OLD NEWS

EARLIEST SPRING WILDFLOWERS PROTECT THEMSELVES
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In April, when the earliest spring wildflowers emerge, temperatures can fluctuate dramatically and the winds can be chilly. Two of our earliest flowering plants that are well equipped to deal with these conditions are Hepatica (Anemone americana and A. acutiloba) and Bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis).
The soft, downy hairs that cover the flower stalks as well as the new young leaves of Hepatica help to conserve warmth and protect the plant from extreme changes in temperature. When Bloodroot emerges, a single leaf envelops the flower bud, protecting the delicate pink flower stalk as well as the bud from the wind, conserving warmth. _NaturallyCurious

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CLEAR
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JAMES HAYWARD, WEST COAST PAINTER WITH A CULT FOLLOWING, DIES AT 82
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James Hayward, a West Coast painter whose abstractions earned him a loyal cult following among artists, died on April 16. He was 82, according to a brief obituary posted by his studio over the weekend.
Hayward may not be among the most well-known names to emerge from the postwar period, but many artists knew and loved his work. Mike Kelley, for example, once praised him as “one of the few truly important West Coast painters.”
His process was marked by a certain eccentricity that differentiated his art from a lot of similar work. From the mid-1970s onward, Hayward largely produced monochrome abstractions. But where many single-color canvases from the era were characterized by the smooth, even application of paint, Hayward purposefully left his materials chunky and thick.
Referring to the phrase “monochrome abstraction,” Hayward told of his work, “People ask what does that mean—you know, lay people? I say, well basically I make one-color paintings of basically nothing.”
A review of an exhibition in 2012 noted that Hayward’s paint “allegedly applied in the dark, offered a surprising degree of variety.”
In the period preceding the monochromes, Hayward had predominantly created paintings composed of two expanses of color that were divided down the middle. But, he said, “I realized that I never again wanted to paint on this side or that side of any more god damn lines.” Thus followed a prolonged period of making paintings that he termed “automatic,” aligning them with Surrealist art that was supposedly produced by yielding all intentionality to the inner workings of the mind.
“I wasn’t good at drawing people,” he said of his undergraduate education. “I was glad to discover at college that you didn’t have to draw people to be an artist.” He went on to study in the University of California, Los Angeles’s graduate program, completing his education there in 1969.
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For much of his career, Hayward made his art on a horse farm in Moorpark, where he painted well into his later years and wrote a book of autobiographical anecdotes called Indiscretions. Asked about the title, Hayward told Flaunt, “Discretion is the better part of valor, but indiscretion is the better part of adventure.” _Alex Greenberger _ARTnews

