OLD NEWS

JOAQUÍN SOROLLA Y BASTIDA, SEÑORA DE SOROLLA IN BLACK, 1906
A portrait of the artist’s wife, Clotilde García del Castillo (1865–1929)
<https://tinyurl.com/y8jx22a9> _JesseLocker

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SIRI AURDAL, ARTIST DIES AT 88
<https://tinyurl.com/y4xwsskv>
Siri Aurdal, a Norwegian sculptor and painter who elevated industrial materials into sleek expressions of art’s social imperative, died on March 31. She was 88.
Though born in 1937 to two prominent Scandinavian artists—Synnøve Anker Aurdal (1908–2000), a textile artist who represented Norway at the 1982 Venice Biennale, and painter Leon Aurdal (1890–1949)—Siri Aurdal forged a visual identity uniquely her own within the Scandinavian art scene of the late 1960s. A core concern of her practice was the potential for change in people, places, and materials—a preoccupation that first took shape in her manipulation of plexiglass and a reinforced fiberglass engineered for Norway’s oil sector.
Aurdal was raised in the orbit of Scandinavian’s leading architects and initially intended to follow them—the father of her childhood best friend worked on the 1952 Winter Olympics. Her art carried forward that modular sensibility: She cut and reassembled fiberglass elements into undulating ribbons, and later turned them into monumental public installations, including ones meant for playing children.
she was commissioned to create interactive works for Oslo’s schools and playgrounds. One such piece, dubbed Havbølger (“ocean waves”) by students at Trosterud Elementary School for its rolling slopes, was constructed from prefabricated, fiberglass-coated polyester pipes originally engineered for the oil industry. A 1972 archival photograph shows students at Trosterud Elementary School scaling its surface.
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For Aurdal, movement via material was a means of linking individuals to one another, to their environment, and to the broader sociopolitical conditions that structure shared reality. Her practice was also overtly political: Januar 67, a painted polystyrene work also known as February 67, was conceived in response to the Vietnam War and is now held by the National Museum in Oslo.
She took long breaks between art-marking, but demonstrated that even a seemingly distinct body of sculpture was “an entirely new moment in an infinite work,” as a review of her 2018 exhibition put it. As the title implied, the group of precise-cut plexiglass forms encompassing rectangles, waves, and circles in fluorescent red, green, and pink belong to Interview, a work begun in 1968 and reprised that year.
Reflecting on the shapes that defined her oeuvre, she recalled how her father, the painter Leon Aurdal, “would extrapolate from simple things to explain the world.” She continued: “For instance, after this circle we made on the floor, I got a little ball and a little lamp. He showed me how to imagine that we’re living on this little ball, which is going around the lamp in an ellipse. That was an initiation to understanding time, daylight, years, seasons.”
She was less inclined to define art herself, favoring a line often attributed to Gerhard Richter: “Art is the highest form of hope.” _ARTnews

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LAUGH
<https://tinyurl.com/yckbhr92> _DavidShrigley

