OLD NEWS

WALK OFF
<https://tinyurl.com/4wjayx9p> _ON&ON / Jeff Weiss

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LETTER REVEALS CASH-STRAPPED MONET ONCE PUT HIS PAINTINGS UP AS COLLATERAL
<https://tinyurl.com/4my9hzce>
Claude Monet may be one of the market’s most bankable artists, but the pioneering painter faced persistent poverty during his ascent One letter immortalizing a loan Monet secured from the brother of his fellow Impressionist Édouard Manet revolves around a comparatively paltry 1,000 franc loan from Gustave Manet, the lawyer and manager who notably married his brother’s rumored lover. In this nearly pristine document, dated October 18, 1875, Monet confirms that he’s received Manet’s money, adding that it “shall be repayable from the proceeds of the sale of thirty-five of my paintings, to be conducted in the course of next February under the direction of Mr. Charles Oudart, auctioneer.” There, Monet also notes that he’s already sent eight works to Oudart, and that he’ll deliver the other 27—including “one depicting a Japanese woman,” which became the infamous La Japonaise (1876)—u
“I think that what makes this particular document signed by Claude Monet so important historically is the light it sheds on the financial struggles of the early Impressionists More than just a list of figures, it captures Monet’s resolve in the face of the movement’s unstable beginnings.”pon their completion.
<https://tinyurl.com/443je4cj>
Impressionism was already far too avant-garde for the public at first blush. The Panic of 1873, a financial crisis that impacted France nearly until the 1880s, certainly didn’t help. “All the bourgeois are unwilling to spend,” Paul Cézanne reportedly complained in September 1874.
<https://tinyurl.com/5abxffta> _artnet

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HAND
<https://tinyurl.com/e7pzu4ed> _DavidShrigley

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FRANCIS BACON TRIPTYCH IS INSTALLED IN LACMA’S NEW DAVID GEFFEN GALLERIES
<https://tinyurl.com/kccpfxpv>
“She’s supposed to be here instead of the paintings,” said Los Angeles County Museum of Art Director and Chief Executive Michael Govan of the late LACMA trustee and philanthropist Elaine Wynn, while watching the installation of a $142.4 million triptych by Francis Bacon. Wynn gifted the 1969 paintings to the museum upon her death.
“So really, the story of this building and her gift, part of the energy for it was, where do you leave these legacies?” said Govan, looking at the paintings on the mottled gray concrete walls. The golden compositions are housed in bright gold frames, and the glass that shields them reflects the world beyond. Both the frames and the glass were specified by the artist, Govan said. The triptych is along the wall in a main thoroughfare of the museum facing the floor-to-ceiling windows that form part of the building’s bridge over Wilshire Boulevard.
<https://tinyurl.com/bdh33zr5>
Visitors will be able to turn their heads from the Bacon paintings to see traffic rushing beneath the building and Chris Burden’s iconic “Urban Light” installation in the distance. Passengers in vehicles below may be able to catch a glimpse of the golden treasures above, which was always part of the plan for the museum’s design, Govan said.
“I am sitting here somewhat sad,” Govan said. “Museum directors are never sad to see a masterpiece on the wall for the opening of their brand new museum. However, it was a life interest gift. At the end of her time she would make this gift, and she told me that. And so I was assuming we would just have a cocktail party at her home after the opening of the building. ... I never imagined [the paintings] would be here, because, of course, I thought Elaine would be here.”
Museums are not just civic spaces meant for public gatherings, concerts and conviviality, Govan said, they are “vessels to hold people’s legacies, hopes and dreams. Almost everything in our museum belonged to somebody, and it was a gift or somebody acquired it for us.”
He hopes that feeling of generosity and public commitment resonates with museumgoers as they explore the new galleries this spring. Govan also says he thinks visitors will appreciate another significant aspect of the triptych: It puts an artist’s portrait of another artist at the heart of the museum.
The psychological energy of two artists in dialogue is meaningful to Govan, a self-described “artist person.”
_Jessica Gelt_LATimes

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THE MOUNT WASHINGTON POST
<https://tinyurl.com/mr43ejh7> _LisaAnneAuerbach

