OLD NEWS

UTAGAWA HIROSHIGE, NEW YEAR’S EVE FOXFIRES, 1857
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Malcolm T Liepke "End of the Night," 2025
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Malcolm T Liepke "Celebration," 2025
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Leonard Freed. Grand Central at New Year’s Eve, NYC, 1969.
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László Moholy-Nagy. 7am, New Year’s Morning, Berlin, 1930
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Happy New Year, America!
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Happy New Year. Bye 2025
<https://tinyurl.com/kdv27327> _RabihAlameddine

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JANET FISH, PAINTER OF LUMINOUS STILL LIFES, DIES AT 87
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Janet Fish, known for her radiant, light-infused still lifes of everyday objects, died at her home in Vermont She was eighty-seven. Her death was announced on December 11.. As rendered by Fish, bottles of window-cleaning fluid, jars of honey, plastic-wrapped trays of fruit, and glass vases bursting with flowers appeared to glow from within, conjuring a sense of exuberance and possibility. In Fish’s work, “the humble hard facts of secular life are softened, almost mystically melted, transubstantiated into sacred objects,” wrote Donald Kuspit in 2016
“I see light as energy,” Fish said, “and energy is always moving through us. I don’t see things as being separated—I don’t paint the objects I paint one after the other. I paint through the painting.”
Janet Fish was born on May 8, 1938, in Boston. Her mother was a sculptor, a grandfather was a painter, and an uncle was a woodcarver. When she was ten, her family moved to Bermuda, whose lush landscape she would credit with influencing her practice and cultivating her interest in light. After earning her BA at Smith College, she enrolled in the MFA program at Yale, where she studied alongside Richard Serra, Chuck Close, Nancy Graves, Brice Marden, and Sylvia Mangold. In 1963, Fish moved to New York, where she made the interaction between light and plastic or glass her subject, painting in a realistic fashion that went against the Abstract Expressionism then in vogue.
“When I first got to New York, I was simply trying to figure out what I wanted painting to be,” she told the Art Students League in 2009. “ I threw some apples down on the table and started painting them.… I began enlarging the things and then focusing more on the object than on the surroundings. I went from that to painting packages, supermarket things. I liked the way the plastic was going over the solid objects, and I liked how it broke the forms up.”
Nodding to Pop art’s fascination with mass-produced items, Fish’s work of the 1960s and 1970s featured arrangements of mundane objects, often placed in front of a window of her sixth-floor SoHo walkup. There, in the streaming light, she strove to depict the shimmering nuances of water in a tumbler or street reflections in a pair of eyeglasses. “It’s really as much painting life as anything else…because it’s not dead,” she said in 1968. “Things aren’t dead. The light is through everything and energy through everything.” Works such as Smucker’s Jelly Glasses, 1973, and Beer and Brandy Glasses, 1975, bore out her words, their depicted liquid reflections seeming almost to vibrate.
In 1979, she moved to Vermont, where she began incorporating figures into her work and painting landscapes. Favoring a long, horizontal format, she crowded her canvases with tableaus of abundance and conviviality, often featuring reflective surfaces. In Birthday, 1999, for example, a cut-glass punch bowl, shiny Mylar balloons, and stacks of plastic cups wrapped in bright cellophane foreground a sunny scene of young children playing.
Fish stopped painting in 2009, _Artforum

