OLD NEWS

JUPITER'S CLOUDS IN HIGH DEFINITION FROM JUNO
<https://tinyurl.com/46rca82x> _NASA

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FIRST OIL PAINTING DEPICTING AN ARTIST AT WORK FEMALE OLD MASTER by Martin Bailey
<https://tinyurl.com/4zdauhtk>
The first-ever exhibition on Europe’s most important early female painter, Catharina van Hemessen, will open later this year
Catharina was the daughter of Jan Sanders van Hemessen, an Antwerp Mannerist painter who was influenced by Italian Renaissance art. Her greatest painting, at the Kunstmuseum Basel, is a relatively little-known 1548 work, which represents the earliest known self-portrait by a female artist. Even more significantly, it is the earliest surviving oil painting which depicts an artist (of any gender) at work—with their easel, brushes, palette and mahlstick.
Finally, she is the earliest known female artist to sign her panel paintings, which she usually did prominently. The Latin inscription in the background of her self-portrait reads: “I Catharina van Hemessen have painted myself/1548/Her age 20.”
To add to the achievement, Self-portrait at the Easel was painted at a very young age. Ariane Mensger, an Old Master curator at the Kunstmuseum Basel with a special interest in female artists, describes the work as “an important art-historical document, both in terms of the self-image of female painters and the practice of painting itself”.
The Snijders&Rockox House is now undertaking extensive archival research on the family. Catharina’s brothers may also have been artists, including Hans, Gilles and the illegitimate Peter; other family members were musicians.
In the self-portrait, the young artist looks out directly at us, having just begun to draw the outlines of a female head on the panel on her easel. The small head suggests that she was setting out to paint a full-length figure. It is most likely that the Basel painting includes two self-portraits: the large one in the main part of the composition and the very small one on her easel.
Van Hemessen does not depict herself painting in working clothes, but wears expensive (and quite impractical) velvet. Her arms are large in proportion to her head and chest, perhaps to emphasise her hands, the instrument of her creativity.
The Basel self-portrait is the prime version of the Van Hemessen composition, but two others are known. The Iziko South African National Gallery in Cape Town has what may well be another autograph painting and the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg owns a possible early copy. Their existence suggests that the original was well regarded at an early period.
Céline Talon, a Brussels-based conservator who has studied Van Hemessen, hopes that when circumstances allow, the three versions will eventually be brought together: “It would be wonderful to subject them to a technical analysis and briefly display them together—giving Van Hemessen’s self-portrait the attention she deserves.”
In 1548, the year of the self-portrait, Van Hemessen also painted Young Woman at the Virginal, in the collection of the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne, with the sitter described as 22 years old. This is believed to represent Catharina’s elder sister, Christina. As the two pictures are the same size, they were probably pendants.
In 1548, the year of the self-portrait, Van Hemessen also painted Young Woman at the Virginal, in the collection of the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum
, Cologne, with the sitter described as 22 years old. This is believed to represent Catharina’s elder sister, Christina. As the two pictures are the same size, they were probably pendants.
Van Hemessen’s idea of showing an artist at work broke fresh ground. Sofonisba Anguissola—another female painter—created a similar composition eight years later, in 1556. (It is now at the Castle Museum in Łańcut, south-eastern Poland.) This shows Anguissola in the act of painting, but with a religious work on her easel, not another portrait (or self-portrait).
Anguissola was working in Rome, so it is unclear how Van Hemessen’s concept had travelled there or whether both artists were influenced by another artist whose self-portrait at work has not survived. It is even possible that they might have come up with the idea independently.
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Catharina van Hemessen was born in 1527 or 1528, the daughter of the Antwerp painter Jan Sanders van Hemessen. Women artists were then rare and those who became professionals were nearly always trained by a close male relative. No self-portraits by her father are known, but considering her youthful age, he presumably guided and encouraged her.
In 1554 Catharina married Christian de Moriem, an organist at Antwerp Cathedral. In around 1556-58 the couple lived in Madrid, in the circle of the court of Mary of Hungary. None of her Madrid paintings are known and the latest dated work is from 1554. She died in around 1565-68, in her late 30s, possibly in childbirth.
Van Hemessen achieved recognition in her time. Lodovico Guicciardini’s 1567 Description of the Low Countries records her as one of the “celebrated women in the arts”. A year later the Italian art historian Giorgio Vasari followed, describing her as an “excellent miniaturist” who had earned “a good salary” at the royal court in Madrid.
Over her entire career, the Antwerp curator Maarten Bassens believes that she completed around 16 surviving portraits and five or six religious subjects. Other works have been subject to attributional debates.
The only two monographs on Van Hemessen are by the Belgian author Karolien de Clippel and the German writer Marguerite Droz-Emmert (both 2004), but no book has been published on her in English.
_Martin Bailey _ArtNewspaper