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BACON TRIPTYCH HAS GLARE ISSUE by William Poundstone
<http://tiny.cc/5nh0101>
Francis Bacon's Three Studies of Lucian Freud has been installed in the David Geffen Galleries at LACMA, reports Jessica Gelt in the Los Angeles Times. The article has immediately sparked controversy, for its photographs and video show prominent reflections in the triptych's glazing. The three framed panels directly face windows looking west along sun-drenched Wilshire Blvd.
Gelt is tactful about the matter ("The golden compositions are housed in bright gold frames, and the glass that shields them reflects the world beyond.") Less so is the first commenter on the L.A. Times site, who snarks: "Wow. Look at all that glare in the glass obscuring the paintings. As if no one predicted this no-no straight from Gallery/Museum Design 101 syllabus…"
The horizontal light and city views are, of course, signature features of Peter Zumthor's David Geffen galleries. Most museum paintings are not glazed. The Bacon triptych presents a unique challenge, however, as Bacon himself insisted on glass. In an interview with art critic David Sylvester, Bacon explained:
"I feel that, because I use no varnishes or anything of that kind, and because of the very flat way I paint, the glass helps to unify the picture. I also like the distance between what has been done and the onlooker that the glass creates; I like the removal of the object as far as possible."
It has been claimed that Bacon welcomed reflections as a way of bringing the viewer into the art. He specifically denied that in the Sylvester interview. "To want the person reflected in the glass of a dark painting is illogical and has no meaning," Bacon said. "I think it's just one of those misfortunes. I hope they'll make glass soon which doesn't reflect."
Three Studies of Lucian Freud, a gift of late casino magnate Elaine Wynn, is LACMA's first work by Bacon. When Wynn purchased it for $142 million in 2013, it was the most expensive painting ever sold at auction. _LosAngelesCountyMuseumOnFire

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IT'S THE DETAILS THAT MATTER:
it appears that at some point in the last few years the Whitney altered its online listing
for the Ralph Lemon video & neon installation in its collection,
changing it from its actual title, "Fuck Bruce Nauman" t
o the far more anodyne "FBN"
<https://tinyurl.com/5amyz9zy>
The Whitney also conspicuously doesn't include an image
of Lemon's artwork, so here's what I presume is a detail from it
<https://tinyurl.com/y8a8j4hx> _MichaelLobel

