OLD NEWS

ENGLISH MEN’S FASHION WAS REALLY FANTASTIC AROUND 1535–40.
<https://tinyurl.com/2aoladvz> _DeanKissick

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TONY BECHARA, PAINTER WHO WRANGLED RANDOMNESS, DIES AT 83
<https://tinyurl.com/29l3ndm4>
Tony Bechara, an artist who was beloved in New York for his intricately crafted grid paintings and for his patronage of El Museo del Barrio, died on Wednesday on his 83rd birthday
Since the 1970s, Bechara repeatedly painted multihued grids using a method that was as rigorous as the concept behind it. His mind-bending, eye-popping canvases sought to understand abstract notions such as randomness and controlled chaos, and though perhaps less famous than other experiments in the medium by his New York colleagues, these works have since emerged as some of the most cutting-edge painterly experiments done in an era when painting was commonly pronounced dead.
But Bechara’s contributions to the city’s art scene extend far beyond what can be shown in galleries and museums. For 18 years, he was board chair at El Museo del Barrio, a museum that specializes in Caribbean and Latin American art, and he was also a trustee at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Brooklyn Rail.
He also was instrumental in stoking greater interest in the work of the painter Carmen Herrera, one of his friends, prior to her death in 2022. When Herrera received a Whitney Museum survey in 2016, Bechara was among those thanked in the credits for it.
<https://tinyurl.com/2co3tewd>
Bechara considered his patronage of arts institutions and his promotion of other artists a part of his practice all the same. Of those activities, he told, “They are an extension of my commitment to art, like unfinished murals in which I work during the night.”
By day, he worked on his paintings, which he made via a process that involved repeatedly taping and un-taping his canvases, then filling in various areas with brightly colored acrylic. Thousands of quarter-inch squares result, nestled together to form vast grids.
he once described his process this way: “It begins with taping one layer on the whole canvas vertically, then proceeds the same horizontally. The next thing is to apply the selected color with a small brush, then remove the tape. Repeat this same process on the unpainted squares one more time vertically, then horizontally, then apply the last layer of colors. What I love is the degrees of surprise every time; to take each layer of tape off the canvas is to reveal new worlds of optical symphony.”
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This symphonic aesthetic differentiated Bechara’s work from contemporaneous Minimalist experiments made during the 1970s. Whereas those works were cold and unfeeling, Bechara’s art is overflowing with color. It also slyly finds ways of exceeding its rigid structure, with some squares slightly exceeding their frame and others flowing onto the sides of his canvases. Critic John Yau recently noted that Bechara’s process “undermines any sense of stability that we associate with a grid.”
To contemporary eyes, these paintings look like computer screens, with each square acting as something like a pixel. But Bechara started producing the grid paintings during the early 1970s, at a time when they would not have had that connotation. At the time, he instead believed his paintings would help him understand the nature of perception.
“Since I have the grid as a structure,” he told, “I trust each painting to tell me what to do, how to be more random, or less random. It is always the surprise element that I find alluring.”
<https://tinyurl.com/2ywscv7g>
he started drifting toward art, initially creating figurative paintings in his spare time. Ultimately, in 1967, he enrolled at the School of Visual Arts, where his professors included painters such as Robert Mangold and Malcolm Morley, as well as the art historian Lucy Lippard. Inspired by Italian Neorealist movies, he started to paint black-and-white figurative imagery, and he even thought briefly of becoming a filmmaker himself.
He weathered controversy in 2013, when Margarita Aguilar filed a complaint with the New York State Division of Human Rights, claiming that she had faced discrimination when she was let go as El Museo del Barrio’s director. In her initial lawsuit, Aguilar claimed Bechara had said she and another staff member were “acting like hysterical women” when Aguilar tried to fire an employee. Bechara denied this, and the lawsuit was ultimately dismissed.
Although he left his post in 2016, Bechara remained a key figure for the museum, donating $1 million in 2019 in support of its curatorial and education departments.
<https://tinyurl.com/26soymwe> _Alex Greenberger _ARTnews

