OLD NEWS

ROY LICHTENSTEIN, PORTRAIT, 1977
(but for today let's just agree
to refer to it simply as "Cheese Head")
<https://tinyurl.com/28l5jo5d> _MichaelLobel

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ELLSWORTH & KELLY & LORENZETTI & KUBRICK by greg
<https://tinyurl.com/2lodobxd>
I was listening to a recording of Ellsworth Kelly’s 1999 Elson Lecture at the National Gallery of Art, and I have some questions. Some could probably be answered by a video of the lecture—more of a conversation, with curator Marla Prather—or with a review of Kelly literature I don’t have.
Kelly talked about his interest in an unusual color combination, orange & pink, which he used in Tiger (1953), after using it as found colors in Painting for a White Wall (1952). Readers <https://tinyurl.com/26rdas65> know this already.
<https://tinyurl.com/29dlqqdj>
But it’s older than that. In 1999, Kelly told of a 1951 meeting with Jean Arp to discuss his (Kelly’s) Guggenheim Fellowship application, a proposal to publish an artist book. Arp, a chance operations-based collagist who Kelly had asked for a reference, was baffled by the pink/orange combo in one chance operations-based collage in the book.
<https://tinyurl.com/29utbc22>
Kelly mentioned that “many years later,” at the National Gallery in London, he saw Lorenzetti, he said, “and suddenly it dawned on me,” that he had spent an entire summer (in 1947) at the Museum School in Boston, copying a pink & orange Virgin & Child by Lorenzetti at the Museum of Fine Arts. And that this was the original source.
Kelly did not mention that copying a Lorenzetti was included in the catalogue for his 1996 Guggenheim retrospective. Or that the book proposal collages were only shown for the first time in the 1996. Or that the the Harvard Art Museums finally published his book, Line Form Color <https://tinyurl.com/2y4kcwdd> , in 1999. What I want to know is, where is this Ellsworth Kelly Lorenzetti?
<https://tinyurl.com/23v8u3e6>
The other puzzle remains unsolved. Kelly was talking about beginning in 1969 to make paintings whose curved edge is a fragment of a circle. After misremembering it as the Apollo moon landing itself, Kelly recalled watching Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey:
When they’re in a spacecraft circling the moon, they had windows in this parlor, and you looked out the window, and you saw this. And I had already done some small paintings like this, and I said, “Oh my God, there’s one of my paintings!” And I wonder if anyone else picked that up, because it just hit me like that.
Reader, I just scrubbed through 2001, and did not pick that up, and it did not just hit me like that. The fragment of the curve of a circle in the movie is rarely the horizon of moon, and most often the sunlit half of the earth. But it occurs in several—even many— shots before and after the moon shuttle; if anything, the shuttle windshield view is the most fleeting. I believe that shape is called a spherical wedge, and I do not know if Kelly made and showed such work in the mid-60s that Kubrick might have been influenced by. My suspicion is he was influenced by the sun shining on half the earth at a time. But this story appears nowhere else that I can find. _greg.org

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ASK
<https://tinyurl.com/2b6ncb5r> _DavidShrigley

