OLD NEWS

‘IT BROADENED MY HORIZONS"
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With a cup of tea in hand, Victoria Rees leads the way down a garden path from her hillside home, through the tumbling branches of an old apple orchard to a small, wooden artist’s studio where floor-to-ceiling windows flood the room with light and offer sweeping views across a green valley.
Closely following her is Dave Newman, a local farmer, balancing a yellow teapot, mug and muffin on a tray, as well as a story he has written for her on the back of an envelope.
It is a ritual the unlikely pair have performed almost every Tuesday afternoon for the past 13 years, as Newman sits as a model for Rees to help her hone her speed and skill with her oil paints.
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For the next 50 minutes they talk, laugh and share stories while Rees completes a small one-off portrait of Newman to add to the hundreds of others of him in her collection.
“It’s a collaboration more than anything else,” Newman, 70, says, as The Times joins them in the studio near Wotton-under-Edge, Gloucestershire.
“I don’t feel I sit for her as a model. We collaborate to produce a small portrait. And we talk. It’s like a counselling session for both of us.”
“For me there’s a friendship,” Rees, also 70, interjects, as she adds confident brushstrokes to a 11in by 9in canvas. “I’ve come to understand Dave’s life as a farmer and what that means. And actually there are lots of similarities, in that as a painter you are alone a lot in your studio. And as a small farmer, Dave ran that farm by himself, he was alone a lot working. So there was a lot to exchange and understand about each other.”
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Newman was a second-generation farmer in the steep Cotswolds valley and had been running his 130-acre farm alone since 1988. For the last ten years before he retired in 2022, he was being paid to turn it into a wildlife haven, looking after meadows where the vulnerable chalkhill blue butterfly flourishes on the unimproved grassland.
Although Rees lived in a neighbouring house for several decades, their friendship didn’t begin until February 2012 when she approached Newman in one of his fields as she enjoyed a walk.
She had recently lost a commission because she wasn’t able to work quickly enough for her subject’s liking, and needed a regular sitter to help quicken her craft.
“I didn’t have a clue what I was signing up for,” Newman says. “I just thought I’m going to go down and just sit for her maybe just once and just see what happens.”
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Since then Newman has only missed the occasional Tuesday owing to the demands of a harvest or a holiday. He says it has allowed him to broaden his horizons.
“In the past, I felt guilty just by going to a garden centre for an hour because I thought I should be working,” he says. “So when we established this routine, it gave me something else to think about.
“When you’re a farmer, you’ve got tunnel vision of what your life should be. You don’t realise there are other little streams going outside. So this was a little stream that took me away from the tunnel vision of farming. It’s done me the world of good.”
Slipping into their easy friendship, Rees interrupts to ask Newman if he initially found it “a shock coming here and being social”.
“No, I thought it was good training,” he says. “You could be on the farm all day long and not talk to anybody and forget how to talk. But at least coming here gave me a chance to speak to someone different as well, not just to your farming friends, because they tend to talk about farms and what bad things they’re going through.
“So it’s just nice to talk to someone in a completely different plane, and be able to use different words than you would do with farming. So I find it very helpful.”
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During the Covid-19 pandemic, Newman took inspiration from a Reader’s Digest competition to write a story in 100 words. Drawing on his love of Spike Milligan, he began writing a short story every fortnight to read to Rees during their Tuesday sessions.
“I really look forward to hearing them,” Rees says. “Day in, day out, I come down to my studio and have done for years, and it’s a great studio and I’m very lucky, but suddenly I’ve got this world — well it’s not suddenly because it’s been 13 years of this craziness — but I’ve got this wonderful thing and now our lives are sort of entwined.”
What started out as a pragmatic way of getting quicker as a painter had developed into “an answer in its own right”, Rees says.
“The paintings at the end are as important as the story and what we get together and what we give to each other as friends, everything, it’s all one,” she adds.
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She says her painting style is now less “process-led” and she isn’t afraid to fail. “It doesn’t matter, you know, because what this is giving us is enough for it to be a successful day,” she says.
“The portraits started out much more formal and then gradually as time went on and I began to understand Dave’s life and wanted to portray him in a different way. I brought in the hands and more of his figure because his hands are such a major part of his life.
“Gradually the forms around Dave have become simplified and abstracted down so that hopefully the paintings start to increase in intensity around the head and around the hands.”
She compares their Tuesdays afternoons to the weekly audience the monarch has with the prime minister. “I tell him things that are private, and he does me, and we know that’s that. It’s quite nice to know that’s there in your life.” _Will Humphries_TimesUK

