OLD NEWS

CANADA GEESE LANDING by Mary Holland
<https://tinyurl.com/3tzxfknw>
Canada Geese, harbingers of the changing seasons, are crowding the skies, lakes and flooded fields as spring approaches. They are very versatile birds, in that they can take off and land on both water and land. When landing, they perform a series of coordinated maneuvers that involve using their wings, tail, and feet as aerodynamic brakes. Wings are extended and held rigid, acting as parachutes to slow their speed as they drop rapidly in elevation. Their tail is fanned out and their feet are stretched out, acting as air brakes. They land feet first, skidding into a sitting position (on water/ice) and running (on land) until coming to a full stop.
If you look closely at the accompanying photograph, you can see the two lines that their extended feet made in the ice when they were first landing, and then the impression their body made upon settling on the ice. Tracks lead from their landing spots to nearby open water. _NaturallyCurious

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SPECIAL
<https://tinyurl.com/4xc7wphn> _DavidShrigley

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THE UNBREAKABLE MARIA LASSNIG by Patricia Zohn
You might have found her standing or sitting or even stretched out on a canvas on the floor, downloading every bodily sensation, eyes wide shut to capture the evanescent colors inside her eyelids before she began to paint. Through these and other radical methodologies, the Austrian artist Maria Lassnig (1919–2014) channeled her perception of a moment and made the invisible visible. Just now, her art is the subject of three concurrent exhibitions: “Flow of Paint = Flow of Life,” at the Hamburger Kunsthalle; “Honey, You’re a Wonderful Model,” at the Des Moines Art Center; and “Maria Lassnig,” at Petzel, in Manhattan.
“I will not be put into one box,” said Lassnig. Like Louise Bourgeois, she did not allow a male-dominated art world to muddy her highly diverse practice, which depended on a deep exploration of self. To this day, her work resists categorization.
<https://tinyurl.com/4wmbx85w>
Born illegitimate, Lassnig grew up in rural southern Austria. Early neglect and domestic volatility brewed extreme sensitivities. She found refuge in drawing, and on the advice of a fortune teller, her mother enrolled her in the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Though she excelled, she chafed under the Nazi-inflected curriculum. No more “brown sauce,” she later declared. It was glimpses of so-called degenerate art, labeled and banned by the Nazis, that captivated her.
<https://tinyurl.com/59cuz7au>
Back home after the war, she found a new studio, which became a magnet for artists and writers. At once coquette and vixen, Lassnig was notorious for her wicked wit and tempestuous affairs with younger men, which often ended in disaster. Art was always her first love. Even when she caused a scandal in 1949 by painting an erotic male nude, she still managed to get a solo gallery show that same year.
In 1951, Lassnig traveled to Paris with the artist Arnulf Rainer and, despite their draconian poverty, was soon immersed in the city’s rich artistic milieu. After leaving Surrealism and Cubism behind, and inspired by seeing de Koonings and Pollocks, she became entranced with the gestural freedom of abstraction. Returning to Vienna, Lassnig brought a new minimalism to her “body sensations.” She bitterly resented the lopsided attention given to Rainer and the other male artists whose innovations were no more original than her own.
<https://tinyurl.com/4rpbrv89> Selbstportrait als Kleiderhänger (Self-Portrait as a Clothes Hanger), 1992.
Wresting herself from the exigencies of gender and heart, Lassnig moved to Paris in 1961. Her studio permitted the creation of larger works that seesawed between abstraction and realism. Thick lines of acid green, reds, and yellows mapped a new kind of body awareness. In 1964, the death of her mother—her fiercest ally—plunged her into depression. She began painting monsters and severed body parts. The critic Robert Storr would write, “One can’t really imagine waking up in bed with one of her double-jointed contraptions.”
<https://tinyurl.com/3uxz582r>
In 1968, Lassnig decamped to New York, relieved to encounter a flourishing women’s movement. After a short course in animation, she began work with bare-bones equipment on a series of 10 hand-drawn films based on body awareness. On view at the Des Moines Art Center, these films are lively, ironic, and, like her paintings, keenly autobiographical.
In turn, Lassnig’s paintings became animated by technology and mutations. A face sprouted a camera, a muzzle, or fell into fragments on a table. A body multiplied or was pierced. Few understood what she was after, and the disaffection of press and friends unmoored her. Hence, in 1980, Lassnig accepted the first female professorship offered by the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Students clamored to get into her classes but nevertheless feared the “she-wolf.”
<https://tinyurl.com/3puvnp7t>
Lassnig finally had money, job security, and was receiving numerous awards and solo exhibitions. But she never overcame her discomfort and mistrust. “I have no skin,” she said. “All my nerves are exposed.” Paintings of cellophane-wrapped bodies were testament to feelings of isolation and vulnerability. Lending her paintings for exhibitions struck terror: they were the children, the husband, she didn’t have. This later work is in the show at Petzel.
<https://tinyurl.com/48dur899>
The exhibition at the Hamburger Kunsthalle pairs Lassnig with Edvard Munch, one of her heroes. Their affinities are plain. Both used painting as a form of self-examination: color, brushwork, and composition all served to relay physical phenomena. Munch was more emotional; Lassnig, more analytical. Yet they both relied on images of nature, the bond with animals, and, notably, a scream, as mediums for pain and transformation. And, like Munch, Lassnig often felt misunderstood.
Her last film, “Kantate” (1992), is a witty, sung autobiography—and it’s available on YouTube. Why not let Maria explain herself to you? _AirMail

