OLD NEWS

IT'S NATIONAL COCKTAIL DAY!
Photograph by Robert Frank, 1955,
<https://tinyurl.com/5ktew5j8> _‪PeterHuestis

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EDVARD MUNCH’S PAINTINGS FOR A CHOCOLATE FACTORY GET A RARE OUTING by Richard Whiddington
<https://tinyurl.com/2s44wz7x>
One of only two public commissions Edvard Munch ever completed is marred by nicotine and chocolate. For the past century, his 12 monumental paintings depicting bucolic life have hung in the workers’ canteen of an Oslo-based chocolate factory, long subject to the drift of cacao dust and cigarette smoke, which was only banned from the Norwegian workplace in the mid-1990s.
For the first time in their history, the paintings of prim and proper children and dancing couples are departing the Freia chocolate factory, but they’re not traveling far. Just a couple of miles down the road is the Munch Museum, which is presenting the so-called Freia Frieze, alongside their preparatory sketches, in an exhibition examining the artist’s 1920s output, a period that saw stirring social change in Norway. In the meantime, Freia employees will have to make-do with replica Munchs as they enjoy lunch.
“The Frieze and the history of the Freia chocolate factory offer a unique lens to examine the intersections of art, industry, and gender in interwar Norway,” the show’s curator Ana María Bresciani said in a statement. “Munch pursued alternative, moveable, and non-monumental forms. The Freia commission exemplifies this and challenged the boundaries between public and private art. ”
The paintings were commissioned by Johan Throne Holst in 1922 for the women’s canteen of his central Oslo factory. By the standards of the early 20th century, Holst was a relatively enlightened industrialist, providing the factory with a doctor, emphasizing worker hygiene (uniforms could be washed onsite), and instituting a 48-hour work week. As the paintings show, Holst’s concerns extended to aesthetics with a contemporary art critic noting that seeing as only the best was good enough for his workers, there was little choice but to commission the nation’s greatest painter.
In 1934, the paintings were moved to a new, larger all-gender canteen in a ceremony presided over by an orchestra. Originally completed in the span of two months, the Freia Frieze depicts summer life in a Norwegian coastal town with Munch presenting scenes of work and play in loose and rapid brushstrokes. It’s a quotidian type of utopia: workers strain to gather fruit, fishermen amble towards boats, and people idle pensively by the shoreline in canvases washed over by the pale blue light of endless summer days.
Beyond the easy-going veneer, Freia was at the frontline of shaping Norwegian labor standards with the exhibition showing advertising and informational films produced by the company in the 1920s and 1930s. Among the concerns was the importance of unions and the demands from workers for eight-hour days and annual leave.
“Alongside showing these unique Munch paintings, we also tell the story of the working class,” the museum’s director Tone Hansen said. “This is an opportunity the public will not get again.” _artnet

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GOOD
<https://tinyurl.com/ycuh4wz7> _DavidShrigley