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UP
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FINNISH MODERNIST HELENE SCHJERFBECK
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Though Schjerfbeck is considered a household name and cultural touchstone of Finnish culture, and whose legacy is widely recognized as one of the most important in the country’s history, international recognition of the artist has lagged.
Born in 1862 in Helsinki, an early childhood injury from a fall left Schjerfbeck with a lifelong limp. During her convalescence, her father, an amateur artist himself, gave her pencils, crayons, and paper to occupy her, catalyzing her lifelong devotion to art.
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Her early proclivity for drawing led her to enroll at the Finnish Art Society School of Drawing under the patronage of Finnish painter Adolf von Becker. A few years after graduating, she received her first of many travel grants and relocated to Paris. Over the subsequent two decades, she travelled extensively and continued to study and expand her repertoire—from copying the Old Masters at the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg to capturing Italian landscapes and training with British painter Adrian Scott Stokes in St.Ives. Her appetite for learning and developing her skills was limitless.
In 1902, she returned to Finland, where she stayed until 1944, when she moved outside of Stockholm, living there until her death in 1946. A decade later, Schjerfbeck’s work was featured in a solo presentation at the debut of the Finnish pavilion designed by Alvar Aalto at the 28th Venice Biennale. And while this cemented her place within Nordic art history, it did not propel her into international fame.
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Works like Clothes Drying (1883) reveals an advanced understanding of perspectival space, so much so that Schjerfbeck can play with her rendering of subject; the lines composing a delicate web of a net are meticulous but inconsistent, mimicking the eyes inability to perceive each thread, and while the shadows and scale of the clothes laid out are attended to with utmost care, their details are lost in the brushstrokes.
Fête Juive (Sukkot, Feast of Tabernacles) (1883), reveals the influence of the painting trends she was influenced by at the time.
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Depicting presumably a man and his daughter in a sukkah, a temporary structure erected for the seven-day Jewish holiday of Sukkot, the subject matter is thought to have been inspired by the artist’s proximity to a Jewish community and cemetery in Helsinki.
Certain elements within the composition expose an Orientalist inclination, like the ornate incense holder, not typically associated with Jewish practices. Orientalism was a style that spread across Europe like wildfire in the 19th century, with major artists like Jean-Léon Gérôme pioneering the genre.
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And it is clear that Schjerfbeck had her finger on the pulse of artistic trends in her time with paintings such as At Home (Mother Sewing) (1903). Like many artists over the century, Schjerfbeck frequently relied on the models that were most often available to her: herself, resulting in a large body of self-portraits, and her mother, with whom she lived for a period in adulthood. Here, the parallels with James McNeill Whistler’s Portrait of the Artist’s Mother (1871) are striking, which Schjerfbeck likely was able to see during her time in Paris, as it was then displayed at the Musée du Luxembourg. Featuring her elderly mother seated and dressed in black, she is focused on the sewing task at hand. Unlike Whistler’s portrait, however, the figure is depicted completing an everyday task rather than at a model’s attention, paying no mind to the artist or viewer observing. Further, there is an overall hazy, atmospheric quality to the work, save for the hands, which intrinsically draw the eye.
The artistic choices Schjerfbeck suggests an attempt at capturing the psychological tone of a quotidian moment.
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Contemporaneous trends and styles were not the only ones to capture Schjerfbeck’s attention, and the one that perhaps most clearly and pervasively influenced her, and to which an entire section of “Seeing Silence” is centered on Mannerism and the work of El Greco.
Though she did not see El Greco’s original works, in 1912 she encountered his work in an art magazine, inspiring her to attempt her own variations on the style. A series of portraits executed in the 1920s and 1930s reveal her achievements; highly stylized, elongated, and with no reference in composition or title to the sitter’s identity, these otherworldly paintings suggest a heightened sense of creative focus.
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Arguably, Schjerfbeck’s most famous work is The Convalescent (1888), a touching and sensitive portrayal of a convalescing child preoccupied with a plant cutting burgeoning with greenery, symbolizing growth and renewal. The subject matter is a recurring motif in Schjerfbeck’s work, likely inspired by her own life-altering injury and recovery in childhood that in part, set her on the path to becoming an artist. Considered as a metaphoric stand-in for her own biography, the image offers a breath of insight into Schjerbeck as an artist, a person.
Of course, Schjerfbeck’s self-portraits, which she created across the breadth of her career, reveal a cogent throughline to her work and ultimately the nuances of her artistic evolution.
Self-Portrait (1884–85) shows the artist confidently looking out at the viewer. By this time, she was a well-trained and successful artist, having already studied in Helsinki and Paris. Naturalistic and poised, it is just a few years before she would make some of the most iconic works in her oeuvre.
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In contrast, her last self-portrait illustrates a dramatic departure from the naturalism of her early career. Created the year before her death, in Self-Portrait, Light and Shadow (1945), the figure isn’t even immediately recognizable as a figure at all. The subtle intonations of light and shadow are the only clues to the presence of a visage at all.
The self-portraits reflect Schjerbeck’s ever-evolving practice and unflinching embrace of new styles, techniques, and approaches to representation and abstraction. They are also a potent point of introduction to audiences outside of Finland and the Nordic countries who have not encountered her work and are outside of the cultural context. _artnet

