiable by viewers, their meanings sometimes shifted. For example, the figure of a three-ball snowman was sometimes a snowman and, when he set on its side or obliquely, could appear as a cloud or smoke signals. Similarly, a chapel could become an oil can or even a witch’s hat.
Each element had personal relevance for Therrien, which is one reason he is not considered a Minimalist. “Strident theorists of Minimalism would not recognise Minimalism in Bob’s work, ”The reason is that private symbols [and] any sort of personal narrative were like pollution to Minimalism. Even though his forms are very spare.”
<https://tinyurl.com/yc6t98sw>
He started making oversized sculptures in the early 1990s. Today he is best known for gargantuan versions of everyday objects, from tables and chairs to fake beards and stacks of plates. There are examples of all these in the show; the first gallery has a set of white plates stacked taller than a person. Elsewhere there is an off-kilter stack of regular dishes as well as a miniature set of dishes.
“It has something to do with scale as a point of comparison, as a way of addressing one’s expectations about the physical world,” Schad says. “One of the things that makes something a monument is [that] it dwarfs the viewer. And with something that’s smaller than expected, the opposite happens, it can become a toy. The important thing was that the viewer was able to connect with it, emotionally and physically.”
_ArtNewspaper

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HAVE BEEN THINKING ABOUT
continuing relevance of Dada artist George Grosz's political critiques.
His scathing 1926 painting "Eclipse of the Sun" portrays alliance between
feckless political & military leaders and capitalist financiers.
Grosz, branded "degenerate" by the Nazis, fled to the US in 1933
<https://tinyurl.com/2hw9armf> _MichaelLobel

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PIVOT POINT DURANT, IA
<https://tinyurl.com/mv9abb98> _RuralIndexingProject

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HENRY DARGER’S SECRET WORLD COMES TO THE STAGE
<https://tinyurl.com/58872j3k>
For a man who lived in near obscurity, Henry Darger has had a remarkably long afterlife. The Chicago janitor’s vast body of work—hundreds of drawings and thousands of manuscript pages created in isolation—have inspired biographies, documentaries, and exhibitions, even decades after his death. Now, Darger’s unlikely story has made its way to the stage.
Bughouse,, explores the life and work of the outsider artist, in his own words. The play was masterminded and directed by theater giant Martha Clarke, with a script by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Beth Henley who adapted Darger’s writings. Stepping into Darger’s shoes is John Kelly, the performance artist who saw a kindred spirit in the reclusive man.
The 80-minute show lands us directly in Darger’s one-bedroom apartment, its walls tacked with his collages and its corners filled with old newspapers and balls of twine. It’s here that the artist spent the most of his life from the 1930s after fleeing a psychiatric facility as a child, creating and stashing away countless drawings and manuscripts that were only discovered after his death in 1973.
<https://tinyurl.com/t6v6xyjz> _artnet

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THINGS I FOUND ON MY LAPTOP, AN OCCASIONAL SERIES
<https://tinyurl.com/e6b33df2> _JesseLocker

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51. ERECTOR SET by Rainey Knudson
<https://tinyurl.com/4c69sjp4>
A.C. Gilbert intuitively understood that the hands are not the brain’s obedient servants; they are its collaborators. When he watched steel girders rising over the New Haven railroad in 1911 and thought children would love to build that, he was responding to the ancient human instinct that understanding a thing physically means touching it, feeling it fail and trying again. His Erector Set didn’t teach engineering; it was engineering: resistant and alive in the hands.
The toy’s components—perforated steel girders, plates, gears, and pulleys—deliberately mimicked 20th-century engineering and construction. Just as a dollhouse is a miniature version of a home, inviting play with domestic rituals, the Erector Set miniaturized the infrastructure age, letting children play with its ambitions. Children could bolt together cranes, Ferris wheels, and skyscrapers. It was an optimistic, Industrial-Age toy for building a giant model of a suspension bridge that would span the whole living room.
Such building toys are theoretically about applied physics, not fantasy—you’re not telling stories with action figures or dolls when you play with one. And yet they are highly imaginative. Today, the child who enjoys puzzles and construction will be drawn into world-building video games—turbocharged versions of an Erector Set, which looks comically basic compared with what we can build in an imaginary world on a screen. Instead, to play with an Erector Set is to sink into engagement with the tactile: tightening a tiny bolt, catching your finger on a metal edge. Its objectness is the thing. _TheImpatientReader

