OLD NEWS

HAIRY-TAILED MOLES AND THEIR TWO-TIERED TUNNEL SYSTEM by Mary Holland
<https://tinyurl.com/24hb3jpd>
We’re familiar with the raised ridges of soil that are pushed above ground in warmer months when Hairy-tailed Moles are digging their shallow subterranean tunnels. Networks of runways exist just under the surface of the ground and are used throughout the summer as moles search for earthworms, insects and other small invertebrates to eat. But what happens when winter comes and the ground freezes?
To solve this dilemma Hairy-tailed Moles have a two-tiered tunnel system, one for summer and one for winter. As cold weather approaches, massive digging takes place beneath the summer runways as moles dig a new layer of deeper tunnels below the frost line, 18 inches or more below the surface. Here they remain active, foraging in the tunnels throughout the winter and caching immobilized prey in special chambers located off the runways. _ _NaturallyCurious

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SOMETHING
<https://tinyurl.com/2yktaksg> _DavidShrigley

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A LITTLE WRITING ON SMALLER ROSETTA STONE by greg
<https://tinyurl.com/2a8au5hc>
Now I am not saying it makes up the global cultural suffering caused by their other major contribution to the modern media landscape, Eurovision, but the European Broadcast Union deserves praise for promulgating one of the most sublime, iconic, and minimalist images ever: the EBU color bars used to calibrate the chrominance and luminance of PAL format video signals and receivers.
And how does TV artist Nam June Paik, who spent more time surrounded by these color bars, on more monitors, than any other artist of the last hundred years, honor it? By making a perfect, little painting. Which apparently looked too much like writing paper to not fill the columns with a repeating series of delicately painted pictograms.
<https://tinyurl.com/24n4gn8e>
Maybe the interest for Paik was mediating our global shift from written to visual language, because he called the work Rosetta Stone. [Smaller Rosetta Stone (Ch. 12), actually, which implies the existence of a larger Rosetta Stone, or Rosetta Stones for the 11 other channels on the dial, or both.]
By the time he published Rosetta Stone prints a year later, in 1984 <https://tinyurl.com/2cnt57ks> , Paik flipped the color bars to the correct orientation, and framed the image in the convex rectangle of a CRT screen. And he made the translation reference more explicit by pairing his pictograms with their often-representational Chinese character counterparts. I just noticed that fifteen years later, in 1998, though it did use the specific logo (〒) of Japan Post, NTT designer Shigetaka Kurita’s first set of emoji <https://tinyurl.com/yfnvvsyy> included no kanji elements, only Roman letters.]
Anyway, the painting belonged to Paik’s dealer Holly Solomon, and now her art advisor son Thomas is selling it. Unsurprisingly, it’s already past the estimate with a week to go. _greg.org

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SELF-PORTRAIT
of Bolognese anatomist, lecturer, and wax modeler
Anna Morandi Manzolini (1714-1774)
dissecting a human brain, 1755
<https://tinyurl.com/2yczoej4> _JesseLocker

