OLD NEWS

SILK FUKUSA (GIFT COVER) EMBROIDERED WITH A FLIGHT OF CRANES, JAPAN, 1800-50, EDO PERIOD
<https://tinyurl.com/6zze69n5> _RabihAlameddine

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STUBBS: PORTRAIT OF A HORSE by Jonathan Jones
<https://tinyurl.com/2p4jb6xf>
Everything keeps getting simpler and shallower – even exhibitions at the National Gallery. A decade ago, if it put on a show about George Stubbs, the 18th-century painter of the natural world, you’d get a thorough survey of the Liverpool-born artist who left a huge number of great portraits of animals – not just horses but a zebra, a kangaroo, a rhinoceros. But in 2026, the National gives him a single room aimed at the most incurious of audiences.
It is certainly a beautiful room. Towering at the centre is a spectacular painting of a riderless, unsaddled, rearing horse called Scrub. As you contemplate his chestnut flanks, something weird happens: a network of veins becomes visible and the ribcage materialises like an X-ray. Look to the left and you see where Stubbs got such an uncanny ability to see inside Scrub. Some of the stunning drawings he did as research for his 1766 book The Anatomy of the Horse hang like spectres against the dark green wall. Stubbs took these horses apart, hiding out in a cottage in Lincolnshire where he could sling up their carcasses and reverently eviscerate them. The flayed, dissected bodies possess a mysterious dignity.
<https://tinyurl.com/y89t5966>
And that’s about it, bar a couple of later, smaller horse portraits and an interloping sheep that holds its own in this company. It didn’t take me nearly long enough, even with repeated lingering looks, and I’m a passionate fan. And one aspect of this is very odd – why do we need a display about a grand Stubbs horse portrait when, at the end of a dramatic architectural sightline in the museum’s permanent collection displays, always admired by a crowd of visitors, you’ll find Whistlejacket, <https://tinyurl.com/2hye5ymc> his greatest horse portrait of all?
One of the reasons Whistlejacket enthrals modern onlookers is that Stubbs left him in olive-toned emptiness, his fetlocks casting shadows in the void, making this equine painting an icon of conceptual art. Scrub, too, is full of nuance and poetic shadow but not as perfect a painting as Whistlejacket. He stands by a lake in a romantic wooded landscape that is quite cursory, and is placed unnaturally within it. So what we have here is a horse portrait that’s not quite as good as Whistlejacket.
Yet there’s a major historical link between the horses themselves. Both these famous thoroughbreds belonged to the 2nd Marquess of Rockingham, gambler, horse aficionado, liberal (or at least Whig) politician, who commissioned Stubbs to paint both for the grand classical interior of his south Yorkshire stately home, known today as Wentworth Woodhouse.
To tell that story means digging into 18th-century Britain with all its many contradictions, its scientific Enlightenment, its discovery of Romanticism and the turf, the shadow of its slave trade. But this exhibition doesn’t dig. It shares a tiptoeing, delicate, less than totally committed quality with the National Gallery’s other current show of Stubbs’s contemporary, Joseph Wright of Derby <https://tinyurl.com/58b9e7t9> .
Stubbs and Wright belonged to the radical, forward-looking side of 18th-century Britain. Both were born far from London, had careers outside the Royal Academy establishment and were entranced by the new science, the gaze of the Enlightenment. Stubbs rightly believed he was doing science when he dissected horses. He is an artist whose themes of power, control and freedom are full of political suggestiveness. The son of a tanner, he grew up surrounded with the stench of slaughtered animals – and the sight of human oppression in Liverpool, a slaving port.
His paintings of animals ask questions about how we treat other species – and other humans. Horses, for him, are servants or slaves whose souls are much finer than those of their masters. They are the Houyhnhnms, the sensitive, wise horses in Jonathan Swift’s 1726 satire Gulliver’s Travels, and their masters the horrible Yahoos. In his portraits of Scrub and Whistlejacket he sets them free.
<https://tinyurl.com/mwydmkb8>
Scrub isn’t just a fine piece of horseflesh. The glimpses of his anatomy are not just Stubbs showing off his science. Rather, he does something comparable with Rembrandt’s painting The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp:<https://tinyurl.com/yr793n4m> through the bloody facts of anatomy he suggests the inner mystery of being, the interior self … the soul?
You begin to see that the anatomical drawings are ghostly. The spirits of these horses emanate from the page in a visionary way I’d compare with William Blake <https://tinyurl.com/yc5pcprw> – except that Stubbs is a much better artist than Blake.
George Stubbs is a true British great who deserves as many exhibitions as Constable and Turner, and many more than Blake – but he still gets dismissed as a “sporting artist” or seen as a stooge of the aristocracy, his radical vision going above our heads, and the best the National Gallery can afford him is one room. I loved everything in it. But he deserves so much more and we do too, for this artist could change the world if we all saw with his eyes. _GuardianUK

