OLD NEWS

RED-BREASTED NUTHATCHES IRRUPTING by Mary Holland
<https://tinyurl.com/3p93ywdw>
Those of us who enjoy watching the sprightly little Red-breasted Nuthatch climbing head-down tree trunks probing for insects or caching seeds are in luck this winter, as according to the latest forecast from the Finch Research Network a poor cone crop on its eastern boreal breeding grounds has resulted in irruptive movements south since mid-August. This large-scale movement has already resulted in sightings as far south as the Alabama Gulf Coast, and is expected to continue into the winter. Thus, your chances of seeing Red-breasted Nuthatches at your feeder this winter are very good, especially if you provide black-oiled sunflower seeds, suet and peanuts. _NaturallyCurious

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ARNULF RAINER, A REVOLUTIONARY FIGURE IN POSTWAR AUSTRIAN ART, HAS DIED AGED 96
<https://tinyurl.com/yucfmj4a>
Arnulf Rainer, a leading figure of the Austrian avant-garde whose gestural paintings confronted the atrocities of the Holocaust and Hiroshima and whose unflinching approach to experimental self-portraiture made him instantly recognisable, has died aged 96;
Born in 1929 in Baden, Austria, Rainer came of age in the aftermath of World War II as a restless enfant terrible who distanced himself from academic traditions, finding early kinship with Surrealism and Art Informel. Largely self-taught, Rainer gravitated to Vienna in the late 1940s, a city where daily life unfolded amid rubble, scarcity, and the lingering trauma of war.
In this environment, Rainer’s practice thrived as he became a crucial figure in the reawakening of Austrian contemporary art. He was one of the founding members of Galerie nächst St Stephan, one of the very few galleries in postwar Vienna which offered a vital meeting point for artists seeking alternatives to a conservative art world playing safe and desperately seeking commercial viability.
Galerie nächst St Stephan would go on to shape generations of Austrian art, serving as the launchpad for many of the country’s most significant figures, including Maria Lassnig. Rainer’s presence there was formative: his radical approach to painting, rejection of polished surfaces, and insistence on psychological intensity helped define the gallery’s ethos. In Vienna, Rainer forged a community that was small but intellectually ferocious, united by the belief that art must square up to the material circumstances of historical traumas rather than merely apologise for them.
By the early 1950s, he had begun producing the works that would define his legacy. In his Übermalungen (overpaintings), Rainer featured painted over photographs, self-portraits, crosses, faces, and even reproductions of historical works, overlaying them with aggressive gestures, dense black strokes, scratches, and erasures that both concealed and intensified the images beneath to create a charged atmosphere in which the human form is transformed, often by a satirical grotesquerie, and comes close to being obliterated altogether. In these works, violence and vulnerability coexist; the surface becomes a record of psychic struggle, weighed down with the heaviness of historical inheritance.
<https://tinyurl.com/2wcdm938>
In 1951, he produced a portfolio of photographs, Perspectives of Destruction, that referenced 20th-century tragedies such as Hiroshima and the Holocaust. One of his most arresting mid-career paintings, Hiroshima (1982), which addressed its subject through gesture, erasure, and violent mark-making, whereby the canvas itself appears scarred, demonstrated the impossibility of adequate representation of one of the century’s defining catastrophes.
His frequent use of his own image, distorted, masked, or partially erased, turned the self-portrait into a site of existential inquiry rather than self-celebration. “For him, as Rainer once said, art history is not a history in which one style replaces another”, said the Dutch curator Rudi H. Fuchs. “For him, art has a cumulative quality; what he has painted remains part of his knowledge... An artist appropriates the past and adds something new to it.”
Throughout his career, Rainer resisted easy categorisation. Though associated at various times with Art Brut, Abstract Expressionism, and Viennese Actionism, he remained fiercely independent, sceptical of movements and labels alike. This resistance extended to his public persona: reclusive, austere, and often critical of the art world, he nevertheless achieved international recognition.
Rainer’s importance lies not only in institutional accolades, but in the enduring urgency of his work. Rainer insisted that art confront discomfort, fear, and mortality, rather than soothe or distract, despite claiming that “the principles of my works… are the extinction of expression, permanent covering and contemplative tranquillity.” He is survived by his wife Hannelore, his daughter Clara, and his son-in-law Javier.
<https://tinyurl.com/5bas7c2h> _ArtNewspaper

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BUBBLES
<https://tinyurl.com/mvd239r9> _DavidShrigley

