OLD NEWS

BORN ON THIS DAY IN 1495, IN FLORENCE, GIOVANNI BATTISTA DI JACOPO.
Better known as Rosso Fiorentino,
the red-headed Florentine.
Here, playing a birthday tune,
a musical cherub from 1521
<https://tinyurl.com/2ysblczd>
Rosso Fiorentino,
the red-headed Florentine,
being wild & weird in his 20s
with the Deposition from 1521.
What mind would invent figures like these?
<https://tinyurl.com/2fkauxsn>
Weeping John the Evangelist -- a redhead,
like the artist who painted him!
<https://tinyurl.com/4pc64cc8>
Men at the top of the cross:
Christ, looking green and dead
and strangely happy.
His friends: frantic & agitated.
<https://tinyurl.com/497dv3ad>
This woman at the foot of Rosso's cross,
throwing herself across the picture
to the feet of the three other woman --
such geometric extremity of grief.
Fascinating.
<https://tinyurl.com/d4vu37yr>
Rosso's other women at the cross,
so stylized and planar.
Remarkable in 1521
or really any time.
<https://tinyurl.com/5dkwf8xa>
Jigsaw puzzle of anguished bodies
from Rosso Fiorentino's powerful Lamentation, 1530s
<https://tinyurl.com/3t756uc7>
Young man, seated, 1529.
He's strangely undefined a
lthough sitting on a very sharp & beautiful carpet!
<https://tinyurl.com/y8jex4c9>
Old man in profile
by the red-head of Florence.
<https://tinyurl.com/4xtsbpd8>
Moses defending the daughters of Jethro.
Another wonderfully strange painting
from Rosso Fiorentino's crazy 20s.
<https://tinyurl.com/3rbjbshs>
Jethro’s daughters:
a strange set of dolls,
as envisioned by young Rosso Fiorentino.
<https://tinyurl.com/4juajk25>
An incredibly intense young man,
painted in 1517 by Rosso Fiorentino,
<https://tinyurl.com/m5bv48d4>
Not intense, just bored:
Man with a helmet,
<https://tinyurl.com/m8pbt5dc>
A woman and her hair-styling, 1530s,
<https://tinyurl.com/2p9s4y4d>
May I present Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia:
smart, athletic, successful ruler,
had good taste (my patron!)
& generally cool.
For International Womens Day
<https://tinyurl.com/2ethabrv>
The creation of Eve, 1524,
in Santa Maria della Pace, Rome.
By Rosso Fiorentino,
Another offering for International Womens Day
<https://tinyurl.com/2xkvklyb>
More from Rosso's wild 20s:
Dead Christ with Angels.
Intensely spiritual?
Or just plain kinky?
You decide.
Today is Rosso's 529th birthday
<https://tinyurl.com/4f89k49m>
Dead.
Or not.
Or what?
Rosso's Christ, 1520s.
<https://tinyurl.com/hxbyz5xk>
Deeply spiritual or weirdly creepy?
You decide!
Holy Family, 1520,
<https://tinyurl.com/y6xexryt>
Stern, solid beauty of dead Christ's guardian angels,
<https://tinyurl.com/4v2mr8hh>
Sacra Conversazione,
from Rosso Fiorentino's creepy & weird period, 1521.
Well, we all experiment in our 20s, right?
<https://tinyurl.com/4wzcksy6>
You interrupted him!
Man with a letter, 1518,
by Rosso Fiorentino.
Today was his day.
<https://tinyurl.com/ypn795sk> _Dr.PeterPaulRubens

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JOSEPH BEUYS MIGHT BE THE 20TH CENTURY’S MOST INFLUENTIAL ARTIST— WE HAVE HIM ALL WRONG.
<https://tinyurl.com/2krb7vzr>
Joseph Beuys was full of contradictions—in his art and in his life. Born in Krefeld, Germany, in 1921, he enlisted in the Hitler Youth months before membership was mandatory. At 18, he worked in a circus, and two years later, he volunteered for the Nazi Air Force. After serving on the front lines of the wrong side of history, he crafted a public persona as Germany’s healer, identifying as a “shaman.” He died young, at 64, and is remembered as a leftist radical, even a naive utopian artist, as well as a founding member of the first Green Party. He helped usher in Germany’s Erinnerungskultur (“culture of remembrance”) and was dubbed by art historian Benjamin Buchloh the “first artist to address the history of fascism.” Beuys was a Nazi and then fashioned himself as a healer, stretching the saying “I contain multitudes” to the absolute limit.
