OLD NEWS

BORN (POSSIBLY) ON THIS DAY IN 1445, IN FLORENCE, THE GREAT SANDRO BOTTICELLI.
Starting off his day with his Primavera,
because don't we all wish spring would arrive?
<https://tinyurl.com/y3futen4>
The three Graces,
passing benefits from one to the next
in the midst of Botticelli's Spring, c, 1480.
<https://tinyurl.com/2ptvspfn>
Primavera herself,
scattering flowers before her;
her flower-makinng doppelganger Flora follows,
blown in by Zephyr, the winds of March.
Which we know all about today!
<https://tinyurl.com/y9ttcm7h>
A man with his Medici medal,
& subtle red ring to match his hat,
painted by Sandro Botticelli.
<https://tinyurl.com/ya2vxk72>
Looking right at you from the 1480s,
a young man painted by Sandro Botticelli.
<https://tinyurl.com/mcpdbkb3>
One of the Horae, or Hours,
rushes in to cloak Venus
(although Venus's nudity was too perfect
for Botticelli to actually disturb it with drapery!).
<https://tinyurl.com/37aj7f8z>
Venus, born from the waves, 1486.
<https://tinyurl.com/mtd25ry3>
Born, along with/as Botticelli's Venus,
the renaissance nude.
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Perfect in profile
possibly modeled on/inspired by
the famously gorgeous Simonetta Vespucci.
<https://tinyurl.com/5n7h9rbm>
It's Zephyr again!
With a friend.
Blowing Venus to the shore,
<https://tinyurl.com/mr4782vk>
Is it possible for grace to be excessive?
Botticelli really testing that in this Annunciation from 1490.
Plus check out the little Christ-in-tomb w/ sudarium on lower frame.
<https://tinyurl.com/jt226f3a>
Rushing in from stage left:
Gabriel. Waiting patiently at right:
Mary. Holding it all together:
fantastic perspectival architecture
<https://tinyurl.com/5n92v9mw>
Fortitude. Because you know you need it!
<https://tinyurl.com/5yhwsnr8>
Saint Augustine, writing away
in a slightly untidy but perspectivally perfect study,
designed for him by Botticelli.
<https://tinyurl.com/4bmh5fvh>
Women messing with men's heads du jour:
Discovery of the body of Holofernes.
Missing its head!
<https://tinyurl.com/475zba64>
That's where it went!
Judith and Abra,
strolling about the countryside with Holofernes' head.
Assume blood is running down Abra's back
But she is stoic, as Botticelli assures us.
<https://tinyurl.com/29nvprw4>
Giuliano de Medici,
looking very cool & confident
(not to say arrogant) in 1478.
<https://tinyurl.com/mbwzz26c>
Please help Smerelda Bandinelli
escape this small narrow room
in which she is trapped.
By Sandro Botticelli, captor,
<https://tinyurl.com/3v44n8xh>
Madonna of the Magnificat, 1483.
Truly splendid in every way.
<https://tinyurl.com/3ub7ymk6>
Madonna of the Pomegranate, 1487,
Everybody looks lethargic or possibly drugged.
Seriously, would you trust this baby?
<https://tinyurl.com/4nvyzr57>
Botticelli recreates antiquity in 1496
with the Calumny of Apelles.
Full of relevant lessons for today!
A lot of calumny goes around online.
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Dragging the victim:
it's Slander, attended by Fraud & Conspiracy.
Beautiful and deadly. Yes,
Botticelli is the man for the moment!
<https://tinyurl.com/33hz7b7h>
Wakey wakey! Venus and Mars, 1483,
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Just wanted to sleep...
a few more minutes... Mars,
<https://tinyurl.com/3jrbyeab>
If you ever wondered about how
that Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic of beauty
was about art pre-Raphael,
here is your answer, from Sandro Botticelli.
<https://tinyurl.com/y5f488tr> _Dr.PeterPaulRubens

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TRACEY EMIN ON ART-MAKING, HONESTY, AND SURVIVAL: ‘ABUSE IS EVERYWHERE’
<https://tinyurl.com/vaxcdxat>
It’s rare that a living artist becomes the subject of a major show at Tate Modern, but Tracey Emin—the subject of a new, sprawling survey at the esteemed London museum—isn’t known for abiding by convention.
“I always said I’d come down and haunt the place and re-hang things if I didn’t like it,” the artist said in a video call on the day of the show’s opening. “But I didn’t die. And to be alive and seeing this is really quite phenomenal.”