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DRIVE
<https://tinyurl.com/2dd39gmr> _DavidShrigley

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JASPER JOHNS LITTLE GUYS IN PRINT by greg
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You’d think I’d have taken the hint sooner. Like after seeing the big jump around 2001 of appearances of the three little, brush-wielding stick figures in Jasper Johns drawings—because they were in the prints he was reworking. Or after finding little guys gazing at the stars <https://tinyurl.com/24gcjnu4> in the 1997 etching he made for Leo Castelli’s 90th birthday portfolio.
But no, it took finding little guys in Johns’s 2008 Artists for Obama print <https://tinyurl.com/25y8oywx> that made me realize there was much I didn’t know about Johns using the little guys motif in his prints. And it turns out they’re all over the place. Johns is a printmaker who paints, and his imagemaking crosses mediums with the ease Canadians used to have crossing the US border. So I was missing a big part of the little guys story.
TBF, I’d done some work, looking at the archives of Johns’s primary print foundries, Gemini GEL and ULAE. But the Gemini CR is currently frozen at 2006, and Johns set up his own printworks in Connecticut. So there are gaps. Fortunately, he’s been giving the Walker Art Center <https://tinyurl.com/2ysa4sez> an example of every print he makes.
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I count fifteen appearances in prints by the stick figure trio up until the pandemic—the latest batch of prints was donated in 2020—beginning in 1989 with The Seasons (ULAE 0249, 1990), the large, cruciform intaglio print that combined elements from the larger, four-image series. They come in groups, or are at least related. The untitled 1992 print at the top, with the trompe l’oeil Barnett Newmans, appears to have some of the plate elements from The Seasons in it as well, mostly on top of the galaxy. But there are also faint stick figures inside the optical illusion vase. This 1998 print <https://tinyurl.com/24deyo96> is like a quarter the size, but it contains a scaled down rendering of The Seasons cross, with redrawn stick figures. [Also, there’s the UNESCO Picasso stick figure, which just feels like its own thing.] Stick figures in the vase reappears, too, but like twenty years later, in a 2011 shrinky dink print <https://tinyurl.com/2y22dpsx>. [I loved that show.]
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But that skates past the 2001 catenary prints <https://tinyurl.com/24zppnsc> , the rejects of which Johns reworked by hand. Then there’s a cluster of linoleum prints <https://tinyurl.com/2ytjn2xt> in 2016 <https://tinyurl.com/29ompwpu> in which the little guys look at the Big Dipper <https://tinyurl.com/23hmsq52> , amidst the disassembled Bruno Bettelheim face.
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And then it comes full circle, to the little guys that started it all, and by it, I mean my fixation on these little guys. From 2018, Johns really put the stick figures to work, and they were everywhere, doing all kinds of stuff. It was these prints and related drawings that made such an impression in Johns’s last two shows at Matthew Marks, in 2024 and 2021—the one with the knee thing <https://tinyurl.com/yhozb3zn> , remember? A little 2019 print in that 2021 show is one of my favorite little guys images: they’re out under the threadlike structure of the universe <https://tinyurl.com/26qkutyn> , admiring the diagram astrophysicist Margaret Geller sent to Johns several years earlier.
<https://tinyurl.com/2d8vv4ks> _greg.org

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THE MOUNT WASHINGTON POST
<https://tinyurl.com/2am9u7m3> _LisaAnneAuerbach