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WEATHER
<https://tinyurl.com/29elbj9c> _DavidShrigley

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EILEEN GRAY’S VERY IMPORTANT HERMÈS MAILBOX by greg
<https://tinyurl.com/29vrs62o>
I don’t know how I can be thirty years and a week into a fairly fervent admiration of Eileen Gray and only be finding out now that her original mailbox at E-1027 was made out of an Hermès saddle bag. And that in 2018 Hermès made a replacement, which I must have walked past multiple times, without knowing—was it actually even there? Yes, there it is in Iwan Baan’s photo.
<https://tinyurl.com/27wwmdot>
And there it is in Manuel Bougot’s photograph of the entrance of E-1027, a print of which he donated to the 2019 Artcurial auction to benefit the Association Cap Moderne, which led the restoration of E-1027. The auction that included an overnight stay for two in the E-1027 guest room, <https://tinyurl.com/2b4cowhr> but who cares? Because the Hermès “boîte aux lettres unique“ was not, in fact unique; it was “Faite main et sur mesure par la Sellerie Hermès en deux exemplaires en 2018, une pour la Villa E1027, une pour vous.”
Pour moi? Mais, non! Because I did not know. Also I did not bid €11,000 for it.
<https://tinyurl.com/2a8hgplu>
But now I have une question. Because the English auction listing said this is “replicating precisely the one made by Eileen Gray from a Hermès saddle-bag in 1929 for E1027,” while the French text says it was made from “à partir d’une selle Hermès,” which, I understand selle to be a saddle. So far I can find no info about the original mailbox at all, much less what Hermès product Gray might have chopped up to make it.
The c. 1929 photo of the boîte published in Jean Badovici’s own architecture magazine does indeed look just like the Hermès replica. According to Peter Adam, Gray put the hole in the box and a mirror in the window so you could check the mail from bed. But my limited mind cannot conceive how it is reworked from a bag, and not just made to Gray’s design from saddle leather. Does the original still exist to have been replicated? Are there some archives that need diving into to solve this mystery? Because now that I know it existed, I can’t figure out why, at this point, it’s not a mailbox, a bag, or both.._greg.org

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THE LAST PLACE ON EARTH PHILLIPSVILLE, MI
<https://tinyurl.com/24b6erp8> _RuralIndexingProject

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GUEST COLUMN: STEVE HURD ON NICK TAGGART
<https://tinyurl.com/2387ceb8>
Fifty years ago, a young artist from the UK, Nick Taggart, landed in Los Angeles. With fresh eyes, colored pencils, and watercolors, he commenced documenting the margins of the mythical “Tinseltown.” Translating his sense of innocence and wonderment over the new world he encountered, he created beautifully rendered meditations of an unusually familiar place and its inhabitants.
<https://tinyurl.com/2d25l4e4>
<https://tinyurl.com/2d5p4xa6>
https://tinyurl.com/268xqv8g<
Although Taggart found commercial success in his adopted home, producing album covers and magazine illustrations, it was his take on how he saw the world around him that was out of place in an art market preoccupied with the next new thing. It is Interesting, though, how these brightly colored narratives feel fresh and appear more relevant in today’s contextually driven culture, where art needs to relate to its community, its environment, and its history.
<https://tinyurl.com/2ackd8ww>
<https://tinyurl.com/29wt6bdr>
<https://tinyurl.com/29hzee7g>
Reappearing from its dormancy at a time when swaths of our city have turned to ash and a lunatic politician is systematically destroying our culture, the vitality, and optimism of this body of work helps to remind Angelenos of the dream that brought us here and why we’ll stay.
<https://tinyurl.com/25kw7ch2> _LessArt

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PAULA ESTEVAN ACOMA POTTERY,
<https://tinyurl.com/2xtcz25t> _#WomensArt