She’s not making jokes about death lightly. Emin, 62, was diagnosed with an aggressive squamous cell cancer in 2020 that required dramatic surgery and an overhaul of her lifestyle. She said she now lives in a survivor “bubble,” but that in this “second life”—aptly also the title of the Tate exhibition—she’s making more work than ever.
“All I know is while I’m here now, I’ve got to make the most of every moment,” she said. “I’ve got to enjoy my painting, enjoy my life. I’ve got to be as bold and as honest as possible.”
Honesty has been her strong suit since she burst onto the art scene in the 1990s as part of the now-iconic Young British Artists (YBAs), equally scandalizing and enthralling the U.K. public with her radically confessional work that explored everything from sexual assault, abortion, and mental health to broader issues of class, race, and sexuality.
<https://tinyurl.com/yfy44xff>
“A Second Life” is an apt reflection of Emin’s unfettered approach to art making. Its 90-odd works are presented with barely any wall text or interpretation and achronologically—an atypical approach to a career survey, one fitting for Emin’s singular I-don’t-give-a-fuck style. There is no attempt at drawing temporal linearity through the themes of her work because even the artist’s earliest pieces touch on current and urgent issues. The show presents Emin’s career as one continuous confrontation with vulnerability, trauma, and survival.
Calling Out Abuse
The artist’s unapologetic and pioneering address of sexual assault and its after-effects runs through her oeuvre. Her own rape at the age of 13 is a frequent touchstone in the Tate show, including the 1999 blanket No Chance (WHAT A YEAR), one of the first textile works one encounters. Appliquéd lettering reads “At the age of 13 why the hell should I trust anyone” and “no I said no.” A 2018 painting, Rape, depicts a frenetically painted white mass bearing down on body outlined in red.
Other works may not reference the incident directly, but still confront sexual violence and loss of agency. An embroidered textile work, Just Like Nothing (2009), depicts a semi-abstracted woman’s body, her legs sprawled outward, her face obscured; the hand-sewn text at the bottom states, “You made me feel like nothing.” A 2024 painting depicting two loosely rendered figures entangled with one another, painted in a vivid red, has the words “you keep fucking me” written over and over at the top. One of Emin’s iconic hand-written neon sculptures glows: “I could have loved my innocence.”
<https://tinyurl.com/2wphsrkk>
The #MeToo movement in the mid 2010s changed how people saw her work. “Previously, people just thought I was moaning and whining and sulking,” she said. “When actually I was writing about teenage sex, rape, abuse, child abuse, abortion—all issues that women and young girls face.”
In the wake of the Epstein files’ partial release—which has so clearly underscored the pervasiveness of sexual predation in society and also how difficult it is for survivors to not only be believed but to find justice—Emin’s work doubly brims with a collective outrage in addition to her own. “It’s not just about women of this generation, but women of the last generation, and women of the next generation,” she said, impassioned, adding that she wants young people—men and women—to be looking at her work and discussing how it applies to their own lives after this show.
“My main problem with all of the Epstein stuff is that people will start to think that it’s over there, that it’s a long way away—it’s the rich, it’s the celebrated, it’s the powerful that are doing these things. And it’s not, is it?,” she said. “It doesn’t matter whether they’re powerful or rich or white or Black. It doesn’t matter where they come from. Abuse is happening everywhere, all the time.”
<https://tinyurl.com/sfzrtf8j>
Emin doesn’t skirt politicized topics in her work, nor is she afraid to speak out about them, but she’s adamant that her candor doesn’t equate to activism. “Not in the slightest, not even in the tiniest bit,” she said. “I’m an artist, I make art.”
A generative tension between art-making and advocacy is most palpable in the artist’s works about an abortion and there are a pair of galleries in the Tate Modern show devoted to the topic. Emin had two abortions in the 1990s; the first nearly killed her, after it was discovered that she had been pregnant with twins and one fetus was left inside her. She has been outspoken on the need for proper medical care for women.
“There’ll be women dying if abortion is outlawed,” she said. “And the fact that someone would rather their daughter die from a backstreet abortion than have a legal abortion is absolutely insane. It’s common sense that I’m talking about.”
<https://tinyurl.com/524eahr3>
Her 1996 film, How it feels, follows her on a walk through London as she discusses not only the pain she endured having an abortion and the way she was treated for having one, but also more generally her thoughts on having children, which are complicated, in part because of her working-class background. At one point in the film, she notes that where she grew up, in the impoverished seaside town of Margate on England’s southeast coast, teen pregnancy was the norm, and it kept young women from pursuing education and opportunities. “By the time you were 17, you had one or two kids and, if you worked really hard, you got a council house or flat,” she explains in the video. (That she now runs an art school and studio program in the town to offer more education and employment opportunities may not be activism, per se, but it’s not far off.) During the exhibition preview, a woman started crying while watching the video.
