OLD NEWS

IT'S SWISS CHEESE DAY!
Roy Lichtenstein's studio elevator doors, painted around 1984.
According to the catalogue raisonné,
<https://tinyurl.com/2jv2xwm8>
"When he moved out years later the doors were not painted over
as planned due to the new loft owners' preference."
Well, yes, I imagine so.
<https://tinyurl.com/pht9spwr> _‪PeterHuestis‬

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MEET THE CHRISTIAN SPEED PAINTER WHO RAISED $2.75 MILLION AT TRUMP CHARITY AUCTION
<https://tinyurl.com/yck4t4z5>
You may not know the name Vanessa Horabuena (b. 1985), but the artist has dominated the art headlines for the start of the year, thanks to her $2.75 million charity art auction with President Donald Trump on New Year’s Eve at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida.
A painter known for her embrace of Christian themes, Horabuena often works at rapid speed, wielding her brush and canvases in front of awed crowds as she seemingly conjures religious imagery she dubs “worship paintings” out of thin air.
“There’s a young lady named Vanessa who’s one of the greatest artists anywhere in the world,” Trump told the crowd at Mar-a-Lago, as reported by CNN. “She can paint, slowly, a beautiful portrait for the White House, or she can paint the most incredible painting in literally 10 minutes.”
Normally, Horabuena sells her original paintings for between $15,000 and $40,000. Prints start at just $11.25. As of press time, she has not responded to requests for comment.
A painter known for her embrace of Christian themes, Horabuena often works at rapid speed, wielding her brush and canvases in front of awed crowds as she seemingly conjures religious imagery she dubs “worship paintings” out of thin air.
“There’s a young lady named Vanessa who’s one of the greatest artists anywhere in the world,” Trump told the crowd at Mar-a-Lago, as reported by CNN. “She can paint, slowly, a beautiful portrait for the White House, or she can paint the most incredible painting in literally 10 minutes.”
<https://tinyurl.com/ys9up9u9>
Normally, Horabuena sells her original paintings for between $15,000 and $40,000. Prints start at just $11.25. As of press time, she has not responded to requests for comment.
Drawing and Christianity were both early passions for Horabuena, an Arizona artist who credits a Christian summer camp she attended at age 13 with igniting her faith in Jesus. On the artist’s website, she wrote of a troubled childhood, during which she allegedly suffered sexual abuse at the hands of several family members. She “began struggling with my sexuality” at age 19, and turned away not only from her faith, but from her art.
“I felt safer with women than I felt with men. That was a difficult thing for me. I remember feeling so sad to know that I was disqualified from living out my life for God,” Horabuena told the Christian Broadcasting Network. (She added that she has since overcome her attraction to women.)
<https://tinyurl.com/3vf5w627>
Reconnecting with the church after eight years following counseling with a pastor, Horabuena also began drawing again. She became convinced that God was working through her when she put pen to paper. The artist turned to speed painting as a way to share the religious fervor she felt behind the canvas with other Christians. Horabuena sees the process as a metaphor, the way the messy brushstrokes coalesce into a coherent portrait as a reflection of God’s unknowable plan.
A Horabuena speed painting performance is a blend of art, prayer, and dance. The artist wields her brushes like a fencer’s foil, whipping them across the canvas with dramatic flair. She periodically raises her arms in praise in between brushstrokes, as if invoking God himself to guide her hand.
<https://tinyurl.com/3cnht6k4>
A video on her promoting Horabuena’s Tempe, Arizona, gallery shows her painting in a darkened room, illuminated by candles held by her audience members. The venue, she wrote, is “perfect for a morning Bible study or simply just to spend time with God as you enjoy the artwork!”
But Horabuena isn’t just a woman of faith. She is also a conspiracy theorist, a, Horabuena took a quick break from sharing videos of her theatrical painting process to post that “The moon landing never happened. They lie and lie and lie.”
“It’s impossible. The radiation barrier has never been breached and we don’t have the technology even today to do it,” she added in the comments. “We didn’t even have cell phones. And we got astronauts that went to the moon in the 60s? Nope. Didn’t happen.”
In other posts, Horabuena seemed to question that the earth was round, implying she believes the disproven theories of flat earthers.
Horabuena’s New Year’s auction, which Trump said would benefit St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and the sheriff’s department (presumably in Palm Beach), immediately followed the creation of one of her works. Painting with both hands in bright shades of blue and yellow, a barefooted Horabuena quickly transformed a black canvas into a large-scale portrait of Jesus Christ inspired by the Shroud of Turin.
This is something of a signature composition for the artist. Horabuena believes deeply in the authenticity of the shroud, in which the face of Jesus is said to have miraculously appeared on the burial cloth in which his body was wrapped after the crucifixion.
Horabuena wrote that “the only way this kind of image could be left was by a high intensity light from within, to shine forth and burn the image into the cloth.” (The controversial artifact, long suspected to be a medieval hoax, has inspired centuries of speculation and scientific investigation.)
<https://tinyurl.com/4nxrahk5>
“There are no words for to express the power and presence of the Holy Spirit when I create this piece. It’s always an impactful experience and I feel so close to the heart of God when I do,” she added. “Each piece comes out a little bit different. All special in their own way. All leaving me anticipating one day… painting Jesus in Heaven.”
The artist also has work hanging in the White House, according to Trump, who said at the charity auction that he has “replaced a lot of people with those portraits.” In June, Horabuena wrote on her website of delivering a Trump portrait to the White House, driving 33 hours with the canvas. She presented the work to Trump, Kirk, U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro, and U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi. _artnet

