OLD NEWS

NORTH AMERICAN RIVER OTTERS SLIDING & GLIDING
<https://tinyurl.com/f62ee32w>
Those of us who spend time near wetlands in the winter occasionally come across six-inch-wide troughs in the snow made by North American River Otters as they slide from one spot to another. How do they manage to slide without their feet getting in the way? Across level ponds and fields as well as down river banks these members of the weasel family flatten their body as they throw themselves on their bellies, tuck in their front paws against their chest and push off with their hind legs which are then lifted into the air as they glide up to 20 feet on ice or snow. This form of travel is very efficient, with otters occasionally traveling 18 miles per hour. They alternately run or lope and then slide, conserving energy as they cover ground and having a good time while doing so, judging from the number of slides you can find in one spot. _NaturallyCurious

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FUNNY
<https://tinyurl.com/mvtyhkaz> _DavidShrigley

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REDISCOVERING PLAUTILLA BRICCI, ROME’S FIRST PROFESSIONAL WOMAN ARCHITECT
<https://tinyurl.com/565ht4ft>
If you’ve ever visited the Church of San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome, chances are you were there for one thing and one thing only: the three original Caravaggios installed in the back left chapel since the early 1600s. And you, like most, probably zipped past the third chapel on the left, which is dedicated to San Luigi IX—and designed by Plautilla Bricci (1616-1705), a Baroque painter and the first professional female architect in Italy (and maybe even in Europe). Planned entirely by Bricci, the chapel includes an oil painting by her as well.
Now, an upcoming restoration project, led by the nonprofit organization Artemisia Gold, is hoping to render a different Bricci altarpiece in another Roman chapel, unignorable. The first chapel on the right of the Church of Santa Maria in Campo Marzio is home to Bricci’s Birth of the Virgin (ca. 1660).
Bricci was a multihyphenate artist active in the mid-17th century, and unique among female artists in that she was not only a painter but also an architect (most famous for a now destroyed Villa Benedetta Il Vascello), sculptor, and amateur musician. The daughter of an artist, Giovanni Bricci, she learned basic skills in his workshop and also worked his connections to meet potential patrons.
Her career kicked off with an early painting, Santa Maria in Montesanto (1640), rumored to have been partially completed by the Virgin Mary herself (Bricci apparently fell asleep while working on it, and when she awoke, the face of the Virgin was inexplicably complete). This episode spurred the artist to take a vow of chastity, either out of devotion or (more likely) as a convenient excuse to avoid marriage and grant her freedom to paint.
<https://tinyurl.com/44n777ws>
Bricci’s career hit its stride around 1660, when she was in her fifties, thanks in part to the support of her main patron, Abbot Elpidio Benedetti (the Roman art agent for the powerful Cardinal Mazarin). This was also around the time when she created Birth of the Virgin.
The large-scale canvas represents an unusual case of a Baroque female artist painting a female-dominated subject, at the request of a female patron. “That’s very rare, it’s very special,” said Jane Adams, co-founder and CEO of Artemisia Gold and leading the restoration project.
The painting illustrates a crowded interior, with a midwife and the newborn Virgin Mary in the foreground. Her mother, Saint Anne, is still recovering in a bed in the background and looks upwards in the direction of an angel and seraphim. That central area with Saint Anne is particularly dark and hard to decipher. “It is so dirty that we really have to start with the X-rays and then the cleaning work to discover what’s underneath,” said Adams.
It was painted for the church where it’s still located, although it may have been moved between chapels. Adams and the team behind the project—art restorer Lorenza M.G. D’Alessandro, technical art historian Beatrice de Ruggieri, and art historian Marco Coppolaro—believe that it was commissioned by the church’s abbess, Anna Maria Mazzarino, who was the niece of Cardinal Mazarin (and therefore may have been persuaded by Benedetti to approach Bricci).
One of the things the team hopes to uncover is more background information. “This is not going to be just a technical restoration project; we also hope to find more information about the painting and the commission,” shared Adams. In particular, since no signature is visible on the front of the canvas (despite the fact that Bricci was known to sign her work), they are looking for a mark of the artist elsewhere. “We don’t know yet, but we’re hoping we’re going to find a signature on the back.”
<https://tinyurl.com/58tjzuvp> _artnet