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THE DANISH WOMEN WHO MADE MODERNISM RADICAL
<https://tinyurl.com/2co482kp>
Nordic women modernists are having a deserved moment.
That moment includes the new book Women Artists in Denmark 1880-1910 — companion to a recent exhibition at the Hirschsprung Collection in Copenhagen. It’s an excellent introduction to an underknown history of modern art, which the authors convincingly argue often looks quite different from what we might expect. “This is not because women came late to modernity, particularly in terms of the stylistic expression of art,” Inge Lise Mogensen Bech explains in her chapter essay, “Punchy women: Art and satire 1880-1910,” “but because the modernity they fought for has become so self-evident today that the contemporary eye may find it difficult to notice the radicalism in, for example, a glance, a length of hair, a dress, or an interior.” Such subtle gestures and fashions are thoroughly explored; you’ll never look at a glove the same way again.
<https://tinyurl.com/27p9vsut>
Bertha Wegmann’s fantastic “Portrait of the Swedish Painter Jeanna Bauck” (1887) is all about the artist’s gaze and where it lingers, from the lorgnette at her lover’s lips to the meaningful look offered by the sitter, staring back at the romantic partner who is painting her. Depicting Bauck encased in black from neck to wrist, with her left hand gloved and the right naked (I said what I said), grasping that glove just so, the portrait is oddly sexier than we might expect of 19th-century middle-aged women, no matter how modern. Women Artists in Denmark 1880-1910 offers many such surprising pleasures.
Featuring the work of 23 Danish artists along with newly unearthed paintings from private collections, Women Artists in Denmark 1880-1910 is a textbook example of how vigorous scholarship can illuminate new ways of seeing the history of art, and of understanding what we’re looking at. Specifically, the authors demonstrate how a pioneering generation of women was “integral to making art modern” during what’s known as the Modern Breakthrough in Scandinavian art.
<https://tinyurl.com/2dcvgeds>
Lest the book and its subjects seem esoteric at a first glance, consider this chilling sentence from the preface by Karina Lykke Grand and Lise Jeppesen: “In today’s Western society, where International Women’s Day is a recurring annual event, and where women’s right to an education, to vote, to financial independence, to exert legal influence equivalent to that of men, and to autonomy over their own bodies is self-evident, the history of these artists serves as a reminder that such privileges are far from guaranteed.” For my fellow American readers in particular, such a sentiment is all too evident.
Also evident is that these women were a lot like we are — struggling to make a living in art, to live as they wanted, to love whom they desired, to control their reproductive lives, and to have a voice in the political sphere. In many cases, they also knew each other. Anna Petersen’s painting “An evening with a friend. By lamplight.” (1891) depicts three visual artists of the so-called “Scandinavian Clique” in Paris, with Bauck and Wegmann tucked close together, bodies touching, on the sofa, and Marie Krøyer seated nearby, while Danish violinist Frida Schytte stands before them, playing music. Petersen herself is present through her own paintings hanging on the wall. This is a self-sufficient community of women artists. The gaze, and means, are all theirs.
<https://tinyurl.com/28pwre5g> _Bridget Quinn_Hyperallergic

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WONDERING IF ANYONE'S DETERMINED IF THAT'S A REPLICA
of an actual Alexander Calder mobile in the Fantastic Four trailer...?
Also curious if the Calder Foundation might have
given permission or collaborated in some way
<https://tinyurl.com/282j32ef>
For what it's worth
I don't see anything that corresponds closely
in the online Calder catalogue raisonné,
but certainly possible I might be missing something
<https://tinyurl.com/2cmkkuym> _MichaelLobel

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THE MET’S BANKSY
Banksy has been making mischief for years, including hitting the US headlines in 2005 when he illicitly hung a work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. John Barelli, the head of the Met’s security department from 2001 to 2016, told last month that three accomplices helped the street artist to carry out the audacious stunt.
Two of them began arguing, distracting the guards, allowing the third, who wore a fake beard and a tweed hat, to covertly affix a painting to the wall, depicting a woman in a gas mask. The intruder then placed a placard next to the painting: “Banksy, 1975. ‘Last breath.’ Oil on board. Donated by the artist.”
Banksy apparently tried to reclaim his property. “About a month later, I got a call from our legal department, telling me that he wants it back,” Barelli said. “And I said, ‘Well, he can’t have it back. We threw it out.’” So where is the piece now? Barelli admits that when he retired, he took the work himself. “If I need some money, maybe I’ll do something with it.” Kerching! _ArtNewspaper

