OLD NEWS

JUMPING (AFRICAN) CROCODILE, PHOTO BY GAVIN CHAPMAN
<https://tinyurl.com/3hd2yja6>
Max Ernst, L'Ange du Foyer ou le Triomphe du Surréalisme, 1937
<https://tinyurl.com/3xm79hcp>

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AMEDEO MODIGLIANI, CARYATID, CA. 1913-14
<https://tinyurl.com/mubd3hn3>
Henri Matisse, Blue Nude IV, 1952
<https://tinyurl.com/4a5942yw>
Auguste Rodin - Minerva, ca. 1905- 1907
<https://tinyurl.com/3btumr2p>
Nathan Oliveira
<https://tinyurl.com/e9mr8ba8> _RabihAlameddine

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BORN ON THIS DAY IN 1724, IN LIVERPOOL, GEORGE STUBBS.
Painter of animals.
Here, though, a human: himself.
<https://tinyurl.com/35j8z5b4>
Portrayed by himself in 1781
George Stubbs, painter of horses.
<https://tinyurl.com/5599bdrw>
And, in 1782, by himself on a horse!
<https://tinyurl.com/mvurvb2k>
Portrait of a horse:
Whistlejacket, 1762, by George Stubbs
<https://tinyurl.com/rt8vxv8tr>
Collection of mares and foals,
painted in the 1760s by George Stubbs.
<https://tinyurl.com/4jr2m2tz>
Rather haunting image
of an empty Newmarket heath
with rubbing-down houses.
From 1795, although looks much later!
<https://tinyurl.com/2p9rrt9b>
And then, the horse enters the picture.
Turf, with jockey up, from 1765.
And a rubbing house where (of course)
they rub down horses.
<https://tinyurl.com/yc392mph>
The great race horse Hambletonian
being rubbed down, c. 1800.
Like having your portrait painted
during a manicure or something.
<https://tinyurl.com/65m8bw39> _Dr.PeterPaulRubens

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YAYOI KUSAMA, 2010
<https://tinyurl.com/mr2fbymz>
George Clooney by Yayoi Kusama
<https://tinyurl.com/4yswfssj> _RabihAlameddine