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

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ARTIST DIANA THATER PARTNERS WITH CONSERVATION LAB
<https://tinyurl.com/2kvhrv78>
When the fire reached Diana Thater’s home in Altadena last January, there was no time for triage. As she and her husband, the artist T. Kelly Mason, evacuated ahead of the flames, Mason grabbed what he could carry: a server and several hard drives. Thater took the cats. Everything else—decades of raw footage, master tapes, installation manuals, ephemera, paintings—was left behind in a temperature-controlled garage that burned to the ground.
“It’s hard to live to be 62 years old and lose your entire life in one night,” Thater told at the time. The loss was not just personal but professional. Much of her work, made since the early 1990s, exists at the intersection of video, sound, and installation, the kind of media whose survival depends on constant technological upkeep. While some of her post-2005 work had been digitized and survived on the drives her husband carried out, large portions of her earlier archive were never transferred. Those materials are gone.
, A year later, as Los Angeles marks the anniversary of the fires that devastated Altadena and the Pacific Palisades, Thater’s experience has come to stand for a broader, unresolved problem in contemporary art: how fragile media-based practices remain once they leave the studio, and how little infrastructure exists to support artists when catastrophe strikes.
In the months after the fire, Thater began working with the Canyon Media Art Conservation Center (CMACC), a new nonprofit conservation laboratory opening in 2026 that is devoted exclusively to time-based media art. Led by Cass Fino-Radin, a longtime media art conservator and former staffer at the Museum of Modern Art and digital arts nonprofit Rhizome, CMACC is designed to address what might be described as a preservation crisis driven by technological obsolescence, limited institutional capacity, and the sheer volume of digital material contemporary artists produce.
For Thater, the collaboration is both pragmatic and urgent. While dozens of her works were destroyed in the fire, many others exist around the world. CMACC is now working with her to locate the best surviving versions of those works—master tapes, artist proofs, or institutionally held copies—so they can be assessed, digitized, and returned, restoring as much of her archive as possible.
But Thater’s case isn’t an exception but a common experience faced by artists working in film and video. For decades, these artists have often been the ones charged with managing preservation of their own work, especially since collectors or institutions often lacked staff specialized in this kind of conservation. Even when contracts required works to be migrated every few years, those updates frequently went undone. Digital storage, meanwhile, introduced its own risks: hard drives fail, formats become unreadable, and “the cloud” is no substitute for active stewardship, according to Fino-Radin.
CMACC was conceived in response to that reality
Fino-Radin describes the moment as analogous to the early 20th century, when American museums first recognized that traditional conservation models were inadequate for modern art. “We’re at a similar inflection point now,” they said. “Media art has become central to contemporary practice, but the systems designed to care for it haven’t caught up.” _ARTnews

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THE MOUNT WASHINGTON POST
<https://tinyurl.com/7b96anes> _LisaAnneAuerbach

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CHARPENTIER RELIEF FOR GETTY by William Poundstone
<http://tiny.cc/dkcx001>
The Getty Museum has acquired Young Mother Breastfeeding Her Child, a stoneware relief by French sculptor Alexandre Charpentier (1856–1909). The image of the artist's sister-in-law and infant, first executed in plaster in 1882, made Charpentier's reputation. The French state bought the plaster and commissioned a marble. Charpentier subsequently produced bronze and stoneware versions. The luminous gold-ochre color of the Getty's relief stands out in the gallery of late nineteenth century sculpture.
<http://tiny.cc/fkcx001>
There is another stoneware Young Mother at the Musée d'Orsay <https://tinyurl.com/4djt3sr6> and bronzes at the National Gallery of Art, the Carnegie Museum of Art, and the Huntington. The Huntington bronze <https://tinyurl.com/mr4cs3es> , bought in Henry and Arabella's time and once displayed in their mansion, is 46 in.-high and dated about 1890. It is hung in a Reference Library staircase, off-limits to visitors.
Charpentier's generation perceived stoneware (grès) as an honest, unpretentious alternative to traditional bronze and marble. Young Mother was cast by the firm of Emile Muller, which also made building tiles. Stoneware is capable of taking sharp lines, displaying Charpentier's skill for anatomy and perspective. The virtuosic foreshortening of the child's legs invites comparison to Renaissance reliefs.
With the rise of Art Nouveau, Charpentier became interested in the Gesamtkunstwerk, an architectural environment incorporating the arts into daily life <https://tinyurl.com/mrz54xn2> . The Getty relief anticipates that philosophy, as it was once installed in the nursery of a suburban Paris home.
<http://tiny.cc/ikcx001> _LosAngelesCountyMuseumOnFire

