OLD NEWS

KIM TSCHANG-YEUL. WATERDROPS. 2017
<https://tinyurl.com/mmje5csh> _RabihAlameddine

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FLORINE STETTHEIMER, CHRISTMAS, 1930-40, SAYS YALE
<https://tinyurl.com/46rwz8v4>
Painting is not photography, so the date of 1930-40 for a painting that includes a reference to a broadway show that only ran in 1925 is plausible, given other evidence. Merry Christmas and Happy Hannukah. . _greg.org

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HAPPY
<https://tinyurl.com/yyzjz4cj> _DavidShrigley

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CHRISTMAS THROUGH THE EYES OF PHOTOGRAPHER LEE FRIEDLANDER
<https://tinyurl.com/m6hcymsb>
“Whether or not you’ve celebrated Christmas at any point over the past seventy years—roughly the period covered by these photographs—you have no doubt encountered some of the things Lee Friedlander shows us here.” So begins the afterward to Lee Friedlander: Christmas, a new book of holiday-related pictures published by the Eakins Press Foundation. The volume assembles various kinds of images by the storied photographer who started pointing his lens at American life in 1948 and now finds himself at the age of 91.
On Friedlander’s vision of Christmas, the afterward, by fellow photographer Peter Kayafas, continues: “In lieu of holding forth on what that means—which would do a disservice to the pictures—it’s worth considering a few things about how Christmas in America looks in the eyes of the great artist of the social landscape, because, after all, what defines a social landscape better than the things we all have in common—by circumstance, religion, inheritance, or commerce? A few words about Friedlander’s take on all this come to mind: plastic, disposable, cheap, timely, earnest, ceremonial, elaborate, ubiquitous, sad, beautiful, true.”
Below see some highlights from Lee Friedlander: Christmas.
Mississippi, 1986
<https://tinyurl.com/mfnuhn3b>
New Orleans, Louisiana, 1971
<https://tinyurl.com/e5sjfkmj>
Nashville, Tennessee, 1966
<https://tinyurl.com/mscdn7b8>
Northeastern United States, 1965
<https://tinyurl.com/ynws4cn6>
New York City, 1961
<https://tinyurl.com/4jnnv3rp>
New York State, 1963
<https://tinyurl.com/fevzn5ur>
Utah, 1988
<https://tinyurl.com/46duy3z2> _ARTnews

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UNKNOWN PHOTOGRAPHER, MEXICO, CHRISTMAS: BREAKING THE PIÑATA, CA. 1909-1919,
<https://tinyurl.com/4esuyhtk> _JesseLocker

