OLD NEWS

CAT'S
<https://tinyurl.com/3k5h8mcu> _DavidShrigley

>>>

IS THIS GIRL’S INDELIBLE EXPRESSION A REBUKE TO MALE BALONEY? by Sebastian Smee
<https://tinyurl.com/ywuy96px>
Watchful, assessing and faintly disgusted, this young Irish girl <https://tinyurl.com/y226uaav> stares out of a tight frame, her own fiery interest in a world we can’t see burning through our voyeuristic interest in her.
She was painted in 1860 by Ford Madox Brown, who had encountered her selling oranges on a London street. He dressed her (unless she was already so dressed) in a shawl typical of impoverished Irish immigrants, then put a cornflower in her hand.
Brown was at that time nearing completion of his masterpiece, “Work,” <https://tinyurl.com/y5abyvc6> a vast Victorian set-piece heroizing manual labor into which he put 13 years of his own labor. Although he was never a full member, he was associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a band of young painters who, at mid-century, kicking against sterile academic tradition, packed their pictures with naturalistic detail, high-keyed color, heavy symbolism and high moral purpose.
<https://tinyurl.com/cek6kn5t>
“Work” was Brown’s attempt to grapple with Thomas Carlyle’s “Condition of England” problem — basically, what to do about the coexistence of England’s exploding material wealth and shocking conditions for a majority of the population, along with a widely felt crisis of spiritual purpose.
Carlyle, whose account of the French Revolution <https://tinyurl.com/3p4jdyfy> left the British recoiling from the prospect of class revolt, put all his faith in the idea of the heroic: He believed in “Great Men” and their great deeds.
In “Work,” which hangs in the Manchester Art Gallery, Brown painted a paean to the heroic nature of labor. The men at the center of the picture, armed with shovels or righteously glugging beer, are like gods who have deigned to install a modern sewerage. But Brown fills out his cast with members of the leisure class, orphans and effeminate street sellers — people (we are to surmise) who haven’t yet learned the value of labor.
Commissioned by Thomas Plint, a stockbroker who was also an evangelical lay preacher, “Work” (which features Carlyle himself in a vignette off to one side), is an astonishing production. But it’s also a painting you would use to demonstrate what’s so awful about a great deal of 19th-century British art: It’s moralistic, hypocritical and drenched in clichés.
“The Irish Girl,” on the other hand, is one of the glories of the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut. Brown met the girl while looking for subjects for “Work,” much of which he painted on location in London’s Hampstead neighborhood.
These were small studies of women or children, intended for domestic interiors. In the same year he painted “The Irish Girl,” which measures a little under a square foot, Brown made a related study — intended as a counterpoint to this disreputable girl — of an English boy <https://tinyurl.com/4evum5e4> (the artist’s own son Oliver) dressed in fine clothes, holding a toy whip and a spinning top.
If “The English Boy” recalls Hans Holbein <https://tinyurl.com/33en64xk> , “The Irish Girl” harks back to the 17th-century Dutch tradition of “tronies” — head studies of anonymous sitters that were, for the artist, above all exercises in light, form and expression; Vermeer’s “Girl With a Pearl Earring” <https://tinyurl.com/yeym3k22> is the most celebrated example.
“The Irish Girl” could well be renamed — with a nod to Vermeer — “Girl With a Cornflower.” But she won’t be so easily turned into a male artist’s cipher.
In fact, Brown’s painting strikes me as a beautiful (and, no doubt, unintentional) rebuke to Victorian heroism.
Look at the subtle, questioning kink in her eyebrow: I’ve seen this expression on the faces of wives and girlfriends at dinner parties as the men at the table hold forth.
This girl is an intelligent skeptic, a gut-level doubter, profoundly unimpressed by opinionated, turgid prose stylists like Carlyle (if she were ever to read them) and by God-bothering stockbrokers like Plint, and disgusted, no doubt, by the Victorian gentlemen who, observing her poverty and the single flower she is holding, would have assumed she was also selling sex.
But credit to Brown. The mottled reds and creams of her face, captured in exquisitely aerated, multidirectional brushstrokes that flow across the contours of her face like magnetized iron filings; the subtle touches of blue in her exploding dark hair and in the whites of her eyes, both chiming with the cornflower; her meaty chin, her glossy brow and her electric, hazel eyes … they leave you in no doubt: This guy could really paint. _WashingtonPost

