OLD NEWS

TWO GIRLS IN FRONT OF DEGAS' ARTWORK, UNKNOWN PHOTOGRAPHER TO ME
<https://tinyurl.com/2kuph86d> _RabihAlameddine

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JACK KEROUAC’S FABLED ‘ON THE ROAD’ SCROLL
<https://tinyurl.com/54kycz7d>
It’s one of the most mythic icons in American letters. The 120-foot long scroll on which Jack Kerouac hammered out the 1957 Beat Generation classic On the Road
Kerouac wrote the first draft of the book over a feverish three weeks in the spring of 1951. He taped together sheets of tracing paper, creating the scroll that he fed into his typewriter. The words emerged in a long paragraph, without line breaks or chapters, recounting the adventures of Sal Paradise (a Kerouac stand-in) and Dean Moriarty (modeled after Neal Cassady) across America. “I let the words flow out in uninterrupted waves, half awake, barely knowing what I was doing except writing,” he later recalled.
On the Road, following some revisions, would be published six years later. It met with middling reviews, but would in time emerge as a Beat touchstone, recognized for its immediacy, raw expression, and stream-of-consciousness construction. Following Kerouac’s death in 1969, the scroll passed from his widow Stella Sampas to her brother Tony Sampas.
Following Kerouac’s death in 1969, the scroll passed from his widow Stella Sampas to her brother Tony Sampas. It was Tony’s nephew, executor of his estate, who offered the artifact at auction in 2001—a sale that incurred the ire of Carolyn Cassady, the former wife of Neal. She deemed it “blasphemy” that the scroll could wind up in a private collection: “Jack loved public libraries,” she insisted. “If they auction it, anybody rich could buy it and keep it out of sight.”
<https://tinyurl.com/2pve4rwz> _artnet

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WALKS
<https://tinyurl.com/mrymb4cx> _DavidShrigley

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12,000-YEAR-OLD CLOTHING DISCOVERED IN ICE AGE CAVES IN OREGON
<https://tinyurl.com/ymh277hz>
A team of 13 archaeologists and scientists from universities in Oregon and Nevada have successfully dated a cache of animal hide clothing to the Late Pleistocene era, making it the oldest known sewn clothing in the world.
The stitched-together hides were originally excavated, along with other materials (braided cords, knotted bark, and other fiber objects), by an amateur archaeologist named John Cowles from Cougar Mountain Cave in western Oregon in 1958, according to the study published in Science Advances <https://tinyurl.com/4w79brv5> . Cowles kept his findings until his death in the 1980s, at which point they were transferred to the Favell Museum, which collects Indigenous artifacts and contemporary western art, in Klamath Falls, Ore. Some of the objects in the study (wooden and fiber artifacts) were originally discovered in the nearby Paisley Cave.
The group that published the study used radiocarbon and ZooMS (Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry) to date 55 object—hides, bone needles, and other tools—to the Younger Dryas, a period that took place between 12,900 and 11,700 years ago and was marked by a return to glacial temperatures, which necessitated different types of clothing technology.
<https://tinyurl.com/bdcsz4mr>
The “well-dated and rare perishable assemblages” discovered in both caves “illustrate the underappreciated technological sophistication and complexity of technologies used by Late Pleistocene peoples that have broader implications for how we envision, model, and discuss early lifeways of the Western Hemisphere,” the authors wrote in their report.
<https://tinyurl.com/3bnwjj4e>
Richard Rosencrance, a PhD student at the University of Nevada, Reno, and one of the authors of the study, told Live Science <https://tinyurl.com/5ydard8e> that while the idea of animal hide clothing from this era isn’t new, no one previously knew what it looked like or how it was constructed as no examples of Pleistocene clothing have previously been identified. It turns out, Rosencrance, notes, that “they were accomplished and serious sewists during the Ice Age.” _ARTnews

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THE MOUNT WASHINGTON POST
<https://tinyurl.com/4mawf5ma> _LisaAnneAuerbach