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AMERICA’S FIRST BLACK PROFESSIONAL ARTIST
<https://tinyurl.com/2vf27ckf>
In the shadow of the American Revolutionary War and at the dawn of the new republic of the United States of America, against all odds a man by the name of Joshua Johnson became the first Black professional artist in the country’s history.
Johnson was born into slavery around 1763 in or near Baltimore, Maryland. He was the son of a white man, George Johnson, and a woman, whose name remains unknown, who was enslaved by a William Wheeler Sr.
Johnson’s story was all but lost to history until the late 1930s, when his work was rediscovered by J. Hall Pleasants, an art historian and genealogist who specialized in early Maryland painters. Through his research, he identified Johnson as the painter behind a number of 19th-century portraits of prominent Baltimoreans. Still, it was not until the mid-1990s that more information was discovered about Johnson, unearthed in manuscripts from the Maryland Historical Society.
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Baltimore County records indicate that George purchased Joshua in 1764 from Wheeler Sr. for £25, roughly half the cost of an enslaved adult field hand at the time. Records also contained a manumission—an official release from slavery—dated to 1782 wherein George recognized Joshua as his son and granted him his freedom once he had turned 21 or completed a blacksmithing apprenticeship, whichever came first.
Little is known about the artist’s life in the more than a decade following 1782. His apprenticeship would have ended in 1784, but it is not until 1796 that his name surfaces once more in archival documents, this time as a professional painter.
<https://tinyurl.com/38kn8w62>
While manuscript listings of the population of Baltimore emerged in the mid-18th century, the first formally printed directory Baltimore City Directory was published in 1796. In this first edition, Johnson is listed as a painter and portraitist. And in a 1798 advertisement placed in the Baltimore Intelligencer, he writes:
As a self-taught genius, deriving from nature and industry his knowledge of the Art; and having experienced many insuperable obstacles in the pursuit of his studies, it is highly gratifying to him to make assurances of his ability to execute all commands with an effect, and in a style, which must give satisfaction.
<https://tinyurl.com/44jcc5d9>
Given the gap in historical records between 1782 and 1796, it is possible, even likely, that Johnson was painting during this period. What is known is that he moved frequently, and may have taken advantage of local furniture makers, assisting with painting on decoration.
There is a chasm between the categories of fine art today and fine art of the 18th century. During this period, painting would have been considered a craft or trade, like furniture painting or blacksmithing, so the barrier between genres and mediums was less distinct, which would have made the transition from one or the other less dramatic by 18th-century standards.
<https://tinyurl.com/3yrtsbbv>
Johnson’s style is emblematic of early American painting, and across the 83 works attributed to him (with only one that is signed), the evolution of his skill and ongoing refinement of his approach to composition is evident.
Specializing in both individual and family portraits, his figures are nearly always rendered in three-quarter profile, and modeling of the faces is kept to a minimum. There is a distinct flatness to his subjects and the surrounding setting—if one is shown at all beyond a monochrome background—but where Johnson excelled was in the details, such as the rendering of delicate lace, sheer fabric, the fall of each strand of hair, individual flower petals, or, as can be found in many of his paintings, the seedy surfaces of strawberries.
<https://tinyurl.com/2fkm4dya>
By today’s standards, early American painting has a formulaic quality, and Johnson’s work is no exception, but this harkens back to art serving a very different function. Nevertheless, his evolution and experimentation with various elements—props held by his sitters, settings, decoration—are fascinating to trace throughout his oeuvre. Dated to between 1803 and 1805, his Portrait of Adelia Ellender shows a proclivity for more ornate composition, but the background is still left a traditional flat monochrome.
Comparing this to his later Portrait of Richard John Cock (ca. 1817), even though both are full-length portraits of children and sharing similar details like a butterfly, rosebush, and ornate attire, here the level of meticulous detail and fully attended to natural landscape points to a growing mastery. It also points to a tradition of memorial portraiture; the sitter, Richard, died at the age of nine in 1817.
<https://tinyurl.com/5avazkxz> _artnet

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THE MOUNT WASHINGTON POST
<https://tinyurl.com/3jfbvwxp> _LisaAnneAuerbach