>>>

THE MOUNT WASHINGTON POST
<https://tinyurl.com/vzjf3a3z> _LisaAnneAuerbach

>>>

A NEW CANON-BUSTING VISION OF MINIMALISM by Louisa Buck
<https://tinyurl.com/3vbp3hj3>
Under the grand glass dome of the 19th-century Bourse de Commerce in Paris rises a pristine cone of salt, nearly two metres high. Nearby, a low circular mound of powdery yellow ochre sits next to a hemisphere of cracked red clay. Opposite, a wall of translucent fragrant beeswax curves away towards a circular enclosure formed from interwoven branches, foliage and berries. This dramatic, delicate quintet of works by the 81-year-old US artist Meg Webster fa new canon-busting vision of Minimalism “Meg is an incredible figure whose work deserves to be better known, Her work continues to investigate geometric forms but only using natural materials that are entirely locally sourced.” Webster was taught by Richard Serra and Donald Judd and for years her poetic and environmentally conscious work was eclipsed by these mentors _ArtNewspaper

>>>

CHICKEN DEKALB, IL
<https://tinyurl.com/yvydsp7e> _RuralIndexingProject

>>>

HENRI ROUSSEAU’S THE SLEEPING GYPSY (1897).
<https://tinyurl.com/etn6cn2u>
One of the most famous stories regarding Henri Rousseau goes something like this: Picasso, after finding Rousseau’s large-scale Portrait of a Woman (1895) for sale as canvas reuse, hosted a roaring banquet for him at Picasso’s Bateau-Lavoir studio in Montmartre. “Honour to Rousseau!” read the banner that hung behind his chair. While Rousseau was both championed and mocked by these artists 40 years his junior, the anecdote illustrates the curious position the self-taught artist has occupied, in his own time and after, between official and unofficial, ignorance and expertise, admiration and pity.
For decades, Rousseau held a modest post in the French civil service, collecting taxes on goods brought into Paris. The job would later earn him the nickname “Le Douanier,” or customs officer, though the inflated title was a misnomer. He began as a “Sunday painter,” working in his spare hours and, eventually, during work itself. In the 1880s, he exhibited some paintings, and when he retired in 1893, at the age of 49, it was to pursue art full-time.
<https://tinyurl.com/46zbw6u6>
Rousseau’s portraits, urban landscapes, and lush jungle scenes with their tightly woven foliage, ripe fruit, and exotic animals are enchanting pictures alive with mystery and sincerity. His distinctive “realist” style—not the class-conscious scenes of contemporary life that defined the earlier French tradition—embraced a flat, formally rigorous, artificially lit, and, at times, overfinished quality whose effects, with their unnatural colors and planar shapes, were often derided as simplistic or childlike. “Monsieur Rousseau paints with his feet with his eyes closed,” wrote one scornful reviewer.
Although Rousseau submitted two paintings to the Salon of 1885, they were not accepted, and the artist would never show in the official academic venue. Instead, the inclusive Société des Artistes Indépendants, a notably jury-free exhibition, displayed the artworks he dutifully submitted almost every year.
In 1897, Rousseau presented The Sleeping Gypsy (1897), one of his most astonishing paintings. In the large canvas, a woman traveller dressed in a multicolored tunic sleeps nestled in a desert dune. She lies parallel to the picture plane, and her right arm, drawn across her body, still grasps her walking stick—a gesture that suggests both the day’s exertion and a quiet readiness, even in sleep. Good thing, for a lion—eyes wide, tail inquisitively erect—has just come upon the subject. He pauses to sniff the air around her, but she remains unaware, lost to a dream world he cannot access. Beside her head rests a lute and a vase of drinking water, and these humble provisions further signal her vulnerability. Behind them, a band of water marks the intervening space between the distant hills, whose smooth curves and abstracted surfaces seem to shrink beneath the weight of the expansive sky. Crisp, nocturnal blues are studded with just six white stars—punctuations that pale beside the reflective moon inscribed with the faint contours of a face.
<https://tinyurl.com/ydvnwabe>
Lost in the period after the exhibition, the painting was discovered in 1923 by Louis Vauxcelles (the critic who coined both Fauvism and Cubism) at a coal dealer’s, then sold the following year to Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler’s Galerie Simon. It was here that Picasso first saw the painting. The American collector John Quinn bought the picture, but it would be his last, and following his death, it returned to auction in 1926. The poet Jean Cocteau, a noted friend of Picasso, wrote an introduction to the exhibition catalogue where his enthusiastic praise for the painting—among the loveliest and most poetic—reinforces its numinous aura: “The Quinn sale includes something phenomenal, unique, the unmoving hub, the fixed point, the center of centers, where motion spins in place suspended, the rose at the eye of the storm, the sleep of all sleep, silence of all silence: The Sleeping Gypsy of Henri Rousseau.”
Such high acclaim, in terms both ultimate and absolute, would be echoed by Alfred Barr, who secured the painting for the Museum of Modern Art in 1939, and in whose collection it remains today. Writing in 1955, Barr recalled: “I look back upon with the keenest satisfaction The Sleeping Gypsy by Henri Rousseau: indeed, I believe it to be one of the most remarkable canvases of the 19th century.”
Though he sometimes claimed otherwise, Rousseau never left France, and his exotic locales and wild animals were drawn from various source material, including zoo animals, taxidermy displays, postcard reproductions, and scientific illustrations.
