OLD NEWS

IT'S WORLD PEAR DAY AND WILL YOU JUST LOOK AT MANET'S PEARS:
<https://tinyurl.com/fkmfjxnv> _‪PeterHuestis‬

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NEVER-BEFORE-SEEN DAVID LYNCH ARTWORKS
If the resounding success of his recent estate sale is any indication, Lynch’s death this January has dimmed none of his enigma. Fortunately, the Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet director also made a lot of similarly haunting fine art. On January 29, 2026, will unveil several never-before-seen Lynch creations as part of his second solo show at the gallery. The Berlin presentation “builds on an idea Lynch was actively developing last year,”
<https://tinyurl.com/ym9h4atw>
Lynch famously started out studying art, not film. He first attended the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design in Washington, D.C., then the School of the Museum of the Fine Arts, Boston, before heading to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia after trying and failing to study under the Viennese Expressionist master Oskar Kokoschka in Salzburg.
In 1967, while still a student in the City of Brotherly Love, Lynch made his first “moving painting,” Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times)—generally considered his debut film. Ten years and seven shorts later, Lynch directed his first feature, Eraserhead (1977). The rest is history.
<https://tinyurl.com/ycx8wz8e>
But Lynch kept making and exhibiting art throughout his cinematic career. By 2022, he’d amassed an extensive, consistent CV of group and solo shows from Dallas to Düsseldorf. His first posthumous show, a sprawling exhibition of works on paper, photography, and prints titled “David Lynch: Up In Flames,” opened this June and remains on view at Prague’s DOX Centre for Contemporary Art.
<https://tinyurl.com/2x553x4v>
A more focused cross-section of Lynch’s practice at the Berlin space will feature previously unseen mixed media paintings, and watercolors housed in frames that Lynch himself built. Three lamps, the likes of which appeared in Lynch’s 2022 debut, will also “punctuate the gallery with their uncanny illumination, “each an artifact of the physical and atmospheric environments conjured by Lynch.” Several of his early short films will also be screened at the show “in dialogue with the paintings,”
<https://tinyurl.com/29kfb45p>
Whereas Lynch’s last show highlighted his latest endeavors, the works slated for next month’s untitled exhibition will span 1999 through 2022. The earliest specimens will hail from a little-seen series of photographs that Lynch snapped at the turn of the millennia, immortalizing Berlin’s signature industrial scenes. These shots ground Lynch’s relationship with the city and Europe more broadly.
Next month’s German outing will prove but an appetizer for the main course to come. Next autumn, plans to hold a much larger, sweeping survey of Lynch’s lifelong oeuvre celebrating the filmmaker’s unparalleled talent in Los Angeles the city he called home for over half a century. _artnet

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CURED
<https://tinyurl.com/4ssd4zxp> _DavidShrigley