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RIP FIGURATION. LONG LIVE THE BODY by Martin Herbert
<https://tinyurl.com/26dzzjz3>
Within visual art, and not infrequently outside of it too, the human body might currently appear to be in a flop era. Going round the galleries and looking, in particular, at exhibitions of painting – because, well, most exhibitions are of painting – it can often feel like the stylistic pendulum has lately swung decisively towards abstraction, after many revivalist years for figuration. Pondering that apparent shift, you might easily think of superficial aesthetic reasons – the fundamental that’s enough-of-that ennui that dates back to when the second generation of cave painters, bored of stick people, insisted on images of buffalo instead – and also point to the conservative backlash against explicitly identity-driven art. Either way, rumour has it, many formerly figurative painters now hire burly assistants to rugby-tackle them as soon as they’ve painted a nice washy or squiggly background and are about to put a person on top of it.
But at the same time, while an absence of human bodies might seem, superficially at least, to be supplanting an obsession with them, in other mediums and artforms the proverbial meat-puppets remain central, and abundant. Take, for example, Anne Imhof’s DOOM: House of Hope (2025), her recent fashion-adjacent spectacle at the Park Avenue Armory in New York, which – on its most basic level – asked people to look at live people doing stuff or just standing there. Of course, those lookers also got irritated by having their views blocked by those trying to film the event on their phones – hell is other people, etc. We want to see bodies, or think we do; and then there they are, lots of them, and we find them annoying and want them to go away. Furthermore, binary narratives suggesting that the human form is currently important or unimportant in art aren’t accurate; or rather, both things can be true. As soon as you make pronouncements like ‘apparently we’ve had enough bodies for now’, or ‘abstraction is back, figurative painting is done, phew’, you go round the galleries again and lo, there’s still a ton of paintings of people being produced. (Let’s leave out of this, for now, the tastes of dunderhead collectors who can’t handle anything other than pictures of their own species.)
<https://tinyurl.com/22tjfh3a>
Such, indeed, seems to be the defining, lenticular tenor of the cultural moment: the body appearing to fade out and, in other quarters, being still really insistently present, partly because there are pressures on it to vanish. (See also human creativity per se, the fact that there’s about to be a premium on ‘human-authored’ books, the not unrelated fact of tech bosses encouraging their offspring to train in the humanities.) This duality, this simultaneous death and efflorescence of the human, is surely underscored by an uncertainty – fuelled by AI, the possibilities of self-modification, the spectre of the Singularity, etc – about what even constitutes ‘humanness’ anymore: a sense, that is, of incipient loss. Recent Hollywood films pinned to the nature of the contemporary body and psyche, from Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things and Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast (both 2023) to Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance <https://tinyurl.com/2behgabg> (2024), anxiously register our moment’s sense of corporeal flux.
<https://tinyurl.com/preview/278x858r>
A lot of recent art, meanwhile, might be construed as a subconscious response to this existential threat, either making the body insistently present, both as a site of defiance and as a locus of baseline humanity, or, as with abstraction’s return, performing its vanishing. Some signature artworks of our time, like Josh Kline’s bagged bodies, imply both at once; others, like Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst’s <https://tinyurl.com/23vddo38> , urge collaboration with our incoming inhuman overlords; still others, like the ones in Ed Atkins’s Tate Britain retrospective this month, combine undead CGI renderings of people with abundant extremely human chatter and feeling. If bodies and persons are seen as synonymous, meanwhile, note that in legal terms it’s increasingly difficult to define what a ‘person’ is, given that things considered to be a ‘legal person’ can include churches, rivers, companies and animals.
Still, buck up. The result, artists will note with gratitude, is that it’s currently impossible to make irrelevant art, so long as there are either people in it or not. Is your art pointedly full of human bodies? Congratulations, you’re incisively commenting on our current predicament, our terrifying hinge point as a species. Is your art pointedly bereft of those human bodies? Same, even if you’re painting rivers and churches. Everything now depends on what it says in the press release. _ArtReview

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ED ATKINS | OPEN NOW | TATE BRITAIN
<https://tinyurl.com/29gx78h6> _Tate