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IN BLOOM by nathan Jones
<https://tinyurl.com/4awfh86c>
Mary Somerset, Duchess of Beaufort, died in 1715 having spent her life changing the floral world. She procured plants from Africa, India, China, Japan and South America that had never been seen in Britain before. These were for her vast formal garden – a print featured in this delightful exhibition shows its regular avenues and plantations, all covering a considerable part of Gloucestershire. But if Somerset’s disciplined parkland is pure Age of Reason, a painting she commissioned of one of her sunflowers is a yellow ecstasy: a blazing cosmic eye staring wildly at you.
Science and obsession, this show reveals, have never been far apart in the history of humans and plants. In the 1600s and 1700s, European botany made huge intellectual advances, filling European gardens with new colours and aromas. All this depended on growing commercial, naval and military might that brought the world’s seeds and bulbs to Britain and its neighbours. Yet even as pioneers collected and classified global flora, the sheer beauty and sensuality of flowers threatened to turn analysis into beauty-addled reverie.
<https://tinyurl.com/2r5daua9>
This is hinted at in a portrait of the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus dressed in traditional Sámi costume, sporting a shaman’s drum. Linnaeus invented the orderly classification of flora and fauna yet here allies himself with beliefs that humans can commune magically with nature. The portrait commemorates his expedition to the far north and, as for his book Flora Lapponica, was his attire a nod to the Sámi help he was given in identifying so many subarctic flowers?
Another adventurer here is responsible for the omnipresence of rhododendrons in the British Isles: Joseph Hooker. An illustration by Hooker himself commemorates his ripping yarns journey to the Himalayas in 1848-49 in search of this mountain flower and the seeds he brought back to Kew Gardens in London. By then, botany was inherently associated with far-off places. Kew was a multicultural paradise: an etching shows visitors admiring, among the planted trees, a mosque with a dome and two minarets, a replica of part of the Alhambra and a Chinese pagoda. Today, only the Great Pagoda remains. Victorians later came face-to-face with heady tropical plants in the Palm House, also illustrated here.
There’s a chance to sniff burnt poppy seeds next to a case containing a 19th-century opium pipe. The exhibition’s subtitle – How Plants Changed our World – really makes sense here. The gentle poppy wrecks lives, but beauty too is a drug. Nearby is a painting by the 17th-century Dutch still life artist Rachel Ruysch of poppies growing around a woodland tree: not the common or garden poppy but a flaming, dancing variant with long bloody petals that ravishingly explode in the shady forest where Ruysch has found them.
<https://tinyurl.com/7zfpr8m4>
Except she didn’t. The forest setting is fictional, for the variation of poppy she paints didn’t evolve naturally but was bred by Dutch flower-fanciers as a novelty. Here is where the story of botany takes flight from science to sensuality, from interest to addiction. As well as cultivating new species of poppy, the Dutch at the height of their commercial power in the 1600s became obsessed with tulips, which came from the Islamic world and were particularly cultivated at the Ottoman court.
You can still feel the force of tulipomania in the disturbing beauty of Dutch flower paintings. Surrounded by night, the spiky curvaceous white and red tulips in Ambrosius Bosschaert’s c 1609 picture A Vase of Flowers are alluring fleurs du mal, perfect, irreplaceable, already dying as he paints them. Dutch tulip paintings are cleverly shown here beside Turkish ceramic platters with tulip decorations that see the flower with a calmer sensuality, as part of an eternal pattern preserved forever on the plate. European flower paintings are more scientific, more precise, yet more brooding and romantic. Life implies death. The caterpillar and snail are coming.
Beneath all the derring-do there is no avoiding the melancholy. We see botanical drawings and pressed flowers – some petals in albums here are 400 years old. Yet more eye-catchingly bizarre, in fact even grotesque, are 19th-century “teaching models” of flowers made of painted wood and papier-mache that meticulously simulate every detail of orchids and other flora, lifesize, for students to learn, well, what? These supposedly scientific models look as freakish as old anatomical waxworks of eviscerated human bodies. There are some lovely works of art here but I couldn’t escape the thought that all of art and science are helpless before the mystery and beauty of a single living daisy. _GuardianUK

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CY’S MATTERS by greg
<https://tinyurl.com/3k6t9ker>
Like I said, every Ugo Mulas photo rewrites art history, if only by making us realize every other photographer of the Twombly rooms at via Monserrato decided to censor his sofa.
Previously, very much related: Cyhaus: Bela Lugosi, Bed <https://tinyurl.com/53ntubth> _greg.org

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53. TELEPHONE by Rainey Knudson
<https://tinyurl.com/yc4d9fsb>
What must it have been like, writing in quiet moments when letters were the only way to communicate across distance? To correspond with someone whose voice we might never have heard? How terrible, the long wait for a piece of paper with handwritten words, guessing at their intonation. And how differently terrible—and yet miraculous—the intimate sound of the voice in our ears, invisible, instantaneous, unmitigated by the deliciousness of waiting or messages thought-out and composed.
Investors were skeptical of Alexander Graham Bell’s vision for a vast network connecting every house in the country. Initially, telephone poles were viewed as urban blight and homeowners were legally exonerated for cutting them down. Each individual telephone needed its own wire, so hundreds of wires could be attached to a pole. The heavens became a scratched-up tangle of dark lines; we could no longer look up from a street and see the open sky.
Mark Twain was among the first Americans to own a telephone, of which he ambivalently said, “The human voice carries entirely too far as it is.” But by the end of the century, there were more telephones than bathtubs in America, and Thomas Edison said the telephone “annihilated time and space, and brought the human family in closer touch.”
Did Edison foresee what it might mean for time and space to be annihilated, how waiting might become abnormal and silence become suspicious when distance and time—our old obstacles and our protection—were known and measured entirely anew?
<https://tinyurl.com/mr2xanx6> _TheImpatientReader

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BIG ARCH HOLTVILLE, CA
<https://tinyurl.com/mj8twpf9> _RuralIndexingProject

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THE PRADO MUSEUM IS REDUCING THE MAX NUMBER OF VISITORS
The Prado Museum is reducing the max number of visitors per group from 30 to 20 to achieve “a better quality of visit.” Group visits make up nearly 17 percent of the museum attendees, but “visiting the museum can’t be like riding the subway at rush hour,” said Prado Museum director Miguel Falomir. _ARTnews