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EILEEN COWIN IS A ‘WRY DISRUPTOR’ IN EXPANSIVE NEW LACMA RETROSPECTIVE
<https://tinyurl.com/u8pecpkh>
“Between Panic and Paradise,” Eileen Cowin’s penetrating retrospective at LACMA, begins in the present, with large, recent color photographs and her newest work, a stirring video. The show then veers back to early work, photographic transparencies with magazine transfers made in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, and continues, gallery by gallery, oscillating between different periods of the artist’s nearly six-decade career.
By deviating from straightforward chronology, the installation resonates smartly with one of Cowin’s key operating principles — that we don’t experience time as a continuous line moving in one direction, but as episodic, fragmented, interrupted, layered. Clock hands circle predictably and calendar pages turn on schedule, but internally, within our bodies, minds and hearts, time is a whole different thing — discontinuous, wondrous, searing.
Cowin was born in Brooklyn in 1947 and attended graduate school at the Institute of Design in Chicago. She began teaching on the East Coast, and showing work that combined photographic imagery with printmaking techniques, collage and stitching. In 1975 she settled for good in Los Angeles, home base to Robert Heinecken, one of the most consequential practitioners of material experimentation in photography. It was an especially fertile period for photography, and L.A. artists were catalytic in elevating the medium’s stature and expanding its range.
Cowin soon shifted to straighter technical methods applied to crooked storylines. She’s become most influential for her staged photography, choreographed decisive moments shot in both color and black and white. In her lauded “Family Docudrama” series (1980-84), Cowin cast herself, her husband and stepkids as characters in suggestive, often tense scenes set in the bedroom, dining room and garage.
<https://tinyurl.com/2j2xk25e>
In one inexhaustible untitled image from 1980, the couple sits in elegant dress at a candlelit table engrossed in each other’s company, while the young, shirtless son adjusts the channel on a television perched on the near side of the same table. The space is shallow and compressed, like a theater set, and details are few and deliberate. The one picture hanging on the wall is another of Cowin’s images from the same series. The scene thrums with the complexity of domestic life, the simultaneity of partnering and parenting, as well as of looking, being looked at, being overlooked, and being visually represented.
From the earliest days of photography, artists have staged tableaux for the camera, often using painting and literature as inspiration. Think 19th century photographic storytellers Julia Margaret Cameron and Oscar Gustave Rejlander. There was enough of a resurgence in the 1970s to merit a new term, the “directorial mode,” coined by critic A.D. Coleman to categorize Duane Michals, William Wegman, Les Krims and others. Cowin has brought the tradition up to date beginning in the late 1970s by suffusing her work with the look and feel of cinema and television (close-ups, storyboard-style progression), and the centering of women’s experience in the narrative.
In terms of narrative, Cowin is a wry disruptor. She has spoken of her interest in lying and duplicity, and has consistently, fruitfully, positioned her work on the border of fiction and nonfiction. The “Family Docudrama” series and much that followed read as something like autofiction, drawn from life but juiced up, rephrased, with gestures and incidents isolated and amplified. Cowin may appear as the subject in her photographs, but she is primarily the narrator, an intriguingly unreliable narrator who recognizes the inevitability of multiple, simultaneous truths.
<https://tinyurl.com/5n94h2wr>
In those earliest works using magazine transfers, Cowin layered disjunctive images, visually uniting realities that can’t easily be reconciled emotionally. In “New Hampshire” (1971), for instance, a man is seen with a camera to his eye in a peaceful moment beside a lake, with a spectral image of Vietnam War soldiers next to him in the frame. There is panic, and there is paradise.
In “Shot” (1976), from another early series, Cowin engages in canny word/image play, pairing photographs of men being shot by guns (including Lee Harvey Oswald) with handwritten dictionary definitions of the word “shot.” The definitions appear below the frames, reminding us that the men were not just shot with a firearm but also by a camera, shot being shot.
Circularity and self-referentiality are mainstays in Cowin’s work, wry disruptor that she is. She frequently puts pictures within pictures, deepening and doubling the story being told and making it deliciously clear that what we are seeing is constructed, not found. We’re also made acutely aware of what we’re not seeing, that no picture is the whole picture and there is narrative power in the denial of sight and therefore knowledge. Figures in Cowin’s work are often blindfolded or covering their eyes with their hands.
<https://tinyurl.com/yyxzdrj9>
Cowin’s own restraint and withholding yield images of distilled power. Over decades, she has isolated subjects within unarticulated fields of solid black: figures in domestic scenarios; book spines; actors embodying untold emotion, as in the multichannel video installation, “Fear Itself” (2014) and her potent new color photographs, “The Uninvited Visitor” (2025). Cowin has also spliced together photographs of disparate subjects — people, places and things — on broad horizontal panels that suggest narrative progression but instead register as evocative panoramic poems. In 2010, she titled a piece (not in the current show) “If I Knew More, I Would Tell You.” But she wouldn’t. She hasn’t. She has made an art out of felt, remembered and imagined experience, not accumulated information.
Her new video, “Another Year Closer to Death” (2026) is unusually declarative and openly autobiographical. Cowin addresses us directly, sharing her anxieties about aging, particularly the varieties of physical decline. It’s a tender, naked and amusing personal essay, grounded in the now while looking both backward and forward.
<https://tinyurl.com/3az5wpf2>
“Between Panic and Paradise” was organized by Rebecca Morse, curator of LACMA’s Wallis Annenberg Photography Department, and Britt Salvesen, curator and department head of the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department and the Prints and Drawings Department, with curatorial assistant Hope Flores. The show is accompanied by Cowin’s first full-scale monograph. True to the show’s structure, and the work it addresses, the book disavows conventional narrative and linear time to make good on a quip attributed to Jean-Luc Godard cited within that “a story should have a beginning, middle, and end — though not necessarily in that order.”
_ Leah Ollman_LATimes