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THE MOUNT WASHINGTON POST
<https://tinyurl.com/2hnku7ac> _LisaAnneAuerbach

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IRVING PENN "CUZCO" TO GETTY by William Poundstone
<http://tiny.cc/vglz001>
The Irving Penn Foundation has donated 189 photographs from the Vogue photographer's Cuzco project to the Getty Museum. The negatives were created in three days during a 1948 trip to Peru. Penn rented the studio of a local photographer specializing in portraits of rural families taken during Christmas shopping expeditions. The customers showed up to find Penn in place of the usual photographer. They wear a variety of ordinary and festive clothes and stand, sometimes barefoot, on the 19th-century studio's tile floor. Penn printed the images in gelatin silver and platinum for decades thereafter. The Cuzco project set the template for similar series taken in cities around the globe.
Though Penn was prolific and worked in large editions, his work commands high prices. A platinum-palladium print of Cuzco Children sold for $361,000 in 2007. In dollar value, the Penn Foundation's gift must rival any received by the Getty's photography department.
The Getty had just a handful of Penn photos until 2008, when it acquired 252 prints from the Small Trades series in a purchase/donation deal with the artist. Then-Getty curator Weston Naef explained: "We like to focus on whole bodies of work. We're seeing these pictures as if they're Monet's waterlilies, a single coherent body of work."
<http://tiny.cc/filz001> _LosAngelesCountyMuseumOnFire

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THIS WAS AN INCREDIBLE TREAT: A VISIT TO ONE OF DIEGO RIVERA'S RARELY SEEN MURALS,
"The People's Demand for Better Health,"
located in a Mexico City public hospital and thus difficult to access.
Completed in 1953, the mural is a sweeping visualization of forms
of ancient & modern medicine
<https://tinyurl.com/mp26vvmh>
The left side of Rivera's mural, showcasing modern medical procedures
<https://tinyurl.com/bddkdz78>
Such a good example of the artist's skill at creating vivid depictions
<https://tinyurl.com/5n7vxevv> _MichaelLobel

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41. DALLAS COWBOY CHEERLEADERS UNIFORM by Rainey Knudson
<https://tinyurl.com/24p5wdhz>
It was the bicentennial, 1976, and that January, the country gathered around its video hearth for the first opportunity to celebrate that milestone. Super Bowl X was a hotly contested matchup between the great rivals of the day, the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Dallas Cowboys. The theme was patriotic, everything draped in flags, with the anthem sung by Tom Sullivan, a blind singer-pianist who’d become a minor national inspiration.
And then… my goodness. Wow. The skimpy uniform had actually been introduced a few years prior, but the entire country hadn’t had its face mashed into repeated views of the hot pants, cropped vest, and high-kicking white boots before. This game originated the term “honey shot” in sports telecasting, as cameramen lingered on the cheerleaders, who managed to come off as both sexy and wholesome at once.
And then Gwenda Swearengin, a former Miss Corsicana runner-up, broke an unspoken rule, looked straight into the camera, and winked.
These were dancers, athletic young women who didn’t do the old cheers-called-into-the-stands. They put on a show that managed to offend both right-wing conservatives and second-wave feminists alike, while delighting everybody else. In that game, they became “America’s Sweethearts,” and their poster outsold Farrah Fawcett’s that year. 50 years on, the instantly recognizable uniform—now a throwback—sits in the Smithsonian Institution. They were egregiously underpaid, still are, yet many say they’d do it all again for free. And all the contradictions around money and sex, fairness and freedom—all of them are true. _TheImpatientReader

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JACQUES ADNET VICHY DESK
<https://tinyurl.com/5n7yy2rh>
As I was quietly thanking Jacques Adnet for this sleek, spare, and elegant desk, it did occur to me that 1940 was a helluva year to be designing modernist steel furniture in Paris. Let’s unpack that a bit! _greg.org

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THE (UN)DAILY PIC by Blake Gopnik
<https://tinyurl.com/mryfba4w>
is a detail from Jeff Koons’s “Three Graces,” a huge sculpture finished in 2022 and now on view in the show of Koons’s Porcelain Series
The series just about struck me dumb (as though…) I think it’s the best work Koons has done in decades. It feels like he has taken the sweet little emotions that porcelain tchotchkes trigger in their collectors, and turned them up to 11—like when Bach turned a ditty about cabbages into a thread in his Goldbergs. I find these Koonses wildly, bizarrely erotic, and confusing as the erotic can often be. And like all of Koons’s best sculptures, there’s something evil at work that’s not there in his sources. It’s the magnification itself, I think, that makes these utterly material objects somehow ungraspable, virtual. These beauties share digital DNA with the T-1000 Terminator. But they are poignant as it wasn’t, except maybe at the moment that it finally melted away. _BlakeGopnik