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In the next room, a shelf holds a hospital wristband and a small bottle of pain killers beside a display of children’s shoes. There’s also a recreation of her beer-can-and-laundry-strewn studio, in which she locked herself for three weeks in ’96 after what she calls the “emotional suicide” of her abortion experience; she destroyed all of her early paintings at that juncture, and started making work afresh.
Taken together, these works are undeniably powerful and speak to an experience that so many women have but don’t talk about. “A Second Life” will travel to a handful of international museums after Tate Modern, among them the Louisiana in Denmark later this year and the Ho-am in Seoul in 2027. There are no United States venues planned as of yet. The artist said she had been in talks with New York’s Guggenheim to stage the show there, but the museum had suggested downsizing it and Emin was concerned the abortion works would be first on the cut list, given the nation’s current political climate that has seen women’s reproductive rights repealed.
Vulnerability as a Strength
While she may be better known for her textiles, neons, and paintings, Emin’s video works are in fact some of the most undersung, and they shine in “A Second Life.” Take, for instance, Why I Never Became A Dancer (1995), which relates the story of how Emin left school at 13 and had a lot of sex with men in their 20s throughout her early teens. When she entered a disco championship in 1978, men, some of whom she’d slept with, shouted “slag, slag, slag”—the British equivalent of “slut”—while she was dancing and she ran out of the room in tears. In the film’s final minutes, the artist identifies the men by name; it ends with her dancing, smiling, reclaiming joy. When it was first shown 30 years ago, it was dismissed as narcissistic and anti-intellectual, as was much of her work.
“The only two things I was good at was dancing and art,” Emin said. “It’s not my narcissism. I was using my voice to talk about things that happen to lots of people.”
<https://tinyurl.com/33pp4bjn>
Other highlights include the Turner Prize-nominated work that is now required study for art students, My Bed (1998), a self-portrait in installation form comprised of her mattress, tousled sheets, crumpled tissues, cigarettes, vodka bottles, a pregnancy test, and other detritus from a four-day breakdown after a breakup. Her bed reappears in the 2024 painting The End of Love, where a dark red mass radiates amid loosely drawn sheets, presided over by the silhouettes of her two cats, Teacup and Pancake. It’s a pained yet tender reflection of her post-cancer reality, one that has shifted the bed from a site of self-destruction to one of rehabilitation.
The artist’s latest self-portraits are just as vulnerable and striking as ever. After undergoing cancer treatment in 2020 that required the surgical removal of several internal organs, Emin now lives with a stoma bag—an experience she documents unflinchingly in a series of personal photographs. These images are displayed opposite half-nude Polaroids she took in the early 2000s, creating a stark dialogue between past and present. Installed along a long, dark corridor, the pairing underscores the exhibition’s theme of a “second life.” The passageway can even be read as a kind of birth canal, leading viewers into rooms that include more of her most recent work.
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Emin said that the corridor is her favorite part of the Tate Modern installation. “It was the only bit that was my idea,” she said, smiling coyly. The show was largely organized by her studio director, Harry Weller, and marks the capstone to Maria Balshaw’s nine-year tenure as Tate director, during which time she has championed feminist, socially resonant art. _Margaret Carrigan _artnet

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THE MOUNT WASHINGTON POST
<https://tinyurl.com/33tsk2t8> _LisaAnneAuerbach

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TRACEY EMIN: 'RACIST BEHAVIOUR IS DIVIDING OUR COUNTRY' by Anny Shaw
<https://tinyurl.com/jnem8p4b>
Living British artists are typically shown at Tate Britain, rather than Tate Modern. But Tracey Emin is not like most British artists.
Speaking yesterday (25 February) at the press preview of her major exhibition Second Life, which opens this week, the artist says she turned down the venue of Tate Britain as it wasn’t enough of a “challenge”, having shown there several times already, including at the 1999 Turner Prize.
Emin recalls how when she got the offer to show at Tate Modern, it came out of the blue. “At first I was hesitant,” she says. “If I was 70 or 75, I’d have thought, ‘Yeah!’ But I had to really think about what I was doing. Is this the right time in my career to do it? How would it affect me? Sometimes, when you do things too young or when you’re not ready, it’s not good for you. But you also have to do things when you’re given the opportunity. I keep saying, ‘I’m so lucky I didn’t die’, because witnessing this is quite phenomenal for any artist.”
The exhibition is pointedly not a retrospective, taking instead a thematic, deeply personal approach. Harry Weller, Emin’s longstanding creative director, has overseen the curation, working with Tate's outgoing director Maria Balshaw, and the museum staffers Alvin Li and Jessica Baxter.