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TALE OF A RIDERLESS HORSE by Michael Glover
<https://tinyurl.com/yxxt63wu>
What’s in a name? “Whistlejacket” is a magnificent, rampant beast. Where to find him, though? Start at the Western (Sainsbury Wing) end of the long corridor that takes you through and past much of the long history of the great paintings in the possession of London’s National Gallery.
The sightline is arrow-direct, through magnificent doors, framed in marble the color of a rich, mottled madder. Look directly ahead of you, through room after room after room. And there, at last, you will find him, facing you — in fact, his pose is side-on, though his head is twisted to catch the bright white of his eye, on the wall of Gallery 34, reared up in all his fiercesome equine magnificence, “Whistlejacket,” that masterpiece of a painting by a man named George Stubbs, the son of a currier, born in Liverpool.
Stubbs: Portrait of a Horse consists of studies and working drawings, three paintings, and a copy of The Anatomy of the Horse, a treatise of 50,000 words, together with descriptive anatomical illustrations reduced to 18 tables. Stubbs published this work in 1762. He knew his horses from the inside out. He dissected them. He saw – as we can see for ourselves – deep into their innards: veins, arteries, ligaments, musculature. His drawings have a ghostly, translucent quality about them. He combines a profound anatomical knowledge with a certain imaginative bravura. When Stubbs paints a horse, it comes alive. It both gleams and pulses.
<https://tinyurl.com/6se27a42>
Stubbs made “Whistlejacket” in 1762. The painting depicts a steed fit for any fat king to depress. Except that none did. “Whistlejacket” is riderless. And out on his own. He has no context, no turf to thunder over, no grass to crop. He is set against a plain ground, in a neutral colour.
In this part of London, in Trafalgar Square, and then down through Whitehall and into Parliament Street, there are many, many statues of horses. No, let me correct myself: There are many statues of men on horses; men who are raised up by their horses to heights much greater than they often deserve — warmongers, politicians, aristocrats. Unlike “Whistlejacket,” these horses were the nameless and unacknowledged servants of those who tamed and ruled over them.
“Whistlejacket” was destined for a rider, too. His rider was to have been the newly crowned Hanoverian king of England, George III, a man who spoke German and was best known for his madness in his later days. Yes, it didn’t happen. “Whistlejacket” was spared to live on in all his magnificent riderlessness.
<https://tinyurl.com/4fj2j426>
This little story is told in another gallery, where an entire exhibition is currently being staged devoted to Stubbs, his horse paintings, and his profound knowledge of horse anatomy. The only other painting of a riderless horse on the scale of “Whistlejacket” by Stubbs generally lives out of sight in a private collection, but this morning it faces us as we walk into the exhibition in Gallery One. Its name is “Scrub.”
“Scrub” is set in an imagined landscape. He rears up beside a river, nervily, as if water is a challenge, something to be wary of. Beware of mankind a little more, perhaps. _Hyperallergic

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THE MOUNT WASHINGTON POST
<https://tinyurl.com/3as9maht> _LisaAnneAuerbach

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MARSDEN HARTLEY, WALT WHITMAN’S HOUSES by greg
<https://tinyurl.com/4uy3dpbx>
In her 2006 chapter on Marsden Hartley’s intense manly connection to Walt Whitman, Ruth L. Bohan noted that Hartley’s painting, Walt Whitman’s House, 328 Mickle Street, Camden, New Jersey, was on the frontispiece of Elizabeth Leavitt Keller’s 1921 memoir about caring for the poet in his last years.
Bohan may have only seen a stripped and rebound library copy, or she would have mentioned that the painting also appeared on the dust jacket of Walt Whitman In Mickle Street, over a tagline from Edna St. Vincent Millay: “There’s this little street and this little house.” The house is now a museum.
<https://tinyurl.com/2jhhuaje>
Whether of a person, a mountain, or a house, Hartley considered his paintings to be portraits. In Keller’s book the painting is dated 1908. Hartley mentioned the painting in one of the two incomplete autobiographical manuscripts he wrote in the later years of his life [1877-1943], which along with an earlier manuscript were published in edited form by Susan Elizabeth Ryan in 1996. <https://tinyurl.com/5ntktzfe> He actually called it a “study,” mentioned its use only as a frontispiece for Keller’s book, said he’d just heard from sculptor Jo Davidson that he’d acquired it. Davidson’s portrait of Gertrude Stein is now in Bryant Park, and a cast of his portrait of a striding Walt Whitman <https://tinyurl.com/2f5jv76k> was acquired by Philadelphia in 1957. You can see the statue in the center of the empty grass field you circle as you get on the highway to the Walt Whitman Bridge from the direction of Skinny Joey’s Cheesesteaks.
Hartley pegged the 1908 date and the trip from Philadelphia to Camden to the English language debut of Yiddish opera star Bertha Kalich. But that was actually in 1905. Which, coincidentally, coincides with the more extensive Whitmanic explorations of brotherly love that Bohan fleshed out in Hartley’s timeline, and with the c. 1905 date given to the painting in the digital catalogue raisonné recently published by the Marsden Hartley Legacy Project <https://tinyurl.com/ywr9p9m7> at Bates College.
It is via the MHLP that I learned there is another. Or was. Whitman bought the Mickle Street house in 1883, and lived there until his death in 1892. For eleven years before that Whitman lived with his brother George in a brick townhouse at 431 Stevens Street. Hartley also painted a portrait of this house. The painting is “documented,” says the MHLP, but no information is known of it, and it is “presumed lost or destroyed.”
<https://tinyurl.com/2m86wka9>
For the painting’s existence, Bohan cites “Somehow A Past,” the title Hartley gave his various autobiographical manuscripts, and that “Hartley intimated that his attraction to the Stevens Street residence was centered on its being the site of Whitman’s [1882] meeting[s] with [Oscar] Wilde.” Which seems highly interesting. But somehow Wilde isn’t even mentioned in the published version of “Somehow A Past.” Turns out Bohan cites the original manuscript, at Yale, which is over 200 handwritten pages, and I just went through about half of it, and found the parts Ryan included, but not the references Bohan makes about another painting, another house, or Wilde. If AI really wants a job, let it transcribe 100-yo handwriting while I do anything else.
Meanwhile, before I contact Bohan over a 20-yo footnote, I feel freer than the MHLP to speculate about this lost Hartley Portrait of Whitman’s House. Would Hartley really have brought panels of different sizes to make his paintings? Is the CR number of Pt-0973 evidence of its late inclusion in a body of work with 960 paintings? Proud Music of A Storm, a c.1908 painting included in Hartley’s first show at 291 Gallery, the only painting Hartley titled with a Whitman poem, which is discussed at length in Bohan’s chapter on the artist’s Whitmanically homosocial landscapes, and also lost, though only listed as “unlocated,” is number Pt-0974. Can we luxuriate in the data-rich treasures of the MHLP, and also ask for a filter of lost or destroyed works? _greg.org