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DUCT-TAPE TYPOGRAPHER SHUETSU SATO HONORED
<https://tinyurl.com/nekc2krn>
Shuetsu Sato began working as a security guard at Shinjuku Station in 2002.
<https://tinyurl.com/3mrptesd>
With constant construction and infrastructure upgrades, it was Sato’s job to redirect crowds using a megaphone.
<https://tinyurl.com/muy4ua2m>
However, he found it to be an ineffective tool that was ignored by most. So with a few rolls of duct tape and a craft knife he took it upon himself to create some eye-catching signage.
<https://tinyurl.com/4sk6v2wx>
Over the years, a cultish appreciation has grown for Shuetsu Sato’s work with fans dubbing his clean-line, rounded edge typography as Shuetsu-tai (Shuetsu font).
<https://tinyurl.com/y9e365fu>
This year, after over 20 years of service to the ever-evolving Tokyo train system, has honored Sato
<https://tinyurl.com/499rvaux> _Spoon&Tamago

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THE MOUNT WASHINGTON POST
<https://tinyurl.com/4s6aswzt> _LisaAnneAuerbach

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LONDON GETS AT LEAST ONE NEW BANKSY MURAL FOR CHRISTMAS
<https://tinyurl.com/ysj6yy26>
A new Banksy mural that shows two children lying down and looking at the sky has appeared in west London.
The artist revealed he was behind the artwork above a row of garages on Queen’s Mews in Bayswater by posting a photo of it to his account on Monday afternoon.
A second, identical artwork appeared outside the Centre Point tower in central London last Friday, but Banksy’s representatives have yet to confirm its provenance.
the artist Daniel Lloyd-Morgan said he believed the Centre Point location was chosen to make a point about child homelessness.
“There are a lot of children who are not having a good time at Christmas,” he said, adding that people walking past the artwork were “ignoring it”.
“It’s a busy area. Quite poignant that people aren’t stopping. They walk past homeless people and they don’t see them lying on the street,” Lloyd-Morgan said.
“It’s kind of like they’re stargazing. It’s quite fitting that the kids are pointing up like they’re looking at the north star.”
<https://tinyurl.com/mr2jd8s2>
Centre Point tower has long been a symbol of homelessness crisis. It was left empty for more than a decade after being completed in 1966.
The name of the homelessness charity Centrepoint was inspired by the tower, with its founder, Rev Ken Leech, calling the building “an affront to the homeless”. The block is now multimillion-pound flats.
Jason Tomkins, a Banksy expert, also thinks the mural is a “clear statement on homelessness” and told the BBC he believed it depicts the same little boy catching snowflakes with his tongue seen in a Banksy artwork <https://tinyurl.com/bdf8cp3k> that appeared in Port Talbot in 2018.
“This is quite unusual for him to use the same little boy again, because he has never done that,” Tomkins said. _Sammy Gecsoyler _GuardianUK

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HOW YOUR EMAIL FOUND ME.
<https://tinyurl.com/uvnafjs8>
"Autorretrato definitivo," (Definitive Self-Portrait), 1985, by Jorge Eielson, _CarolinaAMiranda

