OLD NEWS

DIED (ALAS!) ON THIS DAY IN 1614 IN TOLEDO, SPAIN,, DOMÉNIKOS THEOTOKÓPOULOS, KNOWN AS EL GRECO.
Trod his own path, and what a marvelous path it was!
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Portrait of the artist’s handsome
& well-ruffed son Jorge Manuel Theotokopoulos,
also a painter, in 1600.
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Annunciation #1, 1576, by El Greco.
Elegant beauty with just enough appropriate agitation.
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Twenty-odd years later,
the Annunciation is a mystical experience,
with Gabriel dancing down from heaven
to musical accompaniment.
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Fray Hortensio Felix Paravicino in 1609.
Surely one of the great portraits of all time,
so searching & subtly dynamic,
<https://tinyurl.com/2924yj7j>
Wonderful portrait of Antonio de Covarrubias,
painted around 1600 by, of course, El Greco.
Marvelous.
<https://tinyurl.com/3sksdsja>
Christ driving the money-changers from the temple, 1570s,
with abandoned baby at right waving to his budd.
By El Greco, the marvelous Greek,
who has been looking at Tintoretto (wise choice!).
<https://tinyurl.com/2xvncv3f>
Easter bunnies after the Easter eggs,
evidently, in El Greco's temple.
<https://tinyurl.com/euy6e6ej>
Twenty-odd years later,
El Greco's temple is much more weird and fraught.
No more bunnies (or naked babies).
Just the might of righteous Christ vs. sorry money-changers.
<https://tinyurl.com/48mzkhdm>
Laocoon and his sons engaged in fruitless battle
against serpents sent by the Gods to punish them.
Staged before Toledo in 1610
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The Laocoon, as drawn by me in Rome
just a few years before El Greco painted his.
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Glorious agitation of earth & heaven
at baptism of Christ,
as painted in 1608 by El Greco of Toledo.
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Landscape, rocks, even sky
are composed of anguished unearthly forms
in El Greco's amazing Agony in the Garden, c. 1590.
<https://tinyurl.com/54euz7e8>
Historical hottie du jour:
a monk, painted by El Greco in 1610.
This man was so wasted in a career involving celibacy.
Terrible.
One must hope that he
didn’t take his vows too seriously!
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Gentleman is assuring us of his honorable sincerity.
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Portrait of a man,
probably the great architect Andrea Palladio.
Painted in the 1570s
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Miniaturist Giulio Clovio,
holding a book of his own miniatures
and painted in 1570 by El Greco.
<https://tinyurl.com/3rau4c7p>
Miniature portrait of a bejeweled woman,
possibly painted by El Greco,
<https://tinyurl.com/52wazvyk>
Boy lighting a candle
between an ape & a fool, 1600,
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View and map of Toledo, 1610.
Another wild & wonderful work by El Greco,
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Turbulent skies over Toledo in 1598,
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Cardinal Don Fernando Nino de Guevara,
wearing first recorded spectacles w/ ear pieces in 1600.
Way ahead of his time!
<https://tinyurl.com/yzmu3bne>
Continuing the ocular theme from El Greco,
Christ Healing a blind Man, 1570.
Extras rushing in from below the stage to witness the miracle.
<https://tinyurl.com/4yhkfkrz>
Saints Stephen & Augustine
descend to Toledo in 1312
to bury pious Count Orgaz.
Miracle painted in 1588
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El Greco’s solemn son carries the torch
at this miraculous funeral,
while Saint Stephen wears a picture
of his own martyrdom on his robe.
Intense!
<https://tinyurl.com/56kcy9rz>
Vividness of her miraculous vera icon
rightly outdoes reticent figure of Saint Veronica herself.
<https://tinyurl.com/474rju7f> _Dr.PeterPaulRubens

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THEY PAINTED THE AMERICAN WEST. HISTORY PAINTED THEM OUT
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In 1877, Helen Henderson Chain climbed to the 14,011-foot summit of Mount of the Holy Cross in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains. She was the first non-Indigenous woman to reach the summit, and she did so wearing heavy skirts, petticoats, and a corset. Soonafter, she painted her heavenly Mount of Holy Cross (1877), a majestic vision of the snowy peaks framed by trees and green growth.
Like many women artists of her time, Chain’s life left an indelible mark on her community, though her name has long since fallen into obscurity. She is one of seven women artists highlighted in “Women Artists of the American West: Colorado and Utah: 1885–1935,” now on view at History Jackson Hole in Jackson, Wyoming. Curated by Lucia Pesapane and Camille Morineau, co-founders of the Paris nonprofit AWARE (Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions), the show is the second installment of a two-part series. The first, “Trailblazers of the American West,” presented in 2025, focused on five women artists working in Montana and Wyoming, including Evelyn Cameron, Fra Dana, and Lora Webb Nichols. The current iteration presents Chain alongside artists Elisabeth Spalding, Anne Gregory Van Briggle, and Laura Gilpin, and others.
