OLD NEWS

TRAILCAM
<https://tinyurl.com/mvr93pvv> _trailcam

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CREATIVITY THROUGH ADVERSITY: JIMMY TSUTOMU MIRIKITANI
<https://tinyurl.com/3r9drp7r>
Largely under recognised during his lifetime, the US artist Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani (1920-2012) is earning his due in the largest presentation of his work to date, at the Spencer Museum of Art in Kansas. Spanning drawing, collage and mixed media, Street Nihonga: The Art of Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani will highlight a life and creative practice transformed by displacement, trauma and resilience.
Born in Sacramento in 1920 and raised in Hiroshima, Mirikitani trained in Nihonga, or Japanese-style painting, before returning to the US in 1940. Throughout his life, Mirikitani faced significant adversities, including wartime incarceration for having Japanese ancestry, and homelessness. Against this backdrop, his creative output flourished as a way to survive amid periods of global and personal crisis. Mirikitani’s work became a form of self-determination as he worked through trauma, depicting scenes ranging from the burning World Trade Center buildings to colourful landscapes and portraits of cats. Mirikitani brought Japanese aesthetics to the streets, and created art in public parks, often collaborating with neighbours and strangers.
<https://tinyurl.com/3u62w5jc>
“Mirikitani’s work feels urgently relevant today,” says the exhibition’s co-curator, Maki Kaneko. “His art speaks directly to issues that continue to shape our world—racism, migration, statelessness, war and homelessness—yet it does so through deeply personal and interpersonal forms. In a moment when society feels increasingly divided, Mirikitani’s practice offers a powerful model of art as connection, dialogue and shared coexistence.”
<https://tinyurl.com/bdfwm6p2>
Mirikitani died in 2012 and, while he was not widely known during his lifetime, he gained visibility in 2006 with the documentary The Cats of Mirikitani, in which the film-maker Linda Hattendorf gave the then-unhoused Mirikitani shelter and helped him find stable housing.
<https://tinyurl.com/mr45s8eb> _ArtNewspaper

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LIFE
<https://tinyurl.com/42m9mnra> _DavidShrigley