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THE MOUNT WASHINGTON POST
<https://tinyurl.com/2d95x66o> _LisaAnneAuerbach

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30-YEAR-OLD BLUE-CHIP GALLERY EXPANDS AMID STARK DROP IN PROFITS
Since 2022, there has been near-constant talk of a soft art market, with the latest UBS Art Basel Report finding that global art sales contracted for the second consecutive year. And yet, it is perhaps a sign of strength—or at least confidence—that major galleries continue to expand. The latest example is Sadie Coles, a pillar of London’s contemporary art scene for nearly three decades. Coles announced in February that her gallery will open a new 6,000-square-foot London location in Mayfair, set to open this fall. And yet, according to recent UK filings, the gallery has been far from immune to the art market dip.
In the filings, the gallery reported a steep 46 percent drop in revenue for 2024, falling from £52.3 million to £28.3 million, according to recent UK filings. Its pre-tax profits plunged 93 percent to just £400,000, down from £5.5 million the year prior. The downturn, Coles acknowledged in her director’s report, stemmed from a slowdown at the high end of the art market that “squeezed gross profit margins.”
But Coles is largely insulated from the art market’s downturn. The gallery carries no debt and, over the last five years, has reported a 20 percent increase in its total assets, which according to the filings is primarily stock holdings, but could also include real estate and inventory. In real terms, Coles saw assets grow from £23.9 million in 2019 to £28.8 million in 2024.
“Whilst tough, our business remains healthy,” Coles told ARTnews in an emailed statement. She called the downturn an “industry-wide contraction” and said it hadn’t affected the gallery’s expansion.
The gallery’s 2024 financial dip reflects a broader slowing effect for a generation of older contemporary art dealers. The recent UBS Art Basel report found that overall gallery sales declined 12 percent in 2024. Dealers at the highest transactional end were hit hardest: 64 percent of galleries with more than $10 million in annual turnover reported lower sales, compared to just 23 percent of galleries under $250,000. Still, nearly half of all respondents said 2024 sales exceeded pre-pandemic levels.
The stability of Coles’s business rests largely with the size of its assets, filings show. With the gallery’s assets having grown by 20 percent due to its investment strategy, opening the new London space is a viable option.
Coles considers last year’s slowdown a minor blip in the gallery’s growth plans. _ARTnews

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WHO KNOWS WHAT'S GOING ON IN THIS PICTURE BY TOMMASO (MAO) SALINI,
but who really cares with such a beautifully painted wine flask and cabbages?
Young Peasant with a Flask ca. 1610,
<https://tinyurl.com/23ppjpyt> _JesseLocker

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VAST NEW INTERACTIVE ART MUSEUM IN ABU DHABI
teamLab Phenomena Abu Dhabi, a museum devoted to the interactive art of the Japanese collective teamLab, has opened in the UAE capital. It is the second art institution to open in the long-discussed Saadiyat Cultural District.
“It is a sensory museum based on a philosophy that intertwines art, technology and nature,” said the chairman of Abu Dhabi’s Department of Culture and Tourism, at the museum’s opening. Unlike a conventional museum, it is formed not of a collection but of a series of digitally enabled experiences revolving around the idea of nature. Huge, mirrored rooms reflect and refract swarms of butterflies that flit across the walls, while streaks of light move upwards onto columns. In one water-based installation, small floating objects light up as another bounces across them; in another room tornadoes of silver balloons swivel around visitors.
The global branding director of teamLab, said his collective aimed to create “new forms of perception”, adding that their “art expands the way we see the world”. _ArtNewspaper