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CURLING BISBEE, ND
<https://tinyurl.com/45r54jw5> _RuralIndexingProject

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DOES PIERRE HUYGHE HAVE A PROBLEM WITH WOMEN? by Martin Herbert
<https://tinyurl.com/mz5w59st>
The cavernous Halle am Berghain, part of the decommissioned power station that houses Berlin’s legendarily unbridled Berghain club, is in practical terms a logical place for a video installation. It can be blacked out, and you can project at massive scale onto its soaring concrete walls, as Pierre Huyghe does with Liminals (2026). Beyond its location, the French artist’s work here might not outwardly appear connected to uber-hedonistic clubbing. Rather, it’s a seeming attempt, using generative AI, to find a legible visual analogy for the scientific postulate that quantum particles can exist simultaneously in multiple states, times and places (note: author is not a physicist). That said, Huyghe is quoted in the show’s PR materials as saying that the work aims to place us ‘in a realm outside time and space, where there is no beginning or end, no inside or outside, only an incessant dance of matter, in which every moment is a maybe’ – which does sound a bit like Berghain.
Entering, you stumble around in pitch-darkness until you reach what is effectively the only source of light, the black-and-white (or near enough) CGI film that’s being shown on a wall facing away from the entrance. You likely reach the film at midpoint; that’s not a problem, though, since it soon becomes clear that approximately the same evocation of colossal, fearful uncertainty is going to happen over and over. A naked woman with no face, her features digitally scooped away to leave an abyssal black concavity, awakes and stumbles around in a rocky alien landscape that looks like it might have formed from lava. She has about as much idea of what she’s doing there as we do and gamely performs improvisatory tests – rubbing her head and body against the ground, discovering counterintuitively that she can poke rows of holes in said harsh terra – before passing out exhaustedly. Sometimes it’s night, sometimes a near-lightless grey daytime. On occasion we get an aerial view of what looks like a vast, curving coastline and a black sea, which seems the same shape as the woman’s missing face. At intervals there’s a massive rumbling on the soundtrack, the landscape dissolves and transforms at high speed and the woman reappears in what is seemingly meant to be a different reality, though it looks dismayingly like the previous one, and she continues blindly probing. On one indelible occasion she moves close to a sideways-jutting rock and allows it to entirely enter her voidlike face.
<https://tinyurl.com/3shvm2a4>
Now, charitably, this might be seen as a literalisation of trying to ‘wrap one’s head’ around something you can’t understand, like the fact that you’ve woken up in someone’s horror vacui model of the cold, indifferent infinities suggested by quantum theory. But even before this point you might have wondered why Huyghe (in the grand tradition of French directors) has chosen a shapely young female avatar and undressed her – the motion-capture-driven footage lingering repeatedly on her breasts and pubic hair – while also dehumanising her into facelessness, and throwing in some blunt penetration imagery for good measure. Admittedly, none of this is remotely arousing: the film’s bleak, mysterious vibe, the woman’s mottled and bruised skin, and the industrial soundtrack make it about as erotic as a sex scene in a film by David Lynch, whose terrorising neo-surrealism is a clear reference point here. It’s also not the first time Huyghe has decided that posthumanism is best evoked through the dehumanised female form, for reasons upon which one might only speculate: for example 2012’s Untilled (Liegender Frauenakt) (Reclining Female Nude), a statue with a live beehive for a head, or the monkey dressed as a waitress in the 2014 film Human Mask. But here it feels particularly icky, not least at a moment when AI is increasingly being used to virtually undress women.
Beyond that, the problem with Liminals is that in conceptual terms it expends itself so quickly. You might guess soon enough that the footage is somehow AI-powered and aleatory: previously presented versions of the work, since 2024, have flagged the figure’s actions as determined by inputs including ambient temperature and the movements of viewers. Here that’s not mentioned. But whatever its inner levers, Liminals evidently uses bleeding-edge technology to visualise something resistant to picturing – per the info, a situation in which ‘infinite possibilities collapse into a single version of reality’, and where the borderlines between people, environments, inanimate matter, agency and turbocharged computing are erased. The result has some of the near-visionary estranging qualities of Huyghe’s best work, which allows it to grip for a while, but it also soon comes to feel like a demonstration piece. After a while, you might wish you were somewhere else – which, per the science, you probably are.  _ArtReview