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THE MOUNT WASHINGTON POST
<https://tinyurl.com/y5xx3nzt> _LisaAnneAuerbach

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GIANT GOLDEN TOILET SCULPTURE APPEARS NEAR LINCOLN MEMORIAL IN D.C.
<https://tinyurl.com/56nju8x2>
The latest in a series of politically inflected sculptures to appear on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., is a giant golden toilet that can now be found near the Lincoln Memorial.
Its title, as its plaque states, is A Throne Fit for a King, and its makers is the Secret Handshake, the same group of anonymous artists that also produced Best Friends Forever, a sculpture that featured a beaming Donald Trump and the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
“With so much horror happening on a daily basis, it’s easy to forget what this President has actually accomplished. Like remodeling The Lincoln Bathroom,”
The group was referring to Trump’s renovation last year of the bathroom attached to the Lincoln Bedroom, a guest room at the White House. At Trump’s behest, the bathroom’s Art Deco–style green tiling was switched out for sterile marble, leading to online mockery. Trump said on Truth Social that the gesture was “appropriate for the time of Abraham Lincoln and, in fact, could be the marble that was originally there!”
Conducted during a government shutdown, the renovation was “happening faster than anticipated, one of my trademarks,” Trump said at the time. While the toilet itself still seems to be made out of porcelain, the lavatory’s trash can, lamps, and faucet handles are now gold.
“In a time of unprecedented division, escalating conflict, and economic turmoil, President Trump focused on what truly mattered: remodeling the Lincoln Bathroom in the White House,” its plaque notes. “This, his crowning achievement, is a bold reminder that the President isn’t just a businessman, he’s taking care of business. It stands as a tribute to an unwavering visionary who looked down, saw a problem, and painted it gold.”
<https://tinyurl.com/mk2rdy9m> _ Alex Greenberger _ARTnews

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TO MARK THE BIRTHDAY OF VINCENT VAN GOGH—
iconic modern artist born today in 1853—
a thread of some of my favorite,
relatively lesser known works by him.
First up, the stunning multi-colored variegation of his Tree Trunks in the Grass,
made in last months of his life
<https://tinyurl.com/423my3rb>
Van Gogh was able to combine the beauty of the landscape
with a sense of the foreboding,
as in his 1889 "Landscape under Turbulent Skies,"
<https://tinyurl.com/ypmy2b6c> _MichaelLobel