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THE EGALITARIAN VISION OF NATIVITY SCENES by Ed Simon
<https://tinyurl.com/3a489ndu>
The Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola had been martyred less than two years when the early Renaissance master Sandro Botticelli completed his strange painting “The Mystical Nativity” around 1500. Eschewing the wooden panels on which he normally rendered his compositions, Botticelli’s latest painting was on canvas — the better to roll it up, should its incendiary message anger Florence’s rulers. Indeed, just a few years before he completed the painting, Savonarola, then powerful in the city-state, had been sentenced to death in part for his thunderous edict that Florentines should let the “rich give to the poor, [and] let the churches be stripped of their excessive wealth.” Like all nativities, whether sentimental or censorious, sugary or surreal, Botticelli’s compsoition conveys the central paradox of God being created by a human, and the implications of taking that belief seriously. In all its artistic iterations across millennia, the nativity — the birth of Jesus in a humble manger — remains inherently political. It reveals not just the paradox of divine embodiment, but the radical truth of equality inherent in God choosing to enter the world in marginalized circumstances, thereby declaring the sacred dignity of all human beings and our moral obligations to one another.
The archetype of nativities transcends the Christian account in Luke 2:16 of “Mary, and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger.” The earliest example of the form, discovered by Marco Morelli, director of the Museum of Planetary Sciences in Prato, Italy, in a cave in the Egyptian Sahara, depicted simple male and female figures with a floating infant in between them in red ochre, a star placed above. “As death was associated to Earth in contemporary rock art from the same area,” Morelli told Archaeology Magazine in 2016, “it is likely that the birth was linked to the sky.” Remarkably, this “nativity” was rendered 3,000 years before the events of the gospels. No hypothesis of direct influence needs to be posited — such themes are simply in our collective unconscious.
<https://tinyurl.com/53ajfc6k>
Among the earliest of artistic representations of the nativity that actually do concern the Bible narrative is another Egyptian piece, a remarkable Coptic Orthodox icon preserved since the eighth century at the Monastery of St. Catherine in the Sinai desert. Rendered in hot wax paint on wood, the icon depicts a dark-complexioned Mary berobed in red, reclining and smiling at her son before a chorus of angels. Other early depictions of the nativity in Christian art, as Gail Paterson Corrington writes in The Harvard Theological Review (1989) present him as “seated on her lap in the position of Horus being nursed by Isis.” Such images of Madonna breastfeeding Christ proliferated first in Egypt and then parts of the Roman Empire that were also familiar with venerating images of Isis and Horus.
There is a central paradox to the nativity: The simultaneously exhausted and delighted icon of Mary is a woman and not a goddess, though she births the God that created her — she is the theotokos, or God-bearer. A similar paradox ensnares Christ Himself, who is both man and God. Even in its most basic forms, then, the nativity subverts hierarchies; it is a mystical statement about the relationship between the sacred and the profane expressed by the 19th-century English Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, who in sprung rhythm evoked she who “Gave God’s infinity/Dwindled to infancy” (1883).
Nowhere is the central paradox of Christianity’s faith in Christ being equally both man and God as apparent as in the crèche, or tableaux representing His birth. As a subject, the nativity dwells in embodiment, of the reality of being a human born between piss and shit, the grotesque and glorious truth of what it means to be a physical being — which doesn’t just tinge the material world with the sacred, but indeed makes the sacred material. As different as the Sinai icon is from Botticelli's nearly a millennium later, the central concern remains the same. The Italian painter's “The Mystical Nativity” spatially delineates the realm of the above from that of the below via the roof of the manger; the nativity itself is the belly button connecting the transcendent to the prosaic, the eternal to the present, the heavens to the earth. As with any traditional crèche, the infant Jesus is swaddled in his straw-filled crib with the blessed mother in her celestial blue robe kneeling in prayer before her son. It encompasses both Genesis and apocalypse, eternity collapsing into the present — which could very well define the symbolic itself. The baby’s swaddling cloth looks like a death shroud, the darkened manger like the cave where the dead Christ’s body will one day be placed. Womb and tomb, death and birth, creation and destruction — all are expressed through the same visual idiom, conveying that which is beyond its literal self. It is the only painting that Botticelli ever saw fit to apply that most intimate of symbols, his signature, in a flurry of black paint.
<https://tinyurl.com/5cbv3vye>
Botticelli’s signature on this nativity scene represents the application of the individual to the cosmic — such is the nature of any individual representation of the archetypal. Yet within generic confines, there can be marked displays of difference, and the ways in which the nativity has been represented by artists is no exception. The earliest representations of what’s clearly the theme of the Madonna and child — and not just Neolithic cave paintings that evoke that story — are from the catacombs of Rome during the second century, before the canon of the Bible was even finalized. Beneath the streets of the Eternal City is a fresco in the Catacomb of Priscilla, the earliest discovered version of art depicting Mary nursing Christ, rendered in red pigment that can’t help but recall the ochre in that similarly hidden and dark Sahara cave. A full nativity scene isn’t found until three centuries later, among the earliest being the frieze on a sarcophagus lid from the early fifth century in Milan (after the ecumenical councils had already decided issues of Church theology and the Empire itself had converted to Christianity) where the infant Jesus is swaddled while two beasts of the field watch over him, in keeping with the prophecy from Isaiah 1:3 that the “ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master’s crib.”