A known model for the lion in The Sleeping Gypsy was one of the two cast-bronze sculptures by Henri Alfred Jacquemart, installed in the 1850s above a fountain near the entrance to the Jardin des Plantes. In that sculpture, the lion bends down, having just discovered the limp foot of a corpse buried in the sand. Rousseau retains the same posture—head lowered to sniff the recumbent woman and tail poised in interest—but he elides much of the contoured musculature, detailed pelt, and thick, tufted mane of the original. Comparisons are frequently made to a stuffed animal.
This is characteristic of Rousseau’s flat style. Whether due to inability or disinterest, he eschewed the conventions of depth, perspective, and the faithful modelling of three-dimensionality—effects often pointed out by detractors as evidence of his clumsy lack of technical refinement. Yet this is precisely Rousseau’s beauty: the artist assimilates everything into his distinctive world. For the avant-garde artists who no longer regarded fidelity to nature as art’s highest aspirations, Rousseau’s eccentric non-naturalism felt admirably transgressive, in line with their aim to expand the categories of art.
<https://tinyurl.com/yrdecthn>
Other works, such as The Dream (1910), also in MoMA’s collection, or Surprised! (1891), in London’s National Gallery, exemplify Rousseau’s ability to generate a dense rhythm through the rich patterning of interlocking foliage. The Sleeping Gypsy trades this surface abundance for a more limitless ambiance, where simple grandeur is made all the more pleasing through the deliberate echoing of forms.
The harmony suggested by the nomad’s serene expression is reinforced by the calming repetition of the horizontal planes of the barren yet placid landscape. Even the lion, disruptive as he may seem, is ultimately absorbed into this compositional order.
Other relationships also hold the image in balance. The slightly oblique position of the woman mirrors the angle of both her staff and her lute. Her multicolored dress, with its creamy stripes of coral and cerulean, reinforces the direction and contour of her body. It forms a perpendicular intersection with the lion’s stringy mane, a nexus of connection for the unlikely pair.
<https://tinyurl.com/mshwyrpa>
The nocturnal encounter of The Sleeping Gypsy radiates a foreboding uncertainty. We hold our breath, unsure if the chance visitor is a harmless passerby, benevolent guardian, or menacing threat. His single, wide eye suggests a kind of intensity, a flicker of danger under the surface.
Rousseau began including inscriptions with his paintings, afraid salon viewers might misunderstand the pictures. For The Sleeping Gypsy, he wrote: “The feline, though ferocious, is loathe to leap upon its prey, who, overcome by fatigue, lies in a deep sleep.” The line clarifies his intentions, but another possibility, suggested by Cocteau in 1926, questions whether the entire scene is a projected dream.
The painting’s dreamlike atmosphere certainly anticipates Surrealism, and indeed André Breton, always keen to fold an artist into the Surrealist machine, would see in Rousseau a precursor to the movement, alongside Giorgio de Chirico. Rousseau seemingly accomplished what Breton described in his first manifesto of 1924, “the future resolution of the states of dream and reality.” The Surrealists’ enthusiasm for Rousseau also reflected broader modernist interests in the exotic and the outsider; Rousseau’s self-taught status tied him to beliefs in the unspoiled creativity of “primitive” art, folk art, and the art of children, all positioned in defiance of academic tradition.
In 1926, contemplating the meaning of The Sleeping Gypsy, the critic Henry McBride wondered, “How to measure its peculiarly psychic force?” He continued, “Like music it may be interpreted variously and all interpretations shall be correct.” This idea that Rousseau’s painting could have multiple interpretations, that it could be beyond interpretation, captures the very quality that gives the work its power, and like the Surrealists, be open to the dream or unconscious.
<https://tinyurl.com/35s2pd96>
For most of his life, Rousseau was miserably poor. In retirement, though he received a small state pension, it was not sufficient, and he supplemented his income by performing as a street musician or by giving violin and drawing lessons. Often, he would spend the last of his funds on art supplies, using them conservatively.
In July 1898, Rousseau attempted to sell The Sleeping Gypsy to his hometown of Laval, offering the “very poetic” painting to their mayor in a letter. By pricing it between 1,800 and 2,000 francs, Rousseau was asking a considerable sum, near what the successful academic painters would charge. While he hoped that Laval could have “a souvenir of one of its children,” he did not complete the sale.
For Rousseau, despite a life shadowed by judgment and criticism, he appears to have maintained a steadfast self-belief that enabled him to persevere, determined to achieve acceptance. The sense of serenity that settles over the gypsy, of rest earned from a hard day’s labor, feels inseparable from Rousseau’s own tireless efforts. Like the artist, she is a musician, and though her means are modest, she exudes a quiet contentment.
<https://tinyurl.com/2ev9xxe3>
Towards the end of Rousseau’s life, his status slowly began to change. In 1905, when he exhibited The Hungry Lion Attacking an Antelope (1905) at the juried Salon d’Automne, the same exhibition where the Fauves would be named, he received ample ridicule. Only now, however, he shared the same kind of ridicule as his avant-garde peers, a younger generation of artists starting to admire him.
It’s against this backdrop that Picasso held the famously raucous banquet, with Apollinaire, Gertrude Stein, and Georges Braque among the attendees gathered in noisy celebration—the overfilled room thick with drink and decorations. Rousseau, lifted by the joyous atmosphere, took up his violin. Overcome with pride, he turned to Picasso and declared: “We are the greatest painters of our time, you in the Egyptian style, I in the modern.”
_Bobby McGee _artnet