One gallery pays homage to Emin’s multicultural heritage and exposes the racism she and her family were subjected to. Emin’s father, Enver, was a Turkish Cypriot, whose own grandfather was Sudanese and enslaved during the Ottoman Empire, while her mother had Romanichal roots. “My whole background is so British, everything about me is what being British is—it’s a bit of this, a bit of that. And I’m very proud of it, I’m so proud to be British. I love lots of it. But what I don’t like is jingoistic, racist, bigoted behaviour that is dividing our country,” Emin says.
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The artist notes how Reform party leader Nigel Farage has twice tried to win Margate, the Kent seaside town where Emin grew up and where she returned to live permanently in 2020. “He didn’t get in because there are a lot of people there who are a lot more intelligent and a lot more politically astute than people imagine,” she says.
The opening of Turner Contemporary in 2011 and the launch of Emin’s school and residency in 2023 has gone some way to boosting the local economy in Margate, but, as the artist points out, 18,000 people still live below the poverty line in the town. “Margate is a tough place, it’s really windy and it’s really cold,” she says. “But I’ll tell you what’s making it much better: art. Art is really changing the landscape. More businesses are opening—there are vintage shops, restaurants, little cafes, art galleries, boutiques, you name it. It sounds boujee and like gentrification, but it’s providing young people with jobs. If more people actually did something [about poverty], the country would be in a better place. And Reform wouldn’t have such a big, loud voice.”
Emin is a staunch supporter of keeping Britain’s art institutions free, suggesting that wealthier people should take museum memberships and make voluntary donations to increase access for the less well off. Coming from a working-class background and having left school at 13, the artist recalls how she needed to “find her own way” to museums. “I was 22 when I first went to Tate Britain, and I was really lucky because it was free.”
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As a trustee of the British Museum, Emin is also keenly aware of the work the institution needs to do to modernise. “It’s a fantastic museum in many ways, but it has this terrible colonial past,” she says. “I hope it changes. Nick Cullinan, the new director, is really pushing it. There are a number of new trustees and our aim is to actually get it into gear and into the 21st century. But it’s hard. It’s a battle with certain things and certain issues which I’m not allowed to talk about.”
The British Museum has faced significant, growing pressure to repatriate colonial-era artefacts, notably the Benin Bronzes which were taken by British troops from Nigeria in 1897. The museum's chairman George Osbourne has failed to reach an agreement with Greece over the Parthenon Marbles. Emin says, however, that “you can’t just give things back, it doesn’t work like that”. She adds: “There is a level of responsibility for every museum to look after the works and if you just give something back you don’t know that it is going to be looked after. It is much more complex. I wish it was easier.”
The artist suggests a more supportive approach. “Rather than everybody slagging off [the BM] and trying to get it closed down, why don’t we just try and make it a better place—make it more ethical and make it stronger.”
For now, Emin has her sights on the next leg of her Tate Modern show, which tours to the Louisiana Museum in Denmark in October and later to the Hoam Museum in South Korea. Plans for the exhibition to be shown at the Guggenheim Museum in New York were shelved after Emin was offered half of the Rotunda—a space that would be impossible to fit the Tate show into. “In the end it wasn’t the right institution. We’re in no rush to show in the US and will wait for the right place,” Weller says.
There is also an argument that some of her work, particularly the pieces that address abortion and women’s rights, is at odds with the prevailing political climate in the US. But Emin doesn’t see herself as particularly radical anymore. “There’s still a side of me that that facilitates radical thinking with my residency programme and one of the most important things at the moment is for people to promote freedom of thought and expression,” she says. “But I’m 62. I don’t really want to throw myself around naked or scream at the top of my voice anymore. I just want to do my work and hang it on the wall.” _ArtNewspaper

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YVES KLEIN, FRÉMISSEMENT (MG 17), 1960
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Alexander Calder, Comb, 1940
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Agnes Martin, Friendship, 1963
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Y. Z. Kami, Golden Dome, 2015–16
<https://tinyurl.com/smxxdv9h>
Ewan David Eason Mappa Mundi Beijing, 2012
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Ewan David Eason Mappa Mundi London, 2012
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Ewan David Eason Mappa Mundi Paris, 2012
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Robert Rauschenberg, Untitled (Gold Painting), c.1953,
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Att. to Kano Sansetsu, 'The Old Plum', Edo Period, 1645, four sliding door panels,
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Jumping Carp by Muramasa Kudo. 2014
<https://tinyurl.com/4tf3f3ym> _RabihAlameddine