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THE MOUNT WASHINGTON POST
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THE VIOLENT WEATHER OF ROGER BROWN’S PAINTINGS
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In 1993, the painter Roger Brown told the Los Angeles Times: ‘People think of me as an urban artist, but I’ve actually done quite a bit of work with landscape.’ What he didn’t say is that his landscapes often retain the baggage of big-city life: pollution, highways, humans vexed by local disturbances.
Brown, a stalwart of the Chicago imagists, was as inspired by flea market curios, old toys and sideshow banners as by anything smacking of ‘high art’. Since his death from AIDS-related complications in 1997, he has come to seem like even more of a curveball in late-20th-century American painting: a mordant oracle who saw calamity – sociopolitical and ecological – as his nation’s burden. His most famous paintings depict earthquakes, mudslides, blizzards and freak storms – disasters that are now almost weekly headlines.
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11 paintings that capture the uneasy stalemate between nature and civilization. In Lake Effect (1980), the earliest work on view, Chicago’s centrefold-worthy skyline is reduced to a blocky ribbon meandering across the bottom third of the canvas. The steelworks in neighbouring Gary, Indiana, are shown spuming toxins while, overhead, concentric red and black storm clouds loom like a cosmic hotplate. In the foreground, articulated trucks and a bus speed past lone bystanders, who regard the panorama with uncertain attitudes of dread or yearning.
Throughout Brown’s work, people – almost always silhouetted, like noirish extras – find themselves unsure what to make of the gigantic dynamos upstaging them. Couple Progressing Towards Mount Rincon (1997) is simultaneously a hymn to nature and an allegory that leaves an inscrutable but ominous aftertaste. Named after a mountain near La Conchita, California, where Brown lived part-time, the painting portrays sightseers apparently transfixed by competing scenes. Men point in opposite directions; women raise their hands as if under arrest. The sky churns, a metallic barrel or the inner eye of a vortex. Whatever this scene portends, it’s not a leisurely Sunday hike.
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The vortex reappears in Down Down Down (1986), in which figures spin in a whirlpool marked by the repetition of the painting’s title in cursive lettering. Black Hole (1989), one of Brown’s more atypical works, features the eponymous void as a black and blue funnel into oblivion, surrounded by a radiant litter of stars. It’s hard not to see these pieces as metaphors for Brown’s state of mind. In 1984, his long-time partner, the architect George Veronda, died of lung cancer at 42. A few years later, Brown tested positive for HIV, an all but terminal diagnosis then.
Burned Hills, May to October 1997 (1997) insists on a biographical reading. Here, strips of fire serrate charred hills while ineffectual brush trucks spray water. The image refers at once to the practice of controlled burning and to wildfire, which Brown knew intimately from his perch in California. The image registers both precaution and catastrophe – two signatures of the AIDS crisis. It was Brown’s final painting.
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Although a master of narrative mise-en-scène, Brown was also a luscious pattern-maker, as evident in Weather Map (1981) and Crosswinds (1983). The former is a god’s-eye view through floating lozenges of cloud, while the latter likens intersecting wind currents to a weave or chain-link. In both, gaps in the pattern reveal traffic or tiny figures going about their suburban toils far below. The images are among the show’s most imaginative.
Together, these paintings hit like a truism: we’re buffeted by forces beyond our control. In California Cloud Surprise (1993), that force is a dead ringer for Mickey Mouse, his iconic head transformed into sinister cumulus formations. It’s a permanent forecast for America: expect cartoons, with a chance of doom. _Jeremy Lybarger_FriezeMag

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HANS ULRICH OBRIST REVEALS THE ONE ARTIST WHO REFUSED TO LET HIM INTO THEIR STUDIO
In an interview Obrist said that he has never been able to get a studio visit with Jasper Johns _ARTnews

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LUMINOUS TIFFANY WINDOW
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A late 19th-century Tiffany window that has illuminated a Connecticut church for the past 125 years headlines design sale
The two-lancet scene, long set above the balcony of Second Congregational Church in the town of Winsted, depicts an idyllic landscape at sunset. In the foreground, a staggered waterfall’s streaky glass lends it froth and shimmer with surrounding palms reaching into a sky bruising to night. The right-hand lancet, backgrounded by a streak of purple mountains, is alive with a burst of lilies and irises.
The window, which is topped by a medallion featuring a crown of hand-cut jewels, was commissioned by Ellen Wright Boyd in memory of her parents, John and Emily Boyd, and installed in 1899. John Boyd, a former Secretary of State of Connecticut, made his fortune as a steel industrialist and is best known locally for his history of the region’s early settlers.
“The Boyd Family Memorial Window (The Falls) is an exceptional example of the Studio’s technical brilliance, emotional depth, and command of color and light,” “Windows featuring a waterfall prominently in the foreground are exceedingly rare within Tiffany’s oeuvre, making this example extraordinary.
The Boyd Family Memorial Window, which was restored in the 1990s due to its corroding lead work, is one of three Tiffany Studios decorations in Second Congregational Church. Elsewhere, there’s the Christ With Child window based off a description in the Gospel of Matthew and a Tiffany mosaic in honor of a deacon who served for two decades in the late 19th century. _artnet

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I HAVE FOUND THE MOST PERIMENOPAUSAL PAINTING.
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Kees van Dongen, "Woman with a Cigarette," c. 1906-08 _CarolinaAMiranda