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NIKI DE SAINT PHALLE’S GLITTERING BESTIARY
<https://tinyurl.com/2xk4p6bq>
Born Catherine Marie-Agnes Fan de Saint Phalle in 1930 in Neuilly-sur-Seine (a suburb of Paris), Saint Phalle led an itinerant life that spanned Paris, New York, Mallorca, and the south of France. She began her artistic career in the 1950s, becoming the only female member of Nouveau Réalisme, an art movement whose members included Yves Klein, Daniel Spoerri, and Jean Tinguely, her second husband and lifelong collaborator.
<https://tinyurl.com/2dj3t4tr>
Saint Phalle’s multimedia practice included everything from Tirs (Shooting Paintings, 1961-63), made by firing a .22 caliber rifle at white plaster relief concealing pockets of pigment, to her monumental Tarot Garden (1978-98) in the Tuscan countryside, featuring 22 sculptures based on the major arcana.
Throughout her practice, Saint Phalle repeatedly referenced a personal and mythical bestiary. Here we look at three of her most commonly occurring symbols and how they reveal her endless artistic innovations, from perfume bottles to playgrounds.
Serpents
<https://tinyurl.com/2759yugo>
From prehistoric civilizations to modern religions across cultures, snakes have appeared as symbols of the cycle of life: the source of poison and its antidote. Saint Phalle’s omnipresent use of serpents, on the one hand, reflects her fascination with ancient Egypt; she once described herself as “Cleopatra with a fatal adder.” On the other hand, snakes alluded to the traumas inflicted on her by her abusive father, a presence she sought to exorcise through repeated representation. “I think I was born with a terror of snakes. Snakes have an inherent mystery for me, their rapidity, their lightning,” writes Saint Phalle in a posthumously assembled autobiography. “For me, they represented life itself, a primeval force.”
<https://tinyurl.com/2yw4our6>
In 1982, Saint Phalle launched a perfume that featured a bottle topped with intertwined snakes, the royalties of which helped finance one-third of her Tarot Garden. The premier of the scent was hosted by Andy Warhol and Interview magazine in New York, and the invitation described it as the “first fragrance conceived as a work of art.” As part of the promotional strategy, Saint Phalle attended a fashion show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, wearing a headpiece of entwined snakes. On her continued embrace of snakes, the artist explained, “Through making them I have transformed my fear into joy. I have learned through my art to tame the things that scare me.”
Birds
<https://tinyurl.com/2y6ugw9u>
Another of Saint Phalle’s favored symbols is birds, often in mid-flight. “I have always been crazy about birds ever since I can remember,” wrote Saint Phalle, adding, “Birds have been a constant theme in my work. Immortal birds. Sad birds. Triumphant birds.” There are, in fact, two birds in the Stravinsky Fountain (1982–83), which was a collaborative homage by Saint Phalle and Tinguely to the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky. The nightingale references Stravinsky’s short opera Le Rossignol (1914) and the firebird with its golden halo references the ballet L’oiseau de feu (1910).
<https://tinyurl.com/2y59j3l2>
Saint Phalle often looked to animal allegories across cultures: in addition to Egyptian, she drew from the symbolic language of various African, Pre-Columbian, and Eastern cultures. In this process, she often used the bird to reference the spiritual world, saying, “Birds are messengers from our world to the next. My guardian angel is a bird.” Most poignantly, one of the two tombstones she designed for her friends at the Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris features a soaring bird covered in mirrored mosaics, mounted on top of a metal sculpture salvaged from Tinguely’s studio. Her sustained citation of the bird represented her perennial desire for artistic reinvention writing, “Whenever I change styles the bird is always there in a new form.”
Dragons—And Other Monsters
<https://tinyurl.com/2dntyzpf>
Dragons for Saint-Phalle dually characterized empowerment and escape through a mythological and fairytale world. As creatures that bridge the celestial and the terrestrial realms, dragons appeared as early as the 1960s in her early plaster assemblages. Saint Phalle described, “Most of my sculptures have a timeless quality, reminiscences of ancient civilization and dreams. My work and life are like a fairy tale full of quests, evil dragons, hidden treasures, devouring mothers, witches, the bird of paradise, the good mother, glimpses of paradise, and descents into hell.”
<https://tinyurl.com/2c2psrl9>
Unusually, Saint Phalle turned to dragons and mythological monsters for her early public art commissions: the Golem (1972) in Israel and the Dragon of Knokke-le-Zoute (1973) in Belgium. Both were play structures for children with the monster tongues functioning as slides. By turning to a mythical bestiary for these public projects, Saint Phalle actively opposed the existing canon of public art that glorified heroic men or idealized female bodies. Instead, she populated the public landscape with expressive, colorful, and legendary forms. “Fairy tales and myths are what children need to be able to conquer themselves, to be able to conquer the world, to feel stronger,” she later wrote in 1996.
<https://tinyurl.com/2alc6dl9>
Saint Phalle continued to draw upon creatures such as the Loch Ness monster and sphinxes in her monumental public projects. For Saint Phalle, her lifelong reuse of animals as symbols was a conscious strategy. “Myths and symbols through history and culture have been periodically reinvented and re-created,” she wrote. “I show, in a very modern way, that these myths and symbols are still alive.” Looking at the breadth of her work through her personal bestiary reveals her legacy as a quintessentially modern artist and storyteller. _artnet