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SCHOOL BUS YELLOW CORNER PIECE by greg
<https://tinyurl.com/yeyk44br>
I don’t think Fred Sandback drawings automatically serve as diagrams for a sculptural installation. But if the angry ghost of Fred Sandback haunts the buyer of this sketch for stretching a six-foot square of school bus yellow elastic cord across a corner, at least they get to meet the artist, right? _greg.org

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MEN RETIRE, WOMEN GET FIRED’ — THE QUIET CRISIS GRIPPING MUSEUMS by Charlotte Burns
At a gathering of curators, museum directors, artists, dealers and journalists in Washington DC last weekend, Brooklyn Museum director Anne Pasternak sounded a note of alarm. Speaking at the Making Their Mark Forum — alongside Jodie Foster, MoMA director Christophe Cherix, Chelsea Clinton and artists including Joan Semmel, LaToya Ruby Frazier and Joyce Scott — Pasternak said: “I’m petrified about what’s happening to leadership in our country, and particularly in our field. Take a look at museum leaders who’ve lost their jobs in recent years: you’d find that men retire and women get fired.”
She is not alone. In interviews with museum leaders conducted for the Burns Halperin Report, a study exploring representation in the art world which I cofounded, the majority of women raised unprompted concerns about a gender backlash within the field. So far none of the men interviewed have mentioned it.
“The 10,000ft view,” says Susan Fisher Sterling, director of the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington DC, “is that when we have major societal disruptions and uncertainty, we see a flight to safety. That often means that leaders who have arrived most recently — women leaders and leaders of colour — end up under greater scrutiny and greater pressure to conform. And heaven forbid they are trying to change their institutions: they become a risk.”
Museums have spent much of the past decade proclaiming a new openness to women leaders, particularly those who could broaden audiences, diversify collections, modernise institutions and restore trust after institutional failures. But, after a string of high-profile exits from US and European institutions, many in the field are questioning the depth of that commitment.
The reasons for the departures vary: some were fired; some resigned; others left after clashes over governance or performance. But a common thread runs through them. Women leaders appointed to modernise institutions appear to receive less protection when pressure mounts.
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The rollcall has become impossible to ignore. Sasha Suda was fired three years into a five-year contract as director and chief executive of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and replaced within weeks — without a search — by Daniel Weiss, who had been advising the board on governance. She alleges wrongful termination, which the museum denies; the dispute is being resolved through private arbitration.
In Washington last June, the first woman to lead the National Portrait Gallery since its founding in 1962, Kim Sajet, resigned after 12 years, stepping down two weeks after President Trump claimed on Truth Social that he was firing her for being “a highly partisan person” and “a strong supporter of DEI, which is totally inappropriate for her position”. Elliot Gruber currently serves as the NPG’s acting director; Sajet has since taken up the directorship of the Milwaukee Art Museum
In Paris, the first woman to lead the Louvre in its 230-year history, Laurence des Cars, resigned in February after a string of crises culminating in a jewel theft scandal that exposed long-neglected security failings. Des Cars testified to the French Senate that she had “consistently drawn the attention of our supervisory authorities, the national representation and the media to the state of disrepair and general obsolescence of the Louvre, its buildings, and its infrastructure” before the robbery. She was replaced the day after her resignation by Christophe Leribault.