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WORK
<https://tinyurl.com/25hzufus> _DavidShrigley

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JESÚS ROMEO GALDÁMEZ ESCOBAR, MAIL ARTIST 1956–2025
<https://tinyurl.com/ydpek4j5>
Jesús Romeo Galdámez Escobar, a key figure in El Salvador’s art scene, as well a proponent of mail art, has died.
The artist balanced his studio time, producing politically charged Xerox prints, paintings and murals that appropriated popular imagery, with teaching and various later government appointments after he returned from political exile.
Typical of Galdámez’s artwork is Declaration of Human Rights, a quarterised screenprint in which one window shows a map covered in barbed wire; below which Article 11, which pertains to the right to protests, is handwritten. A woman in indigenous dress dominates the left side of the work. Urban Landscape Record (1978) features the logos of various Latin American fruit companies, a reference to the US-backed right-wing dictatorships that took control of the export markets in the region.
After initial studies at the National Center for the Arts of El Salvador in 1975, the artist received a scholarship to study at the Institute of Arts of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in Porto Alegre, Brazil, where he completed his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1979. He also studied printmaking techniques at the Porto Alegre City Hall’s free workshop between 1976 and 1977. In southern Brazil he gravitated towards the Nervo Óptico Group alongside the likes of Vera Chaves Barcellos, Carlos Pasquetti and Romanita Disconzi, using printing and collage to both attack the Brazilian dictatorship and the art market.
In 2003, he returned permanently to El Salvador where he held positions as Coordinator of Visual Arts at the National Council for Culture and Art (Concultura), National Director of Arts at the Secretariat of Culture of the Presidency of the Republic, and Director of Cultural Promotion at the Directorate of Cultural Affairs in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. _ArtReview

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THE MOUNT WASHINGTON POST
<https://tinyurl.com/4f5zfrem> _LisaAnneAuerbach

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4. WAYNE THIEBAUD, CAKES by Rainey Knudson
<https://tinyurl.com/82rm2b9m>
We don’t normally stop to consider the display cases in our local grocery store when we’re hurrying through. How much thoughtful composition and visual order are at work, how the objects within have been carefully arranged, lit, and repeated. We consider least of all the glass barrier itself, which—like a painting—invites the familiar relationship between viewer and the framed thing that is viewed.
Art is all about attentiveness, and Wayne Thiebaud was a painter of remarkably generous attention. He regarded, and helped us to regard, uniquely American vignettes of abundance without descending into critique or irony. In this painting, the cakes are commercial, made to be sold. None of this is hidden. But whereas one person might view a bakery display case—or a deli counter <https://tinyurl.com/mrpjw7ct> , or a gumball machine <https://tinyurl.com/y5kjey65> —and think drearily of banal, excessive consumer culture, Thiebaud saw the kind of pleasure that requires neither apology nor nostalgia. An even-keeled yet delicious pleasure, elegantly edited to stand alone.
To me, his paintings are some of the most palpably satisfying of any artist. And it’s all in the looking; that’s all it is. Thiebaud simply looked, carefully and patiently, and in doing so, he showed us that the world is worth taking time to consider, and that we ourselves are capable of sustained attention. Most of all, he showed us that our world, just as it is, has not exhausted its meaning, and never will. It isn’t asking to be redeemed. It’s just asking to be noticed.
<https://tinyurl.com/4vvu7jeb> _TheImpatientReader