<https://tinyurl.com/55j6wcnk>
Beuys never apologized, took responsibility, or even accounted for his role in the Nazi annihilation. Several artworks he made around the topic are marked by discomfiting ambiguity. His only public war monument, Memorial for the Dead of the World Wars (1958–59), is a troubling shape—a crucifix—and its title is glaringly vague. And though he was evasive about the Holocaust, when it came to cheerier topics, he was downright blunt, prone to hippie-dippy sloganeering. “Everyone is an artist” was his most famous line. For bright-eyed Beuys, this meant that everything could be art and, by extension, society could be remade.
In hindsight, his utopianism clearly failed—at least if we take him at his word. But a convincing new book by the art historian Daniel Spaulding—Joseph Beuys and History, the first monographic study in English—suggests we shouldn’t, and instead proposes reading him as having acted in bad faith.
For Spaulding, “the problems Beuys makes properly unbearable” are worth confronting head-on; his life and art emerge as synecdoche for the failures of modernism and the grappling that ensued. And “though sometimes taken for one,” Spaulding writes, “Beuys was not a fool.” His sculptures, like his persona, stage multiple, contradictory meanings. Flow and stasis coincide in sculptures Beuys called “batteries,” like Dia Beacon’s Fond III/3 (1979)—sheets of copper resting on stacks of felt. Copper conducts energy, and felt produces warmth through insulation, but it also blocks currents. This work is insistently material, but also metaphorically charged—Beuys’s signature. That trauma and healing recur in the form of lard can be traced back to Beuys’s self-mythologizing at its finest: After a wartime plane crash in Crimea, as his fable went, Tartar nomadswrapped him in fat and felt to keep him alive. Here, care is born from wreckage, even the wreckage of war, and his life is sustained by fat from bodies, presumably animal, now dead and dismembered.
<https://tinyurl.com/4n2hu27x>
Some of Beuys’s dialectics are more disturbing still. Utopia meets dystopia, Germany’s past (the Holocaust) colliding with its idealized future—which Beuys envisioned as “free democratic socialism.” He thought it was both impossible and necessary for artists to speak to the horrors of modernity that the Holocaust epitomized. But since Auschwitz, as Beuys put it, could “never be represented in an image,” he offered positive counter-images instead.
A prime example is his 1979 Guggenheim retrospective, which he described as an image of contemporary capitalism and a vision of a world yet to come. He says Utopia, but we see Holocaust, at least near the end of the show, where he exhibited a pile of felt suits followed by a rusted rail, Tram Stop (1961–76), and then a giant slab of fat, like remnants of a pile of bodies at the end of a train line.
Here, Spaulding offers an interpretation he says “ought to be repellent”: Beuys’s doubling lays the Holocaust bare as a logical extension of capitalist modernity—the West’s attempt to organize the world into a hierarchical system, with accumulation sparing nothing, piling up even human bodies.If this sounds like a violent equivocation, it should: Spaulding calls it perhaps Beuys’s most outrageous proposition.And if it sounds like a metaphor, it is also material: the Wirtschaftswunder (“economic miracle”) of the 1950s grew, quite literally, out of genocide.
<https://tinyurl.com/2wwvya49>
All the doubling makes Beuys a tricky figure. And it’s not clear how intentional it all was: Was his healer persona a clever conceptual act, or proof of his repression and self‑delusion? Probably both; and Spaulding does not—and presumably cannot—parse this out. Instead, he focuses on what the doubling does. Taken in good faith, Beuys’s evasive equivocating risked obstructing rather than enabling an honest reckoning with the past, Germany’s or his own. But it did something else too. Spaulding’s book centers around Beuys’s “economimeses,” a term borrowed from Derrida to describe how his work mimicked capital in order to critique it. Capital, after all, is an abstraction that mediates all social relations; Beuys wagered that art could also do this, and do it better. He made work attempting to prove this point.
Where his contemporaries, like Andy Warhol, turned to commodities and readymades as capitalism’s metonyms, Beuys focused on capitalism as a system and on money as a mediator, signing bank notes and writing “Kunst = Kapital” (“Art = Capital”) on them. The postmodernism coming out of Warhol’s Factory was nihilistic, but Beuys’s PoMo held hope and horror simultaneously, distinguishing irreconcilable, contradictory meanings from total meaninglessness.