<https://tinyurl.com/nhkrfm5d>
Those elemental images, totemic in their simplicity, gave rise to innumerable variations. In his “Nativity at Night” (c. 1490), now held by the National Gallery in London, the late Medieval Netherlandish master Geertgen tot Sint Jans offers a take that is contemporary to Botticelli. If it is less hermetic in its symbolism, it is every bit as mystical. Drawing from the visions of Saint Bridget of Sweden, in which the infant Christ “radiated such an ineffable light and splendor that the sun was not comparable to it,” Sint Jans depicts the vaguely alien-looking infant in startling chiaroscuro, a burst of radiance glowing forth towards Mary. A similar effect of light in darkness — the great Christmas theme, after all — is explored in ostensibly secular form in the French painter Georges de la Tour’s c. <https://tinyurl.com/tja5u8f2> 1640s “The Newborn Child,” held by the Museum of Fine Arts in Rennes, France. In it, an attendant and a mother holding her child are burnished to a glowing, smooth, uniform simplicity and framed by a flickering candle. This is a portrait of Mary, but it’s also a portrait of all mothers. De la Tour’s depiction is less a secularization than a return to the elemental as first expressed in ochre 5,000 years ago.
<https://tinyurl.com/yrxtdj3h>
The nativity, with its expressions of embodiment, paradox, and subversion, can’t help but have political ramifications. The dyad of Mary and child is one of human and God — of the human delivering God into the world, that paradoxical relationship between the divine and the lowly Hopkins wrote of. A turning of the world upside down in its subversions, as well as an embrace of the gritty and grimy reality of matter, a world in which God Himself was born in a filthy stable reeking of urine-soaked hay and animal dung. According to the Slovenian Marxist philosopher Slavoj Žižek in The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (2003), the incarnation — which begins with the nativity — represents the “subversive kernel” of the faith, which is “accessible only to a materialist approach.” In the birth of Christ, there is the subservience of spirit to the flesh, of their unity. Furthermore, because this is God who is being born, there is an implicit egalitarian truth to the unity of all who dwell in matter — all of us, in other words, who have bodies.
<https://tinyurl.com/yfsbx7yy>
And so the nativity can be used as the most potent of political commentaries. Churches such as St. Susanna Parish in Dedham, Massachusetts, have assembled crèches in which the Holy Family is absent, replaced by a sign reading “ICE WAS HERE,” in reference to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). In Evanston, Illinois, Lake Street Church presents a Mary, Joseph, and Jesus that are zip-tied, the Roman centurions outfitted in the tactical gear of immigration officers. Contemporary artist Benjamin Wildflower, whose work often explores radical politics and faith from an anarchically Christian perspective, crafted a 2018 linocut that imagines a distinctly non-Western Mary as a refugee during the flight into Egypt, the haloed Mother of God prying open a barbed wire fence. Another popular illustration, which goes viral every Advent season, is a family Christmas card originally made by artist Everett Patterson in 2014 entitled “José y Maria.” Here, the parents of Christ are Hispanic migrants outside of a blasted-and-dingy convenience store in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania — Mary wears a “Nazareth High School” sweatshirt. Joseph is on a payphone trying to see if there is room at the motel across the street (some letters are missing in the sign so that “New Manager” reads “New Manger”), while the neon light of “Starr Beer” glows in red and green.
Acting Director of ICE Todd Lyons referred to the nativity scene in Dedham as being “abhorrent,” and castigated the parish priest Stephen Josoma as an “activist reverend.” Of course, the Christian nationalists in the Trump administration, having fully supplicated themselves to the idols of state and capital, are incapable of detecting that subversive kernel in the gospels, or perhaps are unwilling to do so for what it might imply about the state of their own mortal souls. But a nativity is by its very nature political, for it expresses that God dwells in the lowliest, most degraded, and most marginalized of places, that the face of the Lord can be found in the weakest and the most ignored.
<https://tinyurl.com/v4s3bemc>
What would all these pearl-clutchers and boot-lickers complaining about political nativities think of Botticelli’s c. 1483 “Madonna of the Magnificat”? True to the same radical politics of “The Mystical Nativity,” this work depicts not the birth of Christ, but rather when Mary was visited by her cousin Elizabeth, who was pregnant with John the Baptist. A beatific Christ sits on his mother’s lap, gazing upward at her, his small hand on her arm, as she writes out a line of Latin words in Gothic script. This Mary is no mere vessel, no meek and supplicating virgin progenitor of Christ, but rather an active agent in her own right, penning the words of the prayer known as the Magnificat. “Praise be to God,” Mary writes, who “hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble. He hath filled the hungry with good things, and the rich He hath sent empty away.” Reactionaries perennially grumble about a so-called “War on Christmas.” That's because it's easier than fully living the implications of the "War for Christmas" — in the most shining truth of the nativity there is no culture war, only a class war. _Hyperallergic