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THE MOUNT WASHINGTON POST
<https://tinyurl.com/24qe85dm> _LisaAnneAuerbach

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WHY WAS THE NATIONAL GALLERY SHY OF SHARING ITS ‘WILTON DIPTYCH’ REPORT? by Bendor Grosvenor
<https://tinyurl.com/2adwbg37>
As we near the National Gallery’s much-anticipated double reveal of its collection rehang and remodelled Sainsbury Wing, here is a curious tale about its instinct to remain closed, at least in spirit. It concerns one of the UK’s most important paintings, the Wilton Diptych.
The diptych, a jewel of medieval art, shows King Richard II kneeling before the Virgin Mary. Scholars have debated its purpose since it was acquired by the London institution in 1929. One of the diptych’s central mysteries is its date; Richard is shown as a boy, but the consensus has been that the diptych was commissioned in the later 1390s, when he was in his late 20s. Another theory is that it was made after he died in 1399. The picture’s meaning depends in large part on knowing its likely date.
In late 2022 the National Gallery commissioned a tree-ring analysis (dendrochronology) of the wooden panels on which it was painted. Establishing when the tree used was cut down could tell us the earliest year of creation for the painting. This was exciting for me, because I was researching the diptych for a book, and exploring new theories about its possible purpose. So I asked the National Gallery’s curatorial team if they might share the analysis with me. My inquiries went unanswered, so I submitted a request under the Freedom of Information Act. This was in September 2023.
The gallery refused to release the report. The Freedom of Information Act gives public bodies certain exemptions to withhold information, and one of these is if it plans to publish the information itself. The gallery said it would release a new catalogue entry online for the diptych in June 2024, as part of its 200th anniversary celebrations, and this would include the dendrochronological findings.
The exemption is subject to a “public interest test”, and must be “reasonable” given the wider circumstances. I first pointed out that my book would come out months after the gallery’s publication, and that I would be glad to share the results of my own research. I also noted that the gallery was established by parliament to “maintain a collection of works of art … and of documents relating to those works” and to make these documents “available to persons seeking to inspect them in connection with study or research”. But the gallery responded that it wanted to “maximise the impact” of its own publication, and I had to concede this was a valid argument: if the report contained bombshell information, then it was reasonable for the gallery to keep the scoop for itself.
June 2024 came, but without the gallery’s promised publication. Eventually I stumbled across it on the National Gallery website in October. The tree ring analysis was referred to in a single sentence: “Dendrochronology shows that the wood comes from the eastern Baltic and the latest tree ring found was from 1375.” The gallery had made little attempt, as far as I could see, to maximise either the “impact” of the catalogue entry or the dendrochronology. Indeed, when I finally received the report, I saw it had omitted its central conclusion: “these results support the attribution of the Diptych to the later 1390s”. The consensus on the diptych’s date had been right. There was no scoop.
So why all that effort to withhold the report? I later learned that the National Gallery had never refused to release such research before. Regular Diary readers will know I have been a critic of the gallery’s 200th anniversary redevelopment. Was its refusal to share the report a personal response? I hope so. For the alternative, that its institutional instinct is to guard, dragon-like, any new information about the nation’s most treasured paintings, would be far worse. _ArtNewspaper

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VINCENT VAN GOGH'S 1889
portrait of his friend Joseph Roulin
in his French postal service uniform
<https://tinyurl.com/24svmklu>
Van Gogh painted a number of portraits
of Joseph Roulin in his postal uniform;
this full-length version is in the collection
of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,
<https://tinyurl.com/23kdw5d6>
One of my favorite objects in Whitney Museum collection:
not an artwork per se but simple envelope
that attests to intimate queer circle—
Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham, John Cage—
at heart of 20th-century American culture
<https://tinyurl.com/2ben35aq> _MichaelLobel

