OLD NEWS

IT'S BARBIE DAY!
Winged Arm Necklace by Margaux Lange, 2004:
<https://tinyurl.com/2m3wn7jy> _‪PeterHuestis‬

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TERESINHA SOARES, ARTIST WHO BROUGHT SEX AND FEMINISM TO POP ART, 1927–2026
<https://tinyurl.com/yz9xr5zp>
Teresinha Soares, the Brazilian artist whose Pop work was infused with sexual politics, has died.
Born in Minas Gerais, Soares studied at the Universidad Mineira das Artes in Belo Horizonte, graduating in 1965 as Brazil’s military dictatorship was beginning to clamp down on radical expression in the arts. Her paintings nonetheless included mouths, breasts, genitals and liberated female bodies. The press too was scandalised: ‘Painter Teresinha fears no sexual taboo’, ran one headline, while another proclaimed ‘Teresinha Soares and art as a volcano of Eros’.
In the late 1960s, Soares started a series of shaped painted wooden-panel works, referencing the Vietnam War, American imperialism, sexual repression, the oppression of women, and the torture and death of political prisoners in Brazilian prisons. One work of the period, painted to appropriate the form of a film negative, So Many Men Die and I Am Here So Lonely (series Vietnam) (1968), features ambiguous bodies entangled, either fighting or having sex.
She stopped making art abruptly in 1976, a decision she said she could never explain, but her work appeared in The World Goes Pop in 2015 at Tate Modern in London and Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985 at the Hammer Museum and Brooklyn Museum in 2018. In 2019 her decade of artmaking was the subject of a retrospective at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo.
She is the mother of the artist Valeria Soares. _ArtReview

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LESS
<https://tinyurl.com/2ebp8kvb> _DavidShrigley

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ALBERT GLEIZES, NEW YORK CUBIST by greg
<https://tinyurl.com/bdh3xrkp>
Discharged from the army for medical reasons and too depressed to stay in Paris, Cubist painter Albert Gleizes left for New York City in 1915. He painted this sweet little portrait of the city as a fragmented skyscraper. The NY Historical [Society], which is expecting its real estate developer owner to give the painting as promised, interprets the text elements extensively, but doesn’t mention how the cornice looks kind of like the Flatiron Building.
<https://tinyurl.com/mpu9eykx>
Anyway, Gleizes eventually found his way into Florine Stettheimer’s circle—and her painting of a party in her studio. That’s him in the lower left, wearing brown in front of the painting. _greg.org

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THE MOUNT WASHINGTON POST
<https://tinyurl.com/uu73ntrw> _LisaAnneAuerbach

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WE ASKED BEN LERNER TO NAME ONE ARTWORK HE CONSIDERS A “REVELATION”
<https://tinyurl.com/36cuk4xm>
I thought of Rose Salane’s 60 Detected Rings (1991–2021) when asked to inaugurate a column called Revelations because the word is so close to “revaluations,” and what the art I love reveals to me is how our measures of value might be challenged and transformed. Salane bought the rings in 60 Detected Rings at an estate sale; they’d been collected by a woman named Jill Benedict, who, using a metal detector, had gleaned them from the beaches of Atlantic City over a period of 30 years. Salane had the rings evaluated by a lab that recorded the electromagnetic frequency of the metal (when detected) and the ring’s “melt value”; she also had psychics interpret—reveal—what they could about the rings’ previous owners. Salane then mounted the rings in cases and captioned them with these scientific and economic and psychometric classifications. I first saw the resulting artwork at the New Museum triennial in 2021, but I think of it often.
What value did these rings once hold for those who wore them? The pathos of the “melt value” is that the metals of these objects are decidedly not precious. The spiritualists’ speculations about the histories of the rings’ wearers are ways of imagining sentimental value in conflict with the meager price the materials would fetch. What value did the rings hold for Benedict? What did Salane pay for them? What did she pay to have the archive assayed by the lab, by the spiritual workers? And how much does it cost to collect 60 Detected Rings, what is the “value added” when these materials become Salane’s work of art?
<https://tinyurl.com/mt98dhza>
A metal detector senses disturbances in the electromagnetic field caused by an object; as I looked at the rings I also detected small disturbances, fluctuations in value that seemed to make these rings vibrate with possibility. The newly auratic rings felt haunted—by those who wore them, by Benedict. Salane makes the rings—which might have been dismissed as litter—appear like small archaeological finds or religious relics. I think of Robert Smithson’s Monuments of the Passaic, his reading of industrial sites as “ruins in reverse” and “memory-traces of an abandoned set of futures”; Salane offers a more intimate version of this artistic anthropology. There is also a postapocalyptic feel here, as though Atlantic City had been washed away; “apocalypse” of course means “revelation.”
All these oscillations between new and old, trash and treasure generate a little wave of possibility. Salane achieves something I aspire to in writing: a reframing, a recontextualization, that reminds us that our world might be weighed differently. Great works of art melt value so that it can be reformed. _ArtInAmerica

