OLD NEWS

BUD SCALES
<https://tinyurl.com/2sbvew3x>
Bud scales are modified leaves that cover and protect immature leaves, stems, or flowers within a woody plant bud from dehydration and damage during dormancy. They are present from the development of buds in the summer until spring, when they are shed as the new growth within them emerges.
During the winter months, the appearance of buds and the arrangement, color and number of their bud scales can be helpful sources of tree and shrub identification. Most woody plants, including American Beech, have “imbricate” scales which overlap like shingles. Others, like dogwoods and Nannyberry have two or three scales that meet in the middle without overlapping (“valvate”). Still other buds, like those of Hobblebush and Witch Hazel, lack any bud scales and their buds are referred to as “naked.” Willows, whose buds are just beginning to swell and open, are unusual in that they have only one bud scale which consists of two fused scales. _NaturallyCurious

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LOOK
<https://tinyurl.com/4ara799n> _DavidShrigley

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EDVARD MUNCH’S FORMATIVE INFLUENCE ON PAULA REGO REVEALED IN UNEARTHED PAINTING
<https://tinyurl.com/3rabcu8e>
He is the towering modern artist of the Nordics; she the most influential figurative painter of the Iberian peninsula. But for decades, no one realised there was a line of influence between Edvard Munch and Paula Rego.
Now, the discovery of an early painting and a previously overlooked letter by the late Rego has revealed the formative role the Norwegian painter played in shaping the Portuguese artist’s work and career.
When Rego died in 2022, aged 87, it wasn’t widely known that, 71 years earlier, Munch’s paintings The Scream and Inheritance had deeply affected her when she visited a 1951 exhibition of his work at the Tate Gallery in London.
In a newly unearthed letter, 16-year-old Rego – who was attending a finishing school in Kent – recounted a school trip to the Tate to her mother, Maria, who was in Portugal. “What impressed me most was an exhibition there by a modern Norwegian painter, Edvard Munch,” she wrote in late 1951. Munch had died seven years earlier, aged 80.
“I don’t know if you are familiar with that quite famous painting The Scream – that’s his – and he paints almost everything in that genre; he also has many engravings and drawings. But it’s so impressive, so impressive that you can’t imagine. Above all, a painting called Inheritance, which shows a seated woman crying with a skeleton child, all painted green, in her lap.”
<https://tinyurl.com/2945smvn>
About a year later, when families in her native Portugal were suffering from a severe drought, Rego used a colour palette reminiscent of The Scream to paint an open-mouthed pregnant woman carrying a skeletal infant and turning her face to the sun.
Rego rediscovered the small 65cm by 22cm painting, which she titled Drought, in 2015, when she and her son, Nick Willing, were tidying Rego’s family home in Portugal.
It was placed in a portfolio and left in storage in her London studio until after her death. Last October, it was unearthed by Willing and the head of her estate, and has never been on public display.
<https://tinyurl.com/mstm866x>
He showed it to Kari J Brandtzæg, an art historian at Norway’s Munch Museum, who immediately saw a connection to The Scream and Anxiety by Munch. “It was so obvious in the use of red and yellow and also how it was painted, very roughly, as Munch did in his 1890s paintings,” Brandtzæg said.
The painting will be one of the stars of Dance Among Thorns, the first major museum exhibition in the Nordic region devoted to Rego, which opens at the Munch Museum in Oslo
When Brandtzæg was asked to curate the show 18 months ago, she had no idea Rego had encountered the work of Munch – who died in 1944 – during her formative years as an artist.
But as soon as she started choosing Rego’s paintings for the exhibition, she was struck by the similarities between the composition and themes of Rego’s The Dance (1988), and Munch’s The Dance of Life (1925), and Rego’s Time – Past and Present (1990) <https://tinyurl.com/3njzew6d> and Munch’s History <https://tinyurl.com/58erz4cs> (1914).
“There is a kind of dialogue with Munch’s pictures. It is almost as though Rego is having a silent conversation with Munch’s visual world,” said Brandtzæg.
Willing confirmed that his late mother admired Munch – but no matter how hard Brandtzæg looked, “we couldn’t find any traces that she went to Oslo or other possible places to see Munch”.
“There was no concrete evidence connected to when and how Rego might have experienced Munch’s work,” she said.
She had almost given up researching the relationship when the discovery of Drought in October convinced her that her hunch was right. “It was like working as a detective,” she said. “I got butterflies in my stomach. I was very excited.”
Knowing that the portrait was painted when Rego was a teenager, she decided to refine her research to the 1950s. “It was one of her first paintings and it was so visually connected to Munch.”
<https://tinyurl.com/vytp976n> _GuardianUK

