OLD NEWS

IT'S WORLD HEARING DAY!
Auditus, engraving by Cornelis Cort after Frans Floris I, 1561:
<https://tinyurl.com/2nurud7u> _‪PeterHuestis‬

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BLACK IS A COLOR
<https://tinyurl.com/m83ajnjz>
In 1994, the visual artist Raymond Saunders sat down for a rare interview with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The Pittsburgh-raised painter had called the Bay Area home for nearly 30 years by that point, living close enough to Oakland’s California College of the Arts (CCA) — where he taught painting — that he could stop by his home for lunch before returning to campus. The conversation reveals that Saunders didn’t move to San Francisco to become enmeshed in the freewheeling art scene of the late 1960s; as he explained in the interview, California spoke to him for a different reason. “California felt physical to me in the way that there was land, sky, water, in a relationship and light, and it was warm,” he said. “I prefer to be in California really for just those reasons, that I like how it feels.”
The artist, who died last year at 90, was perhaps best known for creating collage-style canvases on chalkboard-black backgrounds. East Coast artists influenced his development, but it was in California where he harnessed a distinctive physicality, spaciousness, and emotiveness in his work. An exhibition now in its final weeks, culls together 10 of Saunders’ abstract and assemblage-style paintings, along with ephemera he amassed, rightfully positioning him as an important California artist. What distinguishes Saunders’ paintings is that his work is not “just emotional-feeling, but really textured,” says Ebony L. Haynes, “There’s a presence to the materials and the work and the composition that perhaps he was able to realize, or really feel and work through, in a place like California.”
https://tinyurl.com/5a8882ru
Saunders was born in 1934 in Homestead, Pennsylvania, just outside Pittsburgh. While taking art classes in public school, he was drawn to the sense of play inherent within artistic creation. These ways of learning inspired Saunders, who believed these methods were just as legitimate as an elite arts education, which he also pursued — attending the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie-Mellon) and the California College of Arts and Crafts (which became CCA).
Haynes says that Saunders was intrigued by the idea of someone without formal training making a mark and appreciated artists like Cy Twombly, who didn’t hew to realism or formal styles. These influences converged in his own improvisational painting techniques, with Saunders relying on instinct and his own curiosities to carve out a singular lane for himself. A constant of Saunders’ vocation as an educator involved opening up his studio so that students could learn from one another, himself included.
It Wasn’t Easy Being a First Grader (1979/1984) — at top — takes the childhood art class as the subject of the painting itself: On a deeply saturated cornflower-blue canvas, there are exploratory squiggles, as well as the inclusion of whole crayons pasted onto the piece. The rigors of that era are also seen in the inclusion of familiar notebook lines, the same ones where school-aged children practice writing their name in cursive ad nauseam, with Saunders intricately spelling out “Raymond” near the top of the work. Chalky sketches of stick figures abound in another canvas, We Try (1985), situated alongside delicate drawings of vases and pomegranates, a riot of spray paint drips cutting through the chalkboard-esque backdrop.
<https://tinyurl.com/26m6rhke>
Identity was also a critical, albeit fraught, strain in Saunders’ work. In the late 1960s, the artist made a name for himself by resisting the art world’s insistence that he — by virtue of his artmaking and his identity as a Black man — adhere to a specific formal tradition. Later in the decade, Saunders penned a now-famous pamphlet, Black Is a Color, wherein he rejected a Black artistic canon as described by Ishmael Reed, a poet active in the Black Arts Movement. In it, Saunders asked why he, and his fellow artists who happened to be Black, should be considered outliers rather than part of the broader pantheon of artmaking.
Yet Saunders rarely weighed in on the way his work was received, at least publicly. He preferred to lead a quiet life: teaching in the Bay Area, decamping to Paris for the summer, where he had a home, and rarely discussing his work, even among friends. Despite his prolific output and influence, Saunders was never a towering figure like some of his contemporaries. “He was around and present and able to sustain himself as an artist.. _Paula Mejía_KCRW

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KNEW
<https://tinyurl.com/42pdc4jc> _DavidShrigley