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JASPER JOHNS WATERMARK by greg
<https://tinyurl.com/2s4e433y>
It never really clicked for whatever reason, but maybe it was seeing two copies of Jasper Johns’ illustrated collaboration with Samuel Beckett in the Gagosian crosshatches show; the book just blew my mind. What a gorgeous object. And stuffed—absolutely stuffed—with Johns etchings and lithographs, and wrapped in another lithograph.
Foirades/Fizzles got a lot of attention immediately, and its origin story has been retold over the years, its anecdotes mined for insights. [This discussion in 2025 in Gagosian Quarterly is good, if a bit hype.] There was a whole book and show about it, before my time. I somehow missed how different it is from a traditional artist-illustrated edition of a text.
<https://tinyurl.com/2p9kzw2x>
Johns asked Beckett for unpublished texts to work with; Beckett’s response was to translate texts he’d originally written in French, only some of which had been published. Johns’s prints used elements of what he considered his most successful painting to date, Untitled (1972), part of his now-recognized process of continuing to explore elements from paintings in other mediums. And he worked with Picasso’s printer, who opened up an etching world to him. The result is its own entirely separate, integrated thing, inextricable from his entire practice.
<https://tinyurl.com/52d4sc25>
Ironically, Foirades/Fizzles‘ distinctiveness comes in spite of Johns using a classic orange/purple/green crosshatch print that appears in the endpapers and box lining for at least two other book covers: a screenprint on a 1977 Brooke Alexander catalogue, and a lithograph dustjacket on the 1977 Whitney exhibition catalogue. So maybe I can cut myself a little slack if I’d mostly seen it in artist book auctions looking familiar, and routine, when it was exactly the opposite.
<https://tinyurl.com/ytmkkmne>
And as the photo of an edition sold at Sotheby’s indicates, this book is a deliriously sexy object. It is the paper. A raw sheaf of gorgeous paper with an image surprise on every leaf. And I somehow missed until this weekend that the paper for Foirades/Fizzles, from Moulin Richard de Bas, is watermarked with Beckett’s initials and Johns’s signature. Twenty years before Yvon Lambert had Twombly’s handwriting turned into a watermark <https://tinyurl.com/4ve9zdw8> —for an On Kawara artist book, which is weirder the longer I think about it—Jasper Johns had paper made with his own signature—AND Samuel Beckett’s. I thought I appreciated Johns’s paper game, and I did not. _greg.org

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EVERYONE LIKES TO SAY THAT 9/11 WAS THE GREATEST WORK OF ART OF THE 21ST CENTURY,
but it wasn’t, it was extremely didactic. _DeanKissick

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62. GEORGE W. BUSH BATHTUB PAINTING by Rainey Knudson
<https://tinyurl.com/46kw7e34>
When he was in office, George W. Bush was ridiculed for his verbal gaffes. But there are different types of intelligence, and language, it seems, was the wrong measuring stick for him. His post-presidential paintings suggest different strengths entirely.
After leaving office, Bush worked to expand his visual intelligence as a painter. He wrote, “Before long, I started to see the world differently. Shadows became colors. Once-clear skies had subtle shifts of color. I was getting comfortable with the concepts of values and tones.”
The painting that first revealed this hidden interior life was never meant to be seen. In 2013, a hacker named Guccifer released an intimate self-portrait of a Bush-eye view of his feet in the bathtub. Critics had a field day—especially over something painted by a president who led the country into a catastrophic foreign war.
But there’s something familiar about the painting. Do we separate the art from the artist? What’s the shelf life for lived catastrophe, and who deserves to be understood as more than their worst decisions?
Bush went on to paint world leaders and veterans, a far more challenging subject than pets and Texas hillsides. His veterans series—whatever its politics—represents a striking improvement in painterly skill. Peter Schjeldahl was excoriated for praising the “astonishingly high” quality of Bush’s “painted atonements.”
In a 2017 interview, Bush said, “I’m just a sensitive artist these days, not a government official, but I would say that education of the arts is really important.” _TheImpatientReader

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OSCAR’S FRISCO CITY, AL
<https://tinyurl.com/44phvhm9> _RuralIndexingProject