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THE MOUNT WASHINGTON POST
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FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT, UNDER SWAY OF GUGG CURATOR, APPLIED LEECHES AND TEETH PULLED
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Frank Lloyd Wright, one of the twentieth century’s most revered architects, went in for outdated and downright bizarre medical treatments. Also surprising, he got some of his ideas from the artist and curator who commissioned him to build New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
Hilla Rebay commissioned Wright to design a museum for her patron, writing to him in 1943, “I need a fighter, a lover of space, an originator, a tester and a wise man. I want a temple of spirit, a monument! And your help to make it possible.”
Bruce Pfeiffer relates in his book Frank Lloyd Wright: The Guggenheim Correspondence that at their first New York meeting, Rebay and Wright “liked one another instantly… Very soon they were on a first-name basis.” Just two weeks after that letter, an agreement had been inked. Wright pledged to Guggenheim that his avant-garde museum would “make the Metropolitan Museum look like a Protestant barn.” The museum that resulted, throwing open the doors to its trademark spiral rotunda in 1959,
The child of a Prussian military officer, Rebay was born in Strasbourg in 1890 as Hildegard Anna Augusta Elizabeth Freiin Rebay von Ehrenwiesen, Baroness Hilla von Rebay. She was an artist who had painted Guggenheim’s portrait in 1928 and took the opportunity to talk him up on “non-objective” art (which she distinguished from abstract art, which, as she put it, was “abstracted” from nature), being made by figures like Wassily Kandinsky. She swiftly became his advisor and curator.
“Her vigorous personality was such,” Pfeiffer writes, “that she got not only Mr. Wright but Mrs. Wright to share in her medical idiosyncrasies.”
Those idiosyncracies were no joke. Writing in the New Yorker in 1987, Brendan Gill memorably characterized Rebay as “a demonic amateur physician.”
For one thing, Rebay believed in using leeches for bloodletting, an ancient medical practice that had fallen into decline—though only, it might surprise you to read, as recently as a century before that initial letter she wrote to Wright. Gill notes that several times, the Wrights submitted to having leeches “applied to their throats, in order to drain poisonous ‘old’ blood from their bodies and prompt the manufacture of pure ‘new’ blood.” Physicians had historically drained blood to balance the “humors,” the mystical materials that supposedly governed human health.
Perhaps even more bizarre, the architect also, at Rebay’s urging, had all his teeth pulled and replaced with dentures—“within six weeks of their acquaintance,” writes Pfeiffer. The Hilla Rebay papers at the Guggenheim, the foundation discreetly notes, include information on “her interest in new and alternative medical treatments including teeth and skull x-rays.”
But the architect and his wife had their limits, Gill noted: “When the Wrights noticed one day that Rebay appeared to be casting clinical glances at the healthy teeth of their young daughter, Iovanna, they ceased to pay serious attention to her medical advice.”
It might be possible to look back on the medical ideas of people from eight decades ago and pass them off, with some charity, as merely outdated. Those were different times. In the 1940s, the medical establishment took very seriously issues that are no longer considered grave, like flat feet, crooked teeth, and heart murmurs. Antibiotics were just coming into widespread use. Only in 1946 was histamine discovered, leading to treatments for allergies. _ARTnews