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THE MOUNT WASHINGTON POST
<https://tinyurl.com/msaz79pk> _LisaAnneAuerbach

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DARK DUCHAMP CHRISTMAS
<https://tinyurl.com/mtjk9p6v>le
Christmas came early because nobrashfestivity did some welcome work tidying up this photo of a Christmas tree on a stool in Marcel Duchamp’s Paris studio. The Beinecke <https://tinyurl.com/yc684yce> still says no date, and I didn’t know it when I posted it in 2021, but in 2008, flickr user leiris202 dated this photo to 1907, which would be six years before the legendary original Bicycle Wheel Duchamp got his sister Suzanne to photograph, so he could backdate his 1915 re-creation. _greg.org

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MUSLIM (MUGHAL) XMAS PAINTINGS!
The presentation of the infant Jesus in the temple at Jerusalem, c. 1600-1610.
<https://tinyurl.com/mphxr4e6> _RabihAlameddine

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MUSEUM ARCHIVES ARE THE BEST!
Here at MONDOBLOGO we like the obscure & hard to find in anything and everything really, but especially with design, the more esoteric the better as far as I am concerned. We all love an Eames DCM, but we REALLY love a 3-legged DCM in a red-aniline dye finish. The way to find these one-offs, prototypes, and general one hit wonders, is via museum collections, catalogue raisonnés, and archives. Here are some of my favorite sources, starting with NYC museums (and possibly more later) from old standbys, to the more arcane:
MoMA
<https://tinyurl.com/tu5cpprn>
This amazing chair by Ray & Charles Eames is a one-off I believe, and while technically stunning for the time, 1944, I see myself on the floor soon after sitting down. Probably why they added the 4th leg in 1946.
<https://tinyurl.com/3ekzmf6e>
While we are on the topic of rare, amazing and unstable household furniture, I would be remiss not to show this beauty from 1933 by one of my all time favorite freaky designers Frederic Kiesler. So much going on here, and so little going on. I have many, many questions to ask Fred, but will save those for the Designer Séance later tonight.
<https://tinyurl.com/sem489d9>
The Met
The Met is a bit more restrained (in an elegant way really) with their online design offerings, but there are some slappers hidden in there:
<https://tinyurl.com/567fvxt4>
This “Java” Armchair from c.1930 is by a fave designer Ilonka Karasz. Check her out if you don’t know her, if only to see all her amazing New Yorker covers (she did 186 of them!). Her sister was pretty rad too, Mariska Karasz. She designed a lot of fashion, textiles and a bit of custom furniture. More on her at a later date. Check out this dress from 1927, yes, 1927!
<https://tinyurl.com/3d563tzp>
You might have noticed that the image quality of some of these screenshots isn’t so great, but many of the more obscure things are listed with only thumbnails, and I’m not letting that stop me from using them. Pixels be dammed!
The Whitney
You think the Whitney doesn’t have any design? Well you are either half right or half wrong because I would classify these as both or neither. Get my drift???
<https://tinyurl.com/46hyv9cf>
Yayoi Kusama, “Accumulation”, c. 1963
<https://tinyurl.com/26y9k3um>
<https://tinyurl.com/mr87xc9s>
Lucas Samaras, “Chair Transformations Number” 3 & 16, 1969
There are 25 of these (the Whitney has 7). I see a whole post coming on… unless you beat me to it!
<https://tinyurl.com/3evukbp7>
Richard Artschwager, “Chair/Chair”, 1987
<https://tinyurl.com/4bnp8z62>
Scott Burton, ‘Pair of Two-Part Chairs, Obtuse Angle”, 1984
<https://tinyurl.com/2a5wpzvs>
Jessie Reaves, “Cesca Leaves the Stack (Modified Chair)”, 2016
Is it art? Is it design? Is it it a chair? You tell me, I’m sick of being asked, make up your own mind dangnabit!
Cooper Hewitt
<https://tinyurl.com/bdhjkt8a>
Love this weirdo by Didier Lamache from 1990 (?) for (this is the best name for a lighting company ever) Megalit. Ever heard of Mister Lamache? Ever seen this lamp? Me neither, this is why I love me some archive / collection deep dives.
<https://tinyurl.com/3ubxyhs2>
Another obscure one, Ursula Haupenthal for Praezisionstechnik Gmbh, 1992. Try saying Praezisionstechnik Gmbh three times fast, I dare you…
Museum of the City of New York
<https://tinyurl.com/ywze9t7p>
Sometimes it’s the period photos that are worth their weight in gold such as this shot by Stanley Kubrick (you heard me) for Look Magazine in 1949. Love seeing that Dan Cooper table and the Eames / Saarinen prototype arm chair.
<https://tinyurl.com/2w2hzd2f>
And this is the type of material you can just stumble upon, like I just did, of something /somewhere I have never seen before by a designer I don’t recognize. The geometric furniture is Paul Frankl like, but I don’t think by him, too “radical” for Mr. Skyscraper. The vanity side tables are pretty fantastic no? This is the Seminole Club, Forest Hills, LI, Ladies Dressing Room, March 16th, 1929. How’s that for specific?
Noguchi Museum
<https://tinyurl.com/5n975v4a>
Their catalogue raisonné is fantastic, although I am noticing now that some of the listings now include similar pieces in their shop that are for sale, I don’t find this useful at all, and quite distracting. Please keep the shop stuff on the shop page and let us researchers have some visual calm while we look for treasures such as this Magnesite table from 1942 that Isamu designed for Jeanne Reynal whose beautiful tile work adorned the top
Here is another similar table in form with a tile top that came up at Wright in 2014, but was only attributed to the pair.
<https://tinyurl.com/rm55nb4j>
Estimate 50-70k sold for nearly 69k.
Ok, I could keep going on and on and on, but will pause here for now. Thanks for looking & reading and please check back next week for more design & art based blather from me!
Thanks-
Patrick _MONDOBLOGO’