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THE MOUNT WASHINGTON POST
<https://tinyurl.com/2fwtpdk2> _LisaAnneAuerbach

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EL GRECO PAINTING FOUND HIDDEN BENEATH A FORGERY IN THE VATICAN
<https://tinyurl.com/y5hcxr8n>
This weekend, the Vatican revealed a newly discovered painting by master Mannerist El Greco, long hidden underneath a forgery. This small work of oil on board, titled The Redeemer (c. 1590–95), turned up in the Pope’s home. The newfound relic features in a two-artwork exhibition titled “El Greco in the Mirror: Two Paintings in Dialogue,” now open at the Papal Palace of Castel Gandolfo,
The Redeemer ended up with the Holy See courtesy of José María Sánchez de Muniaín Gil, a Spanish official, aesthetics professor, and author who donated the work to Pope Paul VI in 1967. For decades, it hung in the Hall of Ambassadors, amid the Pope’s apartment on the top floor of the Apostolic Palace.
“Since its arrival in the Vatican, the work had never undergone restoration or scientific studies,” Having therefore noted some conservation problems during a routine check-up, it was decided to carry out a complete restoration to verify its general state of preservation and study its execution technique.
Upon closer inspection, Zarelli and her colleague Paolo Violini realized that an unknown forger had obscured the painting’s original Christ figure with their own rendition.
<https://tinyurl.com/yc757u2j>
Once the overpainting was removed, the restoration crew was able to recover El Greco’s original layers. “All the data, compared with that of other paintings by the artist, confirmed that the work was entirely authentic,” Zarelli and the team’s director Fabio Morresi wrote in press materials. Vatican curator Fabrizio Biferali, who organized “El Greco in the Mirror,” emphasized that “The Vatican Redeemer should be considered in relation to three other versions of the subject conceived by El Greco at the end of the 16th century.” These include examples at Národní Galerie in Prague, the McNay Art Institute in San Antonio, Texas, and the Museo San Telmo in San Sebastián, Spain.
Using high-resolution imaging, experts also found two more discarded compositions beneath The Redeemer—one echoing Apparition of the Virgin to Saint Lawrence (c. 1580), and another evoking Saint Dominic in Adoration of the Crucifix (c. 1590).
Like this, The Redeemer offers a window into El Greco’s working process. Four small holes along the work’s top and bottom edges suggest it served as “a sort of portable altarpiece,” Biferali noted. All things considered, the crew reckons El Greco painted The Redeemer between 1590 and 1595, more than a decade after leaving Italy for Spain.
<https://tinyurl.com/mvzbdvu2>
Now, the newly surfaced and restored El Greco is facing off with a tempera painting of St. Francis of Assisi that the master icon-maker created some 20 years prior, shortly after arriving in Rome. Together, they honor both Pope Leo XIV and Saint Francis—on the 800th anniversary of his death—while demonstrating El Greco’s stylistic evolution, which paved the way for modern painting. _Vittoria Benzine _artnet

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LIVE BAIT MULGA, AL
<https://tinyurl.com/32bcudzy> _RuralIndexingProject

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52. CARMEL WILSON, GOSSIPS by Rainey Knudson
<https://tinyurl.com/mu9743tr>
This is not a picture made from bits of fabric appliquéd onto craft paper. This is a watercolor painting of a picture made from bits of fabric appliquéd onto craft paper. It is astounding.
During the Great Depression, the Federal Art Project, a tiny department within the Works Progress Administration, hit upon the idea of hiring artists to catalog American material culture, mostly by accurately painting objects in watercolor. The Index of American Design employed roughly 1,000 artists between 1935 and 1942. These artists produced some 18,000 images, half of what was originally envisioned before funding was cut. This archive of realistic paintings includes an astonishing variety of American crafts—butter molds, ship figureheads, carousel horses, ox yokes, weathervanes, and countless other types of objects—which eventually made its way to the National Gallery of Art, our national art collection, our patrimony. It’s difficult to imagine such a project occurring today. But there’s no reason it couldn’t.
The artists who made the paintings in the Index of American Design are all but unknown. In some cases there is almost no biographical information available online—not even where they lived or when they died. They’re certainly not household names. One wonders: in the future, what art will be remembered from the 20th century? Will it be the Abstract Expressionism we’ve all been taught to genuflect in front of, or will it be things barely known today, things like an unsung treasure trove of works and their quiet spectacle of skill?
<https://tinyurl.com/3nbydnxk> _TheImpatientReader