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MICHAEL JACKSON?
No, an unknown 17th-century Dutch fellow
painted by Barent Fabritius, brother of Carel
<https://tinyurl.com/mt4wx5jn> _Dr.PeterPaulRubens

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VAN GOGH VISITED GEORGES SEURAT'S STUDIO THE DAY HE LEFT FOR PROVENCE by Martin Bailey
<https://tinyurl.com/mrxz23vt>
The five-star Georges Seurat exhibition at London’s Courtauld Gallery offers an unusual opportunity to experience the pioneer work of the Neo-Impressionist artist who influenced Van Gogh in Paris. In the 1880s Seurat was the leader of the avant-garde group of painters who used pointillist dots of pure colour to create their pictures. The eye blends Seurat’s colours harmoniously, giving his paintings a luminosity and vigour.
Seurat reported that he first met Van Gogh in November 1887 at an exhibition held in the Restaurant du Chalet in the raffish Boulevard de Clichy. Along with Van Gogh, other artists showing there included Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Emile Bernard.
Vincent, accompanied by his brother Theo, later called on Seurat on 19 February 1888, the day he left for Provence. Although he would have been doing the last-minute preparation for a trip to Arles that would last well over a year, he still found the time - evidence of the importance he attached to seeing Seurat’s work. Van Gogh subsequently wrote to his colleague Paul Gauguin about the occasion: “I visited his studio just a few hours before my departure.”
The Van Gogh brothers would have been overwhelmed to enter Seurat’s studio. There they saw two of the French artist’s greatest and largest paintings: A Sunday on La Grande Jatte <https://tinyurl.com/2cz6hyey> (begun 1884) and Models <https://tinyurl.com/2ezsbekm> begun 1886). They must also have seen some of the nine 1885-86 Normandy seascapes which are currently on view at the Courtauld exhibition. Vincent later wrote to Theo that he was “so struck by Seurat’s canvases”.
Two weeks later Theo bought a Seurat drawing, Eden Concert <https://tinyurl.com/ys4m6m9b>
Van Gogh remained an admirer of Seurat and his Neo-Impressionist dots. As he wrote from Arles, “I often think about his system, and yet I won’t follow it at all, but he’s an original colourist”. Although a few of Van Gogh’s pictures are Neo-Impressionist in style, when he followed their technique he usually preferred to use small dashes of paint rather than Seurat’s dots.
In October 1888, Van Gogh suggested to Theo that Seurat might possibly want to join him Arles, to share the Yellow House and work together. This was just before the arrival of Paul Gauguin and he envisaged that they might form a trio of artists. Once again, it remained simply a hope. In view of Van Gogh’s mutilation of his ear, just over two months later, Seurat would have felt relieved that he had stayed in Paris.(1887), for his personal collection. Soon after hearing this news Vincent told his brother that he would like to exchange a painting with Seurat, later suggesting they might swap self-portraits. This never happened.
Borders
What has gone largely unnoticed by art historians is how Seurat and Van Gogh both shared an unusual practice: painting borders around the edges of their canvases. They not only painted borders, but sometimes did so in several colours to contrast with the adjacent colour in their compositions. For Seurat, this quickly became his usual technique; for Van Gogh, it was a very brief experiment.
Seurat reworked his 1884 A Sunday on La Grande Jatte at some point in 1888-89. At the same time he added a narrow painted border, which he varied in colour to contrast with the adjacent colouration. Most of the border is violet (in two different shades), but for a short section it is now blue next to the sunlit leg of the reclining man. By late March 1888, he had also added a painted frame to Models (the frame has since been lost).
<https://tinyurl.com/muucp3ah>
Unlike Seurat’s painted borders, which are composed of dots, Van Gogh’s border in The Sower
(June 1888) is in solid colours. But Van Gogh followed Seurat in using varied colouration, placing what may have been a violet edging (it has now faded to a dark grey-green) next to the golden sunset of sky and wheat, with ochre next to the blue-purple earth.
<https://tinyurl.com/2kf54yuv>
Vincent must have had Seurat in mind, since the picture was completed just two weeks after he had described the Neo-Impressionist, in a letter to Theo, as “the leader” of the radical artists. He called this group the painters of the “Petit Boulevard”, in contrast to the establishment which exhibited in the “Grand Boulevard”.
With his painted border in The Sower, Van Gogh paid homage to Seurat. The picture was recently temporarily in London
Van Gogh also tried a similar effect on a narrow wooden frame he made for one of his Sunflower pictures. Six Sunflowers (August 1888) was sadly destroyed in Japan at the end of the Second World War. However, I discovered a 1921 colour print published in Japan which revealed that Van Gogh had originally framed it with coloured strips of wood.
<https://tinyurl.com/mt9vnkh2>
Seurat specialists generally believe that he only began to add painted frames and borders from spring 1888, a few weeks after Van Gogh’s visit to his studio and his departure from Provence. Van Gogh painted The Sower in mid-June 1888, so this suggests that Seurat may have begun to paint the borders in the first weeks of 1888, before Van Gogh left on 19 February, or even in late 1887. When it came to painted frames and borders, Van Gogh seems to have been Seurat’s first follower.
Tragically, both artists died young. Van Gogh shot himself on 27 July 1890, dying two days later, at the age of 37. Seurat was then working in Normandy, where he was painting some of the seascapes so he was unable to attend the funeral. Seurat died suddenly in Paris of diphtheria on 29 March 1891, aged just 31.
Neither artist was successful in their lifetime. Van Gogh sold only one identified painting; Seurat managed to sell three For their avant-garde colleagues, the deaths of two leading figures within less than a year was a great loss. _ArtNewspaper