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VENICE BIENNALE PARTICIPANTS SIGN LETTER DEMANDING CANCELLATION OF ISRAELI PAVILION
Nearly 200 artists, curators and art workers involved in this year’s Venice Biennale (9 May–22 November) have signed a letter calling for Israel’s exclusion from the event. The Art Not Genocide Alliance (ANGA) group, which is leading the campaign, says the letter was delivered to the Biennale’s president and board today
The letter follows an earlier appeal
sent by ANGA to the Biennale’s organisers on 2 October 2025 calling for Israel’s exclusion from the 2026 exhibition, which the group says went unanswered. The alliance describes itself as an international group of artists, curators, writers, and cultural workers who have come together to call for the exclusion of Israel at the Venice Biennale. _ArtNewspaper

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ROSSO FIORENTINO, MUSICAL ANGEL, A FRAGMENT OF AN ALTARPIECE, 1521
<https://tinyurl.com/4xa86syd> _JesseLocker

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THE RISE AND FALL OF ‘BUY-ONE, GIVE-ONE’ ART SALES by Julia Halperin
If you wanted to purchase a painting by a red-hot contemporary artist a few years ago, you were probably told to get in line. Some galleries had dozens, even hundreds, of prospective buyers and only a handful of works available. But there was a reliable way to get to the front of the pack: a mechanism known in the art business as “buy one, give one”.
Bogo, as the sales tactic has come to be known, is used by galleries to tamp down speculation while supporting their artists’ long-term prospects. To secure preferential access to an in-demand artist’s work, a collector agrees to buy two paintings (and they are almost always paintings, the most commercial of media) by that artist. The collector then donates one to a museum and keeps the other for themselves.
Proponents see the arrangement as a win-win-win. The artist receives institutional imprimatur, the museum gets a desirable gift and the collector gets their hands on a work they desperately want. Meanwhile, the gallery can right-size demand by raising the bar to buy a painting and keep their star artists happy.
During the market’s recent heyday, from 2021 to 2023, bogo deals became de rigueur. “It felt like there was always the bogo conversation,” says the collector and art adviser Adam Green, who estimates he has facilitated dozens of such deals on behalf of clients. Institutions as large as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, as well as smaller ones like the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, and the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio, have acquired work through bogo donations, sources say.
As the market contracted over the past two years, the volume of these arrangements fell accordingly. “The economics aren’t what they used to be,” Green says. The shift away from bogo deals is a sign of the changing power dynamics among collectors, galleries and museums—and it may have a ripple effect on young artists’ careers. Whether those effects are positive or negative depends on whom you ask.
Who benefits most from bogos?
Bogo is not a post-pandemic invention. Over the past 15 years, its prevalence has risen and fallen with the tide of the ultra-contemporary art market. Michael Darling, the former chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, recalls working with the city’s now-shuttered Shane Campbell Gallery on one such deal for a Mark Grotjahn painting back in 2010. “That’s when those were in the $300,000 to $400,000 range retail, but already there was a lot of demand and speculation,” he says. “The collector could have assumed it would be triple the price the next year.”
<https://tinyurl.com/what5zsj>
Two factors contributed to the contraction of bogo, experts say. First, it is considerably less competitive to buy a work of contemporary art than it was three years ago. Bogo deals helped less established collectors—those who do not sit on a major museum board or have a private museum to their name—gain access to in-demand art. “Not all collectors had to do a bogo—just the ones deemed not good enough to buy a work outright by a given artist,” says the art adviser Benjamin Godsill. Today, “any collector is a good collector”.
The second factor in the bogo decline is the rise of primary market prices. In response to rampant speculation, many galleries have increased prices to more closely align with auction sales. This has diminished the bogo value proposition. Collectors can no longer buy two works from a gallery for less than it costs to buy one at auction. And since the fair market value of those works no longer outpaces their retail prices, collectors are unable to no longer get the benefit of a hefty tax deduction.
Bogo deals have not disappeared entirely. Like the market for ultra-contemporary art, they have just become more selective. “Bogos are still happening, just for a smaller group of artists where there is a meaningful gap between primary and secondary market,” Green says. Sources say that galleries are still pursuing bogo deals for painters including Le Hei Di, Louis Fratino and Lucy Bull.
In this new environment, it is also increasingly common for galleries to ask collectors to make a cash donation to support a museum’s acquisition of an in-demand artist’s work instead of donating it outright. This solution—call it “bogs” (buy one, give some)—is less expensive for the collector and gives the museum the flexibility to make a selection on its own terms.
A balancing act for museums
Some art-world figures are ambivalent about bogo. Kevin Tucker, the chief curator of the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, notes that these deals can create an “odd dynamic” for museums, who want to avoid alienating donors while being discerning about what they acquire. “We want to make sure we’re working with the artist and getting what we feel is the best representative example of the work they produce,” he says.
Bogo deals also risk creating the perception that collectors are driving museums’ decision-making, while placing early-stage works in institutions before the artist has the chance to mature. “There will be a look-back period where it’s like, ‘these 40 artists ended up with the same 12 museums on their CV’,” says one dealer. “They didn’t have any proper exhibitions. It’s board members trying to increase the value of their collection.”
Another complicating factor is that, as storage becomes more expensive, museums are increasingly recognising that “even if they are getting a work for free, it’s not free”, says Kibum Kim, a partner at the Los Angeles gallery Commonwealth and Council.
The decline of the bogo deal is symbolic of today’s market moment, when museums and collectors hold more cards than the gallery—and, often, the artist. “Everyone,” Kim says, “is being more deliberate about what work they want.” _ArtNewspaper

