OLD NEWS

IT'S INTERNATIONAL POLAR BEAR DAY!
Law of the Wild,
an utterly bonkers painting
with a superb composition
by Charles S. Raleigh, 1881:
<https://tinyurl.com/456petek> _‪PeterHuestis‬

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ANTONELLO DA MESSINA POCKET PAINTING by greg
I’d been thinking about the idea of ditching the frame before this Roy/Rashid Johnson/Rubens situation came up a couple of weeks ago.
<https://tinyurl.com/2rwfxpe5>
In the run-up to the Old Masters sale in February, Sotheby’s dropped this video of the incredibly named Christopher Apostle, SVP, International Head of Old Masters, with the star lot, a double-sided devotional painting by Antonello da Messina.
<https://tinyurl.com/3z67dx74>
The tiny panel with Christ, Ecce Homo, on one side and St Jerome in Penitence on the other, is smaller than an iPad, and dates from 1463-65. Which would be several years after Antonello returned to Messina from Naples, where exposure to van Eyck and his circle brought oil paint to his attention. [Though this panel is made in tempera grassa, a transitional medium in which oil is added to egg-based tempera.]
<https://tinyurl.com/4h5fph6d>
Which is not the point right now, the point is Apostle is sitting in some church, rhapsodizing on the painting while spinning it naked, in his hands, and honestly.
The video ends with Apostle in full render unto Caesar mode, talking about how 500 years of devotion have imbued this panel with a spiritual charge:
“If Christ could speak in this painting, he’s saying, ‘I’m just like you. I am you.”
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Incredible stuff. Then just a few days later, after Italy intervened, and the painting had been withdrawn, it came back. Ben Luke asked Danh Vo his penultimate question, what one work of art would he live with? Vo replied:
“I’m not that type. I need to live with a lot of things. But you know, the Messina. Thank goodness the Italian state bought it, but recently the last privately held Messina painting was on auction. And, I tell you, I was calling all my galleries, ready to prostitute myself. And that was actually interesting, I would sell everything I have if I could live with that pocket painting, I thinking that would be enough. Did you see that the Jerome on the back was kissed so much that he disappeared!”
“Yes, what an amazing fact!”
“Oh, my God. So good. So good.”
“Wonderful.”
“A painting kissed away. You can’t get it better.”
<https://tinyurl.com/3z6fdjux>
“Pocket paintings” “A painting kissed away.”
As if I didn’t love a great verso painting before now. To live with art out of the frame is all I ask. And double sided. And in my pocket.
<https://tinyurl.com/3w7kk4e6> _greg.org

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LOVE
<https://tinyurl.com/22hafrhy> _DavidShrigley