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Gender is not the only axis. When race and gender intersect, the pattern grows more concerning still.
In February, hundreds of cultural figures — from author Salman Rushdie to artist Isaac Julien — signed an open letter protesting the departure of Devyani Saltzman from her role as director of arts and participation at London’s Barbican Centre. In 2021, the institution faced allegations of institutional racism and has undergone several changes of leadership since. Saltzman, who joined in 2024 and was one of the few leaders of South Asian heritage in the institution’s history, left following the appointment of new CEO Abigail Pogson. The letter argues her loss has “sector-wide and community-wide implications” and is “not an ordinary HR issue.”
At MACBA, Barcelona’s museum of contemporary art, Elvira Dyangani Ose — the first woman and first person of African descent to lead the institution — is stepping down early after its governing body ruled her appointment as director of the Abu Dhabi Public Art Biennial to be incompatible with her museum duties.
<https://tinyurl.com/2ezhmf6b>
Colette Pierce Burnette, the first Black woman to lead the Newfields cultural campus that includes the Indianapolis Museum of Art, was hired as president and CEO in 2022 after the museum’s job posting for a director who could preserve its “traditional, core, white art audience” triggered outrage in 2021. Instead of marking a reset, Burnette left after just 15 months.
The loss of women leaders has measurable consequences. According to the 2022 Burns Halperin Report, the top four US museums in terms of acquiring work by women artists were all led by women. But outcomes are only part of the story. Visibility matters: it shapes ideas of who belongs. As Kymberly Pinder, Dean of the Yale School of Art, said during the conference: “I was naive when I began in these leadership roles in understanding that just being there was important.”
Among the other speakers at the forum was Sandra Jackson-Dumont, formerly the inaugural director and chief executive of the $1bn Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles, which is scheduled to open on September 22, 2026. Jackson-Dumont left in April 2025 after her role was split into two positions, with George Lucas himself taking over content direction. During her tenure, she had hired six women to key leadership positions, five of them women of colour. The appointments prompted widespread disbelief, Jackson-Dumont said during a panel. “You would have thought we blew up the universe. One reporter asked me where we found all these women.” Of those six, two remain. A spokesperson said there are nine other women in senior roles at the museum.
The broader backlash against women in leadership, says philanthropist Jennifer Soros, extends well beyond museums. “It’s endemic — not just arts and culture.” She points to the implosion of female leadership in US academia: in 2023, six of the eight Ivy League institutions were led by women; within a year, four of those six had stepped down. Three of the women were replaced by white men.
For Komal Shah, the collector who organised Making Their Mark, the stakes are clear. “When I look at what is happening to women in museum leadership right now, I feel both urgency and a deep sense of responsibility,” she said. “We gathered because the progress we have made is real but fragile, and the moment demands that we stand together.” Conceived as a celebration of women leading culture, the forum became a space for frank conversation about the obstacles many of its 300 attendees are facing. “These are not women on the margins of the field; they are the field,” Shah said. “Any institution or system that cannot see that is devaluing itself.”
Pasternak framed the issue in still broader terms. “Staying silent about this is dangerous,” she said. “We are watching the erosion of women’s rights.” _FinancialTimes

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UPDATE ON THE CONTEMPORARY PAINTING SCENE IN IRAN:
<https://tinyurl.com/4jrtz6tx> _‪PeterHuestis‬