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PAINTING CONSIDERED WORKSHOP COPY IS IN FACT BY REMBRANDT, EXPERT SAYS
<https://tinyurl.com/yc4xndr5>
A portrait in a UK collection that has long been dismissed as a workshop copy of an almost identical painting by Rembrandt was in fact also painted by the 17th-century Dutch master, according to a leading scholar.
Each of the paintings, titled Old Man with a Gold Chain and dated to the early 1630s, is a near-lifesize depiction of an older man wearing a gold chain and a plumed hat.
For the first time in almost four centuries, the two portraits have been reunited by the Art Institute of Chicago, which owns the undisputed version, painted on panel.
The other portrait, which is slightly smaller and painted on canvas, is on loan from Sir Francis Newman, a Cambridge-based entrepreneur, and is labelled as a “copy” by an artist in Rembrandt’s workshop.
However, the Rembrandt scholar Gary Schwartz has concluded that both are by the master. In addition to the quality of the brushwork, he argued, many Dutch artists of the period created replicas of their own paintings.
In 1699, a French near-contemporary of Rembrandt observed: “There is hardly any painter [in the Netherlands] who did not repeat one of his works because he liked it, or because someone asked him to make one exactly the same.”
Schwartz told “It’s just whether or not we will aim to accept that Rembrandt did it. I find it very exciting. It opens up all sorts of possibilities for looking again at many paintings.”
He added: “If Rembrandt had a customer for a replica of his attractive Old Man, what would be the most effective and efficient way of making it? Assigning it to a pupil, whose work would have to be corrected – and the Newman painting shows no sign of corrections – or re-enacting the steps he had just taken, when they were still fresh in mind and hand? Surely the latter makes more sense. This assumption accounts for the outstanding quality of the canvas.”
<https://tinyurl.com/mr2hu5b8> _GuardianUK

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DOCTOR SAINTS COSMAS AND DAMIAN,
by an anonymous Portuguese artist of the 16th century.
Cosmas is holding a mortar and pestle
while Damian inspects a vial of urine
<https://tinyurl.com/y5sfh8dc> _JesseLocker

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AMERICAN ART HISTORY FROM A TO Z
N – New Topographics
<https://tinyurl.com/f8b4dkrr>
It wasn’t the “purple mountain majesties”extolled in the lyrics to “America the Beautiful” that inspired the mostly monochromatic images in the 1975 exhibition “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape.” Nor was it Ansel Adams’s images, so widely reproduced in magazines,
coffee-table books, calendars, and on posters at that time—except, perhaps, as something to bounce off. In the years leading up to America’s bicentennial, the artists in that sparsely visited yet influential George Eastman House show in Rochester, New York—Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott, Stephen Shore, and Henry Wessel, Jr.—were less than idealistic in their interests and representations of the American scene.
Curator William Jenkins praised work in “New Topographics”for its “stylistic anonymity.” But of equal import was the mash-up of photographic genres that “New Topographic”artists built their vision and idiosyncratic projects around. Their mix of documentary, conceptual, and evidentiary photographic approaches—all with an emphasis on formal precision and print craftsmanship—worked together to direct attention toward the uneasy realities coexisting in America’s cultural landscapes rather than focusing on ennobling beauties in “natural” ones.
The picture-makers’ crystalline and seemingly neutral images—of industrial parks, urban/suburban/ex-urban developments, and prosaic streetscapes—harkened back to century-old photographic surveys of the American West conducted by Carlton Watkins, William Henry Jackson, and Eadweard Muybridge. The sensibility and terrain covered by “New Topographics”participants, however, were equally shaped by modern national challenges such as ending the war in Vietnam and mounting responses to contain rampant development and environmental disasters. In a sense, New Topographers’ just-the-facts pictures shared interrogative strategies with contemporary practitioners of “New Journalism” such as Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, and Tom Wolfe, all of them exploring the literal and figurative lay of the land through decidedly unsentimental critical lenses.
“New Topographics” photographers were as indebted to Ed Ruscha’s mockumentary tiny photo books about mundane sites as they were to Walker Evans’ earlier, pointedly trenchant American views. Now, 50 years later, it’s worth underscoring how profound the group’s big ambitions and its modestly scaled “Madein America” images were in inspiring the next generations of photography—from the so-called Instagram aesthetic to the more spectacularly scaled, colorized, priced, and globally marketed works of European artists like Thomas Struth, Andreas Gursky and Thomas Ruff—in the decades that soon followed. —Marvin Heiferman _ArtInAmerica