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30. WATTS TOWERS by Rainey Knudson
<https://tinyurl.com/5ykrwxbx>
There’s something about Going West, all the way to the edge of the continent—running from the Old World, from personal tragedy, from the profound engagement with ourselves and others otherwise known as being in a family. In the 1890s, Sabato Rodia arrived in the country as a teenage immigrant from southern Italy to work construction. He eventually made his way to Los Angeles, where, in 1921, he bought a small triangular lot in a working-class neighborhood, and began to build.
For over 30 years, without scaffolding, without assistance, using rebar, homemade concrete, and bits of tile and glass, he built elegant, spindly, organic-looking structures that reached for the sky, the tallest nearly 100 feet. And then in 1954 he walked away forever, deeding the property to his neighbor.
It’s tempting to observe this was a person who lived without attachment, except: look what he built! How many evenings did he spend contemplating spatial relationships, the interplay between forms, working without patronage or any guarantee of recognition? What thoughts occupy such a person—and are they different from our own when we suddenly ponder: what am I doing with my life?
In 1959 the City of Los Angeles tried to demolish the towers as unsafe; they survived neglect, the 1965 Watts riots, and eventually became a beloved landmark. Would Rodia have imagined they would survive? That, however strange and lonely his path may have seemed, what he was doing was enough—more than enough—filling millions of people with wonder? _TheImpatientReader

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THE WORM HOLE COLCHESTER, IL
<https://tinyurl.com/3xs6rj6k> _RuralIndexingProject

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RICHTER’S TISCH IS GARDELLA’S TAVOLO by greg
<https://tinyurl.com/5bjhnzpp>
In 1991, Richter told Tate curator Sean Rainbird that the source image of Tisch (Table), 1962, which the artist situated as the starting point of his project, came from Domus. “I began to paint it, but I was not satisfied with the result, so I erased it with newsprint.”
<https://tinyurl.com/38um4c9v>
To celebrate Richter’s 94th birthday, Domus credited itself <https://tinyurl.com/bdh2uepe> for launching his career with a single page: a feature from Domus No. 321, in Summer 1956, on an extendable table designed by Ignazio Gardella. “While there is no direct confirmation, the editorial team suggests that this image may have been the original source.” Here, Domus, can I Google that for you?
<https://tinyurl.com/mwz8smcf>
In the depths of the COVID Online Viewing Room era, the Research Department at Peter Freeman organized Press Images <https://tinyurl.com/4mjaf2wm> : a three artist show of solvent-based picturemaking by Robert Rauschenberg, Gerhard Richter, and Lucy Skaer. It included a 1962 “maquette” for Tisch, a collage of solvent-smeared Domus clippings that even preserves the Domus page layout.
Freeman showed several other collages of Domus clippings partially erased by solvent, evidence that Richter was experimenting with technique, mass media imagery, and subject matter. Richter’s dissatisfaction with an image is revealed to be, not a reaction, but part of a process.
And it shows an awareness of and engagement with Rauschenberg’s freshest solvent transfer works, which were barely available to see in Germany. [The show tracks the timeline and connections, which—I can’t believe I’m writing this—is not important now. This is just about the table. That said, one key point in Freeman’s show is that unlike Rauschenberg and Konrad Leug, Richter doesn’t use solvent for image transfer, but for its own markmaking potential, at once dissolutive and generative. I’ll also note, since no one else does, that Richter was using old Domus issues, from 1956, in his 1960s studies. He’d eventually switch to more current, mass media sources.]
<https://tinyurl.com/5n83rkvt>
Anyway, here is a Gardella T4 table, first designed in 1956 for Azucena, produced by Simon in 1976, and sold in 2022 <https://tinyurl.com/9bwm8xtw> . I have no idea of Richter trueheads out there are propping up the T4 Tavolo market, but I kind of doubt it; it feels like it works better as an image than as an actual table. _greg.org

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ACCORDING TO MULTIPLE SOURCES,
it wasn’t even military personnel at Fort Bliss
that fired an anti-drone laser at alleged cartel drones.
It was CBP who used the weapon on loan from DoD
against a child’s party balloon they mistook for a drone.
The Pentagon gave CBP an anti-aircraft weapon._TylerKing
<https://tinyurl.com/3v6y3fs4> _MichaelLobel