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SANTA MONICA HAS THE JANKIEST NATIVITY SCENE
that looks like an ICE protest
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but is actually totally earnest.
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I have no idea what is going on here,
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but I am here for it!
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ROCKEFELLERS WHO BOUGHT SHAKER DESKS ALSO BOUGHT by greg
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installation view of a Shaker desk; two George III sauce tureens which are at least stamped; and a portrait where the date, title, attribution, and depicted age of the sitter, who I think is Benedict Arnold’s lawyer, Ward Chipman, do not line up, but at least it all belonged to some Rockefellers
Maybe it’s because it’s an online sale in January. Maybe it’s the no reserve, low estimate, leftover furniture from the third guest room. But lot descriptions of American furniture at major auction houses used to overflow with material detail, construction analsys, and connoisseurial judgment behind the dating, attribution, and origin of an object.
But now, literally the only thing that matters about this “elder’s desk” Christie’s says is made in the “19th century,” “possibly” by a cabinetmaker, at an unidentified Shaker community, is not those shockingly lyrical, but also justifiably structural, curved leg braces, but that Mr & Mrs John D. Rockefeller 3d bought it, and their daughter is selling it.
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What happened to the communion with God in that Shaker village that these curved brackets were added,
and the slides for an entire second drawer were just tacked onto the legs like that? It feels like there is a whole story in this thing, and it is not being told _greg.org

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THIS TURN-OF-THE-CENTURY ROSH HASHANAH CARD GOES HARD.
The Old Year struggles in the water while the New Year stands on the shore,
and a Yiddish inscription urging the old year to "drown forever already"
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THE TALKING HEADS ALBUM COVER THAT WON ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG A GRAMMY
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When artist Robert Rauschenberg died in 2008, Talking Heads frontman David Byrne wrote an op-ed for the New York Times. Reflecting on both their friendship and creative collaborations, Byrne recounted how he’d crash at Rauschenberg’s studio on Captiva Island, Florida to workshop songs. One time, he left behind a pair of old tennis shoes, only to see them again sometime later—in a painting.
Byrne struck up Rauschenberg’s acquaintance in the mid-1980s after seeing some of his black-and-white photo collages at a gallery in New York City. Byrne’s band was working on their fifth album, to be titled Speaking in Tongues, and he was wondering if Rauschenberg would be interested in designing the cover. The artist agreed, but under one condition: he’d not only do the cover, but the “whole LP package.”
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Rauschenberg was no stranger to working with musicians. Back when he was studying art at North Carolina’s Black Mountain College in the early ’50s, his aptly named “White Paintings” series served as the inspiration for the four minutes and 33 seconds of pure silence that is composer John Cage’s “4’33.” Setting up shop in New York, he thought the city’s singers and guitar players made for better company than its visual artists. In hindsight, this preference was hardly surprising. As the Museum of Modern Art noted in a 2017 retrospective, his use of everyday objects and interest in other mediums—from music and dance to poetry—were part of a desire to challenge “the heroic gestural painting of Abstract Expressionism.”
For the cover of Speaking in Tongues, which was released in July 1983, Rauschenberg revisited ideas and aesthetics he previously explored with his 1967 “Revolver” sculptures. These consisted of silkscreened Plexiglass discs mounted on metal bases that produced kaleidoscopic effects when spun. For Talking Heads, Rauschenberg created three plastic discs with cyan, magenta, and yellow designs that, when overlaid on top of the spinning LP, would produce a full-color, kinetic composition that featured images of a car, billboard, and bedroom. Clarity of vision was beside the point. As Byrne put it: “One could never see all the full-color images at the same time, as Bob had perversely scrambled the separations.”
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If the album cover is difficult to describe, it was even more difficult to produce, let alone mass-produce. With help from Oscar Meyer, a company otherwise known for processing and packaging meat, Rauschenberg’s vision was turned into a reality—but only as a limited edition, as the standard version of the album ended up featuring a more conventional, easily produceable cover created by Byrne himself.
Andy Warhol, a lifelong fan of Talking Heads, once said that Rauschenberg had told him he was upset because the band had paid him $2,000 when he could have very well asked for $25,000. Whether this story is true or not, any grievance that may have resulted from the deal surely dissolved after Speaking in Tongues won a Grammy for best album cover.
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In many ways, Rauschenberg and Talking Heads were a perfect fit for each other. As an obituary published in TIME magazine noted, “It’s hard to think of a better match for Rauschenberg, a demiurge of creative disorder, than the band that said, ‘Stop making sense.’” Byrne himself agreed, writing in his op-ed that “being around Bob was often like being on some kind of ecstatic drug: he inspired those around him to not only think outside of the box, but to question the box’s very existence.” _Tim Brinkhof _artnet

