OLD NEWS

IT'S NATIONAL COOKIE CUTTER DAY!
Graphite and watercolor drawings
from the Index of American Design
by Helen Hobart,
<https://tinyurl.com/bdde49dj>
Franklyn Syres,
<https://tinyurl.com/mru3vd6f>
Michael Rekucki,
<https://tinyurl.com/mur7pwcv>
and Adolph Opstad:
<https://tinyurl.com/4p9k3rd7> _‪PeterHuestis‬

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GERTRUDE STEIN WAS HER CHAMPION: HAZEL KNAPP
<https://tinyurl.com/83u5j57h>
Hazel Knapp exhibited her work in remarkable circumstances for almost two decades during the early twentieth century, only to face challenges later in life as an adult with a lifelong disability.
When the artist Hazel Knapp painted breathtaking Vermont landscapes, as she often did between the 1930s and 1940s, her mother was always close at hand, describing terrain Knapp could not readily see from her wheelchair. A powerful black-and-white photograph taken in 1942 embodies this relationship: Knapp leans forward, palette and brushes in her left hand, in front of an easel. Framed between her and the easel is Knapp’s mother, Elsie Knapp, who is looking at her daughter’s work-in-progress.
Both their gazes are intensely concentrated at the same point, heightening their dynamic relationship and alluding to their shared vision. The arresting image is exceptional for depicting a seldom-represented bond in art history: the parent and caretaker of an artist with a disability working alongside the artist.
<https://tinyurl.com/2w6r6yuf>
Both their gazes are intensely concentrated at the same point, heightening their dynamic relationship and alluding to their shared vision. The arresting image is exceptional for depicting a seldom-represented bond in art history: the parent and caretaker of an artist with a disability working alongside the artist.
Black-and-white landscape drawing of snow-covered hills and pine trees with distant mountains in the background.
Hazel V. Knapp, Guardian of the Valley (1938). Oil on canvas. Taken from They Taught Themselves: American Primitive Painters of the 20th Century (1942) by Sidney Janis.
Hazel Knapp was an entirely self-taught artist who exhibited a single snowy mountain painting at a 1939 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) exhibition alongside now-canonical artists like Grandma Moses and Morris Hirshfield. A brief biography of Knapp also appeared in Sidney Janis’s seminal collection of profiles on self-taught artists, They Taught Themselves: American Primitive Painters of the 20th Century (1942), and Gertrude Stein was an enthusiastic patron of Knapp’s, purchasing ten paintings during her American literary tour that she brought back to Paris, where Stein planned an unrealized exhibition for the artist.
Despite promising beginnings that could have easily earned equal fame to her autodidact peers, Hazel Knapp fell into total obscurity soon after the death of her mother, who was Knapp’s primary caretaker. Knapps’s story is a compelling one and worthy of renewed interest as the art world considers the role of care and caretaking in art making and art history,
Hazel Victoria Knapp was born in Arlington, Vermont, on November 18, 1908, with Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease (CMT), a hereditary condition that causes abnormalities in the nerves, negatively affecting motor, sensory, and movement functions. Given her limited mobility as a child due to CMT, Knapp’s interest in artmaking began early, with a local newspaper describing her as a child without access to many art supplies, working only with “frugal equipment.” According to the same profile, while Knapp was painting off the side of the road one day, a wealthy, local artist, Harriette G. Miller (1892–1972), stopped to look at her work, which began a friendship that became a significant catalyst for Knapp’s artistic and personal life
<https://tinyurl.com/bd6tt4hu>
Through Miller, Knapp participated in exhibitions at the Southern Vermont Art Center (SVAC) for over a decade. Here, Knapp sold her work on multiple occasions alongside prominent, classically trained modernists such as Reginald Marsh and Luigi Lucioni, thereby exposing her to museums and collectors. According to Vermont newspapers, her participation in the annual show may have led to acquisitions of her watercolors by the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Addison Gallery of American Art. These works, however, have been deaccessioned or are missing, with no records from the museums.
In 1932, Alfred Harcourt, who was Gertrude Stein’s publisher in New York, purchased a painting by Knapp at the SVAC, and he introduced Stein to Knapp’s work, as detailed in a letter to Stein from 1934. Stein contacted Knapp for multiple paintings after seeing them in Manhattan, which she bought and brought back to Europe. Stein purchased many of Knapp’s paintings for her home and planned to stage an exhibition; however, the outbreak of World War II halted the show. Sidney Janis later included Knapp in his 1939 exhibition, Unknown American Painters, at the Museum of Modern Art, which was her last significant art-historical footprint.
<https://tinyurl.com/44wp8bte>
Extant and archival examples of Knapp’s work are limited but striking, indicating an incredibly productive life through assistance. This included large landscapes and scenes based on rural Vermont, watercolor works, and portraits. Two exist in black and white photographs, one from Janis’s book titled Guardian of the Valley (1937), and Winter in Vermont (c. 1935), which was photographed by Carl Van Vechten in 1939 for his lover Mark Lutz, who owned the painting.
Of Knapp’s extant work, her nephew owns several country scenes, and a portrait and floral watercolor are in the Southern Vermont Artist Center collection. Despite only finding a scant amount of artwork, archival catalogue pamphlets from the annual summer exhibitions at the Southern Vermont Artist Center indicate that Knapp produced at least two to three new paintings a year between 1938 and 1950, showing that her output was and there are still many unidentified pieces that could be located along with the missing paintings from Stein’s collection that hung in her apartment in proximity to the most influential artists of the twentieth century.
In 1951, Knapp’s mother died, and the artist was unable to provide herself with the adequate care she’d relied on from her mother her entire life. As a result, Knapp’s home slowly became uninhabitable, and sadly, she also stopped painting. While her extended family provided some care, Knapp was eventually placed into a nursing home in Massachusetts, passing on March 3, 1995, at the age of eighty-six.
<https://tinyurl.com/yfkrfbmf> _artnet