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WHY WAS SARAH MIRIAM PEALE, MEMBER OF AMERICA’S FIRST ART DYNASTY, LEFT BEHIND?
<https://tinyurl.com/rbcpku5b>
No family did more to define American art in its infancy than the Peales. Charles Willson Peale painted the Founding Fathers, founded one of the nation’s first museums, and established the first art school, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) in Philadelphia. His sons, brothers, and their children followed him into the field, creating a multigenerational dynasty unparalleled in American art history. And one of the most pioneering of all the artists in the family legacy, his niece Sarah Miriam Peale, was arguably the first professional woman artist in the United States. Yet, she has been reduced to a footnote.
Born in 1800, Sarah forged a unique path. She never married, and supported herself as an artist across six decades. She painted hundreds of portraits and still lifes, advertising her services as an artist for nearly 60 years out of studios in Baltimore and later in St. Louis, moving on her own to what was then still a frontier town. (She died in 1885.)
In the single solo show of her work that was held in 1967 at the Peale Museum in Baltimore, Sarah was hailed as “the first successful woman artist in America and the only truly professional one until late in the 19th century.” And, still today, almost no one knows her name.
That may soon be changing. As museums and scholars undertake a long-overdue reckoning with the women written out of art history, Sarah is rightfully emerging as one of its most compelling recoveries
<https://tinyurl.com/ys2pr6yv>
When it comes to the Peales, it is Charles Willson Peale and his sons Rembrandt Peale and Raphaelle Peale who have become the institutional and canonized darlings. Charles, who was on the home front during the American Revolution fighting as a captain in the Pennsylvania militia, painted many of the Founding Fathers at the height of the war, including George Washington. The once-struggling saddle maker became the head of a multigenerational artist dynasty and father of 18 children.
It’s a complicated family tree, unparalleled in the history of American art. Charles’s brother James Peale Sr. was an esteemed miniature painter, and taught his daughters, including Sarah and her older sisters Anna Claypoole Peale and Margaretta Angelica Peale. Various other Peales were also artists, including Charles’s sister-in-law, daughter-in-law, two nephews, two grandnephews, five granddaughters, and beyond. After Charles founded PAFA, which opened in Philadelphia in 1807, Sarah and Anna were the first women artists elected as members, in 1824. Eight other Peale women exhibited there over the years.
<https://tinyurl.com/bdh2wdtu>
“The size of the family, just the number of children that went on to become artists, had a huge impact because it helped really establish American art as a real practice,”
The Peales largely taught each other, often copying their compositions and painting the same elements in their still lifes. A single ceramic basket even appears across paintings by six different family members, including those by Sarah. This development of a distinct family style, however, may have helped obscure the talent of the Peale women, long overshadowed by their male relations.
<https://tinyurl.com/5xduwekx>
“Sarah’s been submerged under the Peale family, which in itself is not very well understood,” said Carol Eaton Soltis, a project associate curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and author of The Art of the Peales in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. “It becomes a three-ring circus, and Sarah becomes a minor attraction.
And she’s not. She’s a wonderful painter.”
Sarah studied first with her father James, and then with her cousin Rembrandt. At a time when formalized art education was rare, the Peale women had unique access to the field. Women were also long excluded from figure drawing classes, a foundation that was essential to the lucrative genre of history painting.
“Looking at the history of women artists, the ones who do actually make it as professionals, they had a male relative who could teach them, which meant they weren’t subjected to a lesser kind of training,”
<https://tinyurl.com/55h4bh2e>
Sarah’s first recorded work is a stunning self-portrait, completed at just 18 years old and one of her most enduring images. The work—and her PAFA debut that year—announced the arrival of a remarkable new talent.
Sarah followed in her sister Anna’s footsteps, but took her professional career one step further. Anna regularly exhibited at PAFA and sold work, though she stopped working after her second marriage. Sarah, on the other hand, made work for 60 years, opening a studio in Baltimore and working often in D.C. before she moved to St. Louis in 1847, living there for 30 years.
Part of the reason for Sarah’s relative obscurity is that she did not have an independent archive of her writings. There are few traces of Sarah’s life after she left Baltimore. The reason for the move remains something of a mystery. _artnet