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75. FISK IRON COFFIN by Rainey Knudson
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It was unbearable that a loved one might be buried by strangers, far from home. In 1844, when Almond Fisk’s brother William died in Mississippi, his family could not practically ship his body to the family plot near Lake Champlain in New York. Fisk’s father, a minister, was devastated—there was no way to know if his son had received last rites, or whether his body had been handled with care. No body to visit.
Fisk owned an iron foundry and understood the airtight cast-iron systems developed for steam travel—the very innovation that was causing more Americans to die far from home. He set to work creating a hermetically sealed coffin. One surgeon he consulted was an avid Egyptian mummy collector who may have inspired Fisk’s decision to fashion coffins after Egyptian sarcophagi. Cast in the realistic form of a shrouded body, the coffins featured a glass window at the head—in a time before photography, it was the only way to see the face and know the occupant was your person. The window is the casket’s most macabre feature: a face sealed behind glass, neither fully present nor altogether gone.
Fisk received a patent for his ‘metallic burial case’ in 1848, just in time for the California Gold Rush. The company provided caskets to many notable Americans, including Abraham Lincoln’s son Willie. Their use peaked during the Civil War, just before embalming would make the body itself transportable. For a brief moment, preservation was not chemical but mechanical.
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GOOD FOOD COMING SOON CANTON, SD
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VENINI CLESSIDRE OF THE REVOLUTION by greg
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Wright can auction 86 Venini hourglasses over the years, and they just drift by unnoticed. But then one night there’ll be a foot-tall hourglass standing alone in the midst of enough useless silver and gilt objets, tchotchkes, and designer ashtrays to start a revolution, with the blue and blue of the sea on a summer evening, and you’re staying up late, looking up technical glassblowing terms in Italian: clessidra, incalmo, <https://tinyurl.com/3kmj4r6y>
Lol and then just as you’re about to post, you find the Venini channel on YouTube, and you see the promo for the Peter Marino Collection, <https://tinyurl.com/bdefhma8> and the two-toned capsule-shaped vases by a designer who cites The Matrix <https://tinyurl.com/ypu44xmv> which are named after hormones <https://tinyurl.com/3a5jjyck> and called Happy Pills, and you’re like, oh right, we need to fill up all the clessidre with gasoline and storm the palace. _greg.org