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NEW IMAGES OF LOOTING AT SUDAN’S NATIONAL MUSEUM
<https://tinyurl.com/27daee32>
Videos of Sudan’s national museum showing empty rooms, piles of rubble and broken artefacts posted on social media after the Sudanese army recaptured the area from the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in recent days show the extent of looting of the country’s antiquities.
Fears of looting in the museum were first raised in June 2023 and a year later satellite images emerged of trucks loaded with artefacts leaving the building, according to museum officials. But last week, as the RSF were driven out of Khartoum after two years of war, the full extent of the theft became apparent.
<https://tinyurl.com/27unuv6x>
A video shared by the Sudan Tribune newspaper showed the museum stripped bare, with only a few large statues remaining, including the seven-tonne statue of King Taharqa, a pharaoh who ruled Egypt and Kush (present-day Sudan) from 690 to 664BC. Others showed ransacked rooms and smashed display cabinets.
The museum held an estimated 100,000 artefacts from thousands of years of the country’s history, including the Nubian kingdom, the Kushite empire and through to the Christian and Islamic eras. It held mummies dating from 2500BC, making them among the oldest and archaeologically most important in the world.
<https://tinyurl.com/2bkjlshb>
Elnzeer Tirab Abaker Haroun, a curator at the Ethnographic Museum in Khartoum, said a specialist team visited the site after the RSF were expelled to assess the damage, which they will be documenting in a report.
“The tragedy was immense,” he said. “Most of the museum’s rare artefacts, as well as its precious gold and precious stones, have been lost.”
The theft includes not only items on public display but those held inside a fortified room, including gold, which it is feared have been smuggled out of the country for sale abroad.
Unesco, the UN’s cultural agency, has previously called on art dealers not to trade, import or export artefacts smuggled out of Sudan.
<https://tinyurl.com/22e8ppc9>
Many view it as a tragedy emblematic of the loss the country has suffered since the war started in 2023 during a power struggle between the army commander, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the RSF’s leader, Mohamed Hamdan Dagolo
Shahenda Suliman, a Sudanese trade unionist, said: “Whilst the human tragedy of this war outweighs everything for me, there’s a symbolism there in seeing emptiness where these grand objects once stood that sort of captures the scale of destruction, loss and emptying of the country that we’ve seen since the war started.
<https://tinyurl.com/26lsfpu2> _GuardianUK

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THE MOUNT WASHINGTON POST
<https://tinyurl.com/2dhp6qdr> _LisaAnneAuerbach

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MUSEUMS IN SUDAN by Mary Beard
I have only once been to Sudan, more than fifteen years ago, and the museums there were some of the most memorable I have ever visited.
One of these was the Republican Palace Museum <https://tinyurl.com/2clos4dp> , in the old Anglican Cathedral in Khartoum (pictured). We went there partly because the Cathedral had been designed by a Byzantine scholar and Arts and Crafts architect, Robert Weir Schultz, whom the husband was investigating. By the time of our visit, it had been deconsecrated and repurposed, unforgettably. We walked down the nave, where there were appalling photographs of the carnage of the Battle of Omdurman and its aftermath (should be required viewing for Brits); and featured centre-stage was the table on which John Garang had signed the peace agreement between South and North Sudan (this now seems a very long time ago). You might have thought this was an (understandably) nationalist display.
But as we moved from the nave to the crossing, things became more surprising. For there we found the well-tended piano of General Gordon, as well as portraits of King George (fifth) and Queen Mary. Whatever drove this presentation, it was a rather gentle treatment of the British presence (and unexpected after what we had just seen). It was similar elsewhere in the city with the figure of Kitchener. One of his “gun boats” was being used to store the Coca-Cola at a local yacht club on the Nile. I couldn’t think of any better way of cutting the empire down to size, not smashing the boat up but using it to store the Coca-Cola.
There was more for me a short distance away in the National Museum in Khartoum <https://tinyurl.com/2bkga6bl> , where we saw an extraordinary display of ancient and later material (ranging from the very very ancient to medieval icons and beyond, partly restored and redisplayed in collaboration with the British Museum). We had a good time with the then director, and we met some of their BM collaborators. It was exhilarating and hopeful. _TimesLiterarySupplement

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HOW YOUR EMAIL FOUND ME.
<https://tinyurl.com/2aotbwh4>
A handle spout vessel in the form of a Sacrificer
wearing a jaguar headdress, _CarolinaAMiranda