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ROBERT CRUMB – SEXUAL DEVIANCY ELEVATED TO AN ART FORM
<https://tinyurl.com/c27v264d>
It is unnerving to walk into a gallery and see all your deepest fears and anxieties splayed out across the wall, but that is the power of Robert Crumb. For more than half a century, the wiry, weird, difficult and awkwardly horny artist (now in his 80s) has been churning out underground comics that lay bare his deepest neuroses, and reflect yours back in the process.
Now he is being celebrated in an ultra-high-end London gallery, with pages ripped from his notebooks and framed up like the finest of fine art. Except this isn’t fine, it’s filthy and angry and paranoid. It’s classic Crumb: skinny men quivering with worry and fear and hormones in a cruel, uncaring, senseless world – filled with towering women in thigh-high boots, obviously.
The best works are the simplest, the visual one-liners. Crumb flushes himself down a toilet, with graffiti on the wall saying: “Here I sit and can’t get started, tried to shit and merely farted.” Abject, miserable failure and gross humour, that’s Crumb’s world. In other self-portraits he has a gun pressed to the back of his big goofy head, or he’s whingeing about how no one could possibly understand him. “Self flagellation perhaps,” it says in one drawing, “or maybe it’s true!” He’s a terrible, and hugely relatable, mixture of supercharged self-hatred and extreme arrogance.
<https://tinyurl.com/22x9uvfn>
How could he not be? The world he sees is nasty and brutal and politically anguished. An alien laments the greed and deception of the human race in one image. A miserable man with a dripping nose weeps: “I’ve blown my life, I’m fucked.” Everywhere you look you see happy, healthy humans ignoring and dismissing the poor, tortured little weirdos in their midst.
The only solace in any of this comes from women: giant, towering, buxom Amazons. Crumb worships them, idolises them, grasps desperately on to their thick legs. He is a broken, terrible dork, but these women are something good in the world, something pure. In one almost sweet drawing, a little bald guy in a hospital gown tells a huge glamazon that he is so happy and filled with love. “Every moment is significant!” it says in big bold letters in the sky. Where’s the paranoia and resentment and self-flagellation? All gone, apparently, the instant a babe comes into view.
Downstairs, the works are all prints from a 1980s notebook, but upstairs it’s mainly original drawings. Direct, hilarious, experimental: he’s got a great compositional eye, a brilliant way with line, and an unbelievably unique style. Up here, there’s even more paranoia, even more horniness – guys either throttling their own genitals or pulling their own hair out. There’s no in between: it’s total sexual deviancy or total anguish. What a life.
<https://tinyurl.com/2v8tr3jb>
One portrait of his wife, Aline Kominsky-Crumb (who was also a noted comic artist), swimming in the Med, feels different. It’s not horny or paranoid or gross or intense, it’s just loving, pure and simple. A little moment of unblemished joy in an otherwise pretty vile world.
I don’t know what is gained from seeing most of Crumb’s work in a gallery context, framed and whacked on a wall instead of in a printed publication. At best it gives you the time and space to consider each image, to take every one as a single, important, elevated thing instead of just another anxious page in a long stream of anxious pages. At worst it destroys the experience of reading through the work, undermining the original intention and format. The narrative, more comic-booky images don’t work as well when framed on a wall. Crumb is obviously worthy of being shown in a swanky Mayfair gallery, but equally, there is nothing wrong with comic books. They’re cheap, easy, dirty and real, just like Crumb.
Either way, Crumb remains singular and hilarious. “There’s no end to the nonsense,” it says in big letters on one wall downstairs, and let’s hope not. Because when the nonsense is by Crumb, it’s pretty damn brilliant. _Eddy Frankel_GuardianUK

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HAPPY DARWIN'S BIRTHDAY!
Always a good excuse to share
<https://tinyurl.com/2s3wscb5>
these delightful drawings by his children,
<https://tinyurl.com/2vt9e9vn>
some of them on the back of the manuscript
<https://tinyurl.com/yysdpdp2>
of On the Origin of Species.
<https://tinyurl.com/26y377wu> _JesseLocker