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KYRA MARKHAM FAMILY RESTAURANT, 1954
<https://tinyurl.com/5n6kw4wb>
Conrado Lopez Playa de Benajarafe, 2025
<https://tinyurl.com/yty97fv3>
Chris Firger Cottage Garden at Night, 2026
<https://tinyurl.com/2v832nxb>
Juliette Belmonte Lady in Big Green Chair (Wailani), 2012
<https://tinyurl.com/v76mr9dc>
Kristin Eames Ode to Odilon #2, 2025
<https://tinyurl.com/y7z3jk77> _RabihAlameddine

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RHINOCEROS.
Unlike Durer,
George Stubbs had actually seen this animal
when he painted it in 1790!
<https://tinyurl.com/2s54r9tt>
Rhinoceros by Durer.
Had never seen the real thing!
Only a drawing somebody had sent him.
Yet (being a genius)
he nonetheless made a great
& enduring image of the beast.
<https://tinyurl.com/y62x6n6v>
Soldiers of the 10th dragoon regiment.
One on horseback contemplates
decapitating other 3 with one blow.
By George Stubbs, 1793.
<https://tinyurl.com/yj9e2y2z>
When you call Bull!
you are perhaps thinking of the great Lincolnshire Ox,
painted with its friend the cock (natch!)
<https://tinyurl.com/4n87bkme>
Portrait of Phillis.
She was a good dog!
So she got painted in 1770
<https://tinyurl.com/y46ubsa3>
Five hounds in a landscape,
as immortalized by George Stubbs
<https://tinyurl.com/4jc8k8hb>
A portrait of Mr. Cosway's Spanish dog.
Why does nobody today
commission dog portaits any more?
Was such an excellent trend.
<https://tinyurl.com/2nybb5an> _Dr.PeterPaulRubens

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THE GAYS ARE IN MOURNING.
<https://tinyurl.com/bdzfpb6e>
This is/was my cat, Dollar Parton. He died five years ago. I miss him too.
<https://tinyurl.com/y6u699nb>
Dolly Parton & Keith Haring, 1985, photo by Andy Warhol
<https://tinyurl.com/55ur354m>
Dolly Parton, Nashville, 1976. Photo by Harry Benson
<https://tinyurl.com/yc749hnx> _RabihAlameddine

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THE HAND OF GOD, ROMANESQUE FRESCO, UNKNOWN ARTIST, CA. 1123
<https://tinyurl.com/349bt5dj>
Albrecht Dürer, Hand of an Apostle, c. 1508
<https://tinyurl.com/55hcp6mj>
Albrecht Dürer, Study of the left hand of an apostle’ (circa 1508)
<https://tinyurl.com/mw6u5dua>
Andre Breton and Paul Eluard - L'Immaculee Conception
<https://tinyurl.com/54pztbnu>
Louise Bourgeois, Extrême tension, 2007
<https://tinyurl.com/2wxswcpp>
Fatima Ronquillo Wounded Hand with Lover’s Eye, 2015
<https://tinyurl.com/mr3uvfmb>
Colter Jacobsen, “Don’t Let Your Right Hand Know What Your Left Hand Is Going ” (2019)
Colter drew his left hand with his right and his right with his left.
<https://tinyurl.com/bdhjbjsz>
Right Hand, plaster, Auguste Rodin, c. 1880:
<https://tinyurl.com/bdct8wph> _RabihAlameddine