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PAT STEIR, FAMED FOR HER ABSTRACT ‘WATERFALL’ PAINTINGS, DIES AT 87
<https://tinyurl.com/5f2kmp33>
Pat Steir, who made a name for herself via wall-size abstractions that she achieved by pouring paint from a ladder, died on Wednesday in Manhattan of natural causes. She was 87.
Nearly three decades into her career, in the late 1980s, Steir devised a process that would bring her widespread fame. From a ladder, and later from a cherry picker, she poured oil paint in varying levels of viscosity down upright canvases, allowing gravity to be her collaborator.
“It’s chance within limitations. I decide the colors and make simple divisions to the canvas, and then basically the pouring of the paint paints the painting,” she told for a 2012 article
The first “Waterfalls” began with white paint, but the interplay of color as it settled on the canvas would be key to the appreciation of these abstractions. “White over pink over green makes orange,” she said in a 2017 interview. “The green makes it pink, because what you see is being mixed in your eye, not on the palette. You see one color through another.”
<https://tinyurl.com/3x6zy78s>
The decision would be liberating for her, moving her to eschew paintbrushes for the next four decades. She’d recall the choice fondly in numerous interviews she gave over the years.
Steir said the choice was related to the concerns of the contemporary art world and its contempt, at the time, for abstract painting. “I was thinking more about antimodernism,” she told the Smithsonian Archives of American Art for an oral history in 2008 <https://tinyurl.com/43e8z8f7> . When pressed if she meant “post-modernism,” Steir said she preferred the term “anti-modernism.”
She continued, “Though these look like modernist paintings, you know, and minimalist paintings. But I was thinking about antimodernism. Yes, you could call it postmodernism. I was thinking, is there postmodernism? Is there such a thing? And now, with the art that’s being done now, it’s hard to say there is.”
<https://tinyurl.com/4rx8uzm9>
Steir was born Iris Patricia Sukoneck in 1938 in Newark, New Jersey. Her father’s side were Russian Jews who immigrated to the US ahead of World War I, and her mother’s father was a Sephardic Jew from Egypt who came to the US via London.
Early on, Steir decided to go by Pat, finding the name Iris made her self-conscious, according to a 1985 profile Her father as he took jobs at businesses specializing in silkscreening, window displays, and neon signs produced for highways. “He was sad. He wanted to be an artist,” she recalled of her father in the 2008 oral history, adding that feeding his family kept him from those dreams.
<https://tinyurl.com/y8frp4u5>
<https://tinyurl.com/y65z43az>
She soon became immersed in the New York art world, quitting her day job as an art director at a publishing house. By the mid-’70s, she was heading toward abstraction, showing paintings of crossed-out roses.
That decade would also see her become immersed in the feminist art movement, during which time she was a cofounder, alongside the likes of Lucy Lippard, Joan Synder, Miriam Schapiro, and Harmony Hammond, of the feminist artist collective Heresies. But she bristled at the movement’s orthodoxy that her paintings should have a feminist bent to them. “I became an artist against all odds and nobody was going to tell me what imagery is good for me,” she told in 2019.
<https://tinyurl.com/55vz5uck>
By the mid-1980s, she had been living half of each year in Amsterdam, having been drawn to the city by its art history, Rembrandt and van Gogh, specifically. A train ride back from the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, during which she began to cut up a poster of a Jan Brueghel the Elder still life, would ultimately inspire her 64-panel work The Brueghel Series (A Vanitas of Style), in which squares of different floral still lifes—from across art history, with the likes of Cezanne, Picasso, Matisse, Mondrian, Rothko, Kandinsky, and Basquiat all getting panels—juxtaposed together in a massive grid.“ I feel there’s very little difference between the stylistic modes of art-historical periods” she said of her approach in the 1985 “All art making is research, selection, a combination of thinking and intuition, a connection between history and humanity.”
Steir was making new paintings up until her final days.
<https://tinyurl.com/39dmb5ch> _ARTnews

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THE MOUNT WASHINGTON POST
<https://tinyurl.com/37xuh92x> _LisaAnneAuerbach

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59. ATARI 2600 by Rainey Knudson
<https://tinyurl.com/y425d92j>
In the early 1980s, Ronald Reagan said video games would create a generation of skilled Cold Warriors, while U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop proclaimed games among the top health risks facing Americans. What if video games are just nature doing what nature does? A natural development for a species with tools and imagination—an inevitable progression of games, our ancient pleasure?
The Atari 2600 was the first home gaming system that could play more than one game. It came out in 1977 and was sold through Sears, whose Christmas Wish Book was the Bible for holiday gift-giving, especially toys. But the Atari was located in the sporting goods section, suggesting it had crossover appeal for kids and adults both. Today the notion that it would be in the same category as athletic gear is laughable—gaming is sedentary, with its own specialized chairs and headsets—but in the late 1970s it was still novel, even innocent. Few parents worried about how letting their GenX kids sit for hours with the Atari, trading “real-world” achievements for simulated ones, might be rewiring their brains.
It’s tempting to look back with nostalgia at kids gathered around a cathode-ray television, playing games that were comically simple compared to today’s offerings—the Atari almost like an antique cast-iron toy. But the Atari looks quaint and innocent not because the 1970s were innocent, but because time does that to technology. Our grandchildren will find today’s gaming horrors quaint. Innocence is perpetually renewable.
<https://tinyurl.com/y4rpptkb> _TheImpatientReader