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GHOSTS, NUDES AND LESBIAN PAGEANT QUEENS: – IN PICTURES
<https://tinyurl.com/4ke24knr> _GuardianUK

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77. BUBBLE WRAP by Rainey Knudson
<https://tinyurl.com/yx99zfdm>
It’s mostly—nothing. Just low-status, disposable skin that arrives protectively encasing the thing you actually want. And yet, latent in that mostly nothing is joyful potential. We’ve all stomped on it, savoring the popping sound, the tactile mini-explosions of air. We’ve all squeezed the bubbles free in our hands. Something in the body impulsively craves those sensations.
Like Post-It Notes, bubble wrap was born from failure. In 1957, two engineers were trying to make textured wallpaper for the Beat generation, something futuristic and three-dimensional. They heat-sealed two shower curtains together and got a weird sheet of air pockets nobody wanted to hang on a wall. For a few years, bubble wrap was an oddball substance without a clear function. It was exotic, made of stuff that, in those days, felt like science fiction.
It took a futuristic company to recognize what this new material could do. IBM needed to ship its first mass-produced computers in the early 1960s, and bubble wrap found its ideal purpose. Its strength comes entirely from trapped air that distributes risk, a lab accident that mimics the structural logic of good systems.
But of course, bubble wrap plastic comes from petroleum, from ancient creatures we figured out how to turn into this miraculous, clear material. It has been so good at its job that it taught us, in its small way, about the pitfalls of its own composition. We are still striving to return it to the Earth a little more quickly. A little more cleanly. _TheImpatientReader

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LACMA GALA, C. 1965.
Bless these ladies wearing fur in Los Angeles.
<https://tinyurl.com/58xrny6d> _CarolinaAMiranda