<https://tinyurl.com/3ypzm3jk>
But why money? Society had been remade through economic intervention several times within Beuys’s lifetime. The Nazis exploited economic crisis to further fascism. Soon, Germany split along capitalist and communist lines. Then, a new currency—the deutsche mark—upended life once again, wiping out personal savings while also flooding shops with new goods. By the early ’70s, Nixon put an end to the system that backed global currencies with gold, reimagining money’s meaning and materials—sounds a bit like sculpture, no? Beuys thought so. Turning banknotes into artworks increased their value and proved his pithy point.
Where both capital and art assign meaning to material things, according to Karl Marx, capitalism’s meaning-making is always doubled or split. Objects have use value as well as immaterial value, material reality mingling with affective attachments and symbolic charge. Beuys’s meanings, Spaulding argues, are similarly split; think of his battery, his fat, his Guggenheim installation.
Beuys was fascinated by totalizing systems—not just art and capital, but also nature. Spaulding deems him “the first artist … to make environmentalist concerns an integral part of his practice” and describes I Like America and America Likes Me (1974) as a small‑scale ecosystem: For three days, two species, a human (Beuys) and a coyote, lived in a closed loop of a room, augmented by inputs like straw, felt, food, and water, and outputs like feces and symbolism.
Spaulding spends most of his book on Beuys’s ecological installation Honigpumpe am Arbeitsplatz (Honey Pump at the Workplace), 1977, which proposed a model society inspired by bees. It was installed only once, for documenta 6; later, at the Guggenheim, its components were decommissioned and displayed on the ground. In Kassel, a pump circulated honey through plastic tubes that snaked around the Museum Fridericianum. Beuys likened this honey to blood, but also to money: a substance whose circulation keeps a body or an economy alive.
<https://tinyurl.com/yzwhuttw>
Beuys—who had survived a heart attack two years earlier—described the pump as both a heart and a central bank. He said that money once functioned as a universal means of exchange, but now it flowed through central institutions that issued it in immaterial forms, like credit and debt. Honey promised something better: sweet sustenance produced by and for a collective.
Spaulding critiques Honigpumpe’s utopianism, comparing it unfavorably to Pasolini’s sadomasochistic anti‑fascist film Saló (1975). Pasolini’s infamous coprophagia, Spaulding argues, disrupts the normal flow of biological systems, which stand in for social systems. Eating shit, in other words, swaps automatism for autonomy and offers a way out; Honigpumpe offers only a closed loop.
But given its sticky, viscous quality, isn’t honey more likely to clog the system? It’s unclear from photos whether this happened at documenta 6, and few critics commented on Beuys’s installation at the time. But try sipping honey through a straw; it isn’t easy. Beuys may have said, “Honey is flowing,” but aren’t we to take his words in bad faith? After all, he also claimed his felt-and-copper works were batteries conducting spiritual energy.
Abjection is, per its main theorist Julia Kristeva, anything that disturbs borders, systems, or rules—which is why for Spaulding, via Derrida, it is a form of freedom. In Beuys’s world, this freedom is essential: Where the Holocaust epitomized modernism’s abject failure to systematize humanity, art was proof that we could shape the world and act freely. Sticky substances are famously hard to contain neatly, to systematize. And while Spaulding notes that honey is bee regurgitation, he misses yet another of its more disturbing qualities: Honey is a natural antibiotic, death and healing rolled into one.
And what about the queen bee? Spaulding does not consider her; but Beuys did, at least cursorily, making wax reliefs in her image as early as 1952. The queen raises the question: Is a hive a worker’s utopia, or an authoritarian society?The doubling matters: Beuys’s criticsnote echoes of Nazism, pointing to his words rather than his work. The charge hinges on Beuys’s language of “social sculpture,” which bears an unsettling resemblance to a claim by Hitler’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels: “A statesman is also an artist. For him, the people is merely what stone is for a sculptor.” But the comparison is flimsy—one version is fascist (the Führer sculpts the people), the other communal (the people sculpt themselves). Which is it for the bees? Probably neither, since both “queen” and “hive-mind” are human metaphors.
And it’s metaphors that Spaulding relies on for apiary analogies, borrowing heavily from textual sources from the likes of Marx and Warhol. The move privileges language over materials—a familiar academic habit, though a surprising choice given the book’s brilliant account of the dissonance between metaphor and material under capitalism, and given its charge to compare Beuys’s work with his words. This, of course, is harder to do with a work the author could not have possibly seen installed, but still it’s worth considering that, with Honigpumpe, Beuys is smarter than he seems; Spaulding, after all, convincingly argues that we read him that way, that we “take [his] metaphors literally.”