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FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT’S ONLY FLORIDA DESIGN
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In 1950, Clifton Lewis, a member of a prominent Tallahassee banking family, approached Wright while he was designing Florida Southern College’s campus and asked if the architect would design a house for her family. Wright suggested she first find a suitable parcel of land, one not on a lot, and then get in touch.
Lewis did as ordered, purchasing 10 acres of secluded woodland north of Florida’s capital city. By 1954, the two-story house was complete. The family named it Spring House after the fresh source of water that bubbles up on the grounds before flowing into Lake Jackson. The Lewis family has held the property ever since.
Wright was working in his hemicycle style, the final and shortest-lived phase of his career. It prioritized semi-circular floor plans and curved glass walls and would go on to inspire his designs for New York’s Guggenheim Museum. He would complete only 11 hemicycle houses and Spring House appears like a boat with the main bloc composed of intersecting circles. It’s built from Ocala, a beige-colored concrete block that was popular in midcentury Florida, with panelling on its exterior employing a type of cypress tree native to the southern coast of the U.S.
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In her pitch to Wright, Lewis stressed she had “a lot of children and not much money” and the architect duly designed a house that encouraged the family to spend time together. The main space is a curved open plan area that joins living room, dining room, and kitchen as one. The room faces east and Wright flooded it with natural light by building a two-story wall of glass that looks out into the woods. It’s a view Wright encouraged the Lewises to take in through a built-in wooden bench that wraps the entire length of the west wall. The outside world is brought further in through the use of yellow pinewood flooring. The seating area has a low ceiling on account of the overhang from the second story creating a sense of enclosure.
Upstairs, a narrow balcony overlooking the living room connects to the three bedrooms and two small bathrooms, which are lit from above with a skylight. The bedrooms are relatively small and simple, relying on the natural colors and textures of Wright’s chosen materials. The entrance lies beneath a wedge-shaped carport that opens onto a landing with stairs ascending to the second floor or descending to the first. A semi-circular swimming pool and terrace wall were planned but never built.
<https://tinyurl.com/244z6rgs> _artnet

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NANCY GRAVES, "ENFOLDED ORDER," 1989
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Makes me think of some of Nancy Graves's
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neo-Baroque sculptures of the 1980s
<https://tinyurl.com/2973qlfm> _MichaelLobel

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MY TASTE IS NOT MYSELF (462 WORDS) by Rainey Knudson
It occurred to me recently that we often mistake our passions for our selves.
One time in college, a professor had us go around and introduce ourselves and say what our passion was. I said my passion was aesthetics.
I was smitten—still am—with the look of things, with the sound and taste and touch of them. With art and design, mainly. In my 20s, I would sit in my apartment, cutting images out of Wallpaper magazine and pasting them into a spiral notebook. There was a look I was going for, a look I wanted for my whole life, a look I loved as much as a person can love something.
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Along with having a strong sense of aesthetics came the conviction that my taste was correct, that in fact, there was objectively good taste and bad taste, good and bad art, and nothing subjective about these matters. I clung to this belief for many years, and my sense of aesthetics—and the judgments that flowed forth from that sense—I unconsciously believed to be the true me. Who I was, deep down, was my finely attuned sensory antenna.
For most of us, if we're lucky, our passion has something to do with our work or a hobby. We love some genre of music, or solving puzzles, or comic books, or being in nature, or helping people, and we explore this passion, and it becomes a part of who we are and how we spend our time. We become aficionados in our passion.
But if we’ve mistaken our passion for our innermost self, then when something inevitably comes along to threaten or diminish that passion, it feels like an existential, life-or-death threat. At some unconscious level, I think I used to believe that without my sense of aesthetics, I may as well not exist.
But there is a core selfhood in us, more fundamental than anything associated with passions, personality, or identity. That essential self has nothing to do with all the things we think matter. It has nothing to do with stuff, or status, with displays of erudition or taste or power, or anything else we think is so important in this life. Those things—those material things of this material existence—are not ultimately important. They are not what we will think about on our deathbeds.
Don’t get me wrong: having a passion is one of the things that makes life worth living. It’s one of the great gifts of this existence. But I no longer mistake my sense of taste for myself. I still care about aesthetics deeply, but I am far less certain about taste than I was when I was younger. I am far less decided, and surprisingly, this feels not like a loss or a defeat, or some kind of death. It feels like freedom. _TheImpatientReader