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THE MOUNT WASHINGTON POST
<https://tinyurl.com/3yrz23pf> _LisaAnneAuerbach

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ART DURING WARTIME by Carter Ratcliff
<https://tinyurl.com/ym2sc3xh>
John Singer Sargent was his era’s preeminent portrait painter. He also made watercolor landscapes. These sketches, sparkling with accuracy, prompted the British War Memorials Committee to recruit him for the Allied effort in the First World War. He was too old to serve as a soldier but more than qualified to document the lives of those in uniform. Arriving at the Western Front in July 1918, Sargent was present the following month when the Germans sent an artillery barrage against Allied troops dug in at Arras. After the attack, Sargent saw British and American soldiers walking in single file, each with his hand on the shoulder of the man ahead of him. Blinded by mustard gas, they were dependent on an orderly to guide them to an aid station. From sketches of this dreadful scene Sargent painted Gassed, 1919, which now resides in the Imperial War Museum, London.
<https://tinyurl.com/2zfzp34s>
The best-known work of art made during wartime is no doubt Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, 1937, which the Spanish Republican government commissioned in the midst of its civil war with the fascist coalition led by Generalissimo Francisco Franco. First seen in the Spanish pavilion at an international exposition in Paris, the painting’s frieze of anguished figures commemorates the bombing of Guernica, a town at the heart of Basque territory and culture. The attack was the work of airplanes sent from Nazi Germany to support Franco. After the Parisian exposition closed, Guernica was exhibited in Scandinavia and London. When Franco triumphed, in 1939, the painting went on tour in the United States and then entered, at Picasso’s request, the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, in New York. Guernica was sent to Spain in 1981 and now resides in Madrid’s Reina Sofía National Museum Art Center.
Picasso made two other anti-war paintings: The Charnel House, 1944-45, and Massacre in Korea, <https://tinyurl.com/ysrcjvvf> 1951. Their moral point is clear: war and genocide are evil. He made thousands upon thousands of paintings, drawings, and prints that do not protest evil. What is the morality of these works, which address neither war nor any other bane of humanity? What is the moral weight of the landscape painting and portraiture Sargent resumed after spending a few months recording the horrors of war? If his pictorial dispatches from the Western Front are morally admirable, are his other pictures immoral? Amoral? Early modern writers provide answers to these questions: if a painting is good, it is morally good. In his Miscellaneous Reflections, published in 1711, Lord Shaftesbury says, “What is beautiful is harmonious and proportionable, what is harmonious and proportionable, is true; and what is at once both beautiful and true, is, of consequence, agreeable and good.” An abbreviated version of this doctrine appears at the end of John Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn, 1819: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
A faith in the unity of the loftiest virtues prevailed long before Shaftesbury articulated it. By the mid-1830s, this unity had dissolved, at least in the minds of Théophile Gautier and other avant-garde sensibilities who felt that the aesthetic had been crushed by its ethical obligations. Painting and poetry needed to be free to pursue those forms of beauty that transcend compunctions about truth and the common good. Hence art-for-art’s sake, a modern faith still persuasive to most of us, though we no longer use the phrase. But we—or many of us—still believe that art succeeds only when it is at liberty to focus on its richest aesthetic possibilities. A war may be raging but genuine art rises above current events and the moral concerns of ordinary life. Art is superior to morality. But is it? Does anything transcend the moral values that make humans humane?
Many artists of the modern period have cultivated an indifference to morality—or, if you like, have focused exclusively on the aesthetic—and yet that does not make it right. Moreover, bad people of the modern period have used art and its aura of superiority as cover for bad behavior—as a detergent to launder unsavory reputations. Works of art with especially bright and shimmering auras serve as trophies for oligarchs. These are serious problems. When dubious characters put the supposed purity of art to impure purposes, aesthetic value—or beauty, as Shaftesbury would say—is thrown out of focus and may be lost. We could try to solve these problems by reinstating Shaftesbury’s beauty-truth-goodness equation, but that cannot be done. We no longer believe in the metaphysical absolutes on which his equation depends. We need pragmatic solutions.
If, for example, we were to dispense with notions of art’s superiority, we’d free ourselves to see that the composition of a paintings or a poem or a sonata is a utilitarian endeavor pursued for down-to-earth purposes, just one of which is to animate a faculty crucial to our humanity: the power to empathize, to take you as seriously as I take myself. Art is not just self-expression. It is driven (however obliquely) by a concern for others and the world we inhabit, as are scientific research, maintenance of the infrastructure, and preservation of the rule of law. Artmaking is on an equal footing with these and all the other practical activities we must carry on even during wartime, especially during wartime, if we are to be civilized and society is to cohere.
<https://tinyurl.com/4wrt6zd4>
<https://tinyurl.com/yu72rcym> _CulturalCapital-Art,Politics,AndEverythingElse