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MEANS
<https://tinyurl.com/32yk4cyb> _DavidShrigley

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WE ARE ALL IN THE GUTTER BUT BANKSY’S CHRISTMAS KIDS ARE LOOKING AT THE STARS
<https://tinyurl.com/566a8tbb>
The elusive street artist Banksy has again made waves with a poignant work unveiled in Bayswater, west London, showing two children looking at the stars. The piece, posted on the artist’s account, was painted on to a wall above a row of garages on Queen's Mews.
The image depicting two children lying on the ground dressed in wellington boots, with one of them pointing upwards towards the sky, has naturally got the whole world wondering about its meaning.
Banksy enthusiasts say that the pieces are clearly a statement on homelessness, especially on the eve of Christmas when parents and kids below the poverty line may well find themselves on the streets. Oscar Wilde comes to mind of course: “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” _ArtNewspaper

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THE MOUNT WASHINGTON POST
<https://tinyurl.com/2kd2adu7> _LisaAnneAuerbach

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AS A LEGAL BATTLE LOOMS, PHILADELPHIA ART MUSEUM STAFFERS HEAD INTO NEW YEAR
As Philadelphia’s largest visual arts institution heads into the new year, it does so shaken by disorder and strife — reeling under a drama as extraordinary in substance as the public nature with which it is playing out.
On Nov. 4, Philadelphia Art Museum director and CEO Sasha Suda was abruptly fired and she subsequently sued the museum for wrongful dismissal. Two weeks later, the museum accused her of theft in a public filing. A day later, news broke that a former HR director had been charged with theft by the city of Philadelphia earlier in the year, and the museum announced its new director and CEO, museum veteran Daniel H. Weiss.
In a recent court filing from Suda’s legal team, the ousted director was described as a “visionary leader” recruited to “save a struggling museum.” Her efforts, the filing reads, “collided with a small, corrupt Board faction determined to preserve the status quo.”
Earlier this month, Suda argued for a trial instead of arbitration.
All this comes after three years of organizational turbulence that has left staff angry and bewildered.
“There’s a lot of nervousness about what’s to come now,” said one longtime staffer. “It’s been so chaotic for so long. Nobody feels steady. We’re supposed to be just chugging along like business as usual, but nothing feels stable.”
Though Weiss started at the museum this month, he will also maintain his position as an art history professor at Johns Hopkins University though May 2026.
Among the challenges facing Weiss: depressed attendance, an operating deficit, low staff morale, deferred maintenance on existing buildings, and questions about how to prioritize stalled expansion plans.
This account is based on interviews with former and current staffers, both union and nonunion, ranging from curatorial affairs to finance and operations. All of them spoke on condition they not be named.
Staff shortage
During Suda’s tenure, at least 60 employees — many from the senior executive team — were fired, laid off, or pressured to leave across departments. These include human resources, curatorial, digital content, communications, facilities, conservation, the library, visitor services, and more, according to museum insiders.
A declining reputation
For staffers that have remained, there is a sense of internal disorganization.
“We’ve had three reorganizations within three years, and we were only given an org chart [and] an understanding of it in the last couple months,” said a longtime staffer.
Low morale has been a longstanding issue.
In her lawsuit, Suda detailed two instances of board members allegedly “yelling and berating staff.”
At one event, an unnamed board member “verbally assaulted a Museum employee,” the suit said, leading to a formal complaint. The board member later apologized to the staffer.
Suda’s lawsuit also recounted an incident when former board chair Leslie Anne Miller allegedly screamed and cursed at Suda.
Several employees said Suda regularly engaged in similar behavior herself.
“People are afraid to do their work. Curators are afraid to put on exhibitions. They’re afraid to spend money,” the staffer said. “I feel like my work has ground to a near halt. I do a fraction of what I used to do, just in a very dysfunctional way now.”
Ongoing financial struggles
Over the past several years, the nearly 150-year-old museum has operated with a persistent deficit.
In 2025, that number was forecast as around $2 million on a budget of $62 million. The fiscal year ending June 30, 2023 was the museum’s last period with no deficit. Suda began her tenure as director and CEO in September, 2022.
Attendance has not rebounded to pre-pandemic levels.
Suda’s lawsuit, staff worry, could worsen the financial outlook.
“We’re already broke as an institution. We could have a messy lawsuit that really takes a lot of funding away,” said the longtime staffer.
Unresolved labor grievances
The Philadelphia Museum of Art Union has seen five years of disputes with management over wage increases, remote work, and dozens of labor grievances.
After their boss was fired earlier this year, a staffer said they were expected to take on extra responsibilities, with the promise of an hourly wage increase. Eight months later, the employee has not received that compensation and has been working with the union to address the problem.
What comes next
Weiss officially began his tenure on Dec. 1 but held an all-staff meeting before Thanksgiving. One staffer who attended said Weiss “said all the right things” so they are feeling “cautiously optimistic.”
“Everything he’s doing, he’s doing with such integrity. It’s heartwarming,” said a member of the curatorial affairs division.
But, they cautioned, “he’s going to lose people’s optimism if he doesn’t make any moves soon.”
_PhiladelphiaInquirer.

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NOT SURE ABOUT CRAZIEST ARCHIVE STORY
but this has to be one of my favorite archival documents ever,
a note from abstract painter Jules Olitski to his wife Joan re: a favorite TV program:
"Darling, EMERGENCY!!! I forgot to watch Judge Judy. Don't tape over Judy!"
<https://tinyurl.com/4bjwkukk> _MichaelLobel

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MOMA ADDS CRYPTOPUNKS AND CHROMIE SQUIGGLES TO ITS COLLECTION
The Museum of Modern Art in New York has added eight CryptoPunks and eight Chromie Squiggles to its permanent collection. The acquisition, which comes via donations from multiple collectors The collectors who donated the CryptoPunks are Top 200 Collector Ryan Zurrer, Mara and Erick Calderon, Rhydon and Caroline Lee, and Cozomo de’ Medici.
The timing of the donation to MoMA aligns with a resurgence of interest in blue-chip NFTs. In late July, CryptoPunks recorded their highest weekly trading volume since March 2024, with more than $24.6 million in trades, according to The Block. Still, the collection’s total market capitalization, after peaking near $2.5 billion earlier this year, now stands at roughly $763 million, CoinGecko reported. _ARTnews