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CINDY SHERMAN SLIPS INTO CHARACTER FOR THE NEW YORKER’S CENTENARY COVER
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VAN GOGH MUSEUM SAYS IT MAY CLOSE IF DUTCH GOVERNMENT DOESN’T CONTRIBUTE MORE MONEY
The Van Gogh Museum, the beloved Amsterdam home to many masterpieces by one of the 19th century’s most famous painters, said it could be forced to close if the Dutch government doesn’t appropriate more money to a much-needed renovation.
The museum threatened closure on Wednesday via press release, an unusual measure that the institution said was necessary because the government is “not keeping the promise” it inked with the Vincent van Gogh Foundation in 1962. The foundation owns most of the artworks on view at the museum, including iconic paintings such as The Potato Eaters (1885).
Signed after the artist’s descendants agreed to hand over hundreds of works to the newly created foundation, the 1962 agreement states that the Dutch state must continue to fund the construction and upkeep of the Van Gogh Museum. But the museum alleges that the country’s government has not committed enough funding the institution, which has filed a legal complaint about the matter,
The museum currently receives around $10 million from the government annually—and it now needs around $2.9 million more per year to support costs related to climate control, elevators, and building infrastructure.
In its release, the museum described its building as being in “poor condition.” “Most technical installations have reached the end of their operational lifespan, are conceptionally outdated and increasingly difficult to maintain due to a lack of spare parts,” the museum said. “As a result, ongoing maintenance is no longer feasible and the systems must be replaced.”
To remedy the issue, the museum is undertaking Masterplan 2028, a $120.6 million project that would see the institution partially close to the public and begin necessary maintenance work. The museum said it needed the expanded government funding in part to offset an anticipated decline in ticket sales.
Safety is an issue, too. “If this situation persists, it will be dangerous for the art and dangerous for our visitors,” Emilie Gordenker, the museum’s director, told
Responding to the plea for additional funding, the Dutch culture ministry told, “The subsidy for the housing of the Van Gogh Museum is a fixed amount that is corrected for inflation on an annual basis. The subsidy is calculated according to a methodology which is used for all national museums.” Moreover, the culture ministry said, the “Van Gogh Museum receives one of the highest subsidies per square meter of all national museums.”
The situation appeared to upset the Van Gogh Foundation, which said in a statement, “The Vincent van Gogh Foundation is deeply concerned about the accessibility of the Van Gogh collection in light of the current funding issues surrounding necessary investments in the Van Gogh Museum’s buildings and facilities.” _ARTnews

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COMPTON MUSEUM LAUNCHES EXPANSION DRIVE
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The 900-sf. Compton Museum of Art and History plans to increase its exhibition space by a factor of five. Kevin Sherrod of Gensler has produced renderings for a new building featuring more space for art and historical exhibitions, a theater, a roof deck, and a glass canopy that will cover an area adaptable for art installations. The museum will be moving from its mini-mall address (306 W Compton Blvd, #104) to a new location less than a mile away (961 W Compton Blvd.)
The project is expected to cost $350,000, not much in this age of billion-dollar museums but a lot for a shoestring operation staffed by working artists. _LosAngelesCountyMuseumOnFire

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I AM GOING TO THE BERLIN BIENNALE TODAY.
The Grill Royal terrace, under the awning,
“Capitalism kills love” fluorescent text flashing on and off,
blonde hostess stationed by oil painting of young German prince,
Spree flowing darkly by,
two aging models sit outside with a man in a black hat that says, “TECHNOCAPITALISM.”
<https://tinyurl.com/2yyxt6x2> _DeanKissick