Together, the scope of these women’s works and lives complicate the heroicizing vision of the American West, so often glorified in media and by politicians. Here, one finds artworks that embrace natural beauty, simple moments, elegance, and even humor, and offer glimpses of the women, children, and other artists who lived in the West, but are rarely seen.
To assemble the exhibition, Morineau traversed Wyoming, Montana, Colorado, and Utah, scouring museum collections and archives. “These women artists were in museum collections, but they were barely shown,” she said. “The challenge was to do enough research to find common themes and bring them together. Most of the time, we work like scientists going to the moon and bringing new material back. It’s really about uncovering stories.”
At the same time, these educated white women artists only told part of the West’s story, and were, in many ways, complicit in the colonial forces that violently drove Indigenous Americans from their homes. But as new exhibitions expand our vision of the changing landscape of the American West, from exhibitions centered on Chinese immigrants to Black Pioneers, these women offer snapshots of a more nuanced world of everyday experiences.
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A student of Hudson River School artist George Inness, the Indiana-born Chain traveled the country far and wide, settling in Denver in 1871 with her husband, James Albert Chain. There, the couple set up a bookstore that would become a cultural hub for the city, also operating as an art gallery and publishing house. She also established a school for Denver’s Chinese immigrant population. In 1882, she became one of the first women to exhibit at the National Academy of Design in New York, when two of her paintings of New Mexico pueblos were included in the annual juried exhibition. She was an avid mountaineer and ventured all across Europe.
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Chain’s life ended as vividly as it was lived. On a tour of Asia in 1892, the Chains embarked on a steamship headed from Shanghai to Hong Kong when the ship was engulfed in a typhoon, sinking in the South China Sea. The family drowned along with 200 other passengers on board.
“Chain’s life is full of incredible stories […] Her life had a kind of romance,” said Pesapane, “She took many self-portraits, which added to it. She captured these images of herself wearing a heavy dress and hat like an Impressionist painter in the mountains.”
Chain’s life and art were revelations to both Morineau and Pesapane, who pored over the few books of Western art they could find to learn about her life and work. “These women artists were in museum collections, but they were barely shown,” said Morineau. “The challenge was to do enough research to find common themes and bring them together. Most of the time, we work like scientists going to the moon and bringing new material back. It’s really about uncovering stories.” said Morineau.
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The Landscape as a Mindscape
While Chain was artistically faithful to the romantic and majestic vistas of the Hudson River School, many other women artists of the American West transformed these landscapes into abstracted planes, full of expressive line and evocative colors.
“These landscapes are more a reflection of their mind, their spirit, and their loneliness—rather than a celebration of nature,” explained Pesapane.
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The works of Colorado painter Elisabeth Spalding (1868–1954) can be counted among these. Born in Indiana and raised in Denver, Spalding spent time in New York ​​studying at Cooper Union and later with Childe Hassam at the Art Students League. She exhibited in Philadelphia and Paris. Throughout her career, her works focused on the landscapes and botanicals of Colorado, painted with a modernist sensibility.
In the exhibition, her work Cedar from Rock Subject (Colorado) (1929) exemplifies her approach; a single, sinuous tree emerges from a ground of brilliantly colorful rocks, radiating outwards with visionary intensity.
​​“Landscape is a construction. You don’t paint reality—you construct an image based on what you feel and want to convey,” said Pesapane of these inventive landscapes.
<https://tinyurl.com/2nnbcp2r>
While better known for her Impressionist portraits, the artist Fra Dana (1874–1948) occasionally painted landscapes, which she expressed as reflections of her inner mind. She kept a diary, like many of the women artists of this time. “She said that these horizontal landscapes are more a reflection of her mind, her spirit, and her sense of loneliness, than as a celebration of wild nature being domesticated,” Pesapane said.
Utah-born, Mormon artist Mabel Pearl Frazer (1887-1981) embraced the mountains and deserts of the Southwest, which she painted in vivid colors and undulating lines, in her self-determined quest to define an American aesthetic.
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Frazer, too, studied at New York’s Art Students League and traveled in Europe, even exhibiting two works at the Uffizi in 1930. But it was the American landscape she prized foremost. “If I had my choice of a trip to Europe to study or a trip to the Southern Utah desert, I’d take the desert trip every time,” Frazer wrote in her journals. “There are things there as vital and as valuable to any artist as he will learn in Europe. I would like to spend the rest of my life in southern Utah, just absorbing its intense, almost unreal beauty, and trying to capture it on canvas.” She joined the faculty at the University of Utah in 1920, where she taught for 33 years
Women Behind the Lens
Just a few decades after the invention of photography in Europe, by the late 1800s, the medium had swept to even the remote reaches of the American West, and it was women who were often behind the lens.