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SONYA CLARK, "UNRAVELING" AND "UNRAVELED," 2015
<https://tinyurl.com/2rdy4en9> _MichaelLobel

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SONYA CLARK’S UNRAVELING: THE WORK IS THE WORK by greg
<https://tinyurl.com/jbemd3pa>
When I saw Sonya Clark’s Unraveling (2015) at Duke’s Nasher Museum a few years ago, I did not know she started the project of unraveling a confederate flag on April 9th, 2015, the 15oth anniversary of the confederacy’s surrender.
And I did not know until just now, while making this post inspired by Michael Lobel’s post <https://tinyurl.com/yeymr9ye> about Unraveling and Unraveled, the work where the flag has been reduced to three piles of red, white, and blue thread, that Unraveling is from an edition of 10, and that the Nasher’s is listed as “State: 4.”
And I love that the Nasher’s collection photo of the work is of people doing the work of unraveling. And if “State: 4” is a measure of how far along the flag is at the moment, fine. But I really hope the edition is not ten flags in various artful states of unraveling, depending on how not racist your acquisitions committee thinks they are. _greg.org

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ADOBE MILLING YELLOW JACKET, CO
<https://tinyurl.com/4xbcjkr2> _RuralIndexingProject

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69. THOMAS O’DEA, ANDERSONVILLE PRISON DRAWING by Rainey Knudson
<https://tinyurl.com/2s3jpbsh>
Thomas O’Dea, an Irish immigrant from Boston, was a Union soldier captured during the Civil War in May 1864. He was 16 years old. When he arrived at Andersonville, Georgia, an enclosure designed to house 10,000 prisoners held 35,000. In 1865 he was released: badly emaciated, with only ragged trousers and broken shoes to his name. He was one of the lucky ones.
The word “Andersonville” is synonymous with the horrific POW camps, both Southern and Northern, of the Civil War. During the 15 months Andersonville operated, more than 13,000 prisoners died from starvation, disease, and exposure. Captain Henry Wirz, the Swiss-German-born commander who kept a pack of dogs to attack prisoners, was the only Confederate soldier convicted and executed for war crimes.
14 years after his release, O’Dea saw a photograph that implied Andersonville was orderly and clean. He vowed to depict the prison he had known. Working nights after his day job as a bricklayer, he spent six years to complete a massive, 9-foot-wide drawing. Surrounding the main scene of the prison in August 1864—its deadliest month—are 19 vignettes of life in the prison. The drawing became an immediate sensation. In 1887, O’Dea ordered 10,000 lithograph copies, selling them for $5, with a reduced rate for Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) posts. A copy at the Andersonville site itself was removed after Southern objection.
Historian Lorien Foote said, “The suffering of prisoners did more to inhibit postwar reconciliation than any other episode of the war.” _TheImpatientReader

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BORN THIS DAY IN 1830, EADWEARD MUYBRIDGE. CELEBRATE!
<https://tinyurl.com/438pff25> _PublicDomainReview

