OLD NEWS

FALSE TRUFFLES & SPORE DISPERSAL by Mary Holland
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Most of the fungi we are familiar with have an underground body, or mycelium, with fruiting bodies (mushrooms) that grow above ground and whose spores are dispersed by wind. There are a group of fungi, however, called false truffles (as well as truffles), which develop entirely underground including their fruiting bodies. False truffles have a symbiotic mycorrhizal relationship with trees and shrubs, in that the trees provide them with sugars and the truffles provide the trees with water and nutrients.
Because wind is not a viable spore dispersal mechanism for these underground fungi, they evolved a unique way of attracting spore dispersers. False truffles produce odors that mimic reproductive pheromones, and as a result, many small mammals (chipmunks, squirrels, mice, voles, etc.) are attracted to them and dig them up and consume them. In particular, Northern Flying Squirrels, which have a keen sense of smell, are drawn to them. One study found that 90 percent of their diet consists of the underground fruiting bodies of false truffles.
Trees need mycorrhizal fungi to grow, and mycorrhizal fungi such as false truffles need an animal to disperse their spores. In effect, the Northern Flying Squirrel perpetuates its own forested habitat. _NaturallyCurious

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ASCENT
<https://tinyurl.com/4hszzkry> _DavidShrigley

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AMERICAN ARTIST LLYN FOULKES DIES AT AGE 91
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American artist Llyn Foulkes has died at the age of 91,
Foulkes was known for his refusal to adhere to a single style or approach, which often confounded critics and galleries alike. What seemed like aimlessness to some often placed Foulkes ahead of the curve, showing at the legendary Fergus Gallery in the mid-1960s—ahead of Andy Warhol—where he was declared an early master of Pop art with his famous Cow (also three years ahead of Warhol’s bovine prints). He rose to prominence among the likes of John Baldessari, Wallace Berman, Robert Irwin, and Ed Ruscha.
By the early 1980s, Foulkes’s work began including more collaged elements, with fabric affixed to the surfaces of his paintings that created an illusion of both visual and narrative depth.
Prominent themes in Foulkes’ work include meditations on the nature of photography, considerations of nostalgic Americana, and commentaries on commercial pop culture—all brought to life with a playful sense of humor.
In addition to being an artist, Foulkes was an accomplished jazz musician and performer. He played alongside artist R. Crumb and formed the Rubber Band in 1973, which made an appearance on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show and ran through 1977. By 1979, Foulkes developed and played a one-man-band instrument that he invented, which he dubbed the Machine.
Foulkes was born on November 17, 1934 in Yakima, Washington. He initially studied music and art at Central Washington College of Education in Ellensburg until 1954, when he was drafted into the US Army. He served two years in postwar Germany before returning to the US to attend Chouinard Art Institute (now CalArts) through 1959. Foulkes lived and worked in Los Angeles from then until his death.
In lieu of a formal obituary, a song that Foulkes had been writing:
I’m just an
Old honky
Doin time
Just an old honky
On the decline
Just an old honkey
Walkin to the finishing line
I’m just an old honkey
Doin time
Time for being a bad ass
For stepping on first class
For bein a clown
Puttin people down
On my little red merry go round
Just an old honkey
Doin time
Time for bein jeoulous
Of the popular fellas
For not playin the game
Not takin the blame
On this rocky rocky road
To fame
<https://tinyurl.com/bdbse9f4> _ARTnews

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THE MOUNT WASHINGTON POST
<https://tinyurl.com/yna34n8w> _LisaAnneAuerbach