“Women stormed into photography,” Morineau said, “There were certainly as many women working in photography in the 19th century, if not more.” The appeal of the medium was manifold: it was an affordable and efficient medium that allowed women to maintain an art practice as well as to sell portraits professionally.
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“Photography was also a way to talk about their lives as women,” said Morineau. “It offered an immediate way of representing both themselves and their day-to-day lives.” ​
These photographs often upend stereotypes of life in the West. English-born artist Evelyn Cameron (1868–1928) headed out to the American West, drawn by the appeal of the unshackled life. Her photographs show women on horseback, even hunting. Photographer Lora Webb Nichols (1883–1962) took over 24,000 photographs of life in small-town Wyoming during her life. These snapshots, often of children and women, are playful and lively, offering an intimate vision of the West so often presented as tough and masculine.
Laura Gilpin (1891-1979), a photographer active in Colorado and New Mexico, spent years photographing Navajo and Pueblo people, as well as landscapes of the Southwest. Her works both refused to ignore the lives of those native to the land and presented the landscape distinctly from the crisp majesty emphasized by many male photographers of the era.
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Gilpin’s photograph, The Ghost Rock. Garden of the Gods (1919) is moody and evocative, with steep and rugged cliffs and peaks snapped in a soft focus, so that they appear more like spectral ghosts.
Gilpin, herself, lived an unconventional life for the times, as a lesbian woman in a long-term relationship, but in many ways, the West allowed women unexpected freedoms.
Women’s Western Freedom
That freedom was not incidental. “In this pioneer society, women were encouraged to work. They had a certain autonomy,” said Morineau. “In some sense, women could enjoy freedoms beyond those on the East Coast.”
The curators chose to begin the exhibitions in Wyoming, as it was the first state to grant women the vote in 1869, decades before the ratification of the 19th Amendment. In 1920, Jackson Hole, where the exhibition is held, had elected an all-female town council, known, somewhat infamously, as the “Petticoat Rulers.”
Art, in particular, was a profession that enabled women’s autonomy in the West, and many of the women represented across both exhibitions hosted salons, earned incomes, and held influential roles in society as patrons, museum founders, and philanthropists in the cultural world.
Artist Anne Van Briggle founded Van Briggle Pottery with her husband, Artus Van Briggle, in 1899, and would exhibit pottery at the Paris Salon and the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, continuing the operation long after her husband’s death. Laura Nichols, meanwhile, established the Rocky Mountain Studio, a photography and photofinishing service, to financially support her family; the studio became a touchstone of her community throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Helen Henderson Chain established Denver’s first art school in 1877. Elisabeth Spalding founded Denver’s first all-female arts club, the Le Brun Art Club, named for French portrait painter Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, which would become the foundation of the Denver Art Museum.
Just as importantly, these women achieved freedom of movement, and many of them traveled extensively and not always in the company of men. “Some photographers traveled for months alone, far from home. They were completely free to do it because they were taking pictures,” said Pesapane.
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An Unfolding Story
The revelations about these artists’ lives continue to surface. During her research, Morineau discovered that Frazer had denounced a colleague’s sexist behaviour toward women students and had lost some of her position in the university for doing so.
Recently, after finalizing the exhibition, Morineau learned that Frazer had also painted a large-scale female nude, a painting that would have been shocking given the time and place in a heavily Mormon society and her position as a woman artist. The painting is now in the collection of the Utah Museum of Art.
“A colleague at the museum pulled out this immense nude, the only nude in the corpus of the artist that we know of,” said Morineau, “It’s a magnificent work. I thought, how amazing to paint a nude at that moment.” Morineau said she was flabbergasted. “We discovered another wonderful woman.” _Katie White _artnet

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THE SEA GIVETH
<https://tinyurl.com/2yakmsma> _ON&ON / Jeff Weiss

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WENDY RED STAR GETS HER BAG
Most everything has a price—eggs, gas, art, empire—but how arbitrary is it, and who pays? The other day, at gallery, in Tribeca, the forty-four-year-old Apsáalooke multimedia artist Wendy Red Star held out one of her large-scale (melon-size) blown-glass replicas of trade beads—the regular-sized versions of which traversed the globe for centuries, used for bartering in Africa and the Americas. “Feel that, it’s so awesome,” she said, caressing the “Manhattan Bead” (white, with red and blue stripes, $5,000).