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GIOVANNI DI PAOLO, ST. CLARE RESCUING THE SHIPWRECKED, CA. 1455
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DAZED AND CONFUSED AT THE NEW LACMA
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Three developments over as many decades have revolutionized the art museum. With the 1997 opening of the Frank Gehry-designed Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, museums’ identities began to be increasingly bound up with new architecture rather than their collections. The 2000 launch of Tate Modern, with its vast Turbine Hall dedicated to contemporary projects, institutionalized a new concept: art whose primary purpose was to dazzle by its visual extravagance and vast scale rather than invite contemplation and reflection. Finally, in 2019, after its latest makeover, the Museum of Modern Art abandoned the traditional, linear narrative in favor of an eclectic, ahistorical installation of artists and artworks. This idea wasn’t new; MoMA just mainstreamed it.
All three developments—architecture as identity, art as spectacle, and a nonchronological display—come together in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s David Geffen Galleries building, which was designed by Atelier Peter Zumthor & Partners with Skidmore, Owings & Merrill at a cost of $724 million. A sinuous, concrete-and-glass structure, it provides a single, open 900-foot-long space for the museum’s permanent collection. Its monumentality and distinctive profile virtually ensure that it will “brand” LACMA as definitively as the Gehry building did the Guggenheim Bilbao. To its collection of outdoor sculpture the museum has now added the recently acquired Jeff Koons “Split-Rocker” (2000), a 37-foot-tall riff on children’s toys adorned with flowers and plants. Inside, the organizing framework for the collection is bodies of water—the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Oceans as well as the Mediterranean—in order to, according to the press release, “explore innovative ways to connect cultures and artistic traditions.” All this means that LACMA, which opened in 1965, has transformed itself into the quintessential 21st-century museum.
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On the micro level—the themed galleries—the new concept mostly works well, although LACMA wouldn’t be a 21st-century museum if it didn’t indulge in political sloganeering, so the wall texts are peppered with ritual references to colonialism, environmental despoilation and the like. Especially effective are those displays dealing with cultural exchange, such as “Gandhara & Rome: Crossroads of the Classical World,” which uses objects made in what is now Pakistan to show how, around the fourth century B.C., Greco-Roman classicism traveled east and influenced the depiction of Buddhist subjects. Here the selection of objects brings the ebb and flow of ideas and influences vividly to life.
big problem is the new building. Art and adventurous architecture do not an easy marriage make. The gold standard is the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, where Louis Kahn’s dramatic, barrel-vaulted, light-suffused spaces provide a harmonious setting for the paintings and sculptures. The Geffen’s architecture overwhelms its objects. Entombed in a concrete bunker—one of the stand-alone galleries—and battling hulking walls and cavernous space, one of LACMA’s greatest masterpieces, Georges de La Tour’s “The Magdalen With the Smoking Flame” (c. 1635-37), doesn’t stand a chance.
Where LACMA really comes to grief, though, is in the nonhierarchical layout. “No pathways” is one of those ideas that looks good on paper but doesn’t work in practical terms. Imagine a mayor deciding that it would enhance tourists’ experience to remove all of his city’s street names. That is what we have here. Remarkably, the four major sections are not identified, so you have no idea where, for example, “Pacific Ocean” ends and “Indian Ocean” begins. Nor, surprising for such a geography-based display, are there any maps. You go this way rather than that without really knowing why, where you’ll end up next or where you are in the larger continuum. Each gallery has an introductory wall text and the objects in it are identified by artist, date and the like. But there is nothing to tell you why one object is next to the other, how those objects fit into the overarching theme or what their significance is.
This can lead to serious misfires. In one section, Winslow Homer’s “The Cotton Pickers” (1876) hangs next to Betye Saar’s “I’ll Bend But I Will Not Break” (1998). This is an installation consisting of an ironing board printed with a schematic of a slave ship’s hold; an iron secured with a shackle; and, as a backdrop, a clothesline on which hangs a white sheet appliquéd with “KKK.” Given the ideological undercurrents in the installation as a whole, and the lack of information other than these objects’ identifying labels to go on, a visitor could be forgiven for seeing in this juxtaposition an attempt to tie Homer to slavery and Jim Crow. In fact, however, he had no involvement with either; moreover his representation of black people throughout his work was unfailingly compassionate.
In a walk-through director Michael Govan explained that he wanted visitors to spend their time looking, not reading. Fair enough, but the pendulum has swung too far. The museum does provide QR codes linking to the Bloomberg Connects museum guide app, and a guidebook. But those are no substitute for labels. The nautical metaphor is inescapable: The visitor is completely adrift here.
Mr. Govan and his team deserve credit for the most ambitious effort to forge a new template and, in the process, reconceive the institution of the art museum since Thomas Hoving took over the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the mid-1960s. But the paucity of information and overall lack of guidance mean that while visitors may leave LACMA knowing what they like, they aren’t going to know much about art _Eric Gibson_WallStreetJournal

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"I WANT TO SAY THIS PLAINLY:
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While a lot of the collection looks great in the Geffen Galleries, a lot looks terrible, or is overmatched by the architecture. Architecture critics have so far tended to have nicer things to say about the new wing than art critics." _ChristopherKnight