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DEALER YVES BOUVIER TO STAND TRIAL IN PARIS OVER MISSING PICASSOS
A judge has ordered Yves Bouvier to face trial in a Paris criminal court over the alleged disappearance of dozens of works by Picasso from a storage unit, which the artist’s stepdaughter had rented from Bouvier's company. The Swiss dealer is accused of concealing stolen goods and laundering. His friend and business partner, Olivier Thomas, faces charges of breach of trust, embezzlement and laundering.
Bouvier launched an appeal against the process, which was denied in November 2024, allowing the investigation to continue. The judge in charge of the investigation confirmed on 15 January 2026 that there is sufficient grounds for Bouvier to go to trial. A trial date has yet to be fixed.
The investigation was triggered in 2015 following a complaint from Catherine Hutin, the daughter of Picasso’s last partner Jacqueline Roque, after she discovered that works were missing from the unit she had rented from Bouvier's company, in a Paris suburb. Eight years before, she had asked Olivier Thomas, an art dealer and mutual friend of hers and Bouvier's, to sell Picasso’s last residence on the Riviera, the Mas Notre-Dame-de-Vie in Mougins, and move the furniture to the storage unit.
While the investigation was underway, Hutin reported further disappearances, raising the total of missing works to almost 70. Some were found in photographs on Olivier Thomas’ camera. Notably, two portraits of her mother and 60 drawings from sketchbooks were discovered to have been sold by Bouvier to Dmitri Rybolovlev, for a total of €36m. The Russian collector filed a complaint but withdrew from the procedure after his 2023 settlement with Bouvier, relating to a broader nine-year legal feud.
Bouvier claimed that the Picasso works had come from the late Parisian dealer Jean-François Aittouares. But the investigating judge found “there is not a single element establishing his involvement”. Bouvier tells that “it was a verbal agreement”, explaining that he paid Hutin $8m for the works under investigation, through a Lichtenstein trust. But, according to the ruling, this “payment in fact corresponded to a previous sale of 11 paintings”, in 2010, which is not disputed. “However, Mr Bouvier has produced no evidence or paperwork on the purchase of the works” having disappeared from the storage, concluded the judge. _ArtNewspaper

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KARIN MAMMA ANDERSSON, NIGHT GUEST, 2011
<https://tinyurl.com/rvv7yxuu> _RabihAlameddine

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CONTEMPORARY ART MARKET DECLINES FOR FOURTH STRAIGHT YEAR
For much of the past decade, the art market behaved as though history had stopped. Collectors and speculators chased the wet paint with missionary zeal, convinced that the next studio visit might yield a future masterpiece (or a tidy return when flipped onto the secondary market). Auction houses obliged, turning evening sales into pageants for artists who barely had time to form a reputation.
That fever appears to have broken, according to the latest Art Basel & UBS Art Market Report, written by economist Clare McAndrew of Arts Economics. While the global art market returned to modest growth last year, reaching an estimated $59.6 billion in sales—a 4 percent increase after two years of decline—auction sales of postwar and contemporary art have continued to fall. Those categories generated $4.5 billion last year, compared with $8.5 billion in 2021.
Despite four consecutive years of decline, postwar and contemporary art remains the largest segment of the auction market, underscoring how central it has become to the trade over the past two decades.
For a decade, contemporary art seemed to eclipse everything else. Now collectors appear to be rediscovering the appeal of artists whose reputations were settled long ago. Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works rose 47 percent at auction last year, while Old Masters climbed 30 percent, reversing several years of decline.
During the pandemic boom, recently created works flooded the auction market. Works made within the previous 20 years accounted for 34 percent of postwar and contemporary auction sales by value in 2021, up sharply from previous years. By 2025, that share had fallen to 19 percent. The number of works created in the previous two decades that sold for more than $10 million fell from twenty-one in 2021 to just three in 2025.
The report draws a distinction between “Postwar and Contemporary” art, broadly defined as artists working after 1945, and the more speculative ultra-contemporary segment, made up largely of works created within the past two decades. Works by younger painters such as Avery Singer, Lucy Bull, and Jadé Fadojutimi have become emblematic of that fast-moving sector in recent years.
That pace was unlikely to last. Markets eventually ask the same question they always ask: which artists will still matter twenty years from now? _ARTnews

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JUST WANTED TO SHOW OFF MY ALOE.
I inherited her from a neighbor.
She'd spent months in a bucket but now she is all floral glamour.
<https://tinyurl.com/58t57kbp> _CarolinaAMiranda