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THE FIRST INSTALLATION AT LACMA’S DAVID GEFFEN GALLERIES IS A REVISIONIST FEVER DREAM
<https://tinyurl.com/36p5ashp>
It’s not only easy to get lost in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s new David Geffen Galleries, it’s inevitable, intentional — and one of the best things about the place.
The museum has deconstructed the traditional, boxy narrative of art history and rendered the story itself a matter of curves and continuities. Art in the collection is freed from its departmental silos and put into conversation across genre lines, place and time.
The museum has physically invalidated the binaries of center and periphery, major and minor arts. In a startling and largely gratifying way, LACMA has done what the poet Audre Lorde, alluding to a different but not unrelated aspect of patriarchal dominance, deemed impossible: used the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house.
The change goes far beyond a remodel. It’s a reinvention, a recalibration, a revisionist fever dream.
The vision conceived by museum director and Chief Executive Michael Govan and architect Peter Zumthor is not perfect, and brings with it a modest set of frustrations, but as a whole, the installation registers as ravishing and bracingly fresh. It thrusts us midstream into the ageless, ceaseless flow of makers worldwide reckoning with life, earth and being.
It prompts us, as we bob about, to reflect on our own proclivities and preconceptions, our patterns of reception and perception.
It compels us to recognize that what matters is not just what we see in the museum but how we see, what pulls us close and why, what private histories we bring to the occasion, what expectations, what tools.
Over two visits to the new building, getting my physical bearings mattered less and less as I surrendered to the generative sensations of not knowing. The museum has produced a dense guidebook to the new galleries, whose title, “Wander,” doubles as invitation and imperative. Even at 430 pages, the book is only minimally useful as an orientation device. For help with that internal navigation, Rebecca Solnit’s moving 2005 book, “A Field Guide to Getting Lost,” proved a better compass.
<https://tinyurl.com/2zdtzpfv>
Solnit, citing the cultural critic Walter Benjamin, writes, “to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery.” She goes on to recall how roaming freely as a child was key to developing self-reliance, which feels apt to the LACMA strategy. We are put in charge of making our own way, through tapestries and tea sets, past ancient jug and contemporary sphinx, without heavy-handed authoritative direction.
The history of art reads here as one long, free verse poem-in-progress, gorgeous and absorbing. Even so, many of the most memorable moments come in the form of cogent micro-essays, smartly curated ensembles of work bearing a legible, lucid premise. Some of these are contained within four (rectilinear) walls; some occupy less demarcated spaces. “Tonal Variations: Photography and Music,” for instance, gathers images by Paul Caponigro, William Eggleston, Lisette Model and others. These artists were also serious pianists, attuned, no matter which instrument they were using, to the qualities of rhythm, pattern and progression.
<https://tinyurl.com/3wwte5dx>
In a section headed “The Global Appeal of Blue-and-White Ceramics,” a long display case houses a timeline articulated sculpturally. The sequence advances from a 9th century bowl made in Iraq to a 13th century vessel from China, a 14th century example from Thailand, another from 15th century Syria, up to work by a 20th century German artist who transformed a functional vessel into personal adornment by cutting a string of beads out of the planar surface of the bowl.
<https://tinyurl.com/2e625s72>
On the wall facing this display is a huge vitrine containing an 18th century Talavera jar from Mexico, paired with a 2025/26 color photograph by Brooklyn-based Stephanie H. Shih. In the still-life composition, a cheeky visual lesson on the collision and convergence of cultures, the jar holds flowers, cactus and edible Mexican treats influenced by Chinese and Filipino flavors.
<https://tinyurl.com/bb2r2yjz>
Shih is one of a handful of artists commissioned to create new work using the museum’s collection as muse. L.A.-based Lauren Halsey is another. Her formidable, untitled 2026 sphinx regally commands its space among ancient Egyptian and Roman sculpture, a marvel of the cross-temporal and cross-spatial, spiked with specific references to Black self-determination.
Setting recent works among older ones is an effective element of LACMA’s overall plan to shed outworn hierarchies. It recasts every piece of art by every artist throughout the single-story space as equally relevant. The seamless integration of old and new feels stealthy, and a touch subversive, a doubling-down on the museum’s approach to time as nonlinear, sinuous and delightfully slippery.
<https://tinyurl.com/3p2anm58>
That said, a few words readily available would help connect the dots without undermining the provocation. Text — where and how it appears, or doesn’t — is my only major complaint about the installation of the new galleries.
Text panels announce, in one or two paragraphs, the themes of each given section: “Images of the Divine in South Asia”; “The Evolution of Abstract Painting in Modern Korea”; “Textile Conversations: Africa and Black America.” Individual object labels are kept minimal, containing only basic identification about each work, no commentary. When asked about this decision during my first walkthrough, Govan replied that more time reading means less time looking — “and we have the internet.” Every thematic text panel has a QR code that links to the Bloomberg Connects app, an aggregate guide to museums and other cultural sites that offers selected, augmented entries.
Determining how much didactic information is insightful and sufficient, and how much constitutes excessive artsplaining, is a delicate, ongoing challenge for museums. Where LACMA landed on this contested plain strikes me as unfortunate and counterproductive.
A few lines of explanation or context on a wall label can add perspective for even the most informed visitor, and provides crucial support to those with less foundational exposure and access to art.
You can take or leave text on a wall without breaking your stride, but text accessed via QR code is another matter. (Never mind that connectivity is spotty inside a sprawling concrete shell, and several times when I tried to get information from the app, I couldn’t.) Encouraging us to shift our gaze from the wall to our devices — to assume that accursed downward tilt of the neck when splendors abound before our eyes — is simply detrimental. It breaks the spell of being fruitfully lost in the present, and retethers us to the digital distractions that dominate our days.
<https://tinyurl.com/4f6cu4s7>
Shouldn’t the imaginative minds that created this space, this opportunity to revel in direct sensual experience, want us to keep our attention where our bodies are? Why this fallback to current convention, when the rest of the experience is about radical reinvention? This feels like a missed opportunity. I’m hoping a more experimental, exploratory approach to providing information, context and interpretation, in keeping with the rest of the enterprise, might yet come.
Does the new structure serve the art? Mostly, very well.
The lighting is varied, treated as another texture in the space, palpable and rich. There’s a generous amount of natural sunlight, but some spots are noticeably dim. Some gallery walls are glazed in deep hues (reddish and eggplant), and the intensity of the color is jarring at first. But neutral, white-box viewing spaces (with even, predictable lighting) can be found elsewhere on LACMA’s campus and pretty much anywhere art is shown. Here, the very irregularity of the interior environment, including the concrete surfaces — richer and more textured than I expected — heightened my alertness. And keener senses tend to make for more consequential experiences.
In deciding how to organize roughly 2,000 works of art across 110,000 square feet of exhibition space, LACMA devised a conceptual schema that isn’t apparent in the galleries themselves. The “Wander” guide maps out the division of the space into four regions correlating to bodies of water: the Indian, Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and the Mediterranean Sea. While the zones and their boundaries aren’t indicated by obvious signage, and I caught one laughable categorization (Ansel Adams’ photographs of the Pacific shoreline landing in the Atlantic section), this schema at least doesn’t get in the way.
And what does work about the propositional structure is its comprehensive realignment. It moves to retire art historical frameworks of the past, dependent on borders between places and times.
Throughout this installation, we are repeatedly reminded of the impact of trade and migration, the fluid movement of resources and belief systems. We’re reminded of porousness and simultaneity, and that all art histories are, in the end, propositional structures.
Here’s a new one, the Geffen Galleries say. Try it out. You might get lost. Indeed, you will get lost. And what wonders await you in the uncertainty and mystery. _Leah Ollman_LATimes