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LACMA’S DAVID GEFFEN GALLERIES ARE A FORMLESS MAZE
But the sunlight ends at the building’s skin. The rest of the interior suggests a vast loft that has been crammed with boxy concrete pavilions that vary only in size. There are 29 of them, and they are unrelievedly and oppressively gloomy. Here is all the Cold War Brutalism you could ask for, in all its fallout-shelter glory. Most have only a single entrance, so unless something catches your eye, you are likely to poke your head in and move on. One of the benefits of those “prescribed paths” in conventional museums is that you see a good amount of art as you move along.
The dimness does not help. The light levels are distressingly low—low enough to protect sensitive works on paper or a woven carpet but unnecessary for oil paintings. Not one of the galleries has a skylight, although some have one or two slender slits atop the walls that admit weak slivers of borrowed light. You have the unhappy feeling you are underground, and not atop a building in sunny Southern California.
The pavilions are scattered in seemingly haphazard fashion, in keeping with Mr. Govan’s conviction that visitors should follow their own curiosity and make their own connections without being subjugated to a hierarchy. Such a building is maddeningly difficult to navigate. The extravagant gesture of its shape is undercut by its refusal to give us any great room, any place of gregarious gathering. On one hand we have endless flowing space and on the other a multitude of small cabinets, but nothing in between.
The result is a building of a curiously hesitant monumentality. Its error is to confuse formlessness with freedom. Nature herself is more than shapeless irregularity; the woods have glades and groves, animal trails and vistas; like literature, they have rising and falling action. A thoroughly uninflected, completely random space is not natural; after all, even an amoeba has a nucleus.
How to explain such a willful disregard for the way that people experience space? It would have been a proud enough lifetime achievement to give Los Angeles a neo-expressionist masterpiece that celebrated the distinctive identity of California, its position on the Pacific Rim, its historic relationship to Mexico, and so forth. There was no urgent need to redefine the purpose and character of a museum, to abolish more than two centuries of acquired knowledge and start again.
It helps to remember that Mr. Govan began his career as Thomas Krens’s deputy director during the creation of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, in which the making of a totally new museum architecture went hand in hand with the making of a totally new museum institution. This was his formative experience, one that he clearly wanted to repeat.
And yet the ultimate irony of the Geffen building is that its doctrine of a rigorously nonhierarchical museum, giving visitors absolute freedom to discover their own connections, is strenuously inflexible. Its discrete concrete chambers permit only one type of installation. For all its aspiration of freedom, it is a straitjacket that cannot be removed. _Michael J. Lewis_WallStreetJournal

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ANATOMY OF A PAVILION.
The forthcoming US Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, 37-year-old commissioner, Jenni Parido <https://tinyurl.com/5f43r8j5> , has no professional experience in the arts. She recently ran a luxury pet food store in Florida, setting her on an “unlikely path from selling venison nuggets and dried sardines to organizing a federally sponsored pavilion on a global stage,” Parido later picked Jeffrey Uslip, who made headlines a decade ago for a racially insensitive in St. Louis, to curate the pavilion. Artist Alma Allen ended up being named as the American representative, but not before others, including photographer William Eggleston and sculptor Barbara Chase-Riboud, reportedly bailed out first. “I don’t think my work is political in respect to party politics,” Allen told later adding: “I think that people will have to make a judgment for themselves.” _ARTnews

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SOTHEBY’S OFFERS TO PAY SELLERS INTEREST AS ART MARKET STRUGGLES
In mid-2025, Sotheby’s introduced an “extended settlement terms payments option”, according to three people familiar with the scheme.
One of the people said that the auction house had offered to pay a rate of 8 per cent following the sale of more than $30mn of property if the seller allowed Sotheby’s to hold on to some of their funds for at least six months. It has since reduced the rate on offer following cuts by the US Federal Reserve last year.
Sotheby’s had previously retained some clients’ money beyond the period specified in its terms and conditions, a second person familiar with the company said.
Franco-Israeli billionaire Patrick Drahi acquired the auction house in 2019 through a leveraged buyout, and Sotheby’s has had to contend with a heavy debt burden at a time when demand for fine art has been in decline.
The global art market shrank 16 per cent between 2022 and 2024, according to a report by Art Basel and UBS, before eking out growth of 4 per cent last year.
Sotheby’s annual pre-tax loss more than doubled to $248mn in 2024. Accounts for that year showed that it had more than $1bn of “client payables” outstanding — money it owes to clients — which was lower than $1.7bn at the end of 2023. Its total sales in 2025 were $7.1bn, up from $6bn the year before. _FinancialTimes

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JOANNE'S GARDEN
Mid April
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