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THE CONVERSATION by Matt Stromberg
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On the surface, the artists Philip Guston and Trenton Doyle Hancock might seem like unlikely bedfellows. Guston was a Jew who hung with the Abstract Expressionists, and late in life took to painting mordant scenes featuring the Ku Klux Klan. Hancock, who is Black and was raised in Texas, has long employed the exaggerated language of comics to engage race, religion, and identity in paintings and wild installations. Guston has, in fact, been a longtime inspiration to Hancock, and for years the younger artist has been engaged in a posthumous dialogue with his spectral mentor.
That dialogue is now visible in Draw Them In, Paint Them Out, The show gathers works by both artists that explore how they have engaged the Klan as both literal terror and metaphoric symbol — united by an approach that balances humor with gravitas.
Guston was born in Montreal in 1913 to Ukrainian-Jewish immigrants, but moved to LA as a child. There, he befriended a teenage Jackson Pollock, and both attended — and were expelled from — Los Angeles Manual Arts High School. As a young artist in the 1930s, he painted WPA murals in a social realist style, including an anti-Klan mural that was destroyed during a 1933 raid by the LAPD Red Squad. He transitioned to Abstract Expressionism after moving to New York, gaining wide acclaim.
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In the late 1960s, Guston shocked the art world by returning to his figurative roots, but this time with a cartoonish sensibility: his heavily worked canvases depicted oversized shoes, hands, heads, cups, and famously, white-hooded Klansmen. He portrayed them doing everyday things — driving in cars, smoking cigars, painting — making them look buffoonish rather than threatening.
The new work was initially met with scathing criticism, but Guston felt that abstraction could not effectively address the social and political tumult of the era.“What kind of man am I,” he once remarked, “sitting at home, reading magazines, going into a frustrated fury about everything — and then going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue.”
For Guston, the Klan figures were not simply an indictment of American racism, but alter egos — a way for him to contend his own complicity in that system, and the assimilation made possible by his identity as a white Jewish American. (Guston changed his surname from Goldstein as a young man.)
In 2020, Guston’s Klan paintings came under fire again, albeit for different reasons. The major retrospective, Philip Guston Now, was delayed amid concerns that, following the “Summer of Racial Reckoning,” the images of “white-hooded Ku Klux Klansmen needed to be better contextualized for the current political moment.” The show was presented without incident three years later.
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Hancock couldn’t have had a more different upbringing. Born in Oklahoma in 1974, the artist grew up in Paris, Texas, with a strict Christian upbringing that was often at odds with his love of cartoons and comic books. (His mother once put all his action figures and Garbage Pail Kids in a barrel and burned them.) Paris had a long history of racial violence, including the horrendous 1893 lynching and burning of a Black man on the site of the town’s fairgrounds, which Hancock later visited as a child, an experience represented in a video at the start of the exhibition.
In college, Hancock’s printmaking professor noted that one of his hooded figures looked like a nod to Guston, prompting Hancock to explore Guston’s late work. “It just struck me. I didn’t really have words for it, but I felt this great kinship to it,. In Guston, he had found an artistic father figure, a painter who freely merged high and low, art history and pop culture. Where Guston’s paintings featured simplified forms and color schemes, however, Hancock is exuberantly maximalist, mixing styles, media, text, and image in frenetic explorations of identity, representation, and history. Over the past 30 years, he has created his own cosmology of characters that rivals the Marvel comic universe.
In 2014, Hancock decided to directly engage Guston in Epidemic! Presents: Step and Screw!, a series of 30 black and white panels <https://tinyurl.com/yxbancxz> in which Hancock’s alter-ego, a Black superhero named Torpedoboy, meets Guston’s Klansman. Incised text below each panel describes formative moments from the artists’ lives, alongside episodes in America’s tortured racial past. “Confronting my art grandfather was an opportunity to unpack a lot of things. What was Guston going through? Why did he take on the Klansman as an avatar as a Jewish artist?” Hancock reflected. “Now I’m at this new phase of my career and life where I’m also confronted with this symbol of hate. In the only way I know how, I had to approach this with a kind of humor, but also great respect and understanding that there was a truth that had to be exposed.”
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Hancock has continued to mine this relationship between his avatar and Guston’s, and it develops across several vibrant canvases now on view Guston’s hooded figure tries to push assimilation on Torpedoboy, who has been drained of his natural brown tone. In a hilarious send-up of the pottery scene from the film Ghost, another work finds the Klansman teaching drawing to Torpedoboy, who gazes back with admiration. In Lights Out (2023), Torpedoboy turns on his mentor, stabbing him through the head.
As Hancock puts it, these works explore a “slow slippage into the space of power. At what point are you on the other side of the table? At what point have you lost your core identity?” As Torpedoboy realizes he’s been accepted into this elite club, he begins plotting to “take it down from the inside.”
What was intended as a brief detour in his practice has engaged Hancock for more than a decade. Although he intends to put it to rest at some point, it still bears fruit. “Guston painted Klansmen late in life for a few years, then went on to paint other things. How did he know when the work was finished?” Hancock asks. “I think he probably knew when to stop when his hand stopped moving, and my hand hasn’t stopped moving yet.”
_KCRW