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WILLIAM BLAKE'S DEPICTION OF THE CIRCLE OF TRAITORS IN HELL FROM DANTE'S INFERNO, 1827
<https://tinyurl.com/44najbaw>
And here is Gustave Doré's interpretation of the same scene,
with Dante & Virgil walking among the traitors frozen in ice,
from canto XXXII of the Inferno:
"Then I beheld a thousand faces, made purple with cold"
<https://tinyurl.com/34x5fszy>
And finally when Robert Rauschenberg
tackled the subject of the Inferno in the late 1950s,
illustrating each section of Dante's text with drawn & transferred images,
here is his interpretation of the Circle of the Traitors from canto XXXII
<https://tinyurl.com/yrsdrcua> _MichaelLobel

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LICHTENSTEIN SWISS CHEESE DOORS ESCAPED CONTAINMENT by greg
<https://tinyurl.com/2tjc7sak>
Swiss Cheese Day was yesterday, and Peter Huestis celebrated on Bluesky by posting about the swiss cheese freight elevator doors Roy Lichtenstein painted in his 29th St. loft in 1984. The loft was sold, probably in the 90s, and the buyer, unsurprisingly, wanted to keep the doors, and so they were entered into Lichtenstein’s catalogue raisonné. The most important part to me, though, was the security bar, painted to match, which did not get a CR entry separate from the doors. If that was all a trip into the Lichtenstein Foundation website yielded, it would have been enough.
<https://tinyurl.com/47vb5r43>
But no. There is another. And another. And another. Lichtenstein made THREE more sets of Swiss cheese doors. They’re dated to 1993, fabricated in 1993-97 [by Jack Brogan, <https://tinyurl.com/3rn2ezts> Robert Irwin and Larry Bell’s guy], and only installed, posthumously, in 1998. They were mirror finish bronze, and they were made for two entrances and an elevator in the atrocious house Hugh Newell Jacobsen built in Bel Air for Betsy and Bud Knapp, one-time owners of Architectural Digest and Bon Appetit.
After another artist praised them <https://tinyurl.com/mr9rm96a> , I had to reconsider the bronze doors, and I found an explanation that lets me agree: Lichtenstein created these doors so that every time the Knapps entered their 15,000 square-foot home made of fifteen 1,000-square foot post-modern pavilions, they were faced with their own reflections, and compelled to remember that they were people who commissioned three sets of mirror-finish bronze cartoon Swiss cheese doors.
<https://tinyurl.com/3u8af9hc>
The Knapps could only endure the self-scrutiny for so long. They put the house on the market in 2011 for $24 million. Nobu bought it in 2013 for $15m, said not my existential terror, and got rid of the doors.
<https://tinyurl.com/ybfv3fhu>
At least until then they were contained. They now roam the earth who knows where, just waiting to strike again. The Knapps’ Jasper Johns, meanwhile, has, after a couple of stops, been safely ensconced in Larry Gagosian’s place since at least 2021, when it was loaned to the Philadelphia Museum’s half of the retrospective. _greg.org

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HAPPY HOLIDAYS WILSON CREEK, WA
<https://tinyurl.com/348czecd> _RuralIndexingProject