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EDVARD MUNCH, THE SUN, 1911.
<https://tinyurl.com/z86u4hp3> _PublicDomainReview

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WILLIAM DORIANI LOVED FLAG DAY by greg
<https://tinyurl.com/4tbjuy4j>
In the 1930s Sidney Janis was a garmento and an art collector who joined the junior committee of The Museum of Modern Art, which actually organized and sponsored shows, including one of his own collection, which the museum people did feel weird about, so he agreed to take his name off it. And there was a show of what Janis called Primitive Art, because, as the Modernist thinking of the time went, self-taught painters had access to individualist intuition and aesthetic purity untainted by History and the Academy and the pollution of ever having stepped foot into a museum. And Janis became known for scouring the countryside and the outer boroughs, running down tips on self-taught artists, whose work he either bought up en masse, or whose careers he quietly shepherded into the galleries of his friends.
Anyway Janis found William Doriani’s paintings on a handrail on MacDougal Street during an art street fair in the Village, then he set him up with a show, and started hyping him as one of his Primitivist finds. Others include Morris Hirshfield and Grandma Moses [who, tbf, was getting art world recognition before Janis began promoting her.]
According to the only thing I can find instantly, Janis’s 12-page chapter on him in the 1942 exhibition catalogue They Taught Themselves: American Primitive Painters of the 20th Century, Doriani had been an opera singer, and—oh hey, just like Jasper Johns—he had a dream to make a painting, and then he woke up and painted it. That was in 1931. Many of Doriani’s paintings depicted theater, performance, and spectacle.
But the reason he painted Flag Day in 1935 was because when he returned to the US after studying and singing in Europe for 13 years, the day he got home was Flag Day. And he just loves America and a parade and the flag and Flag Day . “And,” Janis concluded, “if the marchers resemble French school boys doing the German goose-step, it is immaterial, for the flags they carry are unmistakable.”
Janis went on to become an extremely influential dealer—the only dealer, I think, who was also a MoMA trustee—and he and his wife donated around a hundred works to the museum in 1967, including Flag Day.
This dealer/trustee/donor thing, I knew all about, but not the Janis’s prewar history. Or Doriani, who I saw for the first time in a tumblr post a couple of weeks ago. [ZOMG look at this one some Janis heirs just donated to the Folk Art Museum, it’s title is Two Flags, but one of them is somehow not the Ukrainian flag of Doriani’s birth.]
I just wanted to post one quick blurb about one interesting painting, and now the rickety shallowness of this entire historiographic process just really bugs me. _greg.org

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MARCIN MACIEJOWSKI - WOMAN DRESSING , 2013
<https://tinyurl.com/35as5mr3> _RabihAlameddine