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ATLANTA MARRIOTT MARQUIS HOTEL IN ATLANTA GA, USA
<https://tinyurl.com/wpyzd7an>
by architect John Portman
https://tinyurl.com/5v4m4re5
(1985)
<https://tinyurl.com/2nak2yv3> _‪Brutalismbot

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5. THE MAID OF THE MIST by Rainey Knudson
<https://tinyurl.com/ywrvxpm4>
Driving into town, the approach to Niagara Falls has admittedly been compromised by a kind of smaller, crummier version of Las Vegas that has mushroomed up over the past century. But all the casinos, rundown honeymoon hotels, and wax museums in the world can’t compete with the Falls themselves. That’s where the Maid of the Mist comes in. She rescues the experience.
It’s simple, really: the Maid ferries passengers to the base of Horseshoe Falls and idles there for about 10 minutes, then returns. But there is no manmade, so-called “immersive experience” you can get at a museum that comes close to the blinding, deafening sensory overload of this spectacular natural phenomenon. The roar makes conversation impossible; the drenching mist obliterates the sky, even on a sunny day. All ordinary perception is overwhelmed by 600,000 gallons of water crashing down every second, making their way, eventually, to the sea.
The boat’s name comes from an old Iroquois myth. There are different versions of the story, but the most common is that a beautiful young woman named Lelawala, consumed by grief over the death of her husband, drove her canoe over the falls in her despair. She was rescued by the Thunder Beings—the source of power, energy, and spirit who lived behind the falls—and herself became a spirit or deity who dwelt in the mists. And today, riding the boat named for her, you enter the transcendent, otherworldly space that inspired her legend. You touch, briefly, the sublime. _TheImpatientReader

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JULIUS EXNER, A GIRL FROM FANØ, DENMARK,
in traditional dress and mask (strude) for the harvest, 1899
<https://tinyurl.com/2pj8mv2w> _JesseLocker

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AMONG MY MANY ESOTERIC INTERESTS ARE SHAPED TROMPE L'OEIL PAINTINGS
like this one by 18th-century French painter François-Xavier Vispré
I'm fascinated not only by the illusion
but also by the care in creating an irregular shape
<https://tinyurl.com/9x8jvf8w>
to match the elements depicted
<https://tinyurl.com/2sbd5zw8>
SINCE YOU SEEMED TO ENJOY FRANÇOIS-XAVIER VISPRÉ'S SHAPED TROMPE L'OEIL CANVASES
I thought you'd appreciate another of his specialities,
these trompe l'oeil paintings of prints under (illusionistically) cracked glass.
Always great to see painters highlight their ability to conjure visual illusions
<https://tinyurl.com/mpadmmhx> _MichaelLobel

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ENZO MARI’S FIREPLACE by greg
<https://tinyurl.com/33k8d4ct>
This is apparently Enzo Mari’s fireplace, where it looks like he burned a postcard of Julia Louis Dreyfus in effigy every month? I have no idea, but the only other domestic images I can find from his studio are from this apartamento magazine interview from 2009 <https://tinyurl.com/4d22v7ky> , when I was deep in Enzo Mariology. [Everything else for this image is unattributed fluff. And do you know how hard it is to search for Enzo Mari’s own house? This is ridiculous.]
I will update this post with more info when I find it, and if it turns out to be all locked away for two generations in Mari’s archive, I’ll post an update about that, too. _greg.org