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HADN'T KNOWN OF THESE BEFORE,
just came across them & am absolutely loving them:
The Scout Series,
a set of 6 embroidered badges created in conjunction
<https://tinyurl.com/h67f4sc7>
with Kerry James Marshall's 2017 MOCA LA exhibition
<https://tinyurl.com/462jckhr> _MichaelLobel

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RUBENS’S EPIC MEDICI CYCLE
<https://tinyurl.com/yeyt5rym>
The Louvre has announced its most ambitious restoration project yet. The Paris museum plans to return all 24 canvases from Peter Paul Rubens‘s Medici cycle back to their original Baroque glory.
The monumental suite was one of the Flemish master’s most prestigious achievements, produced between 1622 and 1625 on commission for the French Crown. Across some 3,150 square feet of painted surface, Rubens dramatized scenes from the life of Marie de Medici, a Tuscan princess who became the Queen of France in 1600. The Medici cycle is considered one of the Louvre’s greatest treasures, being an exemplary piece of court portraiture, full of allegorical detail, that has influenced generations of French painters from Jean-Honoré Fragonard to Eugène Delacroix.
<https://tinyurl.com/yf8c624v>
This October, the cycle’s current home in the Louvre’s Richelieu Wing will be converted into a temporary workshop so that the paintings can be restored on site but behind closed doors. The sheer size of the canvases has necessitated the creation of custom equipment, including vast easels. Conservators will take the opportunity to analyze the paintings’ materials, in the hope of making new discoveries about Rubens’s process.
<https://tinyurl.com/3wsv94b2>
Rubens was at the height of his international fame when he was chosen to paint the Medici cycle, which he produced in his native Antwerp. The paintings were shipped from Flanders to France to decorate a gallery at the queen’s home, the Luxembourg Palace in Paris.
Three of the paintings are grand portraits of the queen and her parents while 21 more contain scenes that mythologize her life, including her birth, education, marriage, coronation, motherhood, and the period she spent as a regent after her husband died and his successor, their son, remained too young to rule. In 1631, some years after the cycle’s completion, the queen was exiled from Paris by her son. She died in the Spanish Netherlands in 1642. _artnet