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SOL LEWITT WAS HERE by greg
<https://tinyurl.com/4fh78dpe>
Looking into a 1989 etching this morning <https://tinyurl.com/4ryy39u5> led me to the Sol LeWitt Prints Catalogue Raisonné, which is great. It’s one of three postwar print CRs produced by Krakow Witkin Gallery in Boston. [The other two are for Mel Bochner and Fred Sandback.]
Which is where I saw Windows, a 1980 photogrid LeWitt made as an edition by mounting 72 snapshots onto museum board, 25 times. The example Krakow Witkin has [ed. 15/20] still includes the pencil marks for mounting, which makes them feel like a carefully constructed collage object more than a traditional print. If only I’d made it up to Craig Starr’s show of Phong Bui and LeWitt <https://tinyurl.com/wwbdjw8a> last summer, I could have seen Windows in person.
<https://tinyurl.com/ysynfceb>
LeWitt used photography more than it might seem. Edweard Muybridge’s time and motion studies were an early part of LeWitt’s engagement with seriality. And he made artist books with photos, including some incredible photos of the variations of sunlight on a rough brick wall outside his window that feel like gritty urban Monets. Some books <https://tinyurl.com/y7rm3usk> make the SLPCR, but not this one, I guess. Anyway, point is, photographs.
I’d thought of Brick Walls because of how LeWitt’s photos of light on brick captured a sense of space, which an earlier photo book/series Stone Walls (1975) doesn’t. Because while it first appears as just found typology, Windows actually conjures a sense of place. Seeing all the arches in a jpg, I just assumed LeWitt had been shooting lofts in SoHo. But that is not at all what’s going on.
<https://tinyurl.com/2akawdwk>
A closer look at the signage shows LeWitt’s photos are from Thailand, specifically Phuket. Place was not something I usually associate with LeWitt’s work—at least not before some highly site- and context-specific <https://tinyurl.com/bddkmv6v> works here.
[Now I’m racking my brain to remember which artist had compiled a massive archive of photographs in various typologies and grids, was it the TIME LIFE project Mungo Thompson did?]
<https://tinyurl.com/bp6hx2nn>
Anyway, like learning a new word, I started to see references to place in LeWitt’s work where I’d least expected it. Or at least this once, on another fascinating but atypical-seeming print. Rectangles of Color (Prato) is a woodcut from 1994 that, tbh kind of gives the game away by having a place in the title. It turns out to be an edition published by the Museo Pecci in Prato, Italy <https://tinyurl.com/6rp93nuv> , in conjunction with their 1993 commission of a wall drawing for their lobby.
<https://tinyurl.com/yyjs2k96>
Seeing the print first was baffling, but then I realized it includes the doorways in the museum’s curved wall. I’d imagine many of LeWitt’s wall drawings have similar site-specific characteristics, but none of them had souvenir prints. And the wall drawings catalogue raisonné is $600 for a single login, plus $60/year. _greg.org

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THE SEA GIVETH
<https://tinyurl.com/2yakmsma> _ON&ON / Jeff Weiss

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MICHELANGELO PISTOLETTO SENDS MESSAGE OF ‘PREVENTIVE PEACE’ ON DIGITAL BILLBOARDS
The Italian artist and Arte Povera trailblazer Michelangelo Pistoletto has created a new series of works that are being shown on screens in nine cities worldwide. The ambitious public art project entitled Three Mirrors, organised by the UK-based digital art platform Circa, is underpinned by the artist’s conc
Launched on 1 April, the Pistoletto works are shown daily at 20:26 (local time) across London’s Piccadilly Lights and on screens in Los Angeles, Accra, Abidjan, Casablanca, Hong Kong and Seoul
For the trio of works, Pistoletto has drawn directly onto three large sheets of mirror, reflecting three movements linked to his artistic philosophy known as The Third Paradise. The individual titles of the works in the trilogy—filmed at Cittadellarte: Fondazione Pistoletto in Biella, the artist’s hometown in northern Italy—are Formula of Creation, Statodellarte and Third Paradise.
In an interview last year, Pistoletto explained the principles of his artistic philosophy saying: “The formula of the Third Paradise is composed of three circles: the two outer circles represent the opposites. At the centre there is an empty circle that is never truly empty, because there we are always confronted with opposing forces such as, for example, war and peace. The central circle is the place where the opposing elements connect and generate a new element. This is creation.” _ArtNewspaper

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HOW YOUR EMAIL FOUND ME.
<https://tinyurl.com/uwbhs8rz>
A detail from "Bélial, empereur des mouches," 1948 — spotted at the Wifred Lam show _CarolinaA.Miranda