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HOW LACMA GOT A VAN GOGH by William Poundstone
<http://tiny.cc/3irw001>
The Art Institute of Chicago has nine van Gogh paintings. Until recently, LACMA had zero. The prospect of getting one seemed meagre, given staggering auction prices and egotistical billionaires who prefer to start their own museums rather than support public ones. Yet this August the Henry and Rose Pearlman Foundation gave LACMA a major Arles-period van Gogh, Tarascon Stagecoach. It has just gone on view in the exhibition "Collecting Impressionism at LACMA." How did Los Angeles luck out?
<http://tiny.cc/6irw001>
<http://tiny.cc/7irw001>
Van Gogh was popular with West Coast collectors. Hollywood stars Edward G. Robinson, Errol Flynn, Elizabeth Taylor, and Barbra Streisand each owned van Gogh paintings. Industrialist Norton Simon bought six van Goghs, and oilman Armand Hammer had four.
When LACMA opened as a separate, art-focused museum in 1965, much of the Simon collection was on loan. It was easy to read that as a sign that Simon's collection would eventually go to LACMA. But Simon never made any promises.
Armand Hammer did, pledging his collection to LACMA. There was even hope—nothing more than that—that Palm Springs resident Walter Annenberg's collection (five van Goghs) or part of it might come to LACMA.
It didn't happen. Instead we have a Simon Museum in Pasadena and a Hammer Museum in Westwood. The Annenberg collection went to New York, and the movie stars' van Goghs were dispersed in divorces and financial reverses.
<http://tiny.cc/dirw001>
It was a Hollywood hyphenate who established LACMA as a center for Impressionism. George Gard ("Buddy") DeSylva was a child vaudevillian-turned-songwriter, movie producer, and cofounder of Capitol Records. He assembled a serious collection featuring Degas, Monet, Pissarro, Cézanne, Gauguin, and Toulouse-Lautrec. There was an important van Gogh painting, Chestnut Trees in Flower: Pink and White Blossoms, and two Arles-period
<http://tiny.cc/hirw001>
DeSylva and wife gave much of that collection to the Los Angeles County Museum, then in Exposition Park, in 1946. In 1949 they threw in the two van Gogh drawings—the museum's first works by the artist—though not the painting. DeSylva died of heart trouble the next year, at the age of 55.
<http://tiny.cc/pirw001>
One of the deSylva drawings is a large (over 16 by 20-in.) ink portrait of Vincent's postman bro, Joseph Roulin. It records the composition of the famous painting in Boston.
Tarascon Stagecoach had no prior connection to Los Angeles. It's an unusual subject: Americans associate stagecoaches with the Old West, not the south of France. Van Gogh took the idea from Alphonse Daudet's 1872 novel, Tartarin de Tarascon, a boisterous satire in the spirit of Don Quixote. One section is narrated by a stagecoach, recounting its existence from a working conveyance in Tarascon, France, to being torn up for firewood in North Africa.
<http://tiny.cc/tirw001>
Tarascon also figures in one of van Gogh's best-known quotes. In a letter to brother Theo, Vincent describes and sketches Tarascon Stagecoach:
"Why, I say to myself, should the spots of light in the firmament be less accessible to us than the black spots on the map of France? Just as we take the train to go to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to go to a star…"
<http://tiny.cc/xirw001>
Tarascon Stagecoach is one of the group of paintings that van Gogh intended for his Yellow House, the studio space he hoped to share with Paul Gauguin. The humble home was to be a pantheon of what we now regard as masterpieces: The Yellow House, Bedroom in Arles, Night Cafe, Starry Night Over the Rhône, L'Arlésienne, La Berceuse, and two versions of Sunflowers. These paintings conform to the commercial size 30 canvas that van Gogh favored, 36-7/16 by 28-1/8 in. in the case of Tarascon Stagecoach.
In the letter to Theo, Vincent mentions the "very simple" background of "pink and yellow walls" in Tarascon Stagecoach. Today the walls look white and ochre. Van Gogh's pinks have often faded to white due to the inexpensive chemical pigments he used. Seeing Tarascon Stagecoach for the first time, I *think* I was able to discern a blush of pink in the upper part of the building at top left.
<http://tiny.cc/0jrw001>
The painting's most daring feature is the brushy blue-white foreground. Half of a van Gogh painting is a Robert Ryman! The artist must have been thinking of Japanese prints. The stagecoach's lilac shadow foregrounds whiter-than-white wheels with black-and-ochre spokes.
Thanks to the letter, Tarascon Stagecoach's existence has long been known. Its whereabouts were a mystery to the north-of-the-equator art world, though.
<http://tiny.cc/6jrw001>
The painting had been owned by Medardo Rosso (1858–1928), the proto-Modern Italian sculptor. Rosso hung Tarascon Stagecoach in his Paris studio. The reaction was so negative, even in Rosso's avant-garde circle, that he consigned it to the attic. One of the few friends who liked Tarascon Stagecoach was Uruguayan painter Milo Beretta (1875–1935). Rosso gave him the van Gogh when Beretta moved back to his homeland in 1895. It became the first known van Gogh in the Americas.
In 1906 Rosso wrote Beretta to make sure he knew that van Goghs had gone way up in value. He said the painting might be worth (Dr. Evil pinkie…) $4000.
A 1935 exhibition in Montevideo drew attention to Tarascon Stagecoach as a locally held and valuable painting. In 1941 the Museum of Modern Art traded two Cézannes and a Toulouse-Lautrec for Starry Night. Though no dollar value was set, it demonstrated van Gogh's ascendance to the top of the Post-Impressionist market. The spiraling valuations ramped up anxiety for Beretta's six daughters. They placed the painting in a Montevideo bank vault for safekeeping. Eventually they decided to sell it to South American dealer Paul de Koenigsberg.
One of De Koenigsberg's clients was Henry Pearlman, a Brooklyn-born Jewish businessman who had made a modest fortune in marine refrigeration—keeping fish and other perishables fresh at sea. As a collector he was self-taught and not nearly as wealthy as some of his contemporaries. De Koenigsberg asked Pearlman whether he might be interested in an expensive painting. Pearlman said yes and, upon seeing the van Gogh, concluded a deal in an hour and a half.
Pearlman agreed to swap a Chaim Soutine, two Renoirs, four lesser paintings, plus some cash for the van Gogh. He immediately regretted giving up the Soutine and bought it back the next day. But he kept the van Gogh, the prize of his collection.
<http://tiny.cc/djrw001>
Henry seems not to have had a clear vision for the future of his art holdings. After his 1974 death, his wife Rose decided to put the couple's collection on loan to Princeton's University Art Museum. Neither Henry nor Rose had attended Princeton.
Norton Simon might have played an indirect role in the loan. In 1972 Simon announced that he was putting his art collection on a year-long loan to Princeton University Art Gallery. He hinted that the loan might become permanent. But Simon disappointed Princeton much as he had LACMA. In 1974 he negotiated a deal to take over the financially troubled Pasadena Museum and move his collection west. With empty galleries to fill, Princeton might have been especially receptive to Rose's offer, even if it too was only a loan.
The Pearlman collection ended up being on view at Princeton for half a century. After Rose died in 1994, the Pearlman Foundation passed to the couple's descendants. They approved frequent loans to museums on both sides of the Atlantic.
Daniel Edelman, Henry and Rose's grandson and the Foundation's president, spoke to museum directors nationwide about finding a permanent home for the collection. Michael Govan's pitch for LACMA must have started with the museum's extraordinary need. LACMA, the flagship museum of America's second largest city, had no van Gogh painting.
Ultimately the Pearlman Foundation elected to distribute its entire collection to three institutions. The Museum of Modern Art got the Cézanne paintings and watercolors; the Brooklyn Museum got the largest number of works, including the Modiglianis and Soutines; and LACMA got just five works. Yet the LACMA gift is the most consequential for its recipient. Besides a long-sought van Gogh, it got a Manet (its first), a Sisley (its second), a Toulouse-Lautrec (its second and related to its first, donated by the DeSylvas), and a sculpture by Wilhelm Lembruck (its first).
<http://tiny.cc/gjrw001>
In 2022 the estate of Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen auctioned a middling van Gogh landscape for a record $115 million, more than any museum in the world would likely be willing or able to pay. The price testifies to the short supply of museum-worthy van Gogh paintings. It's one of the first Arles paintings and not at the level of those the artist would be making a few months later, such as Tarascon Stagecoach.
So how did LACMA get its van Gogh? As Henry Pearlman wrote, "Luck plays a large part in building up a collection." If Medaro's circle hadn't hated Tarascon Stagecoach… if Medaro hadn't given it to an artist bound for the art market's antipodes… if Pearlman hadn't accepted de Koenigsberg's offer immediately… if Pearlman hadn't neglected to name a permanent home for collection (which surely would have been on the East Coast)… Tarascon Stagecoach probably would have ended up somewhere else. _LosAngelesCountyMuseumOnFire