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HOW DID THIS 18TH-CENTURY ENGLISH DRAWING END UP IN A NEW YORK DUMPSTER?
<https://tinyurl.com/2df24qwx>
One lucky antiques enthusiast was in for the shock of a lifetime when they last went dumpster diving. Rifling through the trash in Hudson, New York last year, they chanced upon a discarded pen and ink sketch that turned out to be by the renowned English portrait painter George Romney.
Romney was one of the leading society portrait painters of 18th-century Britain and his paintings are held in a great number of prestigious international collections,
As it happens, the sketch has been connected by auction specialists to a masterpiece at the Frick, less than 200 miles from the upstate location where it had become mere garbage.
<https://tinyurl.com/26anpmnf>
The drawing is understood to be a study of Henrietta Greville, Countess of Warwick, according to a scrawled note on the reverse of the mount framing the image. According to Rosebery’s, it is a preparatory sketch for a 1787–89 oil portrait of the same countess with her two children that belongs to the Frick. In both cases, the countess is in a seated pose. The Grevilles were lifelong patrons and friends of Romney’s.
According to Lara L’vov-Basirov, head of Old Master, British and European Pictures at Rosebery’s, the work is typical of Romney’s mature style in the late 1780s for how it “is swiftly executed with simple, fluent, and seemingly spontaneous lines.” As a preparatory study, it “offers a tantalizing and intimate glimpse into the artist’s working method.”
Alex Kidson, author of a 2015 catalogue raisonné for George Romney, has confirmed the attribution to the 18th-century master. Rather than the Frick portrait, however, he believes the sketch may have been for another, lost portrait of the Countess of Warwick that is known to us only via an engraving. He noted also that “Romney made a number of other portraits of seated ladies around the same time which the drawing could equally be a study for.”
In any case, nothing is known about the work’s whereabouts before it turned up in a dumpster last year. The question of how this drawing journeyed, over several centuries, from the studio of a leading painter in England to upstate New York remains an intriguing mystery. Bizarrely, it is far from the first time that a valuable work of art has been rescued from the trash. _artnet

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POST OFFICE BEULAH, CO
<https://tinyurl.com/293gortg> _RuralIndexingProject

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NEW RELEASE: BEYOND OPHELIA: THE TRUE LEGACY OF ELIZABETH ELEANOR ROSSETTI
<https://tinyurl.com/26nbws5j>
A new book on the artist and muse Elizabeth Eleanor Rossetti (more widely called Elizabeth Siddal) was published this week. The new volume is penned by Glenda Youde of the University of York.
According to the blurb:
Better known as ‘Lizzie Siddal’, the model who posed for John Everett Millais’s painting Ophelia, Elizabeth Eleanor Rossetti is now finally recognised as a Pre-Raphaelite artist in her own right, working alongside her male colleagues on equal terms. Elizabeth’s designs were truly original, the creation of her own imagination. They embodied the essence of Pre-Raphaelitism that her husband Gabriel and other members of the circle were striving to achieve. The male members of the group shamelessly copied the ideas from Elizabeth’s small sketches to create their own large masterpieces which have since become the epitome of Pre-Raphaelite art. The exclusion of women from the narrative has had a major impact in creating the perception of the Pre-Raphaelites as a predominantly male artistic movement; in Beyond Ophelia Dr Glenda Youde shows Elizabeth not as a pathetic drowning figure, but as the initiator of a directional change in the visual development of Pre-Raphaelite art. Featuring a unique collection of photographs of Elizabeth’s work commissioned by her husband after her death, this book highlights the critical importance of her role within the Pre-Raphaelite circle, and one which ultimately led to the evolution of the Aesthetic Movement. _ArtNewspaper

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EVERYONE JUST PACK IT UP BECAUSE TODAY I FOUND THE BEST WALL TEXT OF ALL TIME.
<https://tinyurl.com/26lsf6b5> _CarolinaAMiranda