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WE ARE LIVING IN AN AGE OF BAD PAINTING—THE MEDIUM MUST BE CHALLENGED
It is dangerous to use art fairs as a barometer of making and meaning in contemporary art. But walking through Frieze London’s carpeted aisles in October, a long-developed hunch was confirmed emphatically: we are amid a deluge of bad painting.
It is not good “bad painting”, in the late Francis Picabia sense. It is bad bad painting. Bloated, vapid, performative (not in the good sense) painting. Stultifyingly boring painting. Market-slump painting. “Oh-why-not?” painting.
The exhibition Painting After Painting: a Contemporary Survey from Belgium at the SMAK museum in Ghent between April and November was less disquieting. (Full disclosure: I led a panel at SMAK on the subject of painting with two curators of recent surveys, Lydia Yee and Manuela Ammer.) But while the intellectual framework around the show was robust and thoughtful and the presentation absorbing, with plenty of examples of engaging work, a lot of it still felt thin in subject or wanting in execution.
This is perhaps inevitable in any survey of 74 artists working in a particular medium in a single country. But as a devout, passionate defender of the discipline’s unique properties and powers, I can’t remember being so often at a loss to find merit in paintings as I have been in the past couple of years.
I wonder: has painting become too comfortable? No one says painting is dead anymore. It never will be, of course. But with no ideological objections it isn’t forced to defend itself, to come out fighting. Some of the best painting of the past century was made in times of crisis and reckoning, when artists using paint felt embattled or disenfranchised from the central discourse.
I was reminded of this when I interviewed Christopher Wool in October. We spoke about his reflection that the moment where the Renaissance gave way to the Baroque was comparable to the shift between Modernism and postmodernism that was happening when he emerged as an artist in the late 1970s. Both situations—moments of crisis or upheaval—liberated artists. Wool suggested that “we’re experiencing a real lack of that now, or that’s my impression, anyway. Those kinds of dialogues are rare now.” I asked if he meant a critical dialogue where ideas are on the line. He responded that artists in the late 1970s “really had to deal with some of these issues… you couldn’t really ignore them”. I asked if artists were literally discussing whether painting was dead in their studios. “There were plenty of people not far from me who really believed painting was problematic and should be avoided in some way,” he replied.
Wool then mentioned a marvellous piece of critical writing from that time: Thomas Lawson’s 'Last Exit: Painting', published in 1981, in which Lawson, himself a painter, argued that painting can be the “unsuspecting vehicle” that camouflages radical ideas. Crucial to painting’s potency in opposition to the photographic practices trumpeted by those marking painting’s demise, Lawson suggested, was its capacity for obscurity and ambiguity. He saw the work of the Pictures Generation artists, such as Richard Prince and Cindy Sherman, as “straightforwardly declarative”. It therefore leaves no room for a factor that I believe remains one of contemporary painting’s superpowers, and an animating force for much of the best painting since that period: harnessing what Lawson calls “the growth of a really troubling doubt”.
Doubt was a productive force for an artist of terrific importance for Wool in his early years—Philip Guston. Guston’s own response to a painting crisis, choosing figuration over abstraction, literally prompted friends to turn their backs on him. I regard Wool’s recent paintings in oil as reanimating some of Guston’s questions.
It seems no accident that the four painters whose shows I have most admired in recent months—Wool, Kerry James Marshall and Peter Doig all in London, and Charline von Heyl in Brussels—forged their painterly languages at moments of fierce debate about the possibilities, and pitfalls, of the discipline. An anything-goes climate is not healthy for painting. Just because we are past the painting-is-dead moment does not mean the fight for its relevance is over._Ben Luke _ArtNewspaper

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BUBBLES ANTIQUES MARVELL, AR
<https://tinyurl.com/2an6rp9y> _RuralIndexingProject