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68. CHICANO PARK by Rainey Knudson
<https://tinyurl.com/2jhavzzf>
It took an artist to see what was possible. The San Diego–Coronado Bridge had bisected Barrio Logan, displacing thousands of families with a forest of concrete pylons. Salvador Torres, a young artist from the neighborhood, had studied the famous murals in Mexico City by Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros. Torres returned with a vision: painted columns amid a green belt stretching to the waterfront.
The city had promised a park since 1969, but the lot stood vacant. Then, one morning in 1970, a passing resident noticed bulldozers gathering on the property. Workers told him they were clearing the site for a California Highway Patrol parking lot. He went door-to-door, alerting locals who gathered and formed human chains around the machinery. By midday, there were hundreds of them. They occupied the land for twelve days, and in 1971, Governor Ronald Reagan signed legislation securing the site for a park.
It was another two years before the city granted permission for murals. In 1973, community organizers raised funds for acid washes, primer, and paints. What emerged from artists working with hundreds of volunteers is the largest collection of outdoor murals in the United States. Tourists from around the globe see pre-Columbian gods, the Virgin of Guadalupe, Frida Kahlo, and other images of the Chicano experience—including César Chávez, whose legacy collapsed in 2026 amid revelations of sexual abuse of girls. An artist’s vision transformed urban blight into an open-air cathedral of community, but even sacred spaces must sometimes reckon with their icons. _TheImpatientReader

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BON APPÉTITE
An archangel locks the Hellmouth' from the Winchester Psalter,
an English 12th-century illuminated psalter
<https://tinyurl.com/7ymy9r3j>

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FRANCISCO GOYA, "TRISTES PRESENTIMIENTOS DE LO QUE HA DE ACONTECER"
("Sad forebodings of what is going to happen"),
first plate from the Disasters of War series, published 1863
<https://tinyurl.com/56eexpve>
You can view the entirety of Goya's Disasters of War series
(around 80 plates) here
<https://tinyurl.com/yc4ep3rw> _MichaelLobel

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ONE OF LACMA’S FIRST COMMISSIONS FINDS NEW LIFE AT DAVID GEFFEN GALLERIES by Jessica Gelt
<https://tinyurl.com/2dfc868x>
What’s old is new again as sculptor Alexander Calder’s monumental “Three Quintains (Hello Girls)” is installed to anchor the northeast corner of Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s new David Geffen Galleries. The four water jets that propel the colorful, whimsical sculpture were turned back on in March more than 60 years after the piece was first commissioned for the museum’s original William Pereira–designed campus, which opened in 1965.
“The concept of museums commissioning artists is now commonplace. It wasn’t commonplace then,” said LACMA’s senior curator and modern art department head, Stephanie Barron, as she watched the fountain’s bright yellow, red and blue mobile-like paddles dance and twist in the wind and water, alongside Sandy Rower, Calder’s grandson and head of his foundation.
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Not only was the sculpture, fondly referred to as “Hello Girls,” one of the museum’s earliest prized attractions, Calder also designed a poster commemorating the museum’s opening, causing his imprint to be baked into the DNA of the place, noted LACMA’s director and chief executive, Michael Govan.
That’s why discussions about where “Hello Girls” would land began very early in the process of designing the new building, said Rower, adding that he even addressed the matter with architect Peter Zumthor.
“At one point, it was across Wilshire by the theater,” Rower said. “And then it really became clear that this is the site related to all the activity.”
The activity in question will come from the sculpture being directly alongside the building’s main cafe, with outdoor tables flanking the fountain’s edge, and just a stone’s throw from the W.M. Keck Education Center, which will be overrun by excitable children who will get a big kick out of the fountain’s inviting whirl and swirl.
“Kids coming over here are gonna love it,” Rower said. “So are people that have been obsessing on modern art and modernism all their lives — they’re gonna be confounded by it.”
<https://tinyurl.com/mpuybsym>
Barron said getting the placement of the sculpture just right was of utmost importance to the museum and the Calder Foundation. Over the years the installation has encountered a variety of difficulties that kept it from realizing its true spirit and form. It was originally situated in pools that people could walk through, but calcium deposits from the water, its proximity to the La Brea Tar Pits and other environmental factors resulted in the sculpture not being “happy,” Barron explained. In the 1980s it was stranded on a hillside in the sculpture garden and later sent for display at Pasadena’s Art Center College of Design.
Anticipation is high with this latest installation, which features a technically advanced filtration system to deal with the perils of an outdoor urban environment, and once again finds the sculpture as its creator intended: at LACMA, surrounded by water.
“Calder is perennial,” Rower said. “A lot of people who arrive here not knowing anything about this artist will be excited that there isn’t a bronze here or something static. There’s activity, there’s color, there’s motion, there’s light, there’s food, there’s a ramp. You can go all the way around it, which is also really nice.”
<https://tinyurl.com/ymyd4vbj>
The ability to observe the piece from a 360-degree vantage point allows viewers to see the “balletic nature of the wind and the water,” said Barron, adding that she has enjoyed watching people’s reactions to the installation as it’s gone up.
“People who haven’t been here for a long time say, ‘Oh my God, it’s back. It’s my favorite piece. It looks so much better. It looks different.’ And people who’ve never seen it say, ‘Oh, wow. This just makes me happy.’”
Rower nodded, smiling as the wind pushed a large blue paddle counterclockwise.
“I think your grandfather probably would be really happy with that,” Barron said. _LATimes