>>>

CHAÏM SOUTINE LITTLE GUY
<https://tinyurl.com/yu6bzbm3>
Chaïm Soutine was one of the first artists I found instead of being taught, and I am still enthralled by the intense, uphoved world of his paintings. [His real life, kind of a bummer, tbqh.]
Anyway, after pg5-ish reblogged Soutine’s Two Children on a Tree Trunk (1942-3) into my dashboard this morning, I went looking for it, and found instead this great little painting of an unsettled little guy, which sold at Christie’s in 2016. _greg.org

>>>

WEXNER RESPONDS TO EPSTEIN CO-CONSPIRATOR EMAIL, DENYING INVOLVEMENT
Despite a newly released email that mentions Les Wexner alongside potential "co-conspirators" of convicted child sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, a spokesperson for Wexner said he cooperated with authorities in the federal investigation of his former financial adviser.
The FBI email message mentioning Wexner was sent a day after Epstein's 2019 arrest and was about possible accomplices of Epstein. Its subject line was "co-conspirators," and several names throughout are redacted.
Wexner was "neither a co-conspirator nor target in any respect" to the investigation, the assistant U.S. Attorney in charge of the Epstein probe told Wexner's attorney at the time, according to a statement from Wexner's representative.
Wexner provided the Federal Bureau of Investigation with background on his relationship with Epstein and was never contacted again by authorities, the statement said.
<https://tinyurl.com/u356m2sr>
The email, released Dec. 23 as part of the Department of Justice's Epstein records dump ordered by Congress, shows correspondence between an unnamed FBI agent and another unnamed official.
The first email, sent at 12:24 p.m., July 7, 2019, by an agent in New York asked for an "an update on the status of the 10 co-conspirators." A few hours later at 5:32 p.m., an agent responded and said that agents had made contact with a number of people, but most of the names were redacted by the DOJ.
The agent wrote that someone would be in touch with Maxwell in Boston, presumably referring to Epstein's now convicted accomplice and former girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell. At the end of the email, though, the agent mentioned Wexner, who worked with Epstein for many years.
"I do not know about Ohio contacting Wexner," the agent wrote.
Wexner was the founder of L Brands, which previously included Victoria's Secret, Abercrombie & Fitch and Bath & Body Works. He stepped down as chief executive officer of the company in 2020.
Wexner has long maintained that he severed ties in 2007 with Epstein over sex abuse allegations. Emails that came to light earlier this month, however, show that four days before Epstein pleaded guilty in Florida in 2008 for soliciting sex from a minor, he received an email from Wexner.
Representatives for Wexner previously have pointed to a 2019 news conference in which Brad Edwards, an attorney who has represented a number of Epstein victims, said that he had doubts about claims that Wexner was aware of Epstein's crimes. Edwards called Wexner's denial that he knew about Epstein's activities "very highly likely to be true." _Max Filby_Columbus Dispatch