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YOU WOULDN’T KNOW HER; SHE PAINTS IN CANADA by greg
<https://tinyurl.com/yurebbws>
I don’t even watch TV, and yet knew a couple of weeks ago that Heated Rivalry had broken containment. But I did not expect to ever find reason for it to end up here. And yet. The picture above is from the fourth episode of the six-part series, a sex-forward, gay hockey romance produced by a Canadian streaming service I’ve never heard of, using some undetermined amount of Canadian public media funding. It’s become explosively popular, and transformed its unknown leads from waiters into stars. But that’s not important now, or at least here.
<https://tinyurl.com/4pvvccrs>
What matters is that someone on —if the post ever turns up in my recommended grid again, I’ll credit them—posted the scene above, and noticed that the painting in between the two guys on the sofa is an abstracted version of the cover of the book from which Heated Rivalry is adapted:
<https://tinyurl.com/4sr42ywb>
So one guy in the secret eight-year situationship has a portrait of the two of them in a faceoff, hanging over his sofa—which could mean nothing. Honestly, I don’t know what it means, if it’s an actual plot point or just a production design easter egg. And if it was just a neat cover reference, I’d leave it floating on the internet.
<https://tinyurl.com/4y6z425t>
But that painting is also similar in both form and approach to paintings by that most Canadian master of Canadian subjects, Douglas Coupland. In 2010 Coupland showed G72K10, a series of paintings geometrically abstracted from iconic landscapes by the Group of Seven, artists who formed the foundation of Canadian visual cultural identity in the early 20th century. “These are the images that the Canadian government officially used…to inculcate a sense of nationalism,” Coupland explained in 2012, “So when Canadians see my abstract works, they know they know what they’re seeing – they just don’t know why”
<https://tinyurl.com/28jzsbs6>
Is this hockey player’s painting supposed to be a Douglas Coupland? The character is Russian and living in Boston, so probably not. But does that mean the production designers weren’t referencing Coupland, or at least inspired by Coupland’s work and approach? Even the most seemingly incongruous element, the wedges of gold leaf, echo elements in Coupland’s most recent iceberg paintings,<https://tinyurl.com/5yr25me9> in 2023.
<https://tinyurl.com/r9trxe54>
The show takes place over many years, and the scene above is in 2016. Which, for Toronto, was a Peak Douglas Coupland Art Moment. He’d just had two museum shows, and unveiled five public art commissions, including at least three new G7-related abstractions, in bank lobbies and plazas all over town.
Now popping geometric abstraction is not just Coupland’s; it’s a language employed by artists as varied as Odili Donald Odita and Dyani White Hawk. But the Canadian force is strong with this one. And Coupland’s low-key intense Canadian-ness seems to resonate with a show that itself has an exceptionally Canadian aura. It’d almost be weird if Coupland wasn’t a reference. _greg.org

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THE MOUNT WASHINGTON POST
<https://tinyurl.com/4jr8r7fb> _LisaAnneAuerbach

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JOSEPH WRIGHT OF DERBY’S CANDLELIT WORLD
<https://tinyurl.com/4rrnd3w3>
Joseph Wright of Derby is like the punchline to a “who am I?” riddle: Whose paintings are monumental in scale and scope, have all the drama and chiaroscuro of a Caravaggio, the red-infused coloring of Georges de la Tour, a touch of ghoulish Fuseli, strong Dutch Golden Age influence, and yet you’ve never heard of them? Born in 1734, this painter adopted the suffix “of Derby” early in his career, distinguishing himself from London painters. He might as well have added “from the sticks,” for while his famous contemporary Hogarth was busy lampooning society in satirical painted farces, Wright of Derby is excluded from the art historical canon — surely due in part to his remoteness, but also precisely to his topical idiosyncrasy, painting obscure nighttime scientific experiments.
<https://tinyurl.com/5z4ftjp5>
The city of Derby was heavily involved with pioneering industrialists of the UK’s Midlands area, associated with the successful pottery pioneer Josiah Wedgwood and the Lunar Society of Birmingham, for example. The region was a melting pot of scientific and philosophical minds. His paintings explore and document the interests and experiments of this movement — the period later called the intellectual Enlightenment — as extensions of the scientific discipline.
<https://tinyurl.com/4fb7ewxv>
For the exhibition Wright of Derby: From the Shadows at the National Gallery, curators Christine Riding and Jon King have chosen to focus on his tenebrism — an extreme form of chiaroscuro, literally meaning "darkened” in Italian — to draw attention to his artistic achievements more than his subject matter. By applying tenebrism to depictions of scientific experiments such as “An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump” (1768), which demonstrates the effect of a vacuum, or “The Alchymist in Search of the Philosopher’s Stone” (exhibited 1771, reworked and dated 1795), recording the accidental discovery of phosphorous, Wright portrays the dramatic moment of intellectual or moral revelation — for they were considered entwined at the time — as the single, intense light source lends both intensity and intimacy. The curators put it simply: “[Wright] treated science lectures with a grandeur and drama usually reserved for history or myth.”
<https://tinyurl.com/2paw8aau>
Accompanying “Air Pump,” the show’s anchoring work, are further candlelit scenes mined heavily from Derby museums, plus a few extraordinary private loans and well-selected pieces from London collections like the Victoria & Albert Museum. From the Shadows is small but its curation is tight and lean, with consistent laser focus on painterly technicality. We learn, for example, that Wright used bright white lead paint to prime his canvases in order to emphasize the reflective brilliance of the depicted light source and applied a darker layer (known as “dead-coloring”) everywhere else to heighten the contrast. A contemporaneous quote referenced in the caption for “The Alchymist” draws attention to his close study of Dutch compositional precedents to inform his own, asking, “Who of all the Flemish and Dutch schools can equal Wright in still life?”
From the Shadows is small but its curation is tight and lean, with consistent laser focus on painterly technicality. We learn, for example, that Wright used bright white lead paint to prime his canvases in order to emphasize the reflective brilliance of the depicted light source and applied a darker layer (known as “dead-coloring”) everywhere else to heighten the contrast. A contemporaneous quote referenced in the caption for “The Alchymist” draws attention to his close study of Dutch compositional precedents to inform his own, asking, “Who of all the Flemish and Dutch schools can equal Wright in still life?”
<https://tinyurl.com/yecw2x28>
Alongside “Air Pump” is the actual object circa 1774–93, loaned from Whipple Museum of the History of Science in Cambridge, while “A Philosopher giving That Lecture on the Orrery in Which a Lamp Is Put in the Place of the Sun” (exhibited 1766) is paired with an actual orrery of 1750, loaned from Dumfries House. In an inspired bit of exhibition design, the latter has been lit from below to cast shadows of its interlocking rings across the wall behind, echoing the light and dark interplay of the paintings it is supporting.
Mezzotints based on 11 of his paintings are arranged tableaux-style, offering a means to see all of Wright’s artworks at once, and to illustrate tenebrism’s effectiveness in this medium — importantly, a transportable and duplicable format that could spread his fame. A single reproduction of a typically grotesque and satirical James Gillray cartoon, included to make a separate point emphasizing an increased awareness of the act of looking and seeing at the time, brings us back to a wider art historical context. Wright’s depictions are the tonal and emotive opposite of Hogarth’s satire, which defined art trends of the moment; Wright expresses an optimism and wonderment in tandem with scientific and intellectual exploration — in short, he has heart.
<https://tinyurl.com/4ay39s73> _Hyperallergic