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☘️ CUMMING TAP ☘️ CUMMING, IA
<https://tinyurl.com/3j6sebsn> _RuralIndexingProject

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P – PHOTOREALISM
<https://tinyurl.com/4v5rdp3m>
The name makes it sound so simple. “Photo”: the technology that documents things more precisely than the human hand could. “Realism”: the style that avoids overt stylishness and aims straight at the material world. Together: a kind of image that starts in a camera and then gets converted, without much flourish, into a painting. No surprise, then, that when the first Photorealists emerged in the late 1960s, too many critics wrote them off as lightweights—a little facile, not intellectual enough for the late, grim Clement Greenberg years.
But if these paintings were as straightforward as the early reviews made them seem, what about glare? What about blur, lens distortion, and other camera effects that the Photorealists went to absurd lengths to copy, resulting in art that was paradoxically realer than human vision but not always very realistic? How to explain the sublime weirdness of the best Photorealists’ efforts? How could such restrained, even robotic technique inspire work as distinct as Robert Bechtle’s ’61 Pontiac (1968–69) and Audrey Flack’s 1977 Marilyn (Vanitas), one a deadpan family portrait and the other a gaudy memorial to an actual death?
Restrained doesn’t mean unfeeling. On the surface, it’s bizarre that so many of the key Photorealists (Flack, Bechtle, Chuck Close, Richard Estes, Malcolm Morley) started off as Abstract Expressionists. What’s hard to deny, though, is how expressive their art remained, even after they renounced the total freedom of the brush. In his huge grisaille portraits, Close hints at some small, sharp emotion, maybe loneliness, and lets it spread through the images like a whisper through a cathedral. For her “Fuck” series (begun in 1969), Betty Tompkins used an airbrush to convert vintage porn stills into gigantic paintings, and the textureless cool of her style still brings out the heat of her subject. The less she does with paint, the more you feel.
Recent exhibitions have argued for Photorealism as a kind of identity politics, deeply inscribed in the work of Amy Sherald, Kehinde Wiley, and others celebrating the humanity of the disenfranchised. I wonder if there’s a further reason why this decades-old movement seems so lively. In the 2020s, the vast majority of images are taken by cameras, sent off to other machines, and at no point shared with human beings. It’s enough to make even the iciest Photorealist portraits look sunny—at least these camera-derived images are of the people, by the people, for the people. —Jackson Arn _ArtInAmerica

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MAKING MATZAH, FROM THE APTLY NAMED BIRDS' HEAD HAGGADAH
<https://tinyurl.com/3b96cz8s>
by an otherwise unknown scribe named Menachem (Southern Germany, c. 1300)
<https://tinyurl.com/mryuf3yb> _JesseLocker