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ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE, BRIAN RIDLEY & LYLE HEETER, 1979
<https://tinyurl.com/579ycw38>
Fairfield Porter, Portrait of Ted Carey & Andy Warhol, 1960
<https://tinyurl.com/2ahdmh8m> _MichaelLobel

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WINSLOW HOMER PAINTING FOR THE HUNTINGTON by William Poundstone
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The Ahmanson Foundation has funded the purchase of Winslow Homer's The Sutler's Tent for the Huntington. Though the painting is small (16-1/4 by 12 in), it fills a large hole in the Huntington's presentation of American art. It had no painting by Homer, often rated the quintessential American artist of his age, nor a direct depiction of the Civil War. The Sutler's Tent was created when Homer was a war artist for Harper's Weekly. Sutlers were civilians who sold supplies, food, and liquor to troops on the front line.
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Harper's Weekly reproduced Homer's war art as wood engravings. The Sutler's Tent is related to a Thanksgiving-themed illustration that ran in November 1862. That means the engraving came before the painting, dated 1863. The horizontal-format print shows many more figures than the painting and clearly shows the tent. (The signage confirms that the soldier at left center is eating half a pie, freehand.) The printed image was likely based on a drawing now at the National Gallery of Art, Sutler's Tent, Third Pennsylvania Cavalry. Homer evidently felt the tight cropping of the painting made a stronger composition.
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The Sutler's Tent was auctioned at Sotheby's New York in 1996 for $550,000. Two years later, a large Homer seascape, Lost on the Grand Banks—which had been on loan to LACMA—was sold privately to Bill Gates. The price was reportedly over $30 million, establishing a new price level for Homer and American paintings.
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Most Homer paintings have long been in East Coast museums. LACMA managed to buy a major Homer, The Cotton Pickers, <http://tiny.cc/tfgv001> in 1977. The Huntington, which opened its American galleries in 1984, has sometimes competed against Arkansas' richly funded Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. Yet even with its Walmart cash, Crystal Bridges has managed to buy only one Homer painting, and it too is a modestly scaled work of the 1860s. Based on the images, I'd say the Huntington got the more compelling picture.
The Ahmanson has designated The Sutler's Tent as a gift in honor of the nation's 250th anniversary. It will go on display in the Virginia Steele Scott Galleries of American Art on Dec. 7th. There it will be a centerpiece of a room relating to the Civil War and reconstruction. Also on view will be French sculptor Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux's Why Born Enslaved! <http://tiny.cc/4ggv001> and a signed Emancipation Proclamation from the Huntington Library's large collection of Civil War material.
<http://tiny.cc/5ggv001> _LosAngelesCountyMuseumOnFire

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IN ADVANCE OF THANKSGIVING:
‪Remedios Varo‬ Still life Reslicitando
<https://tinyurl.com/m4ftfwty> _CarolinaAMiranda