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THE SELF-INVENTION OF HELENE SCHJERFBECK
<https://tinyurl.com/3kyt43hs>
Seeing Silence: The Paintings of Helene Schjerfbeck at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is a rare opportunity for Americans to encounter the stunning work of a mostly unknown artist — unknown, at least, here. Schjerfbeck is not some newly discovered or overlooked woman artist of the past. In fact, she has long been celebrated in Nordic countries, particularly Finland, where she is as culturally important as Edvard Munch is to Norway — that is, a defining voice of modernism.
One reason Schjerfbeck is so little known here is that the vast majority of her work is in Finnish and Swedish collections — though The Met acquired the single painting of hers in a major collection in this country, “The Lace Shawl” (1920), in 2023.
<https://tinyurl.com/5n9bndt2>
Born in Helsinki in 1862, when Finland was part of the Russian empire, Schjerfbeck grew up in a Swedish-speaking family — not unusual, as Sweden ruled Finland for hundreds of years before ceding it to Russia in 1809. Practically, this meant she could converse with the many Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish artists (Finnish is part of a different language family) active in Paris when she arrived in 1880 at the age of 18.
<https://tinyurl.com/bdhev457>
While Schjerfbeck had been a child prodigy — she enrolled at the Drawing School of the Finnish Art Society at age 11 — the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris did not yet admit women, so she studied at the private Académie Colarossi, where many other Nordic women artists also worked. A wall label for her “Portrait of Helena Westermarck” (1884), depicting her lifelong friend and fellow artist concentrating on her work, quotes Schjerfbeck writing years later about their time together in Paris. “My thoughts drift to that winter morning when we went to Colarossi — such happiness!” she writes. “There was no fixed agenda, we simply wanted to paint well during our studies — I had no grand plans for the future. I simply wanted to paint.” She would keep painting until the end of her life, a trajectory Seeing Silence traces via her many self-portraits.
<https://tinyurl.com/37w9mhfs>
The fresh and assured “Self-Portrait” (1884–85), done while Schjerfbeck was studying in Paris is only the first of 40 self-portraits she made from her early 20s until the end of her life at age 83 — moving and sometimes harrowing documents of the growth of an artist, as well as the psychic and physical ravages of aging.
Not far from the opening portrait is probably Schjerfbeck’s most beloved work in Finland, “The Convalescent” (1888). Large for a painting of such an ostensibly unheroic subject, it depicts a disheveled child managing the boredom of illness in an age before TV and iPads, beside a small potted plant. Schjerfbeck knew such infirmity well, as she had permanently injured her left hip at the age of four, and was given art supplies by her amateur-artist father during her own childhood convalescence to occupy her. So this might be considered a kind of history painting describing the birth of an artist — a gentle counterpoint to her more traditionally heroic and nationalist scene from Finnish history, “The Death of Wilhelm von Schwerin” (1862–46) depicting the death of a young count in the Finnish War against Russia.
<https://tinyurl.com/yp999tf9>
Schjerfbeck returned to Finland in 1890, where she taught at the Drawing School in Helsinki, before moving to small-town Hyvinkää to care for her mother in 1902. There, she found her own route away from the naturalism she learned in Paris into a personal style of simplified, abstracted form and symbolic color. Wall texts describe the influence of French artists like Édouard Manet, Paul Cézanne, and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, and older examples ranging from El Greco to Renaissance frescoes. Yet there’s no mention of her Nordic contemporaries whose work often comes equally to mind, such as Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi and Norwegians Harriet Backer and Munch.
<https://tinyurl.com/mrxt58wh>
The resonance between her work and that of Munch is sometimes startling. Schjerfbeck’s poignant “The Tapestry” (1914–16), depicting a man in a dark suit and a blonde woman in white standing in an interior space that somehow also evokes a view of the sea, calls to mind Munch’s “Two Human Beings. The Lonely Ones,” <https://tinyurl.com/4uy2469n> especially the lost 1892 version (he made many). And while Schjerfbeck’s “Fragment” (1904) — an ethereal red-headed girl in profile, the canvas scraped and abraded — is described in the wall texts as having been influenced by Renaissance frescoes, it also reminds me of Munch’s “The Sick Child” <https://tinyurl.com/y296vsma> (1885–86), with a similarly rough and reworked surface.
<https://tinyurl.com/yeu95ydf>
Whether or not Munch influenced Schjerfbeck, they shared a painterly dedication to the excavation of the self. With a dozen self-portraits that grow increasingly haunting as she ages, is moving and dramatic. While early self-portraits rely on the naturalism she found in Paris and the serenity of Renaissance art in Italy, by the time she’s 50, as in “Self-Portrait” (1912), Schjerfbeck trusts her own instincts above anything else. Here, her asymmetric eyes — one dark-blue iris and one shining baby blue — imbue her with a witchy, Bowie-esque sense of self-invention.
Maybe the most powerful thing about these late self-portraits is Schjerfbeck’s unflinching embrace of her monstrous, aging intensity. In “Self-Portrait with Red Spot” <https://tinyurl.com/mvpdw4e9> (1944) and “Self-Portrait in Black and Pink” <https://tinyurl.com/92zamahx> (1945), with heads right out of a horror movie — the original Nosferatu (1922) comes to mind — the artist coolly appraises death. She seems more fascinated than afraid. As she wrote in 1937 to a former love interest, “No one has had so much fun as I have — or so much sorrow — but there’s been more joy.”
<https://tinyurl.com/5n7dypx5> _Bridget Quinn_Hyperallergic

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THE MOUNT WASHINGTON POST
<https://tinyurl.com/fhz6a4mp> _LisaAnneAuerbach

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TURNER PRIZE–WINNING ARTIST TAI SHANI ENDS PHAIDON BOOK DEAL OVER LEON BLACK
<https://tinyurl.com/4fzax6z2>
Tai Shani, a London-based artist who won the Turner Prize in 2019, said this week that she was terminating a book contract with Phaidon, the arts book publisher that has been owned by billionaire art collector Leon Black since 2012.
Shani cited Black’s connections to disgraced financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, including “numerous horrific allegations” about Black and some which have been newly revealed as part of the Department Justice’s recent release of Epstein-related documents.
“I think of withdrawal as a feminist practice,” Shani wrote in a statement. “Not a retreat, or a silence, but a refusal to contribute to any cover for the violence and misogyny that underpin so many of spheres of culture.” _ARTnews