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TWO-STORY OUTHOUSE GAYS, IL
<https://tinyurl.com/584fncsa> _RuralIndexingProject

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CHRISTOPHER WOOL + EAMES – IVANKA by greg
<https://tinyurl.com/2jxwx6en>
While looking for Ivanka’s Christopher Wool next to her Eames lounge chair <https://tinyurl.com/5976yd97> , I stumbled across this Eames plywood screen that Wool painted in 2002. It was acquired by a Geneva art collector-turned-jewelry designer named Arlene Bonnant for her CAP Collection, which she published a book about in 2005, right before flipping a tranche of it in 2007. Some of her haul might not have ever even made it out of the crate before she flipped it. She held off on selling the screen, though, until 2014.
It’s wild how I can imagine being psyched for an object like at one point, but five minutes of Googling has really soured me on it. What a cursed combination of search terms this turned out to be. _greg.org

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DAVID KLÖCKER EHRENSTRAHL, REINDEER WITH SLEIGH (ACKJA), 1671,
<https://tinyurl.com/ypsn6ptv> _JesseLocker

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DIGITAL ART TODAY HAS A NARCISSISM PROBLEM
This has been a tumultuous year for the art market. Following the closures of influential galleries from Los Angeles and New York to London, and alarmingly low sales at auctions in the first half of the year, Art Basel Miami Beach earlier this month had the unpleasant burden of serving as a Rorschach test for how 2025 might transition into 2026. Depending on who you asked it either capped a three-month rebound, or it showed that everything below the top tier of the market remains stubbornly soft.
The fair’s new digital art section, Zero 10, featured a presentation of leading digital artists curated by Eli Scheinman, formerly of Yuga Labs. These presentations were heavily subsidised, compared to the fair’s main sectors. Scheinman and the Art Basel Digital Council bypassed the typical selection committee process as well as the usual requirement that exhibiting artists be represented by galleries.
With a few exceptions, digital artists today rarely benefit from being supported by devoted gallerists who give vital, critical feedback, curatorial guidance and art historical context. Instead they have followers, fans and social media metrics, perilously reactionary mechanisms for a creator to rely on as sounding boards.
The possibility for digital artists to show in an Art Basel fair was a welcome development. Unfortunately pride of place was given to one of the most controversial names in digital art, whose art world credentials were established overnight in 2021, when 5,000 of his Instagram posts were purchased to the tune of $69.3m (with fees) at a auction.
Beeple is an irreverent, middle-aged white man who makes satirical digital images that have the narrative depth and conceptual gravitas of a Saturday morning cartoon. Of course, being irreverent is a powerful thing on the internet, where clout can be accrued through a vaguely self-deprecating, counter-cultural stance. In that regard, Beeple could even be construed as a master of the web.
His presentation at Zero 10, Regular Animals (2025), was composed of dog-like robots in the style of those developed by the company Boston Dynamics, most recently tied to controversy due to their use by police forces against civilians, presented in a petting zoo-like pen. Tan-hued with ultra-realistic humanoid masks of Kim Jong-un, Andy Warhol, Pablo Picasso, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and Beeple himself, the robots scanned their surroundings and “pooped” out collectible images, a groan-inducing attempt at meta-humour by the artist.
The arrogance of Beeple featuring himself among these figures aside, this coterie of dictators, art stars and tech billionaires might have been ripe for real critique. Cuts to US government agencies made by Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency have been linked to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people