Red Star, who grew up on the Crow Indian Reservation in southern Montana and is now based in Oregon, worked with gaffers to create the glasswork for her show, titled “One Blue Bead,” which also features grids of watercolors of, yes, beads. The gallery, on Broadway, is situated along a historic Native trade thoroughfare, near where the Dutch “purchased” Manhattan from Lenape Indians for an apocryphal “handful of beads,” in 1626.
“I started off with the Dutch Moon Bead,” Red Star said. “I looked into it and the Dutch didn’t make these, they only became synonymous with the Dutch because the Dutch would take them to Africa.” She noted that her art usually involves “some kind of nerd research project” into archives and census records. In the diaries of Lewis and Clark, she’d read that the duo stocked up on a type of faceted red trade bead, “because they thought it would just fly off the shelves, but it wasn’t popular at all.” Bright-blue beads, in fact, were the hot commodity; their shade is now referred to as Bodmer blue, after the illustrator Karl Bodmer’s nineteenth-century portraits of Native people.
Red Star’s big beads lay on the floor of the gallery, on top of vintage Hudson’s Bay point blankets, so named because they feature a number of “points,” or short black lines, along one side. “When they were displayed for sale, that would tell you how many beaver pelts you’d need to buy the blanket,” she explained. “What you see in photos of different Native delegations is that people will have point blankets wrapped around them with the points facing out, like a baseball cap with the sticker still on it.”
Plotting the installation, she’d thought about the knockoff designer handbags sold on Canal Street, around the corner, “and how we, as humans, want to be a part of that—O.K., so we can’t get the actual one, we get the fake one, and walk around hoping that it will appear as if it’s real,” she said.
“Do they do, like, Venmo?” Red Star asked her gallerist Allegra LaViola, on the way out, in a faux-fur coat, to shop for a bag for her luxury-loving sister.
LaViola laughed: “I think they do cold, hard cash.”
On Canal, Red Star encountered throngs of jostling venders standing over bags arranged on the sidewalk. She homed in on a Takashi Murakami Louis Vuitton number (the real thing goes for more than two thousand dollars). Asking price: $130; final bid: $100.
Police sirens blared, and the venders scooped up their wares and disappeared. Earlier this year, after ICE raided Canal Street, some Tribeca gallerists came under fire for holding a meeting about how to disperse venders outside their spaces; last week, a bill backed by Mayor Mamdani went into effect which basically decriminalized vending without a license.
Walking back, Red Star discussed the cost of actual antique trade beads. “A string can sometimes be five hundred or a thousand, but you can find individual ones for maybe eight dollars,” she said. “I go to Etsy and eBay, or, if I’m near a reservation, a lot of times pawnshops will have them.”
LaViola greeted her at the door. “Did you get a bag?”
“Yes! It was very exciting,” Red Star said. “And then to see them all pack up—it was really impressive. That’s why the bags are on sheets, but they also had little wagons.”
“How much?” LaViola asked.
“Well, they wanted one-thirty,” Red Star said, presenting the bag.
LaViola scoffed. “I would’ve gotten them down to, like, twenty-five bucks. Well, maybe sixty. This is terrible. Look at this workmanship! Also, it’s upside down.” Indeed, the rainbow “LV” logos were printed the wrong way up.
“Your problem is, you had the artist go out and negotiate,” Red Star said.
“Your sister will burn this on a pyre,” LaViola replied. She reminisced about being in L.A. with Red Star, at a Murakami show at the Broad. “Wendy’s sister was there and she wanted Murakami to sign a bag she’d brought with her, and he was, like, ‘I’m not giving autographs.’ ”
They tracked him down outside later and he signed the purse. “He actually drew some cherries on it,” Red Star recalled. Might that make the bag too valuable to use as a bag?
“It’s a collector’s item now,” LaViola said. _Emma Allen _NewYorkerMag

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LEE KRASNER IN HER STUDIO, THE SPRINGS, LONG ISLAND, 1962.
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Maria Lassnig, Studio Maxingstraße, Vienna, 1983
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Maria Lassnig
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Louise Bourgeois in her studio at East 18th Street in New York, circa 1946
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Louise Bourgeois “garment from the performance 'She Lost it' ” 1992
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Helen Frankenthaler with Alexander Liberman, in her studio, New York City, 1967.
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Helen Frankenthaler in her studio 1957.
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Bridget Riley, 1963
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Current - 1964
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Cataract 3, 1967
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at work, 1964
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Lynda Benglis (in action, 1969)
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Suzanne Valadon
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Helen Frankenthaler and David Smith in Frankenthaler's studio. 1957.
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Agnes Martin, 1952
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Georgia O’Keeffe in Santa fe, Red with Yellow, 1945
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Emily Kame Kngwarreye (1910-1996)
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Emily Kame Kngwarreye - Spring Celebration 1991
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