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HEAD OF AFRICAN AMERICAN MUSEUM ON LEAVE AS SMITHSONIAN FACES TRUMP PRESSURE
<https://tinyurl.com/243d6fh5>
Kevin Young, the director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), is not currently leading the museum and has been on personal leave as of March 14, according to an internal email obtained Young, who has served as director since 2021, is on leave for an “undetermined period,” Kevin Gover, Smithsonian under secretary for museums and culture, wrote in the email. Shanita Brackett, the museum’s associate director of operations, has been appointed acting director in Young’s place.
The internal announcement, which had not previously been made public, came nearly two weeks before President Donald Trump issued an executive order promising a wide-ranging overhaul of the Smithsonian, including the removal of any “improper ideology.” That March 27 order specifically cited the African American Museum as an example of the Smithsonian promoting narratives that portray American and Western values as inherently “harmful and oppressive,” pointing to an infographic posted on the museum’s website in 2020. (Following criticism from Donald Trump Jr. and others, it was removed that year.)
There is no evidence that the announcement is connected to recent pressures placed on the Smithsonian.
Still, Young’s indefinite absence from one of the Smithsonian’s most visited institutions leaves two of the three museums singled out by Trump’s order without permanent leaders at the helm. One, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, removed its director last summer. The third, the forthcoming American Women’s History Museum, named a new leader last year. _WashingtonPost

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CHECKERBOARD SENECA, IL
<https://tinyurl.com/2yfjoq28> _RuralIndexingProject

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CURSE OF THE TOLERANCE MUSEUM (CONT'D) by William Poundstone
<http://tiny.cc/4z8f001>
All museum construction projects come in over budget and late, but Jerusalem's ill-fated Museum of Tolerance takes the cake.
An initiative of L.A.'s Simon Wiesenthal Center, the Jerusalem MOT was conceived as a sister institution to Pico Blvd.'s Museum of Tolerance. Announced by Rabbi Marvin Hier circa 2000, the Jerusalem museum has just opened its doors 25 years later. The original opening date was to have been 2005.
What happened? Bilbao, for one thing. Turn-of-the century museum builders believed that an audacious starchitect building could draw affluent crowds to cities off the cultural tourism track. Hier commissioned Frank Gehry himself to design the building.
Gehry produced an ambitious design that scandalized Israel's more conservative critics. Then sticker shock set in. The client asked for a radically scaled-down and cheaper building. Gehry, who didn't need the aggravation, quit the project in 2010.
Wife-and-husband Israeli architects Bracha and Michael Chyutin took over after Gehry, creating an all-new design from scratch. After two years, they walked off the project too. The museum was built from the Chyutins' plans, though without their direct assistance.
It was discovered, shortly after groundbreaking, that the site sat on a 1000-year-old Muslim graveyard. That led to protests, lawsuits, and an Israeli Supreme Court-litigated reinterment of remains.
A Roman aqueduct was also discovered during construction, mandating a separate 7-year delay so that Israeli archeologists could excavate the site.
The museum engaged a team of Chinese construction workers, and COVID stranded them in China.
MOTJ's opening is best described as a soft launch. Two temporary exhibits are on view, while the permanent galleries remain to be installed. Hier insisted MOTJ would not be a Holocaust museum. It would focus on the future. Absent a time machine, it's hard to build a collection in that area. "Tolerance" is not something you can put in a display case. These issues affect the Los Angeles MOJ as well, a place best-known for school field trips (as satirized on South Park <http://tiny.cc/kz8f001> ) and star-studded galas. Descriptions of the Jerusalem museum emphasize rentable meeting spaces and touch-screen-heavy "interactive" exhibits.
A Haaretz headline <http://tiny.cc/tz8f001> paraphrases Voltaire: "Jerusalem's Museum of Tolerance Has Little to Do with Museums or Tolerance."
<http://tiny.cc/7z8f001> _LosAngelesCountyMuseumOnFire