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

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INTERNET GOES WILD FOR THE MET’S NEWLY ACQUIRED MANNERIST PAINTING
<https://tinyurl.com/87pc49ae>
“Looksmaxxing” might not be a word in the Bible, but that hasn’t stopped others from using the term in response to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s latest acquisition — a Mannerist painting of an infant Jesus who outshines everyone else in the frame.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg in the incredulous comments on the museum’s post of the painting, “Madonna and Child with Saint John the Evangelist” (1512–13), recently identified as a long-lost work by Italian painter Rosso Fiorentino. Others have noted baby Christ’s unusually muscular form (particularly his shapely derrière), using nothing but the language of our time...
<https://tinyurl.com/bnux57xe>
While toeing the line of irreverence, the online reaction to Fiorentino’s recently discovered work might actually be channeling the very essence of the Mannerism movement 500 years on: using stylized language that shirks classical tradition and responds to the turbulences of today. Look at it this way — would we have comments describing the Holy Child as a “baddie,” “yasssified,” and “caked up” if it weren’t for the Brazilian Butt-Lift frenzy and explosion of queer media that took over the last decade?
And even in jest, would such explicit hype comments toward religious iconography have been tolerated (let alone celebrated) if we weren’t at a point where digital nihilism and relentless overexposure ensured that lowkirkenuinely nothing is sacred or off-limits anymore?
<https://tinyurl.com/357rdhmr>
Well, let’s focus on the painting at hand. The work, The Met said in a press release, is believed to be the artist’s earliest recorded surviving painting. It depicts the Virgin Mary alongside a plump, almost cherubic rendition of baby Jesus, whose naked form is sprawled diagonally across the lower half of the composition. During restoration, conservators uncovered a third figure: St. John the Evangelist, previously obscured by a layer of overpaint, in the bottom-right corner of the work, donning a thin gold halo while gazing upward at Mary and Christ with an expression of devotion.
In the painting, Mary’s serenity and stability contrast with the Holy Child’s frenetic positioning and curious expression. This asymmetry and exaggeration, emphasized by saturated color palettes and unusual proportions, are quintessential to Mannerism — an art movement that sprang from the harmonious compositions and classical idealism of the preceding High Renaissance. Coinciding with the Protestant Reformation and the Sack of Rome, Mannerism’s artificial configurations and unnatural beauty reflected the tension and complexity of the surrounding turbulence in Italy during the early 16th century.
<https://tinyurl.com/3jc4tj9e> https://tinyurl.com/dssb92yr
Fiorentino was among the pioneering Mannerists who broke away from the naturalism of the Renaissance. He completed several high-profile commissions in the 1510s, including the “Assumption of the Virgin” <https://tinyurl.com/dssb92yr> (1513) in the Chiostrino dei Voti at Santissima Annunziata, often interpreted as evidence of the early development of the artist’s style. In today’s terms ... we’ve got receipts.
<https://tinyurl.com/97zpn52v>
Madonna and Child with John the Evangelist” was identified through its reference in Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists (1550), which included Fiorentino’s biography and body of works among dozens of others. Vasari’s text outlines that Fiorentino had actually secured the Annunziata by presenting “a painting of the Madonna and Child with a half-length figure of Saint John the Evangelist,” which he would have completed as a teenager.
“This painting is a rare and pivotal early work by one of the most important painters of the 16th century, striking in its experimental ambition and psychological intensity,” said Max Hollein, The Met’s director and CEO.
Or, in other words: “Sweet baddie Jesus 🥹🙏” _Rhea Nayyar_Hyperallergic

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EADWEARD J. MUYBRIDGE, CAT; TROTTING; CHANGE TO GALLOP, CA. 1884-1887.
<https://tinyurl.com/bdcwc3hk> _JesseLocker