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SPERONE, WESTWATER TRADE CLAIMS OF MISMANAGEMENT by Katya Kazakina
<https://tinyurl.com/57398rdj>
With the start of 2026, one of the stalwart galleries in New York’s art scene, Sperone Westwater, is no more. Amid a legal dispute between its namesake principals, the 50-year-old firm shuttered before the clock struck midnight on January 1.
But the legal drama over the dissolution of Sperone Westwater Inc., a corporation established in 1975 by Gian Enzo Sperone, Angela Westwater, and the late German dealer Konrad Fischer (who exited in 1982), is not abating. In documents filed this week, Sperone expands on his claims of mismanagement by Westwater and rebuffs allegations that she made in late-December filings that he has long been out of touch with their business.
The battle began in August, when Sperone, 86, and Sandstown Trade Ltd. (an entity connected to his family that owns 50 percent of the company) initiated proceedings in a New York court to unwind its two assets: the Sperone Westwater gallery and its Norman Foster–designed home on the Bowery in Manhattan.
<https://tinyurl.com/4xx4cvz7>
ribing the situation as “a kind of parasitic deadlock.”
Amid the alleged decline of the gallery, Westwater was using “one very high value asset, the Foster Building, to subsidize the other unprofitable asset, the Gallery,” the petitioners contend. The partners had agreed that the gallery would pay $1.8 million in annual rent to the corporation (to generate income from their investment in the building), but it has not done so, according to court papers. Sperone and Sandstown are asking the court to appoint a third-party arbiter, also known as a receiver, to resolve outstanding matters.
Westwater, who is the other 50-percent stockholder, is asking the court to dismiss the petition and forgo the receiver, saying that the partners are not deadlocked and that Sperone and Sandstown are engaged in “a blatant attempt to extract every penny from the Corporation for their own financial benefit.”
On December 22, she fired off a memorandum to the court accompanied by several juicy exhibits, including a nine-page “term sheet” with details of winding down the gallery that Sperone’s filings say was supposed to remain confidential.
The agreement, which had been drawn up through mediation, details who gets what and when. If the partners can’t agree on all the terms, they are to select an independent referee to help them.
One example from the term sheet: The parties will receive 50 percent of the proceeds from the sale of the building and equally distribute 80 percent of the corporation’s cash reserves within 10 days after the execution of a settlement agreement. Also, the proceeds from art sales will be also evenly divided, “except that 20 percent of each artwork sale shall first be paid into a lockbox account, established jointly by the Parties, to be used for the sole purpose of paying any outstanding debts, liabilities, and taxes that are identified during the wind-up process under the below terms,”
<https://tinyurl.com/5fn73kh9>
Some items have already been handled. Westwater’s memo states that the gallery terminated employees and returned “nearly all consigned artworks to their original owners.” It also reveals that the parties have retained the brokerage firm CBRE “to place the Foster Building on the market and sell it to the highest bidder.”
She claims that she’s been “the only person responsible for the daily management—including all financial and employment decisions”—of the gallery.
Even before Sperone moved to Europe in 2016, he “had very little involvement in the Gallery’s operations,” she claims. “He would spend approximately 30-50 days at the Gallery each year and would appear only for openings and exhibitions. He was otherwise a largely absent partner.”
Westwater says that Sperone has not been to the gallery, or the United States, since relocating. “In fact, he has been so absent from the Gallery that Ms. Westwater has only communicated with him through his girlfriend’s email account and has had to ask her whether Mr. Sperone was still living since it had been so long since she had heard from him,” her filing says.
<https://tinyurl.com/4jkznvrt>
On Tuesday, Sperone and Sandstone responded to Westwater’s claims with affidavits and 24 exhibits that include emails, invoices, and a financial analysis of the gallery since 2019. The dealer claims that the Foster Building cost more than $34 million to build, a substantial difference from previous reports that listed the price simply as more than $20 million.
Sperone invested more than $15 million personally in the building, using funds from the sale of a Roy Lichtenstein—the most valuable artwork in his collection, he says—and his apartment in New York.
The dealer says that his investment in the gallery “generates practically no income or dividends,” and adds that it has been “unprofitable and has burned its cash reserves in recent years.”
To back up this claim, the petitioners attached a financial analysis of the gallery’s revenue, profit, and cash reserves from 2019 through December 11, 2025. It shows losses in five of those seven years, including a shortfall of $2.07 million in 2025. Revenue peaked at $20 million in 2021, but dropped to $3.58 million in 2025, according to the documents.
The dispute between the octogenarian partners “is no longer whether the Corporation will physically close down—its Gallery is closed, and the Foster Building is being marketed for sale—it is how the Corporation will wind down and be lawfully dissolved,” John Cahill, the attorney for Sperone and Sandstown, says in the latest filing. _ArtNewspaper

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SOLSTICE ON A SPINNING EARTH
<https://tinyurl.com/yu73nm2t> _NASA