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‘A REVELATION!’::EDWARD WESTON TRANSFORMED BUMS INTO SCULPTURE – IN PICTURES
<https://tinyurl.com/mryf3m3k> _GuardianUK

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ART MEETS CONCRETE AT THE GEFFEN by William Poundstone
<http://tiny.cc/qhkw001>
Last night Julia Latané, assistant director of art preparation at LACMA, hosted an online discussion of the Geffen Galleries' ongoing installation. It included photos of the installation of three large artworks. Above, Matisse's ceramic mural La Gerbe weighs a literal ton. If I understood Latané correctly, it is the only work of the Modern Art Department that will reside permanently in the Geffen Galleries, in view of its weight. That implies that the museum will be keeping the installation of Modern art in BCAM.
<http://tiny.cc/rhkw001>
<http://tiny.cc/shkw001>
John Deare's marble relief Judgment of Jupiter weighs 1.82 tons. Asked whether the installation of such massive works was "permanent," the preparators said that they were unlikely to be moved anytime soon. Otherwise, the Geffen's installations are expected to change regularly.
The Neoclassical precision of Deare's relief provides a particularly stark contrast to Peter Zumthor's raw concrete.
<http://tiny.cc/uhkw001>
<http://tiny.cc/yhkw001>
Todd Gray's Octavia's Gaze is a collage of framed inkjet prints that are reputed to be resistant to light. The work faces windows near one entrance.
<http://tiny.cc/0ikw001>
There were audience questions about the logistics and aesthetics of hanging artwork on concrete. Latané mentioned that they had consulted with preparators at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, which also hangs its artwork on bare concrete (albeit lighter and smoother than Zumthor's, going by photos).
<http://tiny.cc/2ikw001> _LosAngelesCountyMuseumOnFire

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"THE GENERALS," 1961-62, BY VENEZUELAN-AMERICAN ARTIST MARISOL
<https://tinyurl.com/2bh686nk> _MichaelLobel