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THE NEW MUSEUM GOT BIGGER, HOTTER, AND WAY EASIER TO UNDERSTAND.by The art daddy .
Critics are divided on the reopening of the New Museum, which after two years and an $80 million renovation has returned with a major expansion by OMA that finally gives the institution the space it has been begging for. And to be clear, it needed it
<https://tinyurl.com/ypxp8mt5>
The old New Museum was not a building so much as a personality disorder. It was confusing, cramped, and occasionally felt like the architecture itself did not want you there. You were always a little lost, quietly pretending the disorientation was intentional, conceptual, even. The new one fixes that.
<https://tinyurl.com/2u7b5rpa>
There is a staircase that works, galleries that open up, and a flow that does not feel like a low-stakes endurance test. The art is no longer fighting for basic visibility. It finally feels like a museum.
Which is exactly the problem. Because I am not fully sold. In fixing everything, they also fixed the mess. The building is cleaner now, more legible, more resolved. It moves the way museums are supposed to move, which is great, but also deeply suspicious.
The New Museum used to have a very specific energy. Slightly chaotic, a little hostile, sometimes genuinely annoying, but distinct. It felt like a place that had not fully decided what it wanted to be, and that indecision was part of the appeal. Now it feels decided. Final. Like it went to therapy, got its life together, and now posts morning routines.
<https://tinyurl.com/3tyny25s>
Which is also why it makes perfect sense that the New Museum just landed on the cover of Elle Decor with Tablala Self. This is a building that photographs well. That reads cleanly. That translates outside the art world without needing a translator. It is easier to understand now, and maybe a little easier to like. Which, again, is not nothing. But it does mean the New Museum is now flirting with lifestyle. And once you cross into lifestyle, you do not come back the same.
The inaugural exhibition, New Humans: Memories of the Future, follows that same maximalist energy. Over 200 artists, a century of work, and a sweeping attempt to explain what it means to be human right now. It is ambitious, it is dense, and at times it feels like 47 browser tabs open at once, all insisting they are essential. Some critics are thrilled. The scale finally matches the institution. The experience works. Others are less convinced, circling the same question: does fixing the building also flatten what made it feel specific in the first place. I am somewhere in the middle. It works. It needed to happen. But I do not think it is an uncomplicated glow-up.
And then there is ARTnews, where Maximilíano Durón and Alex Greenberger responded to all of this by essentially publishing a live Google Doc of their feelings in real time. Not a review. Not even really a take. A document.
Durón opens by announcing he has “loathed visiting the New Museum for 15 years,” which is an incredible way to begin what is technically journalism. From there, we move through ceilings, staircases, emotional grievances, and what can only be described as two men finally processing a building that wronged them. Greenberger agrees the old building was bad and the new one is better, which is correct, but the format turns the whole thing into a kind of shared Notes app therapy session. They are not wrong. They are just… working through something.
<https://tinyurl.com/bdd29mfk>
Meanwhile, over at Frieze, the tone is glossy, composed, and deeply committed to not spiraling at all. The emphasis is on ambition, scale, and institutional maturity, on the idea that the New Museum has finally become what it was always meant to be. Which is true, but also a little too clean. Between ARTnews live-blogging their emotional journey and Frieze acting like this is a luxury rebrand, you end up with two extremes that almost cancel each other out. One cannot stop processing, the other refuses to process at all. The reality is somewhere in between. The building works. The expansion was necessary. But something about the New Museum’s earlier, slightly unhinged downtown energy has been smoothed into something easier to navigate, easier to explain, and easier to circulate. And that, for better or worse, is the upgrade. _Theartdaddy .

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LAUNDROMAT WESSINGTON, SD
<https://tinyurl.com/43jnjf3a> _RuralIndexingProject

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KOCHI BIENNALE HEAD BOSE KRISHNAMACHARI RESIGNED AFTER SEXUAL HARASSMENT ALLEGATION
<https://tinyurl.com/4jkwfms5>
The resignation of artist Bose Krishnamachari from the posts of president of Kochi-Muziris Biennale (KMB) and member of the Board of Trustees of Kochi Biennale Foundation (KBF) in January followed a complaint of sexual harassment against him,
Krishnamachari is the co-founder of KMB and co-curator of its first edition in 2012. One of the country’s most prestigious art events,
When contacted by this newspaper, Venu Vasudevan, chairperson of KBF, confirmed that they had received a complaint against Krishnamachari alleging sexual harassment. “A complaint was received with the Internal Complaints Committee (ICC) under the PoSH Act… This was in December,” he said.
Asked whether this was the reason Krishnamachari stepped down from his positions at the Biennale in January, Vasudevan said it was “one of the reasons”.
The KBF had announced Krishnamachari’s resignation, which said, “Mr Bose has cited pressing family reasons for his resignation.”
According to sources, the complainant described Krishnamachari as her supervisor at the Biennale. She accused the artist of calling her to his apartment in Kochi where he allegedly made sexually coloured remarks and physical advances towards her, the sources said.
When contacted , Krishnamachari said, “These are misleading and unsubstantiated allegations taken out of context. I am aware of the sources and the pattern of circulation. I have already instructed my lawyers to initiate legal proceedings both civil and criminal, in Mumbai and expect to lodge the same in coming days.”
Incidentally, the Kochi Municipal Corporation appointed Krishnamachari as the Art, Design and Cultural Curator of the city earlier this month. _IndianExpress

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IT'S NATIONAL MINNESOTA DAY!
Minneapolis, a typically fabulous lithograph by Louis Lozowick, 1925:
<https://tinyurl.com/3ykjn9um> _‪PeterHuestis‬