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EILEEN COWIN FINDS THE DARK SIDE OF PHOTOGRAPHY by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp
<https://tinyurl.com/3wf6bemu>
In our digital age, questioning the reliability of a picture is commonplace. Photography has lost its position as an arbiter of facts. Artists, meanwhile, take advantage of that slippage to explore concepts of truth and falsehood.
This is a forceful consideration in the art of Eileen Cowin, whose survey Between Panic and Paradise, of 50 prints and a few videos, is on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)
Cowin is a pioneer in the ways photography came to be used by contemporary artists in the 1970s. Rather than documentation, they chose invention. All photographs are a form of fiction. Hers are explicitly so.
Many of her overtly staged photographs, whether in color or black and white, draw from a cinematic sensibility. To underscore this idea, the galleries of her show are painted in noirish tones, rather than the customary white. It is like walking into a darkened theater. Her photographs are often produced in a sequence to suggest a story, at times with the artist herself a figure in the drama.
The entrance gallery, dedicated to “The Unforeseeable Future,” displays pieces addressing the passing of time. In a recent piece presented on a large monitor, the artist, who just turned 79, is talking about mortality while looking at a greeting card that states, with purported irony, “Happy Birthday, another year closer to death.” That tone of dark humor, hard facts, Thanatos, and eros pervades the exhibition.
That first gallery also includes her stunning 2025 series, The Uninvited Visitor. Cowin photographed herself wearing an oversize scarlet bathrobe, her face buried in a white cloth held in both hands; in a second print, her back is to the camera and her considerable mass of curly dark hair is blowing straight upward. A third print is black-and-white, capturing a man holding his face in his hand as though grieving. A fourth shows a man and woman embracing in a darkened cinder block room. All are lit in the cool, stark manner of the Dutch old masters. The uninvited visitor is, of course, death.
Even in her color photographs, black triumphs. There are no sunny seascapes, despite the artist’s having lived in Los Angeles for many years. Three giant unframed works, suspended vertically, show only the spines of books with significant titles, Killing Time, Waiting, and Lost in America.
The show unfolds in a series of works spanning half a century, but their look is fresh and timeless. The museum’s photography curators, Rebecca Morse and Britt Salvesen, were careful not to crowd a show that ranges from Polaroids from the 1970s to elaborate multipanel compositions from the 2010s.
The artist loves a double entendre. In the exhibition catalog, Salvesen writes, “Eyes and hands may speak without words, but language itself is central to Cowin’s aesthetic.” In 1977, Cowin used pairs of small color photos to illustrate two definitions of a single word. For instance, Shot refers to a snapshot, yes, but also depicts a person being shot with a gun.
<https://tinyurl.com/3jhdhv2c>
Cowin’s work evolved in the 1970s, when the long struggle for photography to be accepted as art dovetailed with the evolution of conceptual art, which rejected the tradition of painting. As Morse explains, “Cowin paved the way for experimental narrative photography.”
At the same time, women were coming to terms with identity during the feminist movement and embracing photography as a useful tool of representation. Cowin’s art is emblematic of that moment.
She matured at a time when Southern California artists were gaining attention for their fabricated photographs, as opposed to those termed “straight,” or unmanipulated images taken with a camera. And why not? It’s Hollywood. Cowin used such techniques in ways similar to artists such as Cindy Sherman and other figures in the Pictures Generation in New York. All were leading a movement to be considered as artists using photographic methods, not as photographers.
Cowin, a Brooklyn native, studied art, specifically printmaking, at the State University of New York, New Paltz. During graduate studies at the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology, she dedicated herself to photography. After graduation in 1970, she worked at Witkin, a photography gallery in New York, and then at Franconia College, where she set up the photography department.
<https://tinyurl.com/4eud7b24>
She moved to Los Angeles in the early ’70s when she was hired by California State University Fullerton. Using the newly popular 4x5 large-format camera with a Polaroid back, allowing high-quality photographs developed instantaneously, she made the provocative series One Night Stand (1977–1978). In one still life, composed atop a nightstand, a telephone and a lamp are joined by a suggestive print of a man dropping his trousers. More double entendres.
Her subsequent series, Family Docudrama (1980–1984), consists of stylized and staged photographs of her then–new husband, Jay Brecker, with his two teenage children from a previous marriage. Cowin first met Brecker at a party where they both had followed directions to dress in a single color, yellow for him, red for her. They married in 1980.
There is a voyeuristic quality to watching their marriage evolve alongside adolescents watching TV or finishing their homework. The fictional and factual coalesce to make the art. Later in the exhibition, long texts describe Cowin’s and Brecker’s very different first impressions. But isn’t everyone’s story some kind of fiction? Cowin’s photographs lean in to such speculation.
<https://tinyurl.com/mwpb4x34>
Cowin had a secret weapon that allowed her the freedom to construct her dramatic fictions: her identical twin sister, Robbi Johnstone. Johnstone was used to represent the artist in the action. Cowin is operating at a remove, as though she has been looking at a self that isn’t quite her. Both Johnstone and Brecker saw themselves in these pictures while attending the LACMA preview.
Parallel to Cowin’s photography is her work in video. Fear Itself (2014) consists of monitors presenting individual faces, not recognizable figures, reacting to fear. No words, just music composed to reflect the same emotion. Viewers may add their own story.
She extended the aesthetic of cinematic editing to the still photographs arranged in long horizontal strips. Now You Know (2019) has an aura of melancholy: white shirts on hangers, a gray block wall building, desolate landscapes, a man wearing a gas mask. The piece seems to ask, What do we know about our passing lives, the larger histories, or the future?
In this or other work, Cowin never provides the easy answer. Her exhibition confirms what she has said of herself: “I’m not an in-your-face artist. I’m an under-the-skin artist.”• _Hunter Drohojowska-Philp_Alta