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2,400-YEAR-OLD FINGERPRINT FOUND ON PLANK BOAT
<https://tinyurl.com/ay9w83x9>
Researchers have discovered a 2,400-year-old fingerprint on Scandinavia’s oldest plank boat, likely belonging to someone who helped repair the craft. This finding will help elucidate the origins and warring aims of the ancient sea raiders who were once onboard.
The vessel is known as the Hjortspring boat, as it discovered in the Hjortspring Mose bog, in southern Denmark, in the 1880s. It was excavated in the 1920s, and it is on view at the National Museum of Denmark. The boat is believed to have been part of a larger fleet used to attack the island of Als, off modern-day Denmark, in the 4th century B.C.E.
<https://tinyurl.com/mu367due>
For their studies, archaeologists from Lund University in Sweden, in collaboration with the University of Gothenburg’s Maritime Encounters research program, sought untouched pieces of the vessel and centered much of their work on fragments of caulking tar and rope. It was in the tar where they newly uncovered the fingerprint. The sex and identity of the print’s owner remain a mystery.
Modern ropemakers aided the researchers as they studied how the rope was produced.
“Our experimental reconstruction of the cordage… indicates that strings were combined to make both two- and four-ply cordage during the sewing of the vessel, answering the question of why some caulking fragments show imprints of cordage with different ply numbers,
<https://tinyurl.com/2zn6cw3d>
The chemical makeup of the caulking shifted ideas about where the seafarers came from, as the researchers discovered a composition of animal fat mixed with pine pitch, or resin. Historians previously believed the vessel came from a region near modern-day Hamburg, Germany, but the pine pitch waterproofing suggests the Baltic Sea region is a more likely origin. This makes the ancient seafarers’ trip even more impressive.
“If the boat came from the pine forest-rich coastal regions of the Baltic Sea, it means that the warriors who attacked the island of Als chose to launch a maritime raid over hundreds of kilometers of open sea,” _artnet

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CIGARS — DRUGS — DRINKS OPP, AL
<https://tinyurl.com/53jxsk42> _RuralIndexingProject

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UKRAINIAN ART HISTORIAN BELIEVES ITALIAN MUSEUM HOLDS 14 FAKE MODERNIST WORKS
<https://tinyurl.com/5h3xj7tv>
Konstantin Akinsha, a top curator and art historian of Russian and Ukrainian art, said he believes 14 artworks attributed to Russian and Ukrainian modernists in the collection of the Palazzo de Nordis, a museum in the northern Italian town of Cividale del Friuli, are not authentic.
In late September, Akinsha analyzed the De Martiis Collection, a cache of 64 modern and contemporary works donated to the palazzo in 2015 by the late local collector Giancarlo De Martiis. The collection includes works by significant Italian modernist artists, including Mario Sironi, Afro Basaldella, and Giuseppe Santomaso, as well as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Eugène Boudin, and Graham Sutherland. But it is 14 works attributed to several Russian and Ukrainian modernist painters that have drawn Akinsha’s scrutiny.
Akinsha—who has previously covered fakes and forgeries in the Russian art market—said that the attributions and provenances listed for those works “raise serious suspicions.” Akinsha noted that the collection’s online catalogue lists Jean Chauvelin in the provenance of many of the works. Chauvelin, who died in January, was a French art dealer and self-proclaimed Russian art expert implicated in numerous scandals involving paintings falsely attributed to Russian artists. Other figures named in the provenances include Boris Gribanov, a convicted Russian art forger.
Elisabetta Gottardo, the municipal head of culture for Cividale del Friuli, which manages Palazzo de Nordis, told that the city accepted the works in the De Martiis Collection “based on documentation that include, for each work, an expert’s authentication, a historical report, an analysis of the materials and colors, and a graphic technical opinion.” However, she noted that Akinsha’s “opinion is certainly authoritative, and we will take it into great consideration for further investigation of these works.”
<https://tinyurl.com/244ma836>
Akinsha takes particular issue with a still life attributed to Russian artist Olga Rozanova and dated 1915-17, which he claims “shows virtually no resemblance to any of her authentic works.” He further argues that the work’s composition and style are “nearly identical” to a 1999 painting by Andrei Saratov, a contemporary Russian artist. Akinsha wrote that it was unlikely Saratov was the artist behind the supposed Rozanova, but that the “neo-modernist style of this contemporary Russian painter was deliberately exploited by forgers, who recognized in it a convenient template for fabricating works that could pass as Russian cubo-futurism tailored to satisfy Western expectations.”
<https://tinyurl.com/2s3c3ku8>
Saratov told that he did not paint the work in the De Martiis Collection. “No, of course I didn’t paint it,” he wrote. “It’s a low-grade copy [of my work].” He then sent an image of the 1999 still life cited by Akinsha, saying the work “still hangs in my kitchen.”
“On the one hand, I am glad about this development because only good works tend to be counterfeited, but on the other hand, the museum could have bought my original,” he joked.
Maria Timina, a curator of Russian and European art at Amherst College’s Mead Art Museum, similarly found the work “questionable.”
“Taken as a whole, the painting in question is unconvincing and reflects only a superficial understanding of Rozanova’s artistic work around 1912–13,” she said
Timina continued that the De Martiis painting “entirely misses the essence of Rozanova’s style” and makes “an awkward attempt to align itself” with several still lifes produced by Rozanova in 1912 and 1913. But in actuality, it shares only the genre and “a seemingly cubo-futurist painterly manner.”
<https://tinyurl.com/h8whv3yr> _ARTnews