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HELEN FRANKENTHALER IN HER STUDIO, PHOTOGRAPHED BY DAVID PARKSE IN 1956.
<https://tinyurl.com/3snuhyhp> _RabihAlameddine

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HOW A TRIP TO MONET’S GARDEN INSPIRED TAKASHI MURAKAMI
<https://tinyurl.com/y6n6sb4p>
After the COVID-19 pandemic, Takashi Murakami felt like he was losing his way. His generation of artists, he thought, was increasingly untethered from a concrete movement or theme. “The art had become more and more about a struggle against the market or within the market,” he says through a translator during a recent interview at Los Angeles
The Impressionists were influenced by the Japanese genre of ukiyo-e, which translates to “floating world pictures,” and references Japanese woodblock prints and paintings made during the Edo period (between 1615–1867). The colorful artworks largely depict the sensual hedonistic lifestyles of city dwellers including merchants, courtesans and kabuki actors.
Dressed in patchwork jeans, a faded denim jacket and a white long sleeve shirt, Murakami reveals how a recent trip to Claude Monet’s house and gardens in Giverny, France, cemented his understanding of the fundamental connections between genres.
“I came to [Monet’s] garden for inspiration and I thought, ‘OK, we can do anything,’” Murakami says, adding that contemplating the Impressionist legend’s unconventional world helped him to become unstuck.
<https://tinyurl.com/2fy9pmem>
Murakami is known for eschewing the walls that separate Eastern art from Western art. Superflat, the movement he founded, blends traditional Japanese art with pop culture and anime. As one of the world’s most famous contemporary artists, Murakami is a polarizing figure in his home country of Japan, where older manga and anime fans thought he was appropriating anime culture for the art world, and sometimes viewed his lucrative collaborations with brands like Louis Vuitton and Crocs as a form of selling out.
Forgoing his translator, Murakami said that while certain factions of Japanese society still don’t approve of his practice, “step by step, the younger generation is understanding.”
<https://tinyurl.com/5vxs469s>
A wave of art based on anime characters and manga motifs swelled in the wake of Murakami’s success, along with that of Yayoi Kusama and Yoshitomo Nara — but that trend only served to unmoor Murakami from his roots.
“If they paint something like that visually, then they would kind of have a certain level of success,” Murakami said as an assistant brought him sandals to replace his work boots. “So there was a feeling in the air where you don’t have to talk about Pop Art, Simulationism or all these isms and movements, and it’s actually better not to talk about those things. And so I myself felt like I started to lose sight of themes and had nothing really concrete to pursue as a theme for a while.”
<https://tinyurl.com/3umpn978>
At the time, the 64-year-old artist was in the midst of reinterpreting the work of 19th century ukiyo-e master Utagawa Hiroshige for a show That show also explored the art of Van Gogh, Monet and Whistler, Impressionist artists deeply influenced by Japanese prints, as expressed by the French term Japonisme.
“I was trying to make sense of how this might be received by the audience and was a little bit worried, so I wanted to come up with more of a concrete theory,” Murakami said.
He turned to Ed Schad, a curator, for help sorting out his thinking about the Japonisme influence.
Schad pointed him in the direction of Alfred Barr, the first director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, who created a diagram in the 1930s that traced the lineage of every genre of art from 1890 on — Synthetism, Neo-Impressionism, Cubism, Surrealism, Expressionism, Abstract — back to Japanese prints.
“So that meant ukiyo-e had influenced all these Western art movements to the point that it destroyed art, really,” Murakami said with a laugh.
<https://tinyurl.com/e3hhmc82>
Murakami’s interest in this history took on added contours when he began watching “Shōgun,” the 2024 FX historical drama that unfolds in 1600 at the start of the Tokugawa era — during a time of brutal civil war and epic power struggles. He was struck by how intertwined art and architecture were in the series, and also the way it treated the Japanese sense of life and death — and how death was colored by art.
“Each time samurai would commit the ritual suicide of seppuku, they would first read the death poem they had prepared in order to summarize their life and make sense of it,” Murakami said.
The samurai worldview, thrown into relief by “Shōgun,” highlighted the warrior’s ideas “about what is just, what is correct and how they should live,” said Murakami. “So that really influenced me and I became interested in this very chaotic time before Japan was completely unified — and so that chaotic uncertainty and anxiety about it became my new theme.”
The result of Murakami’s thinking about the cyclical, interrelated influence of art upon itself in different historical eras, spanning east to west and back again, can be seen on the white walls four giant paneled canvases measuring more than 10-by-7 feet, with Murakami’s interpretations of work by the ukiyo-e masters Kitagawa Utamaro and Torii Kiyonaga.
<https://tinyurl.com/vczuh4zj>
Murakami’s take on Monet’s “Woman with a Parasol,” which is on display between two classic Murakami canvases inspired by it, one featuring a doe-eyed anime style girl, the other with one of Murakami’s signature smiling flowers sitting on a hill and staring wistfully at the cloudy sky.
Additional pieces contain Murakami’s reimaginings of gilded floral motifs by Katsushika Hokusai, Ogata Korin and Ogata Kenzan; as well as the beautiful women rendered by Kikukawa Eizan.
Murakami gestures to the walls before him, nodding his head sagely.
“Everything is in the melting pot,” he says. _Jessica Gelt_LATimes