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FOUR POLAROID PHOTOS BY ANDY WARHOL OF JANE FONDA,
whose 88th birthday is today
<https://tinyurl.com/53v9fu2m>
Andy Warhol, Jane Fonda, 1982, screenprint
<https://tinyurl.com/4tw4w382>
Jane Fonda & Andy Warhol in 1982
<https://tinyurl.com/35jtpwzb> _MichaelLobel

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DISAVOW DISAVOW by greg
<https://tinyurl.com/jve55uv6>
The wild thing is that there was possibly as much as an entire decade in which Christopher Wool might have known that Ivanka Trump had bought one of his prints, and he might have just thought, “lol weird but whatever.”
And if he just stayed silent during the first administration, when Ivanka was in the White House, but the print wasn’t in her feed, he could have just clammed up and let Richard Prince do all the disavowing.
But now, with her tryna be just a pensive bookfluencer in her DWR chair, dropping her reading list, while her civilian husband cuts a side deal with Putin her dad just [gestures to all this], does Wool feel a little different about his screenprinted exploration of the meaning of abstract painting being used as a backdrop for the regime? Or is it just par for the course?
[one google search later: oh right, we’ve all known since 2016. <https://tinyurl.com/2fbp5rmc> I guess Wool just decided to walk the Marfa desert and collect barbed wire about it.] _greg.org