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MASTERPIECE BY REMBRANDT’S STAR PUPIL
<https://tinyurl.com/4vx9pfzn>
There’s a black-and-white photograph from 1945 of American soldiers stood outside the salt mines of Altaussee, Austria, propping up a pair of oil paintings. The Art of Painting (1666–68) draws the eye first, its drapery and checkerboard floor immediately identifying it as a Vermeer. In the foreground, a Monuments Man holds a work by Vermeer’s contemporary, Willem Drost, which offers a thickly bearded man leaning forward with an intense expression.
That work, Man With a Plumed Red Beret (1654), has now joined the Leiden Collection’s encyclopedic roster of 17th-century Dutch painting. Since its founding in 2003, the Leiden Collection, named for Rembrandt’s birthplace, has steadily amassed paintings by the Dutch master and his circle, with its founder Thomas Kaplan calling the Drost a “capstone acquisition.”
“This exquisite painting displays how Drost, like his teacher, could capture a sitter’s distinct individuality with inner life and contemplative potenc [The painting] shows Drost’s own unique sensibility, evident in his carefully modulated brushwork and striking use of color.”
<https://tinyurl.com/ut6jyd2p>
Though less well known that some of Rembrandt’s other pupils, such as Ferdinand Bol and Carel Fabritius, Drost’s reputation has risen in recent decades on the back of scholarship acknowledging the range and depth of his painting. Part of this oversight has been down to the Amsterdam-born painter’s tragic biography: he died of pneumonia in Venice in 1659 at the age of 25. Man With a Plumed Red Beret was painted after Drost had left Rembrandt’s workshop and shortly before his departure for Italy.
As with most Drost works from his latter Amsterdam period, the man’s unusual dress marks it as a tronie, a depiction of a figure in an exaggerated dress or pose. Drost offers a man in motion, one hand curves at his hip, the other gestures performatively, and he seems on the cusp of speaking. As the Rijksmuseum researcher, Jonathan Bikker, noted: “Drost demonstrates a command of the ‘rough manner’ that is indistinguishable from Rembrandt’s own work of the mid-1650s.” _artnet

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WHEN YOUR MOM MAKES YOU PUT YOUR TOYS AWAY
[Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, MS 425, fol. 48r, France ca. 1470-75]
<https://tinyurl.com/495ebjst> _JesseLocker

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"PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT" AT THE GETTY by William Poundstone
<http://tiny.cc/usf0101>
The Getty is hosting a large, ambitious photography show organized by the National Gallery of Art. Building on recent acquisitions by the NGA and Getty, "Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955–1985" conjoins photojournalism, agitprop, and advertising as well as photography-as-art. Its point of departure is the Black Arts Movement, a literary and political zeitgeist centering on poet, playwright, and essayist Amiri Baraka and his circle, c. 1965 to 1975. The exhibition expands that timeline to a full three decades and of course, centers on visual expression. Many of the activists, writers, and performers of the era recognized the importance of photography in crafting public personas and promoting social change.
<http://tiny.cc/wsf0101>
As shown here the result is occasionally unfocused. There's not much sense of chronology, which is after all useful for organizing historical narratives. Instead, objects are displayed according to themes so open-ended that it's hard to keep track of them. On the art-for-art's-sake side, the show has multiple inventive artists who are far from overexposed (Anthony Barboza, Adger Cowans, Louis Draper, Ming Smith, etc.) I found myself wishing their works had been displayed together. A handful of big, colorful mixed-media works tend to upstage the smaller B&W prints that are the show's core.
<http://tiny.cc/1tf0101>
One clever bit that works is a listening station for period jazz, funk, and soul, with original album art.
<http://tiny.cc/7tf0101>
Barbara DuMetz was one of the first Black women to achieve success in advertising photography. This image was used in an ad for Kraft's "Natural Cheese" that ran in the March 1978 issue of Ebony.
Despite the exhibition's DC-LA connection, the show has only a couple of images from the Johnson Publishing Company (Ebony, Jet) archives, now preserved by the Getty Research Institute and the Smithsonian's Museum of African American History and Culture.
<http://tiny.cc/atf0101>
<http://tiny.cc/btf0101>
Kwame Brathwaite popularized the "Black is Beautiful" catchphrase with images of elegant Black women, upending the editorial standards of white fashion. A male counterpart is Ben Jones' Stand/Funk Elegance, a 1975 screen print. Pan-African colors frame three images of dancer Larry Sanders in a soul-era paragone.
<http://tiny.cc/ftf0101>
Harlem Renaissance portraitist James Van Der Zee was 96 when he photographed 22-year-old Jean-Michel Basquiat in the latter's "best" creative year, 1982. Van Der Zee died the next year; Basquiat had only six more years.
<http://tiny.cc/gtf0101>
<http://tiny.cc/htf0101>
<http://tiny.cc/jtf0101>
<http://tiny.cc/ktf0101> _LosAngelesCountyMuseumOnFire

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JOHANN LISS, THE DEATH OF CLEOPATRA, 1622-24,
<https://tinyurl.com/4fvazkdv> _JesseLocker