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PHILADELPHIA ART MUSEUM NAMES A NEW DIRECTOR AND CEO
The Philadelphia Art Museum, seeking to calm the waters after a turbulent six-week stretch, has named an experienced hand, Daniel H. Weiss, as director and CEO.
Weiss, 68, was president of Haverford College starting in 2013 and left the post in 2015 to lead the Metropolitan Museum of Art, staying eight years. Prior to Haverford, he was president of Lafayette College.
The decision was approved Friday morning by the Art Museum’s trustees with a unanimous vote, a spokesperson said. Weiss’ appointment comes as something of a surprise. The museum had been expected to name an interim director while it searched for a permanent one. Right now, Weiss is set to remain in the post only through 2028, though his tenure could be extended.
Weiss takes over an institution left shaken by the Nov. 4 firing of its director and CEO, Sasha Suda, after an investigation by an outside law firm flagged the handling of her own compensation. She filed a wrongful termination lawsuit against the museum less than a week later.
Weiss comes to his new post with both substantial art and business credentials. An art historian, he holds a master’s degree in medieval and modern art and a PhD in western medieval and Byzantine art, both from Johns Hopkins University. He previously earned an MBA from Yale School of Management, and worked for consulting giant Booz Allen Hamilton.
He was at Haverford College for a little less than two years before being hired away to lead the Met along with director Thomas P. Campbell. With Campbell’s departure in 2017, he took on the title of chief executive. He worked alongside Max Hollein after Hollein became director in 2018. Weiss left the Met in 2023.
Suda filed a lawsuit on Nov. 10 against her former employer. Her lawyer said that she was the victim of a “small cabal” from the board that commissioned a “sham investigation” as a “pretext” for her “unlawful dismissal.”
The Art Museum has a list of short- and long-term challenges with which it must grapple. Among them is the question of whether to roll back the recent name change and rebrand, which have been widely mocked and disliked.
In addition, the museum is challenged by an operating deficit and visitorship numbers that have not recovered post-pandemic. _PhiladelphiaInquirer

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SMALL BUILDING WHARTON, TX
<https://tinyurl.com/mkprwjn4> _RuralIndexingProject

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PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING TIMES ART CRITIC CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT TO RETIRE
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After 45 years, 36 of them at The Times, art critic Christopher Knight is retiring from daily journalism. His final day at The Times is Nov. 28. In 2020, Knight won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism, and was also honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award for Art Journalism from the Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation.
It’s impossible to overstate the loss Knight’s departure represents for the paper and Los Angeles, or what a tireless, generous, inspiring colleague he is. He possesses a quiet, encyclopedic knowledge of art, and in column after column he connected the dots of culture, history, folklore, civics and psychology in razor-sharp assessments of what a piece of art really means, or how a particular exhibition is poised to change the narrative around a longstanding or misguided idea. In short, he is everything a truly excellent critic should be.
He is also endlessly supportive of arts writers like me who look up to him — will always look up to him.
Thank you, Christopher, for all your words. _Jessica Gelt_LATimes

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ERIK HALL "GET WHERE YOU'RE GOING," 2015
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Ben Bauer "I Gryningen," 2023
<https://tinyurl.com/yu58uuve> _RabihAlameddine

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THE BOONE REBOOT BEGINS AT BERGDORF GOODMAN
The new Bergdorf Goodman reel has Mary Boone gliding through holiday retail in her patterned Chanel suit, oversized schoolgirl bow, and pragmatic dealer flats and it’s giving a bigger comeback than the LGD show she curated. She moves through the store like she’s restaging her own myth in real time: pausing at displays the way she once paused in front of fresh canvases, evaluating handbags with the same laser focus she once reserved for emerging talent. There’s an unspoken choreography to it a dealer’s gait disguised as casual shopping, the kind of cinematic return the art world pretends not to crave but absolutely does.
And to Daddy, this moment is unmistakably a signal flare, a larger rebrand brewing beneath the holiday gloss. Boone isn’t just appearing; she’s strategically inserting herself back into the cultural bloodstream. The timing (holidays), the styling (Chanel-coded contrition), the setting (Bergdorf as the cathedral of luxury), the tone (soft power wrapped in cashmere) it all gestures toward a Mary Boone revival arc that extends far beyond LGD. If that show was the teaser trailer, this reel is the first wide shot of the reboot: recalibrated, rehabilitated, and ready to reclaim space. Daddy sees the play, the polish, and the calculated sparkle and honestly? It’s working. When will the big brands take Mary? _TheArtDaddy

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FÉLIX NADAR, PIERROT THE PHOTOGRAPHER, 1854-55,
From a series of photographs of the famous mime Charles Deburau
(son of Baptiste Deburau who was portrayed in Marcel Carné's “Les enfants du Paradis”)
<https://tinyurl.com/59snw7b7> _JesseLocker