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DIEGO RIVERA, EL PINTOR EN REPOSO (THE PAINTER IN REPOSE), 1916,
from Rivera's early & lesser-known - but still stupendous - Cubist period.
<https://tinyurl.com/4an98357>
Rufino Tamayo, Portrait of Cantinflas, 1948
<https://tinyurl.com/4y7ky7az> _MichaelLobel

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VINCENT VAN GOGH DIDN’T KILL HIMSELF,
or at least that’s what retired Arizona ear surgeon Irv Arenberg insists
Fascinated by the artist since seeing the 1956 film Lust for Life as a teen, Arenberg first studied van Gogh through art history classes and dorm-room posters. In 1990, he shook the medical world by diagnosing van Gogh, not with epilepsy, as previously claimed, but with Ménière’s disease, an inner-ear disorder that could explain the infamous ear-cutting incident. After retiring, Arenberg went full detective. By 2017, he concluded van Gogh was murdered and devoted the past decade to exposing what he calls “the art world’s biggest cold-case homicide and cover-up.” He’s traveled to France, performed ballistics tests with historical revolvers, co-authored papers, and has written two books (with a third in the works), all challenging historians and “murder deniers.” Arenberg believes van Gogh was a victim who story needs to be told. _ARTnews

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HOPES AND DREAMS BOWDON, GA
<https://tinyurl.com/57axujkb> _RuralIndexingProject

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BLACK PANTHER DOOR HISTORY MONTH ny greg
<https://tinyurl.com/rhxt7mr9>
The door they assassinated Fred Hampton through wasn’t the first Black Panther door the heat shot through in 1969. In October, during the trial of Panthers co-founder Bobby Seale and seven others for conspiring to incite anti-Vietnam riots d ring the 1968 Democratic Convention, the FBI and Chicago PD raided Black Panthers’ Chicago headquarters, blasting through the steel door with shotguns, and then arresting six people inside for attempted murder, which, does that just mean they shot back?
Anyway. Thanks to a bluesky post by postcard-past.com, I just learned that this door not only survives, it is on exhibit at the DuSable Black History Museum. And it is on loan from Kerry James Marshall.
Dana Chandler made a painting of Fred Hampton’s bullet-ridden door <https://tinyurl.com/46udcj5d> , but this is next-level. If I learn something more Black Historic than this this month, I will be truly surprised. _greg.org

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VITTORIO CARPACCIO, VISION OF ST. AUGUSTINE, 1502,
Augustine, at work in his well appointed study,
is interrupted by the voice of the just-deceased St. Jerome.
And so is his little dog.
<https://tinyurl.com/2kjd362b> _JesseLocker