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NAZI-LOOTED PORTRAIT SHOWS UP IN A REAL ESTATE LISTING IN ARGENTINA—THEN QUICKLY DISAPPEARS
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The Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad (AD), in a collaboration with a Dutch retiree named Paul Post, has sleuthed out in a highly improbable way the location of a painting looted by the Nazis. The canvas showed up in a real estate listing offering a home in Mar del Plata, Argentina, owned by the daughter of a German official.
Portrait of a Lady (Contessa Colleoni) is by Giuseppe Ghislandi, also known as Fra’ Galgario. Bram de Klerck, associate professor of art history at Radboud University, described him to AD as “one of the most important portraitists in northern Italy of the late 17th and early 18th centuries.” His works reside in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (which describes him as “especially famous in his day as a naturalistic portraitist”); the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; the Accademia Carrara, Bergamo; the Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice; and the National Museum of Fine Arts of Algiers, among other institutions.
The painting appears in the Lost Art Database, which indicates that it was looted by the Nazis in Amsterdam in July 1940 from legendary Dutch Jewish dealer Jacques Goudstikker. During the invasion of the Netherlands in 1940, Goudstikker attempted to escape by ship, but died in an accidental fall on board. In his family’s luggage was an inventory of some 1,100 works of art then in his possession (including eight Rembrandts and two Vermeers), which were sold at depressed prices to Reich Marshal Hermann Göring and other Nazis.
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The painting was sold by German banker Alois Miedl to Friedrich Kadgien, right-hand man to Göring. Kadgien, AD reported, was partly responsible for the Four-Year Plan to finance Germany’s rearmament, and fled to Switzerland in 1945, likely with some looted art. He later moved via Brazil to Argentina, where he founded a company, started a family, and died in Buenos Aires in 1978.
One of Kadgien’s two daughters, now living in a town on the Argentine coast, put her home up for sale via Robles Casas and Campos. Ghislandi’s painting hangs in full view over the couch. The owner, per La Nacion, is Patricia Kadgien. Those living nearby describe her as a good neighbor, who taught yoga classes in the garage.
The Dutch National Agency for Cultural Heritage also lists the canvas as missing. Two experts with the agency tell AD: “There is no reason to think of why this could be a copy.”
“I don’t know what information you want from me and I don’t know what painting you’re talking about either,” the homeowner told AD. She asked for questions to be sent in writing but then replied, “Sorry, I’m too busy to answer them right now.” The newspaper has heard nothing from her since then.
When police showed up at the home, the painting was nowhere to be found, reports Argentinian publication La Capital. Hanging in its place is a large tapestry, reported La Nacion, which confirmed that the listing has been removed from Robles Casas and Campos’s website.
The Ghislandi portrait may not be the only looted artwork still in the Kadgien family’s holdings. The National Agency for Cultural Heritage researchers also saw, on one daughter’s social media, a still life by the Dutch 17th-century painter Abraham Mignon that was in Friedrich Kadgien’s hands and is listed as missing. _artnet

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❌ SCOOBA, MS
<https://tinyurl.com/29oe7ygx> _RuralIndexingProject

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WILLIAM ROBINSON, PAINTER, DIES AGED 89
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William Robinson AO, acclaimed Australian landscape painter and two-time winner of the Archibald Prize, has died aged 89.
The Brisbane-born artist, who won his first Archibald prize in 1987 with a self-mocking portrait of himself on a horse, died peacefully in Brisbane on Tuesday evening.
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Robinson was best known for his paintings of the lush rainforest of south-east Queensland, winning the Wynne prize for landscape painting twice. He also won acclaim for his humorous self-portraits, winning the Archibald a second time in 1995 for his painting Self-portrait with stunned mullet, <https://tinyurl.com/2a3evrlt> showing him in full wet weather gear and holding two fish.
In the 1970s he moved with wife Shirley and their six children to a rural property where they raised cows, goats and chooks, before retreating to the Gold Coast hinterland.
Robinson was working as an art lecturer when he got the call telling him he had won the Archibald prize – and that he had to be in Sydney that afternoon.
“I can’t, I’ve got to feed the goats,” he reportedly replied,
<https://tinyurl.com/22a8e8l8> _GuardianUK