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64. TAOS PUEBLO by Rainey Knudson
<https://tinyurl.com/kjedax2z>
The Taos Pueblo triumphed because they refused to take the government’s money. In 1946, the Indian Claims Commission was created to settle Native land claims—but only with cash, not land. The leaders of the Taos Pueblo, whose ancestors had occupied the area for over 1,000 years, refused payment for their sacred Blue Lake, which had been taken by Theodore Roosevelt’s administration in 1906 and added to National Forest land for grazing, mining, logging, and stocking with fish for recreation.
Blue Lake is the Pueblo’s water source and its most sacred site, its cathedral. The Forest Service bureaucracy reduced all that to red tape, requiring the Pueblo to apply for permits weeks in advance for their own ceremonies. As Taos Pueblo Council Secretary Paul Bernal testified before Congress in 1969, “We are probably the only citizens of the United States who are required to practice our religion under a permit from the government. This is not religious freedom as it is guaranteed by the Constitution.”
In 1970, after 64 years of protest and lobbying, Congress returned 48,000 acres, including Blue Lake, to Taos Pueblo.1
The pueblo itself, a multi-story adobe structure rising against the mountain sky, is the oldest continuously inhabited community in the United States. It has endured because the people persisted, and the land was never reduced to a price. Even now, with no electricity or piped water, the pueblo remains a place organized around what cannot be bought. Its people and its place are the same story. _TheImpatientReader

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PRELUDE 1 ORANGE
<https://tinyurl.com/4d5cek9u> _ON&ON / Jeff Weiss

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TWO MONET PAINTINGS, UNSEEN FOR A CENTURY, RESURFACE
In the spring of 1883, Claude Monet moved to Giverny, the bucolic village where he would spend the final four decades of his life. There, he continued his love affair with the Seine, paddling out in a customized studio boat and lending bob and flow to the meaning of plein air painting.
An early obsession was the thickly wooded islands stranded in the river across from Giverny. Monet painted them half a dozen times or so, offering blooms of mottled green rising out of the languid waters. One of these riverboat works is resurfacing at Paris this April after being sequestered in a private collection for the past 115 years.
Previously known only through a black and white photograph from the 1950s, Les Îles de Port-Villez (1883) depicts the natural world untouched by man. One glance and you can feel the speed at which Monet worked in his boat. The focus is the billowing island and its reflection, which Monet builds with energetic, generous strokes of greens and blues. The hazy sky, by contrast, is almost an afterthought.
“Monet is like an explorer arriving in a new world and using his boat to be as free as possible, He’s saying: ‘I am going to choose the part of the landscape that I want to paint, not the part that nature or some Impressionist code chooses.’ He really becomes the master of his aesthetic.” In color, technique, and intensity, it’s an aesthetic Bompard sees as foreshadowing Monet’s later fixation on water lilies.
After news of Îles de Port-Villez trickled through French collecting networks in January, a second long-held Monet emerged
<https://tinyurl.com/262r2trd>
That work is Vétheuil, Effet du Matin (1901), a pointillistic depiction of a valley Monet knew intimately. The painting of the village of Vétheuil as seen from across a broad sweep of the Seine
Vétheuil was painted 18 years and one elongated bend of the river away from Port-Villez. In the interim, Monet’s circumstances had transformed. By the first years of the 20th century, he was famous and seeing financial success. Most straightforwardly, his mode of transportation has changed. The studio boat is out and a chauffeured car is in: a Panhard & Levassor, then the fastest thing on four wheels. The car not only allowed Monet to explore a much wider area, but escape the stifling heat of the 1901 summer and decamp to Lavacourt, where he rented a house overlooking the Seine.
<https://tinyurl.com/52hnxmny> Édouard Manet, Claude Monet Painting in His Studio (1874).
There, he found a perch high up on the bank and painted Vétheuil’s river scene throughout the summer months. Two decades on, his compositions are more expansive, taking in the variations of the sky, the tones of farmland, and, as ever, light on water. There’s detail too: you can make out the boatman’s oars and the villagers’ gardens. Unlike the alla prima approach of Les Îles de Port-Villez, at Lavacourt Monet worked on multiple canvases at the same time, tinkering according to light and mood. Vétheuil, Effet du Matin is the second in a series of 15. _Richard Whiddington _artnet

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JUNE LEAF, "THE BALLROOM," 1968
<https://tinyurl.com/55vh8wea>
June Leaf, "Study for Ballroom," c. 1956
<https://tinyurl.com/3w9famxz> _MichaelLobel