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GOALS. ATTRIBUTED TO ARTUS WOLFFORT (OR WOLFAERTS), MAN COOKING SAUSAGES
<https://tinyurl.com/3n2b8t54> _JesseLocker

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ICONIC BUCKMINSTER FULLER SCULPTURE COLLAPSES UNDER HEAVY SNOW
<https://tinyurl.com/cc25nvhk>
The historic blizzard that struck the East Coast on Sunday into Monday has claimed at least one art historical victim: a Buckminster Fuller fiberglass structure that collapsed at Long Island’s LongHouse Reserve in East Hampton.
“It’s devastating,” LongHouse director Carrie Rebora Barratt said. “It’s our most iconic piece in the garden. It’s a backdrop for our galas. It’s on most of our promotional materials. And it’s the one thing that almost no one else in the world has.”
The piece is one of only five existing versions of Fuller’s Fly’s Eye Dome, a round structure dotted with large circular openings—a bit like a giant whiffle ball. Now, the fiberglass structure has completely caved in, the rounded roof lying crushed on the floor. _artnet

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SVA IS SHUTTING DOWN ITS MFA IN CURATORIAL PRACTICE PROGRAM
On Thursday, the School of Visual Arts announced that starting next year, it will no longer offer a masters of arts degree in curatorial practice. The update was shared with faculty via an email from Steven Henry Madoff, who founded the department in 2013 and has been chair of the two-year program for the past 14 years.
The sudden announcement follows years of financial difficulty for the New York art school. And, earlier this month, David A. Ross, chair of the MFA art practice program at SVA, abruptly resigned after revealed that he had a friendly relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and appears a number of times in newly-released emails.
In his letter to faculty, Madoff explains that he informed SVA president David Rhodes a year and a half ago that he plans to retire in May 2027, and that Rhodes decided to end the masters program upon Madoff’s retirement. “We call this ‘teaching out the program,’” he wrote, while also referencing the school’s “financial challenges.”
As recently as January of this year, SVA was promoting the curatorial practice program online and soliciting applications for the coming fall. _ARTnews

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WILLIAM BEEBE - EVOLUTION OF THE EYES OF A PEACOCK’S TRAIN - 1918-1920
<https://tinyurl.com/49rrcr4t>
Ernst Haeckel, from art forms of nature, 1899
<https://tinyurl.com/mu2mpbe3>
Gartenflora vol. 6 - 1857
<https://tinyurl.com/y83v4tpp> _RabihAlameddine