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WALKER EVANS, "GUTHRIE, KENTUCKY, NEW YEAR'S DAY," 1970
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Max Beckmann, Happy New Year, 1917
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BAD BUNNY SCOLDED FOR TOUCHING ANCIENT ART AT MEXICAN MUSEUM
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Ey, Tití me preguntó … Why did you touch a historical artifact in a museum?
The National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) in Mexico City issued a statement on Saturday, December 27, after Puerto Rican musician Bad Bunny touched an artifact on display at an archaeology museum earlier this month.
According to INAH and fan accounts, Bad Bunny, whose full name is Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, posted images of himself placing his hands on a stela, a type of carved stone monument found in former Maya city-states in Mexico and Central America.
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The singer and rapper, who will headline the Super Bowl halftime show in February, reportedly deleted a post that showed a hooded individual touching an unprotected stela at the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City.
“As it is public knowledge, physical contact with archaeological property is prohibited,” INAH said in a post about the incident.
The museum said that its staff instructed Bad Bunny not to touch the artifacts.
“When the artist placed his hand on the stela, museum security reiterated that the pieces could not be touched,” the statement said. _Hyperallergic

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VOLUNTEER FIRE DEPARTMENT EQUALITY, AL
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THE MAGAFICATION OF NORMAN ROCKWELL
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Not everyone who ventures out to the Norman Rockwell Museum in Western Massachusetts gets the luxury of a tour from the artist’s own family.
But on a fall day in this—yes—picture-perfect New England town, Daisy Rockwell graciously took me through some of her famous grandfather’s most iconic works.
The works have been endlessly parodied since their introduction in 1943. In the internet age, they’ve become ubiquitously memed. (Freedom of Speech, for example, is nowadays widely known as the “unpopular opinion” meme.) But originally, they served as wartime propaganda, meant to help rally support for America and its cause during the years of war against the Nazis.
As Daisy puts it, “Norman Rockwell was antifa”—literally.
So you’ll understand her indignation when President Trump began hijacking her grandfather’s legacy to promote what she considers modern-day fascism.
Over the past several months, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has been lawlessly appropriating Rockwell’s Leave It to Beaver-esque paintings to promote its Gestapo tactics. In August, the DHS Instagram account posted his 1971 painting of Americans saluting a billowing American flag, alongside the department’s own caption: “Protect our American way of life.”
“They used [the paintings] . . . as though his work aligned with their values, i.e., promoting this segregationist vision of America,” said Daisy. “And so of course we were upset by this, because Norman Rockwell was really very clearly anti-segregationist.”
This fall, Daisy decided to take action, organizing a family letter denouncing DHS’s unauthorized use of their patriarch’s oeuvre.
Whether he was antifa, in the sense of the left-wing Antifa movement that President Donald Trump recently declared a terrorist group or more broadly anti-fascist, is less certain, though he did make works about the fight against fascism abroad during World War II. He also did not always accede to conservative interests. He declined to paint a poster for the Marine Corps during the war in Vietnam, saying, “I just can’t paint a picture unless I have my heart in it.” _BulwarkMag

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MAY YOUR NEW YEAR BE WONDERFUL!
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MAY YOUR NEW YEAR BE FESTIVE!
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MAY YOUR NEW YEAR BE FABULOUS!
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