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CHOPPED ARTEMISIA GENTILESCHI UP FOR SALE IN VIENNA
<https://tinyurl.com/3wjwyuwj>
Amongst the highlights of the upcoming Old Master auction at the Dorotheum in Vienna is this chopped fragment of Mary Magdalene by Artemisia Gentileschi.* The picture, which is an 'autograph replica' of a version in the Uffizi in Florence and had been exhibited in Milan in 2011-2012, may have been cut into its present state at some point during the war when the painting was in Berlin. What remains is up for sale carrying an estimate of €100,000 - €150,000.
The work was published by scholars Roberto Contini and Francesco Solinas as by the artist in full and also carries a recent endorsement by Riccardo Lattuada (according to the catalogue note).
According to their catalogue note (again, not a hoax):
The fact that this painting is damaged should not diminish its significance within the artists oeuvre. It is highly unusual for, a work of art of this importance to come to auction with the central feature, in this case the head of the saint, summarily removed. More often it is the fragment itself which has been removed from a larger, damaged work which appears on the market. In the absence of the missing part of this painting, it could be argued that the very loss it has suffered imbues the painting with a sense of dramatic intensity, evoking a visceral response almost akin to the reaction experienced with certain contemporary works of art. Ricardo Lattuada draws parallels between the impact of the present painting in its damaged state, with the conceptual work of emilio Isgrò (b.1937) who is known for his use of creative erasure, a technique of removing words from books to turn absence into meaning.
* - Although today is 1st April, I can assure you this is not an April fools.
_Adam Busiakiewicz:_ArtHistoryNews

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"IT’S WHAT A PRIVATE COLLECTION LOOKS LIKE
when the patron has prioritized their own predilections and passions,
no matter how idiosyncratic,
rather than giving over to mere 'trophyism' or clout-chasing."
on Eileen Harris Norton
<https://tinyurl.com/2ahkwpdx> _CarolinaAMiranda

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THE MET TOUTED HER AS ITS FIRST NATIVE AMERICAN CURATOR. AMID CRITICISM, SHE QUIETLY LEFT.
<https://tinyurl.com/ykeuy4ev>
Patricia Marroquin Norby, the first curator of Native American art ever hired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, quietly left her post in December 2025. Earlier this month, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York posted a job listing for a curator of Native American art to replace Norby, who had been the museum’s associate curator of Native American art since 2020.
Norby had been hired to great fanfare, as both the first person to hold the role at the Met and the first Native American to be hired as a curator by the institution. Her appointment was seen as both a watershed and as a response to criticism from various Native American tribes, who pointed to the museum’s poor documentation for many of the thousands of Native artworks and cultural objects it owns, some of which are on display in the recently opened Rockefeller Wing.
Norby’s departure was much quieter. She left the Met in December; Norby and a Met spokesperson both cited health reasons as the cause of her departure.
Since Norby was hired in 2020, her claims of Native heritage have been contested, including by the tribes she was affiliated with. Over the years, she has claimed ancestry to the Nde, Apache, and Eastern Apache peoples, who live in the Southwestern US and Northern Mexico, and the Purépecha, who live in Michoacán, Mexico. During her five-year tenure at the Met, she claimed only Purépecha as her Indigenous heritage.
Organizations, groups, and individuals that investigate false claims of Indigenous heritage in the US and Canada have made their work increasingly public over the past decade. A report published by the Tribal Alliance Against Frauds (TAAF) in 2024 said that Norby has “zero American Indian ancestry.” TAAF, responding to whistleblower reports, led an independent genealogical investigation that produced hundreds of documents tracing Norby’s family lineage, comprising US Indian census rolls and Mexican Indigenous identity requirements. For the Purépecha, community kinship is the main requirement, while the Mexican government stipulates linguistic fluency in order to claim such an identity.
Days after the Met job was posted, Norby published an op-ed in the Minnesota Star Tribune defending her identity as a private matter, setting her argument against the backdrop of the ongoing ICE raids nationwide and the University of Minnesota’s “Holding Our Ground: Voices and Strategies Against Self Indigenization” symposium. “Identities are personal,” she wrote. “If questioned, it is an issue to be resolved privately with their family and with the community that claims them or with whom they identify.”
Norby’s framing filters Indigenous identity through the lens of self-identification, but the majority of Indigenous tribes in both the US and Mexico prioritize community kinship, or an active relationship with the tribe one claims. “Tribal belonging exists through collectivity, not individuality,” Joseph Pierce (Cherokee Nation Citizen), an associate professor and the founding director of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative at Stony Brook University, told
What was the Met’s process for validating Norby’s ties to Native communities?
The answer remains opaque. The Met did not respond to multiple queries as to whether a formal process existed to vet Norby’s claims of Indigeneity or if one has been established since. In a statement, the Met simply said, “As with all curatorial roles, candidates are evaluated through a rigorous search process that considers scholarly expertise, professional experience, and the ability to work collaboratively and respectfully with communities whose cultural heritage is represented in the Museum’s collections.” Citing federal and state law, a Met spokesperson pointed to the job listing’s equal opportunity statement, which reads in part that candidates are hired without regard to “race, color, … [or] ancestry.” _ARTnews