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PRELUDE 2
<https://tinyurl.com/fdd59kjz> _ON&ON / Jeff Weiss

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ANTONY GORMLEY SCULPTURE QUIETLY REMOVED AND SOLD OFF BY UK COUNCIL
<https://tinyurl.com/mryf8cpf>
The right-wing council running the county of Kent in southeast England has removed a key early work by the artist Antony Gormley from a public site. The piece Two Stones (1979-81)—which stood outside the Kent History and Library Centre in Maidstone—was sold back to the artist by the Reform-run Kent County Council for an undisclosed sum, according to a council spokesperson.
The Green Party’s Stuart Jeffery, leader of Maidstone Borough Council, told the Byline Times
that KCC removed the work “quietly”, adding: “It disappeared sometime last week [week beginning 6 April] and then we found it missing.”
Kent County Council said in a statement: “[The council] recognises the cultural significance of Two Stones and Gormley’s connection to Maidstone, therefore the decision to sell [the work] back to the artist was taken carefully as part of KCC’s ongoing work to manage the significant financial pressures facing Kent… the private sale enables the council to raise income without increasing costs for residents or reducing frontline services.” The council faces a severe budget deficit and Reform has yet to deliver the tax cuts promised ahead of winning control of Kent in last spring’s local elections.
Gormley was commissioned in 1979 by Kent County Council (KCC) and Arts Council England to create the piece while teaching at Maidstone College of Art. It was the first public commission by the artist. Gormley went onto create one of the UK's most famous public works of art, the Angel of the North (1998) in Gateshead.
Gormley declined to comment on the sale of the work. The work is still listed on the artist’s website as being a “permanent installation [at] Kent History and Library Centre, Maidstone, England”.
Paula Orrell, the national director of the Contemporary Visual Arts Network, told: “This is deeply disappointing, as a former Maidstone School of Art student. Selling public artworks risks hollowing out our shared cultural life. In ten to 15 years, our sector could look unrecognizable _ArtNewspaper

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IT'S GOOD HAIR DAY
so hop to it, people.
Fashions in Trenton: Hair,
photograph by Mariette Pathy Allen, 1968.
A dream divine!
<https://tinyurl.com/e7btbfch> _‪PeterHuestis