Still, Spaulding is right to conclude that Beuys laid bare agonizing existential and political problems as the first step toward resolving them. And he is right to lament that since Beuys’s death, this thorny territory has “mostly been abandoned rather than worked through.” Social practice and relational aesthetics, he writes, offer neat and sanitized versions of Beuys’s legacy, focusing earnestly on solutions in an attempt to avoid his failures and complications.
Any art history book that defends a morally compromised dead white man, never mind a former Nazi, is bound to be unfashionable. And yet, the timing of Joseph Beuys and History is sadly apt, because it forces readers who scoff at Beuys to look at themselves: What are you doing now, as fascism resurges and the climate collapses? Beuys flailed, but his blend of impotence and righteousness—as extreme and cringeworthy as it was—is also relatable. One only wishes that the contrast between his time and ours felt starker.
_Emily Watlington _ArtInAmerica

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WALK OFF
<https://tinyurl.com/4wjayx9p> _ON&ON / Jeff Weiss

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THE CANONIZATION OF FRIDA KAHLO
<https://tinyurl.com/2p6dbszy>
Frida Kahlo is already a canonical Mexican artist, but Frida: Making of an Icon at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston positions her as an emblem of the metaphorical and geographical borderlands. With an emphasis on the reception of Kahlo’s work across times and cultures in the past century, the exhibition blasts apart any crystallized conception of the artist until no easily digestible singular figure emerges. That is, indeed, the point.
<https://tinyurl.com/3ba8ekjc>
The show is organized by theme and consists of both Kahlo’s work and those by artists who were part of her community as well as those she influenced. Three of the sections, consisting of a majority of the 35 works total, are dedicated to the artist’s work, while a whopping 13 explore her impact and influence via more than a hundred works by related and subsequent generations of artists.
<https://tinyurl.com/32c2uct4>
The section “Early Experimentation” displays four of Kahlo’s works from the mid-1920s, made during her student years, alongside two family photos. Here, Kahlo was finding her voice, and not all of her experiments were successful, including her brief foray into Cubism in “Untitled (known as Pancho Villa y Adelita)” (1927). Kahlo’s stylistic interest in Mannerist Renaissance portraiture, on the other hand, is a revelation, as seen in works that showcase shallow depths of field and delicate linearities.
<https://tinyurl.com/bddmz695>
“Surrealist Affinities” brings into view Kahlo’s connection to André Breton, who organized a Parisian exhibition of her works alongside that of José Guadalupe Posada and Manuel Álvarez Bravo in 1939, titled Mexique. This section also highlights self-portraits from Kahlo’s contemporaries, such as María Izquierdo, whose “Sueño y presentimiento” (1947) depicts the artist holding her own decapitated head. Taken together, this part of the show situates the artist as not only a Surrealist, but also an active participant in larger regional and artistic circles.
<https://tinyurl.com/4533xm46>
The section “Early Experimentation” displays four of Kahlo’s works from the mid-1920s, made during her student years, alongside two family photos. Here, Kahlo was finding her voice, and not all of her experiments were successful, including her brief foray into Cubism in “Untitled (known as Pancho Villa y Adelita)” (1927). Kahlo’s stylistic interest in Mannerist Renaissance portraiture, on the other hand, is a revelation, as seen in works that showcase shallow depths of field and delicate linearities.
<https://tinyurl.com/yzbh3p86>
“Surrealist Affinities” brings into view Kahlo’s connection to André Breton, who organized a Parisian exhibition of her works alongside that of José Guadalupe Posada and Manuel Álvarez Bravo in 1939, titled Mexique. This section also highlights self-portraits from Kahlo’s contemporaries, such as María Izquierdo, whose “Sueño y presentimiento” (1947) depicts the artist holding her own decapitated head. Taken together, this part of the show situates the artist as not only a Surrealist, but also an active participant in larger regional and artistic circles.
<https://tinyurl.com/265unfe9>
The exhibition’s strength is in historicizing how Kahlo came to mean so much to so many, crediting Chicana/o artists with rediscovering her to forge an art history in their own image. This began with the exhibition Homenaje a Frida Kahlo at Galería de la Raza in San Francisco, curated in 1978 by Carmen Lomas Garza with committee support. The section “On the Other Side of the Border” reveals how Chicana/o artists such as Santa Barraza tread in her footsteps by painting odes to their Mesoamerican roots, and how those like Joey Terrill began turning Kahlo into a pop symbol.