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AUSTRALIAN INDIGENOUS ROCK ART.
Maybe 50,000 years old.
<https://tinyurl.com/46vbr8c8> _RabihAlameddine

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VENICE BIENNALE ARTISTS PUSH TO BAN U.S., ISRAEL, AND RUSSIA FROM EXHIBITION
Artists and curators participating in the main exhibition at this year’s Venice Biennale have issued an “urgent” open letter protesting the inclusion of Israel, Russia, and the United States in the global art event.
The letter follows on a similar call to exclude Israel from the Biennale that was published earlier this month by activist group Art Not Genocide Alliance (ANGA), but it expands the call to include all “current regimes committing war crimes,” including Russia and the U.S.
The question of whether the U.S. should be excluded from the Venice Biennale alongside Russia and Israel has been gaining momentum. One high-profile voice to weigh in was New York art critic Jerry Saltz, who suggested in a social media post from March 29 that “the United States should be banned, as well.”
The Biennale did not respond to a request for comment. It has so far resisted all calls to exclude any nation from participating in its 61st edition, which opens in May. In a statement published this month, the Biennale emphasized that it is a place of “artistic freedom” that “rejects any form of exclusion or censorship in culture and art.”
The writers of the letter have questioned the Biennale’s stance of “neutrality,” claiming that “allowing governments that are actively committing war crimes, atrocities, and genocide to participate is not neutral.
“A community of nations can only exist if states are sanctioned when they egregiously violate international law and human rights,” the letter states. It added that the insertion of the Israel pavilion into the Arsenale, which also houses the main exhibition, “intrudes upon and goes directly against Kouoh’s curatorial vision.” It noted “conditions of violence and fear” that will be imposed by the police presence required to protect the Israel pavilion.
The Biennale has remained steadfast in its position amid a wave of backlash triggered by its decision to allow Russia to return to the event this year. This has included a threat by the E.U. to withdraw €2 million ($2.3 million) in funding as well as criticism from within Italian government.
Several of the letter’s 73 signatories chose to stay anonymous. Others are not individual artists, such as the collective and the artist-run organizations _artnet

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SELLING STOLEN ART IS TRICKY, SO WHY EVEN BOTHER HEISTING IT?
There is a third reason to steal artworks. Organised crime groups sometimes use stolen artworks as bargaining chips to negotiate more lenient punishment. For example, the Dresden jewellery thieves kept a few pieces of their haul aside to use their recovery to negotiate shorter sentences. Penitentos (“repentant ones”) who want to leave mafia organisations also sometimes provide information on the whereabouts of missing treasures. If there is a perception that stolen artworks can used to reduce a prison sentence or financial compensation package, their underworld value can grow far beyond the finder’s fee.
While it is difficult to verify the assertion that stolen artworks are used as collateral in drug deals, several unique treasures have indeed been retrieved from properties owned by senior mafiosi. These works have not been found in temperature controlled galleries, but rolled up in dank places that make museum curators weep with despair. Let us hope that the beautiful artworks from Parma are treated with respect until we see them again. _TheConversation

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IT'S NATIONAL FALSE TEETH DAY!
A French Dentist Shewing a Specimen of his Artificial Teeth and False Palates,
hand-colored etching by Thomas Rowlandson, 1811:
<https://tinyurl.com/yeypztnb> _‪PeterHuestis‬