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NO TRESPASSING SLEDGE, MS
<https://tinyurl.com/mr3b2jkj> _RuralIndexingProject

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ROBERT MNUCHIN, GOLDMAN SACHS POWER BROKER TURNED INFLUENTIAL ART DEALER, DIES AT 92
Robert Mnuchin, the Wall Street pioneer who became one of New York’s most respected art dealers and a fixture at blue-chip auctions, died on Friday at his home in Bridgewater, Connecticut. He was 92.
Mnuchin was unusual in having two long and highly successful careers. At Goldman Sachs, he was a central figure in the rise of block trading in the 1960s and ’70s, helping build the firm’s institutional equities business under managing partner Gustave Levy. By 1978, the Wall Street Journal described him as “the acknowledged dean of block traders,” rivaled only by Salomon Brothers’ Michael Bloomberg. His skill on the trading floor—an encyclopedic recall of buyers and sellers, an instinct for pressure and timing—made him a legend inside the firm. He became a partner in 1967, co-headed trading and arbitrage by 1976, and joined the firm’s powerful management committee in 1980. He retired in 1990.
That same set of instincts—competitive, analytic, and deeply interpersonal—animated his second act. After decades on Wall Street, Mnuchin did something that surprised even close friends: he left finance to open a gallery. It was not a move financiers of his stature typically made. As he later told, it “took a lot of courage” to step away from the Goldman machine and test whether his success came from his own abilities or the institution behind him. “I wanted to see what I could do on my own,” he recalled. And because no museum would hire s
Though he was the father of Steven Mnuchin, the former Treasury secretary, Robert Mnuchin largely avoided politics and was described by colleagues as modest, disciplined, and deeply devoted to art. omeone without a formal art background, “the only alternative was to start my own gallery, which is what I did.”
Responding to the Trump administration, Bunch wrote in a letter Friday, that the institution remains “committed to sharing information and data” and asked them to “please understand that this work has been time consuming, involving many staff and departments throughout the Smithsonian.”
Bunch wrote that the government shutdown delayed the requested work and that he “would be pleased to meet and share an update on our internal efforts to review and update our content.” _WashingtonPost

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REJOICE, THE LORD HAS COME.
<https://tinyurl.com/5d2fj36s> _RabihAlameddine

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ARE THE MEN OF THE ART WORLD OK THIS HOLIDAY SEASON?
The art world men have truly entered their unwell holiday posting era, and this week felt less like content and more like a cry for help with a ring light. Ray Ray Bulman the Chaotic Cooker has returned, once again confusing domesticity with performance art and treating a stove like it’s a conceptual prop.
<https://tinyurl.com/yxuex53u>
Magnus, meanwhile, appears to believe he’s in active training for the 2026 Winter Olympics, documenting a boys’ ski trip that reads less leisure and more slow motion benzo breakdown scored by Enya. The fixation on endurance, motion, and vague masculinity through exertion is fascinating. Who is filming, who approved this, and why does every clip feel like a soft launch for a podcast about resilience no one asked for?
<https://tinyurl.com/mr2ubfn8>
And then there’s Caspar Jopling, whose recent posts look uncannily like a United Colors of Benetton ad staged for Vogue circa 2008, all polished ease, curated multicultural vibes, and lifestyle ambiguity masquerading as depth. This genre of art man content is especially revealing, influencer adjacent, fashion coded, and deeply aware of the camera while pretending not to be. What ties all of this together isn’t just cringe, it’s a specific kind of gendered performance.
<https://tinyurl.com/3t52vccn>
Men in the art world narrating themselves into relevance through lifestyle spectacle rather than ideas, labor, or accountability. The result is content that begs to be read, not liked. Anxious, self mythologizing, and increasingly untethered from the institutions and power structures they’re supposedly inside of.
_TheArtDaddy

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SOCAL DRIVER FINDS LIVE GREAT HORNED OWL LODGED IN CAR GRILLE
<https://tinyurl.com/3k549vr5>
It took about 30 minutes to free the injured owl,
which was taken to a Goleta wildlife rescue
<https://tinyurl.com/5ckn9yep> _LATimes