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LIVE
<https://tinyurl.com/2n5mbmm6> _DavidShrigley

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49. PRAIRIE SCHOONER by Rainey Knudson
<https://tinyurl.com/uytt5h4d>
People embarked on the grueling quest for many reasons, not just to get rich. Always to make a new life, yes, but most fundamentally, the desire to get out from under the establishment back home. This was the place they thought they could shake off the encumbrances and dead ends of a clotted old order. They pulled up stakes and drove themselves relentlessly, piling all their belongings into a covered wagon that sailed the great prairie like a ship, their families walking alongside the oxen, heading into a dream they called West.
That opportunity simply didn’t exist in the Old World. One wonders: at what level did it ever truly exist in the New? We change our location, we try to leave our identity behind, sometimes our names even. But when we finally get where we’re going, we find it’s still just life. We humans are still ourselves, self-organizing into ever-shifting establishments. We scan the horizon, imagining the unburdened life just beyond the next ridge. Trying to get in. Trying to get out.
But there is always an establishment trying to establish itself at the most personal, most local level, as well as society-wide. What does the dream of freedom look like, that it calls us to make the difficult journey? We pile everything we have, everything we are, into our vehicles for chasing horizons that keep disappearing when they’re reached. And we’re surprised to find the wagon is still carrying the same cargo.
_TheImpatientReader

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A THREAD FOR THE DAY.
First up: Vincent van Gogh, "Shoes," 1888
<https://tinyurl.com/bdzamf37>
Philip Guston, "Shoes," 1980, published 1981
<https://tinyurl.com/mvd4hdm2>
Robert Gober, "Untitled Leg [with Shoe!]," 1989-90
<https://tinyurl.com/3fejj7xd>
Gabriel Orozco, "Empty Shoe Box," 1993
<https://tinyurl.com/2yhpxt9h>
Meret Oppenheim, "Ma gouvernante - My nurse - Mein Kindermädchen," 1936/1937.- ‪Carolina A. Miranda
<https://tinyurl.com/5xt6shsk>
Sherrie Levine, "Shoe Sale" exhibition, 3 Mercer Street Gallery, NYC, 1977
<https://tinyurl.com/mr2k4aj9> _MichaelLobel

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LUCIAN FREUD MASTERED THE ART OF LOSTNESS by Michael Glover
<https://tinyurl.com/c48ukzzd>
Death can be such a miserable nose-dive for any artist. Lucian Freud is deep into the 15th year of his posthumous life as a celebrated figurative painter. Where do the custodians of his reputation take him from here?
I am asking myself this question in London, where Lucian stalked abroad in his studio in the city’s W9 area, in his clumpy old boots, for so long, brushes all a-bristle. And, more particularly this morning, in the National Portrait Gallery, an institution that backs up against the National Gallery as if the two were a brace of vain aristocratic duelists. This place has shown Freud off to great effect, more than once within relatively recent memory. Does anyone want to hear the small, sweet tune played over again, this time a little more faintly?
<https://tinyurl.com/msayu2f4>
What’s the big idea behind Drawing into Painting, a new show of about 170 of Freud’s pieces, then? What about digging deep into the archives, and pestering private collectors for their Lucianic riches? That is precisely what has happened. And the overarching theme? How drawing fed into his painting from first to last, and how print-making played a crucial role, too. We see some works that we already know far too well, but not that many, and several others that may pleasantly surprise us, some adjuncts, others off-cuts, and a few real gems.
Let’s think about what we knew relatively little about — the stuff of Lucian’s childhood. The son of an architect, grandson of Sigmund, he was fleeted away from Germany in 1933 at the age of 11 like many Jewish children. Frank Auerbach and other artists had similar experiences.
The earliest drawings show off his passion for steamboats. There are also images of a birdhouse and flowers in a vase, all meticulously rendered. His 1940s portraits often possess a cold, forensic ferocity. A pen and ink on torn paper from 1941 called “The Village Boys” is particularly nasty. Several unruly kids appear to be scrapping on the ground in a rolled-up ball of rudeness and no-holds-barred pugnacity. Lucian seems to have relished the sight — quoted in the captions, he called them “weedy, nasty, but strange.” He’s very good at painting lostness, people painfully adrift from themselves.
<https://tinyurl.com/5rdbyyvu>
But what about the man himself? He often treated women with contempt, and his behavior toward his own children could be questionable. Does any of that matter now? Should we care more than the experts seem to?
So many lovers and wives and ex-wives and children are shown off to good or ill effect in this show that it’s almost yawn-worthy, but some works do jump out at us. There is much brutality in the lumpish mottling of his wife Suzy Boyt’s beaten about nose in a painting improbably entitled “Woman Smiling.” Did she hate this picture as much as England’s queen must have hated her grim portrait, with her climbing jug-handles for hair? It was all grist to Freud’s mill. All that sounds ferociously, relentlessly studied, and icily technical. David Hockney was amazed that it took Freud 120 hours of scrutiny to capture him just so in 2002.
Freud never spares himself in his portraits either. If anything, he seems to be trying to discover just how repellently unknowable he can prove himself to be. Very seems to be the answer.
<https://tinyurl.com/4s5dkn9w> _Hyperallergic