following the overnight abandonment of medical assistance, food aid and other programmes. Kim’s government in North Korea is known for executing people who exercise free speech, even for sharing films or other media, among many, many other atrocities. Picasso’s abuse of womenis well documented but has done little to dampen his image as a paragon of Modern artistic genius. Bezos’s current net worth of over $239bn was earned in part on the backs of workers whose efforts at unionising are continually opposed
Despite presenting the many contemporary (d)evils of the world, Guernica this installation was not. Regular Animals hinged on the cult of personality and the context of Art Basel Miami Beach, a setting that perhaps exonerates Beeple’s protagonists by virtue of being presented whimsically or defiantly. Perhaps the message is that shallow satire eclipses any misdeeds because it renders the perpetrators artistic and therefore beyond reproach?
Conflating attention with substance is a mistake any artist can be forgiven for making, especially in the spectacle-driven context of Art Basel Miami Beach. Seeking attention at an art fair is not a crime. The crime committed, if it can be called as such, is that Beeple and this installation were rhetorically positioned as the pinnacle of digital art today. The implication seemed to be that the installation’s relative commercial success ($100,000 per robot, which were sold out before the fair even opened to VIPs) and its virality represented a valid and even exemplary path forward for digital art.
Regular Animals treads thin ice, chasing after the status of Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian (2019) with an installation that hinges on shock value, while seemingly idolising public figures whose legacies are mixed at best, destructive at worst. It is an eye-watering reminder that the most influential and expensive digital artists at the top of the pyramid might have arrived there because they are very good internet users, not necessarily good artists.
It is crucial for the digital art community, as well as the media that covers it, to recognise that this reactionary, adolescent approach does not have to define digital art. Digital art does not need to be viral or so exhaustingly post-internet. It does not have to be defined or governed by the rules of the internet at all. Cryptocurrency culture has led to a paradigm shift wherein viral fame and shock value, rather than conceptual heft, seem to determine value, and consequently even enabled some artists to present at an Art Basel fair without passing through the traditional art world filters. The implication seems to be that those filters are somehow incapable of vetting digital art and that doing so requires different metrics and channels. Ironically, most digital art that successfully passes through those filters has been much more likely to stand the test of time.
What also warrants investigation is the unwillingness of art and crypto media to interrogate these spectacles with any rigor. You would be hard pressed to find any publication on digital art that criticises Beeple or his cohort. At best this betrays a colossal lack of critical thinking, or perhaps an erroneous belief that fostering community and establishing new champions for one’s field requires unquestioning fandom. At worst it elevates digital art that is kept alive by its own arrogance and its preference for spectacle over substance. For his part, Beeple has tended to dismiss criticism from the traditional art world,to promote it as proof of the installation’s (and his own) artistic credentials.
Life on the internet does often require emotional callouses of teflon, but the notion that negative feedback confirms an artist’s success by serving as proof that he is misunderstood or ahead of his time is narcissistic. It is also symptomatic of a defensive crypto-bro culture that has alienated public support for digital art in the aftermath of the NFT (non-fungible token) bubble bursting.
The digital art world is not doing its denizens any favours by continuing to champion hollow spectacles. The culture of fandom will continue to create cognitive dissonance in artists who mistake their own celebrity for artistic success, unless we begin to hold all digital art to a higher standard.
_Sarp Kerem Yavuz _ArtNewspaper