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PUTTING THE JOE FRAZIER STATUE IN THE SHADOW OF THE ROCKY STATUE IS A LOW BLOW
https://tinyurl.com/ybyccujn
I thought the absolute nonsense around the Rocky statue being permanently exalted to the top of the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art couldn’t be any more embarrassing for Philly. Then, the people in charge of these decisions ripped open my eyes, like Mick, to prove me wrong.
On Wednesday, the Art Commission approved a proposal from Creative Philadelphia, the city’s office of arts and culture that maintains and preserves Philly’s art collection, to move the statue of legendary Philadelphia boxer “Smokin’” Joe Frazier from the stadium complex, where it’s been since 2014, to the base of the steps of the Art Museum.
This would normally be a great thing — the Art Museum is in a much more prominent place in the city and Frazier deserves that honor — except that in this case, the Frazier statue is getting the Rocky statue’s leftovers. It’s a bigger smack in the face than a sucker punch in the ring.
Creative Philadelphia didn’t think the nice little cove at the base of the Art Museum steps where the city’s Rocky statue has been displayed since 2006 was good enough for it anymore. So last month — despite an informal Inquirer poll that showed it was the last thing Philadelphians wanted — the commission approved Creative Philadelphia’s proposal to permanently move the city’s Rocky statue to the top of the steps. (There are currently three Rocky statues in Philadelphia; don’t even get me started on that.)
<https://tinyurl.com/hpj8nmr9>
At the January meeting, commissioner Rebecca Segall said of the Rocky statue: “I believe it’s one of Philadelphia’s most meaningful monuments, and I believe we should just get him out of the bushes and put him up top.”
Creative Philadelphia and the Art Commission decided “the bushes” weren’t good enough for Rocky, but will be good enough for Joe Frazier. They will put the statue of the real legendary Black boxer right there near a shipping container called the Rocky Shop that sells Sylvester Stallone-licensed products, as if it were some Black History Month consolation prize.
I mean, c’mon! Do they even hear themselves?
If any statue belongs at the top of the steps, it’s Frazier’s.
I’m not the first to point out that Frazier deserves the recognition this city gives to Rocky, and if history is any indicator, I sadly won’t be the last.
<https://tinyurl.com/yjuyhy73> _Stephanie Farr_ThePhiladelphiaInquirer

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FRENCH PHOTOGRAPHER EUGÈNE ATGET WAS BORN ON THIS DATE IN 1857.
Men's Fashions, 1923-24.
Fun fact: the NGA's copy was printed in the 50s by Berenice Abbot!
<https://tinyurl.com/2vk697fh> _‪PeterHuestis‬