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A VERY PRIVATE AFFAIR:
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Every auction season I find myself wondering the same thing.
While some collectors join dealers, consultants, the press, and hangers-on in the salesrooms (or in VIP skyboxes), many more choose to follow along via livestreams. Where are they actually? Where are they hiding?
On Wednesday night, at least, I had an answer: They were at Clemente Bar.
When I stopped by after covering Phillips’s evening sale, the place was packed with HNWIs and assorted power players. There was Greek shipping magnate George Economou, and over there, the Andy Warhol-loving wheeler-dealer David Mugrabi, and—oh!—artist-dealer Tony Shafrazi, who received applause when he arrived at the boîte above chef Daniel Humm’s Eleven Madison Park.
They were there to attend a live auction hosted by Fair Warning, the app created by Christie’s veteran Loic Gouzer that hosts single-lot sales. This week, a Warhol portrait of Brigitte Bardot was up, and it was hanging over the bar, where martinis usually go for $26.
“It’s a model we’d like to continue: an auction event where people actually have fun, eat food, and have a drink,” Gouzer told me.
“We’re respecting all of the auction legislation,” he said, before immediately noting that “you’re not supposed to mix alcohol and auctions… but we do it. People have seen too many auctions, and it’s good to be someplace with young, fun energy.”
Gouzer hosted the event with curator-advisor-party thrower extraordinaire Lolita Cros. “Lolita brings the Downtown energy to all of the Uptown collectors,” Gouzer said. He tapped fellow Christie’s vet Jussi Pylkkänen to be the night’s auctioneer. Pylkkänen greeted the crowd by saying, “Welcome to the Clemente Bar. It will stand shoulder to shoulder with the Breuer Building, I’m sure.”
The first owner of the Warhol was socialite Gunter Sachs, who was married to Bardot for three years during the Swinging Sixties, but Gouzer’s consignor was anonymous. The artist made versions in a variety of colors, and one sold in 2014 for about $11.6 million at Sotheby’s in New York, the record for the series, according to the Artnet Price Database. The piece appropriates a Richard Avedon portrait of the French singer, model, animal-rights activist, and more recently, far-right voice.
Servers offered agedashi tofu dogs to attendees like former Gagosian director Sam Orlofsky, Sotheby’s rainmaker Jacqueline Wachter, and prominent advisors Bernard Lagrange and Sarah Calodney (who works for Fair Warning), plus Humm and his wife, actress Annabelle Dexter-Jones.
Pylkkänen started the bidding at $7 million.
<https://tinyurl.com/5y9vrjta>
“Here she is, at the height of her career!” Pylkkänen gestured toward the bar. “In Warhol’s hands, she becomes not just a star, but a timeless icon. Her hair, the sultry gaze, the bewitching aura…” He trailed off.
As in the auction rooms earlier that evening, most of the offers came in over the phone. Mugrabi whispered into his cell during the action, but he told me after that he hadn’t been bidding during the call. (He suggested that I was a “piece of shit” for asking.) In the end, it sold for $14.5 million ($16.7 million with fees) to an unnamed bidder on the phone with Gouzer. Everyone clapped, then went back to drinking and gossiping.
Orlofsky was pitching me on his private-dealing practice when Mugrabi, apparently excited by the festivities, strolled up and announced, “It’s all about the market!”
“Well, when you’re happy, we’re happy,” Orlofsky said.
“It’s a vicious cycle,” Mugrabi responded.
“No, it’s a virtuous cycle,” Orlofsky countered. From there, the evening began to fall into a haze of unsteady martini trays and remixed Serge Gainsbourg.
Chatter in the room tended to return to the same predictable place. The auction week was going great. Is the market is back? Auction-house whisperer Lock Kresler seemed hopeful, praising the efforts of auction staffers and collectors. “You could tell that the specialists at all three houses did an exceptional job of making sure that the lots were not only covered by third parties but also multiple bids above those,” he said. “It wasn’t just, ‘Boom it went to a guarantor,’ ‘Boom it went to a guarantor.’”
It certainly felt like boom times at the Clemente Bar.. _Annie Armstrong_artnet

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JOANNE'S GARDEN
Mid late November
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<https://tinyurl.com/y7pmywk2> _JoanneCarson