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THE MOUNT WASHINGTON POST
<https://tinyurl.com/2d6eut3e> _LisaAnneAuerbach

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FOR SALE: THE SPIRAL JETTY, 16MM by greg
<https://tinyurl.com/ycjx78ye>
I never thought I’d be back in the bidding on The Spiral Jetty business, but here we are.
A 16mm print of Robert Smithson’s film, The Spiral Jetty that belonged to a retired art history professor is selling next week. The condition of the 50-year-old film seems fine, but who knows if it’s playable? How many film prints are there? Does it matter? Is this an artifact people want [to spend $6-8,000 on]?
Is it 20x better than just buying the DVD from EAI? Oh, wait, now you really have to be an educational institution to buy it? Are any retired art professors selling the DVDs, too? _greg.org

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1-2-3
3000yrs-14yrs-29mins
<https://tinyurl.com/y9fc33n8> _ON&ON / Jefrf Weiss

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IT’S TIME TO GIVE ANNIBALE CARRACCI SOME OF REMBRANDT’S SPOTLIGHT
<https://tinyurl.com/tvurpwv3>
Dutch artist Rembrandt van Rijn has cropped up in a lot of headlines and exhibitions over the past year. From a four-venue traveling print exhibition organized by the American Federation of Arts (currently at the Taft Museum of Art) to the largest private collection of his paintings going on view at the Norton Museum of Art, plus a record-breaking drawing sale and the rediscovery of a 1633 painting at the Rijksmuseum, Rembrandt’s presence is inescapable.
I can understand why Rembrandt draws so much fanfare. An Old Master of the Dutch Golden Age, he has name recognition within and beyond the art world that is rivaled by few. He has been dubbed one of the best within all of Western art history for his distinctive execution of light and realism.
Yet a generation earlier, another artist deserves as much pomp and circumstance: Annibale Carracci. Less familiar today, his contributions were equally groundbreaking, and there is one person definitely knew them well: Rembrandt himself.
<https://tinyurl.com/bdhus8w8>
While Annibale and Rembrandt didn’t know one another, separated by a generation and half a continent, Rembrandt was familiar with and influenced by Annibale; he owned pieces by or attributed to Annibale, with some scholars even positing he borrowed and adapted from the Italian artist’s Christ of Caprarola (1597).
Carracci was born in 1560 in Bologna, Italy, part of a creative family. In the early 1580s along with his brother Agostino Caracci and cousin Ludovico Caracci, Annibale opened a painters’ studio and school, the Accademia degli Incamminati, often referred to as the Accademia dei Carracci. Annibale, the most assertive of the three, helmed the school.
While not the first formal art academy to be established in Europe, it was still a first of its kind. The Carracci school trained its artists both in theory and practice and created an opportunity for them to draw from live models—an activity formerly banned by the Counter Reformation Catholic Church. It is considered the first major art school to prioritize life drawing and became the blueprint for other, later schools across the continent.
<https://tinyurl.com/yc5fvc32>
The Accademia dei Carracci under Annibale’s stewardship also marked another significant change in the trajectory of art history beyond its structure and curriculum, and that is the perception of artists themselves. The academy was foundational in the transition of artists being seen on par with musicians and poets with their own point of view and creative agency rather than simply artisans or craftspeople.
While this shift in perspective certainly didn’t happen overnight or even wholly in his lifetime, I’d like to think Annibale was well aware that he was planting a seed that would continue to grow and flourish—and it has. Though the crux of my belief that Annibale should be held in similar esteem to Rembrandt doesn’t specifically reside in his work creating an art academy, the import of his contributions to the status of artists overall cannot be understated. It is arguably unparalleled by any other artist of the Baroque period, and rivals that of painter and architect Giorgio Vasari whose seminal Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects (1550) pioneered the artist biography as a cornerstone of understanding art history, helping raise the status and perspective on artists.