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FANTASY LISBON, ND
<https://tinyurl.com/34u4vh4y> _RuralIndexingProject

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THE PROBLEM WITH AMERICAN ART? IT’S NEW YORK
Josh Kline’s October essay “New York Real Estate and the Ruin of American Art”
Brief excerpts.
The first step towards a cure is admitting you have a problem. Contemporary art in twenty-first-century America is sick with problems. These are not problems raised by artworks as subjects of concern, but structural malignancies in the United States that are present in art’s curation, its institutions, and its patronage; in the commercial entities that sell it and the schools that produce the people who participate in its world. The result is a tidal wave of art whose primary function as decorative speculative financial instruments eclipses any possibility of inquiry, experimentation, or real meaning. These problems share a root cause: New York City real estate and its currently impossible prices and rents, which smother art in a choking, conservative atmosphere. American art is suffering a polycrisis that combines a lack of belief in and support for its artists born after 1975, the structural de-centering of artists in the art industry, and the subsequent stagnation and possible breakdown of formal innovation in art. In other words, meaningful art, relevant for society and our time, may not be sustainable under the current conditions here.
[…]
The artist Georgia Sagri once likened an artist’s lot to that of a sixteen-year-old American girl in the 1950s who had to be asked to attend the school dance by a boy. The rule is that we have to hang around until a curator or gallery employee notices us and says something along the lines of “What are you working on?” or “I’ve been thinking about you” or “I want to visit your studio.” These words magically unseal the artist’s ability to promote their work. This places enormous pressure on young artists to be present in New York to entertain these career bouncers, blowing conceptual balloon animals at the bar or acting as a nightlife safari guide for aging curators, etc.
[…]
New York City itself now constitutes a core problem in American art. The answers for younger artists are likely not in New York and not in the American art industry, for which the art of the present and the art of the future are not as important as the art of the past.
For all these reasons, New York no longer deserves the ambitions and ideas of the country’s young artists. They should stop fighting to give them away to an industry and to a city that no longer care about art except as a means to make some quick money or generate some fleeting attention before moving on. _ENOUGH

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DOGS WITH PIERCED EARS IN OLD PAINTINGS
<https://tinyurl.com/5n8v26zk>
<https://tinyurl.com/52tvkn25>
<https://tinyurl.com/yhewd4kf>
<https://tinyurl.com/bdduja4y> _JesseLocker

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THANKS TO THE WHOLE JOSH KLINE / NYC REAL ESTATE DISCOURSE
for giving me an excuse to re-up this Theaster Gates quote I’ve been thinking about multiple times a year for 12 years:
“I’m the hustler who’s just willing to admit this is all a fucking hustle—like, you think that Basel Miami isn’t a fucking hustle? For a hundred and twenty-five square feet we got to pay seventy-five thousand dollars. It’s five-day real estate!” _TimSchneider

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HE WASN'T EXAGGERATING
<https://tinyurl.com/4trarcxy> _JesseLocker