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GRUNWALD CENTER BRANCHES OUT by William Poundstone
<http://tiny.cc/riax001>
UCLA is celebrating a significant anniversary of its prints and drawings collection with "Five Centuries of Works on Paper: The Grunwald Center at 70." It's a two-part exhibition of which the first installment, now on view at the Hammer, is an all-star line-up of nearly 100 works on paper by the likes of Mantegna, Dürer, Rembrandt, Goya, and Hiroshige; José Guadalupe Posada, Norman Lewis, Corita Kent, Toba Khedoori, and Analia Saban.
Fred Grunwald (1898–1964) was a German-Jewish collector who fled the Nazi regime with his family in 1939. He rebuilt his livelihood (a shirt business) in New York and then Los Angeles, where he resumed collecting prints. Grunwald's interests started with Käthe Kollwitz and branched out to include other German Expressionists; French lithographs and Old Masters; the Japanese Ukiyo-e tradition; the print revival of 20th-century America.
Grunwald considered donating his 2000-piece collection to the Los Angeles County Museum. By one story the curators snubbed him; by another, a drunken host made an offensive remark at a donor gathering. Grunwald found a warmer welcome at UCLA. In 1956 he promised his collection to the university, establishing what is now known as the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts. The Center grew along with the reputation of UCLA's art school, but its works were displayed only sporadically until the 2022 opening of the Hammer Museum's works on paper gallery.
Today's Grunwald Center is a true collection of collections, with 45,000 works from diverse donors. Focused on prints, it includes 2500 drawings, a similar number of photographs, and artist's books. The city's ascendance as a center of printmaking is extensively represented.
<http://tiny.cc/yiax001>
<http://tiny.cc/2jax001>
The UCLA community built on Grunwald's founding gift by purchasing several marquee Renaissance prints in the 1960s. On view are Mantegna's Bacchanal, Dürer's Melancolia I, and Ghisi's Allegory of Life.
<http://tiny.cc/6jax001>
Like Grunwald, Walter Otto Schneider was a German emigre. He bequeathed about 150 Callot prints in 1962, part of an 800-sheet gift that brought numerous European and American works into the collection.
<http://tiny.cc/9jax001>
Claude Mellan's Saint John the Baptist was purchased last year (with funds from Helga K. and Walter Oppenheimer) and is being shown for the first time. The artist is best known for his Sudarium of Saint Veronica <http://tiny.cc/ajax001> , the engraving of Jesus' head consisting of a single, spiraling line. Saint John the Baptist proves that Mellan was no one-hit wonder.
<http://tiny.cc/djax001>
Los Angeles architect Rudolf L. Baumfeld donated a collection of 850 landscape prints and drawings in 1988. The gift included examples of Rembrandt's landscape etchings.
<http://tiny.cc/gjax001>
British satire is represented with sets of prints by Hogarth and the Cruikshank family. The Five Order of Perriwigs was a gift of Robert Mills.
<http://tiny.cc/ljax001>
Lasr year saw Elizabeth Dean's bequest of a thousand-some fin-de-siècle prints, books, and ephemera (featured in a 2014 Hammer show). Ripped from tabloid headlines, Eugène Grasset's Vitrioleuse is a wronged woman about to toss acid at a rival's face. The sloshing vitriol is a Hokusai Great Wave in miniature.
<http://tiny.cc/njax001>
José Guadalupe Posada's vision of late capitalism involved late capitalists. UCLA Spanish professor Stanley L. Robe assembled a collection of Posada's satirical broadsides and gave it to the university upon his retirement in 1985.
<http://tiny.cc/qjax001>
Kollwitz's The People was part of Fred Grunwald's collection, donated by the family the year after the collector's death.
<http://tiny.cc/rjax001>
Grunwald donated about 50 Japanese prints, and UCLA bought many more from the collection of Frank Lloyd Wright. Natori Shunsen's The Actor Ichimura Uzaemon XV was a gift of Helen and Felix Juda, who also helped build LACMA's Japanese print collection.
<http://tiny.cc/tjax001>
Modest-sized prints by famous American painters were once popularly priced. The Grant Wood is a lithograph from an edition of 250, donated by Mr. and Mrs. Stanley Talpis (son-in-law and daughter of Fred Grunwald). The Paul Cadmus, an etching from an edition of 75, was from Walter Otto Schneider.
<http://tiny.cc/wjax001>
<http://tiny.cc/yjax001>
60s media hailed Warhol as the Pope of Pop Art and Corita Kent as the Pop Art Nun. Kent really was a nun, though she left the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary after her politically edged art rankled Church hierarchy. She donated over 1400 of her prints and preparatory works to the Grunwald.
<http://tiny.cc/1kax001>
Vera Molnár's computer plotter drawings have become prized as mandalas of the AI juggernaut. This example is part of a collection of 68 vintage computer artworks donated by Patrick Frank.
<http://tiny.cc/2kax001>
Art and tech continue to co-evolve. Analia Saban's 2016 THANK YOU… is a 3D-printed sculpture-multiple of a creased plastic shopping bag, published by Mixographia, Los Angeles, and printed by Jose Luz Jimenes.
_LosAngelesCountyMuseumOnFire