<https://tinyurl.com/srenkurj>
To understand how revolutionary Annibale’s painting practice was, it’s important to first look at the prevailing styles and trends of the time.
The High Renaissance, dated roughly to between 1490 and 1527, prized compositional harmony, extreme technical skill, and an advanced degree of naturalism—all qualities exemplified by artists like Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and Michelangelo. As the 16th century progressed, Mannerism took hold, identifiable by its elongated and dramatically posed figures, razor sharp perspective, and bold color palettes, with artists like El Greco and Parmigianino.
The three Carracci spurned the affectations and fakeness of Mannerism and instead championed a return to naturalism like that of Northern Italian Renaissance painters like Titian.
<https://tinyurl.com/48pz32yd>
The work Annibale, along with his brother and cousin, helped lay the early foundations for the emergence of what is now recognized as the Baroque period alongside artists like Artemisia Gentileschi, Gaulli (Baciccio), and, of course, Caravaggio.
And though much of Annibale’s work reflects the dramatic yet unwaveringly naturalistic qualities that are associated with the period, three works stand out as truly radical. Two are dated to the early 1580s and are both titled The Butcher’s Shop, one belonging to the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, the other to Christ Church Picture Gallery in Oxford. Each composition offers an unflinching look into a 16th-century butcher shop; rows of meat on hooks, entrails being removed, skin peeled back, a goat being pinned down by an attendant, likely to soon be dispatched.
Among the rather gruesome scene in the Christ Church version are tucked more moments of everyday life, a guard or soldier reaches into his coin purse as the butcher weighs out a piece of meat, and an old woman in the background waits patiently as an attendant reaches for her order. In the Kimbell’s iteration, one of the butchers pauses and breaks the fourth wall, meeting our the viewer’s gaze as though to see if we are waiting to make a purchase—still now more than 400 years later.
<https://tinyurl.com/yvasaths>
The third of these radical paintings is The Bean Eater dated to roughly the same period between 1580 and 1590. Blunt and uncompromising, it incorporates both elements of still life and portraiture, portraying a simple yet hearty meal spread and a common laborer or peasant mid-bite. These three paintings are some of the earliest Italian examples of genre paintings, a style of art that would later become commonplace in art history, focusing on the people, activities, and settings of everyday life.
Looking more closely at the execution of this trio of works, the brushwork is loose, particularly in many of the details such as the fat veining the meat in The Butcher Shop or the highlights on the collar of The Bean Eater. A radical departure from the meticulous rendering of his contemporaries, the three paintings mirror mid-19th century realism, and in my opinion would look quite at home alongside works by the likes of Gustav Courbet or Jean-François Millet who worked centuries after Annibale.
<https://tinyurl.com/z8zb2x82>
The extent to which Annibale directly influenced Rembrandt is diluted due to the fact that Rembrandt was influenced by a whole host of artists and styles and eras—from his contemporaries to antiquities. To understand Rembrandt, one must look at what came before. Annibale is there, of central significance in the fabric of art history.
Foundational contributions have a way of disappearing into everything that follows them. The butcher’s shop paintings, the Bean Eater, the academy that changed how Europe thought about artists— these aren’t footnotes to someone else’s story. In light of the absolute deluge of recent exhibitions and events tied to Rembrandt, I don’t think it unfair to ask that at least a sliver of the contemporary spotlight be cast back on Annibale. His pioneering work both as a painter and art academy founder helped shape not only the trajectory of Western painting itself, but the foundation from which we consider artists and what they do._Annikka Olsen _artnet

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STAIRS TO NOWHERE SIDNEY, IL
<https://tinyurl.com/p3jr5z2e> _RuralIndexingProject