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CYRIL POWER THE HIGH SWING, 1933.
<https://tinyurl.com/38hvsrju> _RabihAlameddine

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WE THREE KINGS OF MAR-A-LAGO ARE.
`President Donald Trump has compared himself to a king, a one-day dictator, and even an emperor, but this Christmas in Naples, he has also been recast as one of the three wise men. Along Via San Gregorio Armeno, a historic street in the southern Italian city known for its handcrafted Nativity scenes, artisans have long incorporated figurines of contemporary figures alongside biblical characters. Statues of footballer Diego Maradona and Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s former prime minister, have been popular for years. This season, however, Trump has emerged as the top seller. In workshops lining the street, Trump figurines, dressed in dark suits, red ties, and his distinctive yellow hair are displayed in rows. Some buyers place them among the Magi visiting the newborn Jesus. Michele Buonincontro, a veteran artisan, said Trump is seen as connected to faith, if not sanctity. Even clergy have expressed openness. A Naples cathedral official noted that Jesus was born under Emperor Augustus, adding that today’s world might similarly be shaped “under the empire of Trump.” _ARTnews

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IT'S NATIONAL VIOLIN DAY!
Here's a beautiful graphite and chalk drawing
by the always dreamy Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, c. 1880:
<https://tinyurl.com/2dfwjfr8> _‪PeterHuestis‬