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EPSTEIN FILES SHOW ART MARKET FINANCIALISATION IN FULL FLOW
<https://tinyurl.com/38a22x4b>
If you happen to be near Basel in Switzerland, you could do worse than go and visit the Beyeler Foundation’s exhibition of late works by Cezanne. It’s “eloquent”, according to the FT’s art critic, with paintings which “opened the door to modern art”.
One of the works on show is “Château Noir” (c1904), which depicts faint umber buildings disappearing behind blue-green trees rendered in Cezanne’s idiosyncratic tache broad brushstrokes.
What does this proto-abstract piece have to do with child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, you might wonder.
At the back of the catalogue, the painting is described as coming from a private collection — and thanks to the Epstein files, we can identify whose collection that probably is (or certainly once was).
Spoiler: it’s Leon Black, co-founder of private capital firm Apollo and a big client of Epstein’s. But how we found this out, and what it tells us about the art market, is the interesting part.
Some background. The market for art-backed loans — where paintings and sculptures are used as collateral — is surprisingly big.
A report from Deloitte Private and ArtTactic Art estimated it at $33.9bn-$40bn in 2025, up almost 12 per cent on its previous estimate. It projected that the total loan portfolio would rise to $42bn-$50.1bn in 2027.
Billionaires don’t like to have their paintings just hanging on the wall, doing nothing for them. Much better to make them sweat by using them as collateral.
Private banks will consider lending sums from $5mn into the hundreds of millions, or even more, and tend to use a 50 per cent loan-to-value. That means you need to pledge art worth double the money you need.
Lenders want pieces worth more than $200,000-$250,000 and by more than one artist to avoid concentration risk. They prefer Impressionist and Modern works, spanning Monet to Warhol, over those of emerging artists without a proven auction record.
Because the art market has been bad for a few years, art lenders have asked borrowers for more pictures as security for their loans after the value of their collateral has fallen. Default rates among non-bank lenders are high.
Back to Black.
While trawling through the Epstein files for art-related interest, I came across a $470mn art-backed loan he was involved with on Black’s behalf. Epstein’s wide-ranging work for Black, including around art, has been covered, but the details of this loan do not appear to have been reported before.
The loan appears clearly in the paperwork. “Black Asset Summary” from September 30 2014 lists, under Liabilities, $470mn for “Loan payable — BofA (Art)”:
<https://tinyurl.com/yc8zecct>
Other emails to Epstein show he was being kept up to date on the loan.
We can dive into what’s behind — or, rather, inside — that loan, thanks to more of the Epstein files.
In July 2014, in a document titled “Collateral for BofA loan”, Sotheby’s valued dozens of items from Black’s collection at a total of $1bn. (BofA will be Bank of America, which is being sued by one of Epstein’s victims.)
An undated file, but presumably after the valuation, is called “Pledged — BofA loan” and details the actual collateral given. Price-wise, it ranges from a $55mn Cezanne (not our work but also referenced in the Beyeler’s catalogue) to a $2mn Matisse drawing.
The pledged items total $891.7mn, of which the loan amount, $470mn, would be 52.7 per cent — the LTV sweet spot for art-backed loans.
Among the items is a line for “Le Château Noir” (c1904), oil on canvas, 27¼ x 32½ inches. Sotheby’s had appraised the value at $25mn and it had been pledged to BofA at same:
<https://tinyurl.com/4bpx3z5d>
So how do we know this is the work at the Beyeler? After all, as the Beyeler catalogue says, “Cezanne left many of his works untitled.” And there are six works with “Château Noir” in their titles being exhibited.
First, most of the others are called things like “Sous-bois (Chemin du Mas Jolie au Château Noir)”, aka “Undergrowth (Path from Mas Jolie to the Château Noir)”.
The only other unadorned “Château Noir” comes from 1903-04, the wrong date, and is owned by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, “gift of Mrs David M Levy”. Levy gave it to MoMA in 1957, which means it’s out of the running.
The clincher is the size. In the catalogue, it’s given as 69.2cm x 82.5cm. Converted into imperial — the format from the pledge document — you get 27.24in x 32.5in, almost the exact size listed in the file (“27¼ x 32½ inches”).
As an aside, the Château Noir featured in the artworks was so named, according to a MoMA catalogue, “not because of its color but because local rumor labeled its builder an alchemist in alliance with the devil”. Apt.
I asked the Beyeler whether the private collection was Black’s and it said:
We are unable to share further details regarding the ownership of this particular painting beyond the fact that it is on loan from a private collection. The museum is contractually bound to respect the privacy of its lenders as set out in its loan agreements. Such confidentiality obligations are standard practice for loans from private collections to museum exhibitions.
Of course, Black could easily have sold this work privately (it doesn’t seem to have gone through recent public auctions at Sotheby’s or Christie’s), so it may not be his now. But it sure once was.
Why does this matter? The art market, despite its turmoil, is still valued at $57.5bn and the art-backed loans market is not much smaller. The art market itself is poorly regulated and thrives on privacy/discretion/confidentiality/secrecy/mystery/obfuscation.
Had Leon Black’s adviser been anyone other than Jeffrey Epstein, we would probably have never known any of these details, and there is no suggestion that Black did anything wrong in this transaction or with this loan to the Beyeler (if indeed it is still his).
But the art market contains as much market as art, and the Epstein files show how a painting produced by a genius can be involved in a transaction overseen by a sex offender. From an expression of the soul to a line on a balance sheet.
The next time you go to an exhibition and the label by an artwork says “private collection”, these may be some of the complexities, and perhaps some of the people, behind it.v _Josh Spero_FinancialTimes

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MARILYN MONROE LOOKING AT A DEGAS' STATUETTE, 1956
<https://tinyurl.com/f7mehfcd> _RabihAlameddine