<https://tinyurl.com/3jsz5s3j>
The extensive “Gendered Dialogues,” meanwhile, connects Kahlo’s work to the feminist canon of the late 20th century. Among the works included are Judy Baca’s theatrical imagery, Carrie Mae Weems’s intimate black-and-white photographs, and Delilah Montoya’s shocking symbolic stillbirth. Here, Kahlo’s unflinching representations of the body and womanhood, such as the immensely painful work about her miscarriage, “Henry Ford Hospital” (1932), find affinities across space and time.
<https://tinyurl.com/3pp4da7a>
“Neo-Mexicanisms” gathers works by Mexican artists during the late 1980s and 1990s, who embraced Kahlo’s interests in subversion and folk art. Julio Galán’s self-portraits, for instance, satirize the cult of personality, while Astrid Hadad’s sumptuous cabaret costumes amplify Kahlo’s theatricality. In the uncanny section “Embodying Frida,” Graciela Iturbide poses as Kahlo in her bathtub for the series El baño de Frida, Coyoacán (2005), and Mary McCartney captures Tracy Emin appropriating the modernist in “Being Frida, London” (2000) as part of a reverent, self-referential ritual. Finally, in “Queer Interventions and Decolonization,” artists like Rafael Amorim and Martine Gutierrez deliver apt tributes to the openly bisexual icon via a staged gay pairing in “Las dos Fridas” (1939) and a decadent 2018 self-portrait embodying queer rage, respectively.
<https://tinyurl.com/29b36a6x>
The exhibition misses some opportunities to juxtapose Kahlo’s works with those that emulate them, such as “Lo que el agua me dio” (1938), the painting Iturbide referenced, and “Las dos Fridas” (1939), which Amorim visually quotes. In the grand scheme of the show, however, this matters little — it is all about Frida the signifier, and her miracles are already in our minds, our hearts.
<https://tinyurl.com/4suums99>
<https://tinyurl.com/bdfphwce> _Liz Kim_Hyperallergic

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WILLIAM SANDERSON, GREEN TWILIGHT C. 1971.
<https://tinyurl.com/2n8rupme>
Jan Bogaerts, Evening twilight in Mategna, 1931
<https://tinyurl.com/56be228h>
Issac Levitan 'At the Summer House in Twilight' (1895)
<https://tinyurl.com/y6ntmst>
Hasui Kawase, Twilight at Itako, 1930.
<https://tinyurl.com/mp7hv6a5>
Anselm Kiefer - Twilight of the West - 1989
<https://tinyurl.com/3tnu5xxb>
Frederic Edwin Church, Twilight in the wilderness, 1860.
<https://tinyurl.com/5f76z7hd>
Evgeny Lushpin (b. 1966) Twilight in Krumlov
<https://tinyurl.com/3wsd6tvm>
Charles Burchfield. Winter Twilight. 1930
<https://tinyurl.com/mrxw86w4>
Félix Vallotton Twilight, 1904
<https://tinyurl.com/59b7dpe7>
Hiroshi Yoshida (1876 - 1950), Twilight on the Kiso River
<https://tinyurl.com/2erwpbvp>
William Hays, Twilight, woodcut print on silk.
<https://tinyurl.com/3w2wp33y>
Evgeny Lushpin (b. 1966) Twilight (2000)
<https://tinyurl.com/4tue7axm>
Arthur Bianchini (1869-1955), Stockholm at Twilight.
<https://tinyurl.com/yc8knrjb>
Robbie Craig, The Moon of Twilight
<https://tinyurl.com/yr6bmw5h>
Scott Kahn Twilight
<https://tinyurl.com/mrkznrt3>
John Frederick Kensett, "Twilight in the Cedars at Darien, Connecticut"; [1872]
<https://tinyurl.com/2v8j24wm>
Charles Burchfield, "March Pools at Twilight", 1917
<https://tinyurl.com/5cvp4ch5>
John Dowd, East End Twilight, 1995.
<https://tinyurl.com/h5wwtrwv>
Jane Freilicher City at Twilight, 2010,
<https://tinyurl.com/ywvt3jsf> _RabihAlameddine