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VIGGO JOHANSEN, GLADE JUL (HAPPY CHRISTMAS), 1891
<https://tinyurl.com/3z525mke> _JesseLocker

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THE ART DADDY HOLIDAY HELP HOTLINE
Welcome to the Art Daddy HolidayHelpline desk, currently operating out of someone’s childhood bedroom with a door that does not lock, one usable outlet, and a phone hovering permanently at 12 percent. If you are home with your family and feel like you’ve been soft-reset into a version of yourself you retired years ago, this is not a personal failure. This is the holiday effect. Time collapses, roles reappear, and suddenly you are explaining your entire life to people who still think your job is either fake, temporary, or a phase you’ll grow out of once you “settle down.”
The holidays are a durational performance with no intermission. Family gatherings are emotionally dense environments where every comment comes with history and every question is loaded. Add alcohol, nostalgia, and one person who refuses to let a topic die, and you’ve got conditions that rival the VIP lounge on day three of a fair. Daddy is here to help you survive it.
Here are the rules.
1. Your family does not need the lore.
You are not on a panel, you are not being interviewed, and no one is taking notes. You do not need to explain how museums work, what a curator does, why art costs money, or why something looks “like that.” Most family questions are not genuine curiosity; they are expressions of confusion, anxiety, or discomfort with ambiguity. Give a short answer, keep your tone neutral, and redirect toward food, pets, or literally anything else. You are not obligated to provide context, history, or a thesis statement.
2. Use the vaguest job description possible.
This is critical. Say you write. Say you teach. Say you work in education or media. Do not say contemporary art, criticism, market, collectors, or theory unless you want to spend forty minutes defending your existence. The more boring you sound, the safer you are. This is not lying. This is crisis communication. Vague answers protect your energy and keep the evening moving.
3. Accept that family is a chaos archive.
Family is not a neutral audience. It is an archive of every version of you they remember, whether or not that version still exists. Every comment comes with footnotes from 2008. Every interaction activates old dynamics you thought you outgrew. If you feel irrationally irritated or suddenly small, it’s not because you’re regressing — it’s because the environment is designed to destabilize you. Once you accept this, you can stop taking things personally.
4. Charge your weed vape like your life depends on it.
Showing up with a dead vape is a rookie mistake and a failure of planning. Charge it overnight. Bring the charger. Bring a backup charger. This is not indulgence; this is infrastructure. You would not arrive at an art fair with a dead phone and no plan. Treat your nervous system with the same respect. Preparation is self-care.
5. You learned how to drink at art fairs, so pace yourself accordingly.
You did not learn to drink at home. You learned to drink standing up, under fluorescent lights, making eye contact, and talking about things you only half care about. That means your family gathering is now a full-blown art fair calendar for the duration of your stay. Day one is opening night energy. Day two is collector brunch. Day three is physical and emotional collapse. Drink water like it’s Basel. Eat something substantial. Do not let yourself hit day three in Miami mode while trapped in a suburban kitchen.
6. Take strategic vape breaks.
The vape break is not avoidance; it is maintenance. It creates a pause between a comment and your reaction. Five minutes outside can stop a remark from becoming a lifelong quote. You are allowed to step away from the booth. You are allowed to reset before re-entering the floor.
7. Leave early and lie if necessary.
You do not need to stay until collapse. You have a deadline. You have a pet. You have an early morning. You have a commute. Pick one and exit. Families respect responsibility more than boundaries, so use this to your advantage. Leave while you are still calm, functional, and vaguely likable and before someone asks you to explain what you really do again.
Drink water. Charge the vape. Keep it vague. The holidays are temporary, the art world will still be there, and Daddy is on call. _TheArtDaddy

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MI-YOUNG CHOI. ENLIGHTENMENT. 2013
<https://tinyurl.com/y3m6cztc> _RabihAlameddine