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PAUL KLEE - MEMORY OF A BIRD (1932)
<https://tinyurl.com/58rrsz86> _RabihAlameddine

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LA EXHIBITION OF JULIA STOSCHEK’S VIDEO ART COLLECTION IS THE CITY’S HOTTEST TICKET
<https://tinyurl.com/3t3y2cxs>
“No white cubes! No black boxes!”
That’s Udo Kittelmann speaking during a tour of “What a Wonderful World: An Audiovisual Poem,” a presentation he organized at the disused Venetian-style Variety Arts Theater, a six-story Los Angeles palace. On view are selections from the holdings of Julia Stoschek, collector who primarily focuses on time-based media. Spaces from grand theaters to dingy basements, shadowy bathrooms to dusty hallways host 45 artworks from an international roster.
<https://tinyurl.com/42h5j5kf>
Stoschek’s collection, managed by a foundation she established in 2002, includes over 1,000 works by 300 artists from the 1960s to the present, and brings together works created in mediums including video, film, installation, performance, and virtual reality. The works are typically on display at exhibition spaces opened in Düsseldorf in 2007 and Berlin in 2016. This is the collection’s US debut,
<https://tinyurl.com/7zx6nd2r>
In a nod to the obvious—LA’s status as a historical home of the global film industry—Kittelmann, a former museum director, has also selected a roster of early cinema classics, including silent films by giants including Luis Buñuel, Walt Disney, and Georges Méliès, to play alongside the contemporary works. “The early films make clear that the technology might have changed,” he said, “but not the topics.”
Another rule, said Kittelmann: “It’s not an exhibition, and I’m not a curator.” It’s a poem, he insists, which, in his view, sets a different expectation for the visitor. Kittelmann’s advice: “Embrace your disorientation.”
Kittelmann organized “What a Wonderful World” to be different from typical museum and gallery shows not only in the ways above, but also extending to the hours—5 p.m. to midnight, in a city that, LA dealer Davida Nemeroff recently told me, after dark becomes “the loneliest place on Earth.” Tickets are free, there’s gratis popcorn at the entrance, and you can amble around aimlessly or view the show in whatever sequence you desire.
<https://tinyurl.com/4zpexn6n>
Sound bleed is best avoided in traditional presentations, but Kittelmann intentionally allowed the soundtracks to overlap. This might typically drive museum visitors crazy. In this case, it really works. Anyway, Kittelmann selected for works that are mostly non-narrative, so visitors don’t feel they have to enter and leave any given room at any given time, or stick around longer than they wish.
<https://tinyurl.com/4m974jww>
In a booklet that comes with the show (bound, cutely enough, in the style of a screenplay you might buy from a sidewalk vendor in New York), Stoschek says, “With the collection I try to create an image of the social and cultural changes of my generation.”
<https://tinyurl.com/bd79cvjb> _ARTnews