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DARTMOUTH STUDENTS RENEW CALLS TO REMOVE LEON BLACK’S NAME FROM ARTS CENTER
<https://tinyurl.com/mssf3v88>
Students at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, have renewed calls to strip the name of billionaire collector Leon Black from the school’s visual arts center, citing his ties to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Dartmouth recently dropped César Chávez’s name from a fellowship after new sexual assault allegations emerged, but has yet to act on longstanding concerns about Black, raising broader questions about the legal, financial, and ethical complexities of renaming buildings tied to major gifts.
The Black Family Visual Arts Center (BVAC), which opened in 2012, was founded with the help of a $48 million donation from Black, an alumnus of the school (class of 1973), who has faced vocal criticism due to his long-term relationship with Epstein.
The Dartmouth community first called for Black’s name to be stripped from the art center building in 2021, shortly after Black stepped down as chairman of the board of New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
Oscar Rempe-Hiam, a current Dartmouth undergraduate (class of 2029) and a member of the student government, raised the renaming issue again at the Dartmouth Student Government’s first weekly meeting of spring term on April 5, according to the school’s newspaper, the Dartmouth.
Dartmouth did not respond to a request for comment. Last year, a spokesperson for the college said the institution had “no current financial relationship” with Black. _artnet

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THE SEA GIVETH
<https://tinyurl.com/2yakmsma> _ON&ON / Jeff Weiss

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ARCHITECTS ON THE GEFFEN GALLERIES by William Poundstone
<http://tiny.cc/pgm1101>
The Architect's Newspaper surveys 27 architects and influencers <https://tinyurl.com/387hkuay> on Peter Zumthor's new David Geffen Galleries at LACMA. By my quick tally, 10 of the reviews are positive; 2 are negative; and 15 are mixed or evasive.
Here's Michael Maltzan's positive reaction:
"Big, curvy, floating—for all the seeming detachments to the surrounding scene, Peter Zumthor’s new building at LACMA does everything to sidestep those preconceptions and criticisms. It can be slippery, it can be heavy-handed, sometimes both simultaneously, but it pushes and pulls the city around it into an undeniable conversation. … Putting aside exterior form for a moment, it’s ‘up there’ on the lifted plane of galleries where the design’s real newness resides. Here one meanders and weaves between city and art, simultaneously challenging and celebrating both. Can one be a flaneur inside a building?"
The prickliest review is Michael Bohn's:
"Los Angeles is notorious for commissioning world-renowned architects with less-than-ideal outcomes. This appears to be the case for LACMA’s David Geffen Galleries designed by Peter Zumthor, and I would argue the same for the adjacent Broad Contemporary Art Museum by Renzo Piano. I admired Peter Zumthor’s precise and tactile work when visiting his Therme Vals spa in Switzerland and the Kolumba Museum in Cologne. Possibly the pressures of value engineering, patron demands, political caution, and lack of attention to detailing makes design excellence difficult to achieve here. Perhaps decision-makers are more interested in the designer label rather than the value of the product"
Nobody had kind words for William Pereira's demolished campus. But Meara Daly and Joe Day each wistfully invoked Rem Koolhaas/OMA's never-built 2001 design for LACMA. Day writes,
"Opening between two museums overtly about film—the Academy of Motion Pictures Museum (2021) and the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art (2026)—Zumthor’s LACMA expansion is ironically the most cinematic of the three. And it should have been even more so. … Had LACMA built OMA’s more audacious, ‘x,y,z’ scheme, L.A. could have hosted an encyclopedic museum as reimagined by Godard. Instead, looking out from its hovering plenum, we see Midtown, especially the rest of Museum Mile, as if reshot by Antonioni. I suspect most won’t mind that trade. Another prediction: It’s best now, empty."
Rem Koolhaas' 2001 design for LACMA <http://tiny.cc/3hm1101> _LosAngelesCountyMuseumOnFire

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IT'S BEEN A WHILE, SO HERE YOU GO:
Joseph Désiré Court, The Mask (1837)
<https://tinyurl.com/3hjv63p6> _RabihAlameddine

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MAYBE TRYING A LITTLE TOO HARD TO SELL A PAINTING WITH A BIG HOLE IN IT?
<https://tinyurl.com/bdew86jv>
It's of some scholarly interest, but should probably just be in a museum storeroom until the other fragment is located. Alternative use until then
<https://tinyurl.com/mtpxv6v6> _JesseLocker

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IT'S NATIONAL DANCE THE WALTZ DAY!
Black Range Waltz, linocut by Harold Edward West, c. 1939-1940:
<https://tinyurl.com/5c76me4u> _‪PeterHuestis‬