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CONTROVERSIAL NUDE WOMAN SCULPTURE GETS EXTENDED RUN AT SAN FRANCISCO
<https://tinyurl.com/mt3afc4c>
The San Francisco Arts Commission has extended the reign of the controversial nude sculpture at Embarcadero Plaza.
On Tuesday, March 4, commissioners voted to keep the temporary installation of "R-Evolution" on display through October. The 48-foot-tall, steel-and-mesh figure of a naked woman by Petaluma artist Marco Cochrane was previously approved to be on view from mid-March 2025 to early March.
The resolution passed with one dissenting vote from commissioner JD Beltran, who also voted "nay" to the initial installation. He said Tuesday that the original approval lacked a "serious public comment process" and attracted "tremendous pushback" after it was put on display.
Because the sculpture is a temporary, privately funded work hosted by the Recreation and Park Department, it did not go through a period of public feedback before it was initially installed last year
<https://tinyurl.com/8dzfarvf>
"R-Evolution" was created for Burning Man in 2015. Its presentation was sponsored by the private Sijbrandij Foundation - the group also responsible for the city's Big Art Loop, which showcases 100 large-scale sculptures throughout the city - with a budget of around $300,000.
The figure's body is based on Bay Area model Deja Solis. Cochrane explained the sculpture's position is "meditating in the mountain pose, just being present in the moment." An interior mechanism also makes the sculpture's chest subtly move for an hour a day, as though it's breathing.
<https://tinyurl.com/y3p5wb7r>
"What is disappointing and confusing about this is the city allowing private money to come in and commandeer very public space," Rebecca Camacho, whose gallery is within walking distance of the sculpture in Jackson Square, told the Chronicle at the time. "It's a slippery slope when you open the gates to basically anybody who has money and can put something into a very public environment and create their own statement."
Meanwhile, Mayor Daniel Lurie has been a supporter of the Sijbrandij Foundation's work placing art along the Embarcadero, calling the installations helpful to downtown revitalization efforts. _SFChronicle

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TIGHTROPE WALKER MARGRET ZIMMERMANN OVER THE RUINS OF COLOGNE’S HAYMARKET 1946.
<https://tinyurl.com/mrysrtw4> _JesseLocker

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EU SAYS IT COULD PULL FUNDING TO VENICE BIENNALE OVER RUSSIAN PAVILION by Alex Greenberger
The European Union said it could pull funding to the Venice Biennale if the show goes through with hosting Russia, adding to mounting furor over plans by the country to show at the world’s most important art exhibition for the first time since its 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
Henna Virkkunen and Glenn Micallef, respectively the EU’s commissioners for technology and culture, said in a joint statement that staging the Russian Pavilion ran aground of the EU’s stance on the country, whose war in Ukraine is still ongoing.
“This decision by the Fondazione Biennale is not compatible with the EU’s collective response to Russia’s brutal aggression,” they wrote. “Should the Fondazione Biennale go forward with its decision to allow Russia’s participation, we will examine further action, including the suspension or termination of an ongoing EU grant to the Biennale Foundation.”
They called Russia’s war in Ukraine “illegal” and said, “Culture promotes and safeguards democratic values, fosters open dialogue, diversity and freedom of expression, and should never be used as a platform for propaganda.”
Queried about the Russian Pavilion on Monday, the Biennale directed to a statement from last week in which the exhibition allows any country recognized by Italy to have a pavilion and that the show “rejects any form of exclusion or censorship of culture and art.”
This is the first time Russia has participated in the Biennale since 2019. In 2022, the pavilion closed because its curator and artists made the decision to shutter their show. In 2024, Russia ceded its pavilion to Bolivia, which staged an exhibition of its own there.
The 2022 Biennale appeared to feature a show of support for Ukraine. That edition featured a special pro-Ukraine showing staged in the Giardini, one of the Biennale’s main venues. “The aim of this project is giving a voice to artists and the art community of Ukraine as well as other countries in solidarity with the people of Ukraine in the aftermath of the brutal invasion by the Russian government, and to create a space for debate, conversation and support to Ukrainian culture,” the Biennale said at the time.
Ukraine and Lithuania have also bitterly called on the Biennale to drop Russia’s participation, which allows the nation to compete for one of the Biennale’s main prizes, the Golden Lion for Best National Participation.
One Venice art space has even weighed in on the matter. The PinchukArtCentre, a space run by Ukrainian collector Victor Pinchuk that regularly stages events with the Biennale’s blessing, said this week that it was “appalled” by the decision to allow Russia in this time.
“Inaction does not equal neutrality,” wrote the PinchukArtCentre. “We therefore call upon La Biennale di Venezia to take a clear position and refuse the participation of the Russian Federation, thereby condemning the illegal war of aggression it continues to wage against Ukraine.” _ARTnews

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THE KING OF THE CROWS CONFERRING WITH HIS POLITICAL ADVISORS,
a page from the Arabic version of Kalila wa dimna, dated 1210 CE.
<https://tinyurl.com/m9rszyyp> _RabihAlameddine