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PAUL KLEE, ARRIVAL OF THE AIR DRAGON, 1929
<https://tinyurl.com/ca28w4fw>
Adolph Gottlieb, Pictograph, 1946
<https://tinyurl.com/yc5ns493>
Willi Baumeister, Standing Figure with Blue Area, 1933
<https://tinyurl.com/yvfpz7t6>
Raoul de Keyser, Drift, 2008
<https://tinyurl.com/5n9abbbe>
Willi Baumeister, Horizontal-abstrakt III, 1937
<https://tinyurl.com/2t6uk95e>
Paul Klee ~ Fish Magic, 1925
<https://tinyurl.com/bde2znpd> _RabihAlameddine

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THE WEDGEWOOD FAMILY & THEIR HORSES.
Of course they chose horse-painter George Stubbs to paint them,
as horses were more important than humans.
<https://tinyurl.com/pp4syvhr>
Also keen on horses,
the Reverend Robert Carter Thelwall and his family,
painted of course by George Stubbs because who else?
<https://tinyurl.com/4ntryz6n>
John and Sophia Musters riding at Colwick Hall, 1777.
The look of the 18th-c. elite,
<https://tinyurl.com/yzuau7bn>
The Prince of Wales' phaeton,
and of course his fine horses,
and dog, painted in 1793
<https://tinyurl.com/4nk53j96>
The Countess of Coningsby,
depicted in the costume of the Charlton Hunt in 1760.
With dog.
<https://tinyurl.com/mryab6w3>
Was this really the proper headgear
for outdoor manual labor?
Haymakers, painted in 1785
<https://tinyurl.com/2upp27su>
George Stubbs: The Reapers.
Some more fine female headgear
out there for harvest time.
Of course you'd dress your best!
<https://tinyurl.com/4dm2y8z7> _Dr.PeterPaulRubens

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TIMOTHY BARR "ANOTHER TIME," 2024
<https://tinyurl.com/mtvk9d44>
Sarah Gayle Carter House Dreams, 2026
<https://tinyurl.com/3hyz6ce8>
Laura Krifka Sink or Swim, 2022
<https://tinyurl.com/uh5jva6a> _RabihAlameddine

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JOHN SINGER SARGENT - TWO BOYS ON AN ANCHOR, C. 1908
<https://tinyurl.com/kszm6dtt>
Georges Seurat -Two Men Walking in a Field, ca. 1884
<https://tinyurl.com/3nhfjvmn>
Henri Matisse, Two Women, 1939
<https://tinyurl.com/tha6atw3>
De Kooning - Two Women - 1953
<https://tinyurl.com/cu9t8jvw>
Suzuki Harunobu, "Two Women Gathering Lotus Blossoms", 1765,
<https://tinyurl.com/2uk875wu>
Paul Klee, Two Men Meet, Each Believing the Other to be of Higher Rank, (1903-05)
<https://tinyurl.com/22seuz3f>
David Hockney, Two Men in a Shower, 1963
<https://tinyurl.com/3bsukf4f>
Winslow Homer Two Boys in a Pasture, 1974
<https://tinyurl.com/5c736ee9> _RabihAlameddine