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ARTEMISIA GENTILESCHI, ANNUNCIATION (DETAIL), 1630.
<https://tinyurl.com/2brvamec> _JesseLocker

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LACMA WORKERS VOTE TO UNIONIZE WITH AFSCME
Workers at the the Los Angeles County Museum of Art voted to unionize with AFSCME District Council 36, the union announced on Wednesday.
The new union, LACMA United, will represent around 300 workers across the museum, from curators to art handlers.
Workers announced their plan to unionize in late October, citing high turnover, low wages compared to the city’s rising cost of living, and a lack of transparency from management. The group sent out an open letter, addressed to colleagues and management, writing that “ensuring the stability of our staff” is crucial to LACMA’s future.
“Many employees are struggling with wages that have not kept up with the rising cost of living in the sixth-most expensive city in the world,” it reads. “At the same time, employees in virtually every department continue to absorb expanded responsibilities and workloads, often without additional compensation, due to high turnover, limited resources, and positions that have been vacated or frozen.”
LACMA leadership declined to voluntarily recognize LACMA United in November, opting instead to pursue an election facilitated by the American Arbitration Association and approved by the National Labor Relations Board.
The election took place electronically on Monday and Tuesday, with 96 percent of those voting in favor of the unionization effort with AFSCME. _ARTnews

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QAJAR PAINTING OF WOMAN DOING A HANDSTAND, IRAN, EARLY 20TH CENTURY,
<https://tinyurl.com/566md7x7> _RabihAlameddine

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LOUVRE STAFF VOTE TO CONTINUE STRIKE
Staff at the Louvre Museum in Paris voted unanimously this morning in favour of continuing the rolling strike which shuttered the museum’s doors on Monday.
The industrial action is jointly conducted by French trade unions CFDT Culture, SNMD-CGT: Syndicat Culture Musées et Domaines, and SUD Culture Solidaires, and represents approximately 400 staff members.
Workers held signs and waved union flags outside the glass pyramid on Monday morning, calling for ‘decent’ working conditions, increased salaries and staffing, and voicing their discontent against the ‘dilapidated’ state of the building.
The strikers also expressed frustration over a new budget that will raise entry fees for non-European Union citizens by 45 percent, from €22 to €32. The price hike comes with the hope of raising €15–20 million each year to pay for much-needed renovations. _AP

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IT'S BOOKSHOP DAY! LITHOGRAPH BY ROBERT COTTINGHAM, 1975:
<https://tinyurl.com/yc59ee> _‪PeterHuestis‬