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BIRKENSTOCK ARGUED ITS SHOES ARE ART
<https://tinyurl.com/2cnacfrp>
If art is measured by the passion it inspires in its admirers or the extent of its reach, Birkenstocks — touted by hipsters and health-care workers, and sported by the likes of Steve Jobs and Barbie — might count as a masterpiece. But Germany’s top court begs to differ, ruling Thursday that the famously comfy cork shoes and sandals are no work of “applied art” at all.
In a legal drama that has been unfolding for nearly two years, Birkenstock argued that several models are applied art, a designation given to creations defined by functionality in daily life and aesthetic merits. The company said imitations would violate the copyright its footwear would be entitled to under the designation as it tries to keep some knockoffs, often called “fakenstocks,” at bay.
For such legal protection, however, a level of design must be achieved that reflects individuality, the German court said. It concluded that creativity has not been demonstrated to such an artistic extent that the models are entitled to copyright _WashingtonPost

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JEFF OLSSON, ALMOST THERE, 2017.
<https://tinyurl.com/277drqqz> _RabihAlameddine

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ELIZABETH STREET GARDEN SEEKS PROTECTION AS A WORK OF ART
<https://tinyurl.com/y5jjkhgh>
The long-imperiled Elizabeth Street Garden has filed a federal lawsuit seeking protection under the Visual Artist Rights Act (VARA). The beloved one-acre garden received a stay of execution after the city served it with eviction papers last fall, but the lawsuit hopes to save it once and for all from being destroyed to erect an affordable housing project called Haven Green.
“This legal action seeks to secure the garden’s status as an irreplaceable physical and social sculpture, integral to New York City’s cultural and environmental landscape,” said the garden in a statement.
The complaint, filed by the New York firm Siegel Teitelbaum and Evans, argued that the late Allan Reiver, owner of the neighboring antique shop the Elizabeth Street Gallery, and his son, Joseph Reiver, have created a unique work of visual art and landscape architecture in the Elizabeth Street Garden that should be protected under VARA.
“The garden… is a single unified sculptural work of visual art, comprised of carefully selected sculptural elements, complemented by plantings specifically curated to accentuate them, thematically integrated into the foundation, to create a neo-classical theme mixed with a sense of timelessness,” the complaint stated.
The lawsuit includes an exhibit with letters of support from such cultural luminaries as filmmaker Martin Scorsese, Oscar-winning actor Robert de Niro, and singer-songwriter Patti Smith. Other noted proponents of the garden include artists JR and Dustin Yellin, curator Klaus Biesenbach, and the Cultural Landscape Foundation, which has listed it as an endangered landscape for years.
Supporters of the garden have tried to work with the city to identify alternative sites in the neighborhood where affordable housing can be built. One of those sites, a formerly vacant city-owned lot at 388 Hudson Street, has already been greenlit for development, but the city has maintained that it needs to build on the garden too.
At this point, the VARA lawsuit seems unlikely to change the city’s opinion.
“This is a gross attempt to mislead the public and steal public land,” Allison Maser deputy press secretary and communications advisor to Mayor Eric Adams, told me in an email. “The truth is, Haven Green will provide 100 percent deeply-affordable senior housing in a neighborhood with limited affordable options, while also offering over 15,000 square feet of public space, including a garden and public art—nearly doubling the space currently accessible to the community. We will review the lawsuit.”
If the court finds that VARA applies, the act would protect the garden from “any intentional distortion, mutilation, or other modification.”
<https://tinyurl.com/2d8uc9so> _artnet

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LYSKE GAIS AND LIA DUINKER, BOOK BRACELET REMBRANDT
<https://tinyurl.com/25ou8xqv> _#WomensArt

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DAMIEN HIRST UNLEASHES HIS SHARK AND SHEEP FOR SUPREME’S NEW DROP
Forget the museum. The latest place to spot a Damien Hirst is not in the galleries, but on some guy’s Supreme puffer.
For its Spring 2025 collection, New York’s leading streetwear purveyor has teamed up with the British artist on a drop of apparel, skate decks, and accessories splashed with his signature animal works.
The collection taps Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991) and Black Sheep with Golden Horns (2009), both emerging from his fascination with mortality. _artnet

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NEITHER OF THEM COULD HAVE GUESSED IT WAS AN OARFISH —
a deep-sea creature rarely spotted on the surface
whose infrequent appearances
have inspired centuries of folklore
that the fish are both good omens
and harbingers of doom.
<https://tinyurl.com/2bng6b4l> _WashingtonPost