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ARTISTS WOULD BE ‘WISE’ TO BE ‘UNPOLITICAL’
When the National Endowment of the Humanities announced in January its first round of grants since the start of President Donald Trump‘s second term, one recipient stood out from the rest: Grand Central Atelier.
Based in Queens, the New York art school was awarded $2 million, one of only a handful that exceeded $1 million to a single recipient. The school says that it promotes “art untouched by modernism” and teaches methods “rooted in traditions pre-dating the 19th century and the advent of photography.” Its founder, the realist painter Jacob Collins, has been an outspoken critic of modernism and avant-garde art; he was also a speaker at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, D.C., in September. There he argued that American modernism was “an error” and that European abstraction complicated the “natural American empricism” that had existed in art prior.
Now, in an interview, Collins says the school’s mission is to stay out of politics. “To say things aren’t politics—that’s just not true,” Collins said, in his first major comments since the award. “But the artist is very wise to be as unpolitical as possible.”
According to Collins, he has always had an affinity for Old Master, but finding that out of fashion, started a classical arts academy in the 1990s, Water Street Atellier. That school became Grand Central Academy under a partnership with the Institute of Classical Architecture in Manhattan. In 2014, it became independent and began operating under its current name.
Perhaps most curiously, Collins gave conflicting accounts, as to how the Atelier received the grant. First, he said that he was approached by Michael McDonald, the agency’s acting chairman; then he said that he had reached out to McDonald in August at the suggestion of a mutual acquaintance.
The NEH said in a press release that Grand Central Atelier’s grant will support a public lecture series, studio lectures for students, a symposium, a digital publication, and the creation of two new postdoctoral fellowships. _ARTnews

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JARED KUSHNER,
you look so youthful!
What's your secret?
Dipped in wax, you say?
<https://tinyurl.com/4sbzsbfu> _‪PeterHuestis‬

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BANK OF ENGLAND TO REPLACE J.M.W. TURNER WITH UK WILDLIFE ON BANKNOTES
<https://tinyurl.com/yc5n2zvh>
The Bank of England (BOE) announced last week that the next generation of banknotes it will issue will feature depictions of wildlife native to the UK, rather than historical figures, including painter J.M.W. Turner.
The decision comes after the BOE held a consultation in July 2025 asking the public to vote on six categories that could appear on the forthcoming notes, according to various criteria, which include that it “symbolises the UK,” “resonates with the public,” “is not divisive,” and “is enduring.” _ARTnews

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ITALY’S CULTURE MINISTER CALLS FOR RESIGNATION OVER RUSSIAN RETURN TO VENICE BIENNALE
Italy’s culture minister has called for the resignation of the government’s representative on the board of the Venice Biennale, as a growing political dispute continues to eruope over Russia‘s plans to reopen its pavilion at the 2026 exhibition in May.
In a statement this week, culture minister Alessandro Giuli said he had lost confidence in Tamara Gregoretti, who has served on the Biennale’s board since March 2024, accusing her of failing to alert the ministry to the possibility that Russia would participate. According to the ministry, Gregoretti “did not deem it necessary to announce the possible presence of the Russian Federation at the next Biennale,” despite the international sensitivity of the issue.
Italian media outlets report that Gregoretti has so far shown no intention of stepping down. Meanwhile, the culture ministry has asked the Biennale for urgent clarification about how the Russian pavilion will be installed and managed, particularly in relation to the current sanctions regime. _ARTnews

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STILL TIME LEFT FOR THE UNIVERSE TO DO THE MOST AMAZING THING TODAY
<https://tinyurl.com/7cu6ymx2> _MichaelLobel

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LONDON’S TIMOTHY TAYLOR TO CLOSE NEW YORK OUTPOST AFTER A DECAD
The London-based gallery Timothy Taylor will close its New York outpost next month at the conclusion of its current show, after nearly a decade of operation in Manhattan.
The decision was made “to ensure the long-term stability of the gallery and the community around it,” the gallery told The gallery, however, will maintain an office and viewing room in New York.
“In light of current market conditions, the gallery has made the decision to close its New York space and consolidate its operations while continuing our relationships with artists and maintaining our gallery space in London,” Timothy Taylor, the gallery’s founder, said “However, the realities of the present climate, combined with the considerable costs of operating a second permanent space, make this a prudent and responsible step.” _ARTnews

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CHARLEY HARPER, "DARWIN'S FINCHES",
from "The Giant Golden Book of Biology", 1961
<https://tinyurl.com/bd5thkt6> _RabihAlameddine