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IT'S EPIPHANY,
<https://tinyurl.com/4svtpcfj>
which means
<https://tinyurl.com/37bvtdp6>
it's time for Cuddling Kings
<https://tinyurl.com/bdf5btc3>
in Medieval art
<https://tinyurl.com/2jeyvj9k> _JesseLocker

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IN A ‘K-SHAPED’ ECONOMY, THE ART MARKET'S RECOVERY COULD RELY ON THE SUPER-RICH
“I think the last week is going to bring a lot of confidence back into the market,” said Madeline Lissner, Sotheby’s global head of fine art and major collections, in an interview with the online magazine Puck in November, after a mood-changing $2.2bn series of Modern and contemporary art auctions in New York. “I’m talking beyond auction, to the landscape of dealers and advisors,” Lissner added, speaking the week before the Art Basel Miami Beach fair, where the biggest dealers reported strong enough sales to suggest a rebound at the top end might endure into the new year.
“From 2022 until now, we’ve been in a period of decline. Big collections don’t need to come to market when the market is in a dip. People will look at these sales and say the market has hit firm ground and there’s a V-shaped recovery,” says Anders Petterson, the founder of the London-based art market analysts, ArtTactic. “We’re likely to see the flow again in the $1m-plus market.”
But rather than a V-shaped recovery—a steep decline of an entire market, followed by an equally steep bounce-back—could we be seeing an uneven reset that mirrors the so-called “K-shaped” inequalities of the wider economy?
Popularised by the US academic Peter Atwater, a professor at William & Mary college in Virginia, the “K-shaped” economy expresses the idea that the asset-owning wealthiest now dominate income growth and discretionary consumption, becoming richer and richer, while less well-off salaried workers become poorer and poorer, and less active consumers.
According to the authoritative World Inequality Report 2026, the richest 0.001%, comprising 60,000 centi-millionaires and billionaires (the sort of people who can comfortably spend $1m or more on a work of art), now control three times more wealth than the entire poorest half of humanity. The wealth of the 0.001% has grown at a rate of 8% per annum since the 1990s, twice the rate of the bottom half, according to the report. Yet somehow, relatively little of this inordinate affluence trickles down into the middle and lower levels of the art market, let alone the “real” economy.
“The market has become so dependent on the top end. We’ve seen how ultra high net worth wealth has been increasing in the last 25 years. The same kind of individuals are driving the art market,” says Petterson. He points out that over the last ten years, art that sells for more than $1m has contributed 77% of the total sales value at Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips, based on 7% of the volume of lots. “That 77% is the driving force of the art market,” Petterson says.
The top auction houses and dealers are hoping that, now that market confidence has been regained, more ageing Boomer-generation collectors will put their most valuable Modern and classic contemporary works up for auction. At this heady level, there are enough members of the international 0.001% interested in buying big-ticket art to ensure it will make the right kind of price, either through auction guarantees, live bidding or private sale. True trophy works by names like Klimt, Van Gogh, Picasso or Monet have the potential to make nine-figure prices.
But what about further down the price scale? Recent contemporary art is a clear pressure point, judging by some tell-tale results at the fall New York auctions. Despite a record 61% of the lots at the evening sales being guaranteed, there were some notable flops for living artists whose auction prices have recently been on a roll. Large canvases from 2022 by Cecily Brown and Jadé Fadojutimi, both of whom have been at the forefront of the booming market for abstract paintings by women artists, failed at Christie’s and Phillips respectively against estimates of $4m-$6m and $800,000-$1.2m. Since May only one of the four Fadojutimi works offered at auction with estimates of at least $300,000 have found buyers. From 2021 to 2024, 11 of her canvases sold for more than $1m,
“The market is much better than it was six months ago, but not better in every sector,” says Philip Hoffman, the founder of the London-based advisers, The Fine Art Group, who was in New York for those bellwether November sales. “Too many people have had their fingers burned by young art.”
Welcome to our current “K-shaped” art market. _ArtNewspaper

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IT'S HUMAN RIGHTS DAY!
Slave Collar, depicted in watercolor and graphite by Al Curry
for the Index of American Design, 1935.
When Mr. Curry drew this,
the device was probably fewer than 70 years old.
<https://tinyurl.com/n3v6esw4> _‪PeterHuestis‬