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34. CHINESE ZODIAC PLACEMAT by Rainey Knudson
<https://tinyurl.com/2p2v8249>
The Chinese zodiac is only superficially similar to the Western version, although both divide time into cycles of twelve parts and ascribe certain traits to each. But as Chinese Americans made lives in the United States, their zodiac served as a bridge between cultures. A bridge made out of paper placemats.
Amid the fierce anti-immigration wave in the late 19th century—Irish, Italians, and Jews in the East; Chinese laborers in the West—the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act left few options for Chinese Americans to make a living. One avenue was restaurants, which survived by adopting a friendly, formalized Orientalism of dragons, bamboo, and Buddha statues tailored for American diners. By 1903, more than 100 Chinese restaurants operated in lower Manhattan.
Nobody knows who first designed the placemats—likely a restaurant supply printer—but they emerged in the 1950s alongside paper mats for other “ethnic” cuisines. Unlike the Italian or Mexican versions, however, the Chinese zodiac placemat has endured, probably because it offers participation: the game of finding one’s birth year, claiming one’s animal personality, remains evergreen.
We don’t attach deep cosmological meaning to being a Tiger, Ox, or Rabbit—the complex, ancient Chinese mythology has been simplified and repackaged for American sensibilities, just as Chinese American food been made boneless and sugary for the American sweet tooth. But the ubiquitous, disposable mat has unobtrusively done cultural work, introducing millions of Americans to a fragment of Chinese cosmology at dinner, attempting some small degree of understanding. That’s no minor diplomacy. _TheImpatientReader

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HELL YEAH, NANCY
<https://tinyurl.com/nx93wwvd> _‪PeterHuestis‬

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COURT DISMISSES ARTIST’S CHALLENGE TO SOUTH AFRICA’S CANCELED VENICE BIENNALE SHOW
<https://tinyurl.com/yjjes7dm>
Artist Gabrielle Goliath’s attempt to overturn the South African government’s cancellation of her Venice Biennale pavilion has failed, after a high court judge dismissed her urgent application just hours before the biennial’s submission deadline.
Goliath and curator Ingrid Masondo had argued that South African culture minister Gayton McKenzie overstepped his authority when he cancelled the proposed pavilion exhibition, Elegy, after it was selected by the nonprofit Art Periodic. Their urgent application contended that the minister had no contractual right to veto the appointment and that his decision infringed on Goliath’s constitutional right to freedom of expression.
McKenzie, who described the project as “divisive” when he canceled the exhibition on January 2, maintained that his department had been misled about the nature of the proposal and terminated its contract with Art Periodic, a move critics claim has left South Africa without a pavilion in Venice this year.
North Gauteng High Court’s Judge Mamokolo Kubushi did not give a reason for her decision and awarded costs to the respondents, which included the minister.
Goliath’s team did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The judgement follows a hearing in South Africa’s high court on February 11 of Goliath’s application to be reinstated as the country’s artist for the 61st Venice Biennale, which opens in May.
At the hearing, Goliath argued for the chance to exhibit her ongoing performance piece Elegy, which commemorates the unjust killing of various groups, including women and queer people in South Africa, and victims of atrocities like the Herero and Nama genocide of the early 1900s. She had been preparing to present a new iteration in Venice, curated by Masondo, that would honor Hiba Abu Nada, a Palestinian poet who was killed by an Israeli airstrike
<https://tinyurl.com/5n8rwnbj> _artnet

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“VIEW FROM THE LEFT EYE”,
is the creation of Austrian physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach
(famous for his work on supersonic fluid mechanics)
<https://tinyurl.com/mrmrf76f> _PublicDomainReview

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SECRET CAMERA DISCOVERED IN CENTRE POMPIDOU RESTROOM
The Centre Pompidou in Paris has filed a legal complaint after a staff member discovered a hidden recording device installed in the women’s restroom in its administrative offices. The suspected perpetrator was quickly identified and has been suspended, but some employees say the museum has not been sufficiently transparent about the incident.
The covert video camera was found by a female employee, who reported it on January 14. An internal email was sent to staff by museum management, reassuring them that “given the seriousness of the incident,” the suspect had been “immediately suspended from their duties as a precautionary measure to ensure the safety of staff.
The museum has issued a statement confirming that it has filed a complaint with the public prosecutor under Article 40 of the French Code of Criminal Procedure, which stipulates that any public official learning of an offense must report it.
“An exhaustive inspection of all restrooms across the office buildings has confirmed the absence of any other image or video [capturing] devices,” the museum added. “Staff members who wish [to] may meet with the Human Resources Department or the Medical Department on this matter.”
The statement said that “the ongoing administrative procedure limits the communication of further information at this stage.”
In it’s internal email, management said it was “aware” the incident may “raise questions, concerns, and numerous discussions within the teams,” _Jo Lawson-Tancred _artnet

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TRAILCAM
<https://tinyurl.com/38eppzk2> _trailcam