>>>

EDWARD HOPPER, CHRISTMAS CARD, 1928
<https://tinyurl.com/mamfp23c> _MichaelLobel

>>>

COLLECTOR LESLIE WEXNER DENIES BEING JEFFREY EPSTEIN’S ‘CO-CONSPIRATOR’
<https://tinyurl.com/yx2avfup>
A recently released set of files related to Jeffrey Epstein implied that the convicted sex criminal’s ties to collector Leslie Wexner ran deeper than some previously thought, placing new scrutiny on the former Victoria’s Secret CEO.
One email from an FBI official that was released to the public this week referred to potential “co-conspirators” who had worked with Epstein. While the email was heavily redacted, like other files released by the Department of Justice on December 23, the message clearly refers to Wexner, the namesake collector behind the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio.
Epstein and Wexner’s professional relationship is well-documented. Epstein managed Wexner’s finances and even acted as a trustee to the businessman’s foundation. Epstein at one point owned a home near Wexner’s estate.
But some have claimed that Wexner may have been aware of Epstein’s crimes. In her memoir, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, one of Epstein’s victims, mentioned Wexner and urged readers not to “be fooled by those… who say they didn’t know.”
Though best known for leading brands such as Victoria’s Secret and Abercrombie, Wexner and his wife Abigail are also recognized for their art collection, appearing on the annual Top 200 Collectors list each year between 2003 and 2018. They have purchased major works by modernists such as Pablo Picasso, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, and more. _ARTnews

>>>

LES WEXNER, COLUMBUS RETAIL MAGNATE AND ONE OF OHIO'S RICHEST MEN, THROUGH THE YEARS
<https://tinyurl.com/ye2yat8u> _Columbus Dispatch

>>>

OLD MONEY LOSES THE PLOT: THE ROTHSCHILD MINI LOUVRE MELTDOWN
This is what happens when Succession energy collides with RHONY delusion and no one is willing to back down. A long-simmering Rothschild family dispute has gone fully public, and suddenly centuries of discretion are out the window. At the center of it all is a secret art trove inside the Château de Pregny overlooking Lake Geneva that insiders have described as a “mini Louvre.” According to The Guardian, the fight pits 93 year old Baroness Nadine de Rothschild against her daughter in law Ariane de Rothschild over who controls the collection and what its future should be.
<https://tinyurl.com/yc5rs3uv>
Per The Guardian, the collection includes Louis XVI furniture and paintings attributed to Goya, Rembrandt, Fragonard, El Greco, and Boucher, works that have spent decades quietly doing their job as inherited power symbols. What makes this so Art Daddy delicious is not the art itself but the sudden personality shift. A family famous for never explaining anything is now litigating legacy in public, complete with moral positioning, foundation talk, and subtle digs about stewardship. Everyone insists they are protecting culture while very clearly fighting over relevance, authorship, and who gets to be the tasteful matriarch in charge of the narrative. It’s philanthropy as a plot device, culture as currency, and a reminder that when old money cracks, it doesn’t get humble. It gets louder, messier, and somehow even more convinced it’s right.
_TheArtDaddy

>>>

GOOD
<https://tinyurl.com/4xv8ptmj> _DavidShrigley