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MAX ERNST, PETALS IN THE GARDEN OF THE NYMPH ANCOLIE, 1934.
<https://tinyurl.com/29x3dle3>
Max Ernst working on his fresco
'Petals and Garden of the Nymph Columbine' at the Corso Theater in Zurich (1934).
<https://tinyurl.com/27sf4aeh> _RabihAlameddine

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YUGA LABS SEEKS ACCESS TO CRYPTO WALLETS TO ENFORCE JUDGMENT IN BORED APES LAWSUIT
In a surprise development, the copyright clash between Yuga Labs and the duo behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club-lookalike NFT series RR/BAYC, Ryder Ripps and Jeremy Cahen, will continue in the US District Court.
On April 21, Yuga Labs filed a motion in the federal court that demanded Cahen turn over control of four cryptocurrency wallets allegedly holding some $400,000 in assets. The request follows a February judgment that ordered Ripps and Cahen to pay nearly $9 million in damages, disgorgement, and legal fees for infringing on Yuga Labs’ trademarks and cybersquatting (the practice of registering a domain name with the intent to profit from another’s trademark or brand).
According to the Yuga Labs’ filing, the company has made consistent monthly efforts since the judgment to locate and collect on Cahen’s assets. Those attempts have included subpoenas, levies on banks and crypto exchanges, and even a request for Cahen’s financial records from the Los Angeles Clippers—who confirmed he is a season ticket holder.
The motion alleges that shortly after a court-authorized levy was served on Gemini, a crypto exchange where Cahen held an account, he transferred large sums of Bitcoin and Ethereum to private wallets in an apparent attempt to avoid paying damages. These wallets, identified on the public blockchain, remain active and are now the subject of Yuga Labs’ turnover request.
The filing argues that because Cahen has refused to cooperate with post-judgment discovery or post a bond to delay enforcement, the court should issue an order directing him to provide the cryptographic keys to the U.S. Marshals. Without this access, Yuga Labs contends, there is a risk the funds could be lost or further hidden.
The case centers the RR/BAYC NFTs (short for Ryder Ripps Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs) created by Ripps, whose side argued that the collection was a protest artwork meant to “bring attention to Yuga’s use of racist and neo-Nazi messages and imagery” and that it was never intended to mislead consumers into believing the collection was associated with BAYC. His legal team has attempted to frame the Yuga Labs lawsuit as an attempt to silence dissent—what’s known as a SLAPP suit—but that argument failed to find traction.
Yuga Labs is the parent company behind the NFT projects Bored Ape Yacht Club and Crypto Punks, and has argued that the project should not earn copyright protections, as it was not satire, but a deliberate attempt to confuse buyers and damage their brand—a claim the court upheld last year. In an earlier ruling, the judge wrote that “confusion is likely given the complexity and required sophistication to understand the blockchain and verify provenance.”
A representative for Cahen called Yuga Labs’ latest filing as “more of the same,” and includes arguments the court has already rejected. He pointed to a previous similar motion—filed under the guise of an emergency—that was denied after a judge found it both untimely and based on “misleading or incomplete” information. Cahen’s team plans to respond by May 5, and will again highlight what they allege are factual misrepresentations. “Yuga’s so-called emergency tactics are little more than courtroom theater—legally flimsy, financially wasteful, and emblematic of a company that once raised hundreds of millions for a monkey metaverse that still doesn’t exist,” he said. _ARTnews

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ACCUSED OF TRYING TO SELL STOLEN ANDY WARHOL ART
<https://tinyurl.com/2cyeh973>
A former Beverly Hills resident and the owner of an L.A. pawn shop tried to sell stolen Andy Warhol art and lied about the scheme to federal agents, authorities said.
Glenn Steven Bednarsh, 58, has been charged with knowingly buying a stolen Warhol trial proof depicting Soviet Union leader Vladimir Lenin in February 2021 for $6,000. He then attempted to sell it to a Dallas-based auction house, a Tuesday news release from the U.S. Attorney's Office alleges. _LATimes

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FOR INSTANCE, THE CODED LEDA-AND-THE-SWAN MOTIF ON HIS HAT
<https://tinyurl.com/2c5bew9c> _DeanKissick