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INTERIOR: MOTHER AND SISTER OF THE ARTIST BY EDOUARD VUILLARD, 1893:
<https://tinyurl.com/3vk8vmv4> _‪PeterHuestis‬

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THE ANGEL OF HISTORY IS STUCK IN JERUSALEM
<https://tinyurl.com/bdc9e5wv>
The most famous work in Paul Klee: Other Possible Worlds at the Jewish Museum is defined not by its creator, but by its owner. “Angelus Novus” (1920) is etched into 20th-century history as a source of inspiration for cultural critic Walter Benjamin, who bought it in 1921, and as a symbol of his persecution by the Nazis and subsequent suicide.
“Angelus Novus.” The watercolor of a comically awkward angel with an oversized head and undersized wings gets its own gallery space. (Or, more accurately, a reproduction that acts as a placeholder until the original arrives from its home in Jerusalem’s Israel Museum, delayed vaguely by “current conditions affecting international transport,” as the wall text puts it.) On an adjacent wall is a passage about the figure as the “Angel of History” from Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940) that reads in part:
His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe that keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet .… The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. _Hyperallergic

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VIRGINIA WOOLF —
who died this day in 1941 –
painted by fellow Bloomsbury Group member Roger Fry.
<https://tinyurl.com/dxjutr7e> _PublicDomainReview

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LACMA CÉZANNE *NOT* THE ONE STOLEN by William Poundstone
<http://tiny.cc/yg41101>
Despite a report in The Art Newspaper <https://tinyurl.com/25tyabxn> , a Cézanne owned by LACMA has not been stolen. Italian police say thieves took a Renoir painting and watercolors by Cézanne and Matisse from the Magnani-Rocca Foundation, near Parma, Italy. The Art Newspaper article leads with an image of the LACMA Cézanne and uses a version of its title (Still Life with Cherries) for the stolen work. In fact the stolen work is a watercolor with a somewhat similar name (Tasse et plat de cerises/"Cup and Plate of Cherries"). Art Newspaper's error has been picked up by media around the globe <https://tinyurl.com/5b7xhrd3> .
The LACMA painting is currently in the museum's Resnick Pavilion
Below is the missing watercolor.
<http://tiny.cc/zs31101> _LosAngelesCountyMuseumOnFire

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YAJURO TAKASHIMA. 1890-1975. JAPAN
<https://tinyurl.com/yfzkzmd4> _RabihAlameddine

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WHY DO NUTHATCHES COAT THEIR NEST ENTRANCES WITH SAP?
<https://tinyurl.com/ym2m8rnw>
Since the 1940s, researchers and birders have noticed that Red-breasted Nuthatches have an odd habit: After excavating their nest cavities, these nuthatches gather resin from pine and other conifer trees and use their bills (and, in at least one instance, a piece of bark) to spread it around the entrances to their nest cavities
But why? Ornithologists in Arizona used a clever set of experiments to find a bird might do something like this,
Starting with setting up nest boxes.. half received a coating of resin around their entrances, and half did not. To lure in potential nest predators, they also placed balls of cat food and peanut butter in some of the boxes as bait.
The pine-scented goo deterred both predators and competitors.The researchers observed. In the days that followed, squirrels were less likely to chew at the entrances of boxes with resin and enter to eat the cat food bait within, and Northern House Wrens were less likely to begin building nests in boxes with resin.
The resin-spreading behavior likely represents a previously unrecognized example of a bird co-opting a plant’s defenses for its own use; resin helps conifers repel pests and seal wounds, and it’s easy for birds to borrow these benefits for themselves. .This type of relationship among birds and plants may be more common than currently recognized. Resin protects Red-cockaded Woodpeckers from parasites as well. <https://tinyurl.com/56d7vmbp> __CornellLabOfOrnithology