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HE HUAISHUO. NIGHT OF THE FORGOTTEN MOON, 1983
<https://tinyurl.com/2y2mv78o> _RabihAlameddine

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THE GETTY TRUST WILL SELL $500 MILLION IN BONDS TO BEEF UP MUSEUM’S FIRE PROTECTIONS
The world watched on the edge of its seat in early January as the Palisades wildfire in California breached the grounds of the Getty Center, which houses one of the most treasured collections in the city, consisting of over 44,000 antiquities dating back to 6,500 B.C.E.
Tens of thousands were evacuated from the area, and the Center evacuated all non-essential personnel. While the museum was untouched, some vegetation on the grounds burned. The institution posted a message on January 8, confirming it was safe.
Now, the Getty Trust will sell $500 million in bonds to beef up its protection from fire and other acts of God, such as earthquakes, according to an official filing. The proceeds will be used to invest in new boilers, irrigation and surveillance systems, water storage, communications systems, emergency management software, and firefighting equipment. The bonds will be available starting Thursday, April 3. A museum spokesperson declined to comment.
<https://tinyurl.com/24lrtrxj>
What’s more the institution maintains earthquake and fire insurance at what it deems reasonable rates. But, it added, “such insurance could become unavailable at rates considered reasonable by the Getty Trust.”
While the institution points out that the museum’s earthquake protections meet a high standard, it noted that “The occurrence of severe seismic activity in the area could result in substantial damage” to the center and its collections. _artnet

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HE FELL DOWN IN THE MARKET-PLACE,
and foam’d at mouth,
and was speechless. _‪WilliamShakespeare‬

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ARTSY ANTICS.
Two men from Germany smuggled portraits of American President Donald Trump and Friedrich Merz, the politician expected to become the next chancellor of Germany, into the Louvre and stuck them on the wall in the same room as the Mona Lisa, How did they pull it off? The men from Cologne identified as Ilgar Aliyev and a friend who called himself “Bobby” shared apparently plotted their stunt in advance and spoke of their plans in a film posted t<https://tinyurl.com/2yoxb8d6> two days ago. It all appears to have gone mostly as they imagined it would. In a film of their shenanigans, Louvre personnel appear not to notice as the duo place the frames on the wall with double-stick tape, then exit the museum. Following what is surely an embarrassing snafu for the Louvre, a spokesperson for the institution declined to comment _ARTnews

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HERON ENCIRCLED BY A SNAKE.
While eating a worm.
By Maria Sibylla Merian.
<https://tinyurl.com/24wg3jky> _Dr.PeterPaulRubens

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TRUMP ADMINISTRATION THREATENS EXTREME CUTS TO THE NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES
Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is reportedly recommending extreme cuts to staff and programs at the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the New York Times reported Tuesday evening.
NEH employees were informed by managers on Tuesday morning of DOGE’s recommended reductions to the staff by as much as 70 to 80 percent of the organization’s 180 staffers, as well as the possible cancellation of all outstanding grants made under the Biden administration. Senior leadership is expected to provide more detailed plans.
Only three weeks ago, the head of the NEH Shelly Lowe was forced to resign several months before the end of her four-year term; she was appointed under former President Biden. The agency is currently being led by interim director Michael McDonald, who also serves as its general counsel.
“DOGE is targeting a small federal agency that—with an annual appropriation that amounts to a rounding error in the U.S. budget—has a positive impact on every congressional district,” the National Humanities Alliance, a nationwide coalition of universities, museums, state councils, and cultural organizations advocating for the humanities, said in defense of the NEH in a statement on Tuesday.
“Cutting NEH funding directly harms communities in every state and contributes to the destruction of our shared cultural heritage,” it continues. “This puts unnecessary barriers in the way of the agency’s mission to distribute federal dollars to American communities.” _ARTnews

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THOMAS SCHÜTTE, GUT KÄSE (GOOD CHEESE), 1987
<https://tinyurl.com/2dqkbmdm> _MichaelLobel